THE ROMANTIC AGE - Romanticism was a European phenomenon which developed in different ways and times according to the cultural, social and political situations of each country. The term "romanticism" derives from the French word "romance" which referred to the languages derived from Latin and to the works written in those languages.

The Romantic writers wanted to express their individual emotions and feelings; they gave much importance to passion, imagination and history, and found in nature the main source of inspiration.

The Romantic poets searched for a new and individual style, choosing a language suitable to poetry; there was a return to past forms such as "the ballad", "the sonnet" and "blank verse".

The English Romantic poets are usually grouped into two generations: the first generation, called "the Lake poets", included William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the poets of the second generation were George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

Wordsworth wrote mainly on the beauty of nature and ordinary things with the aim of making them interesting for the reader; Coleridge dealt with visionary topics, the supernatural and mystery. The poets of the second generation were characterized by individualism and escapism (for instance, Keats's escape into the world of classical beauty).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - Rejected the standards of eighteenth-century poetry, in particular its artificial and elevated language, which he called "poetic diction". He was interested in the relationship between the natural world and the human consciousness. His poetry offers a detailed account of the interaction between man and nature.

When a natural object is described, the main focus of interest is the poet's response to that object. One of the most consistent concepts in Wordsworth is the idea that man and nature are inseparable: nature comforts man in sorrow, it is a source of pleasure and joy, in teaches man to love and to act in a moral way, it is the seat of the spirit of the universe. "Daffodils" records the experience of a walk of the poet with his sister near their home; in this poem Wordsworth he conveys his love for nature.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE - Like Blake and Wordsworth, Coleridge gave much importance to imagination, distinguishing between "primary" and "secondary" imagination. "Primary imagination" was a fusion of perception and the human power to produce images; "secondary imagination" was the poetic faculty. Coleridge did not view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation and happiness; his contemplation of nature was always accompanied by the awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real. In other words, the material world was the projection of the "real" world of Ideas on the flux of time.

JOHN KEATS - Was perhaps the greatest member of that group of the second generation of Romantic poets. He is Romantic for sensation, his feeling for the Middle Ages, his love for Greek civilization. The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective emotions is rarely present in his poetry; it was his belief in the supreme value of the Imagination which made him a Romantic poet. His imagination is concentrated on beauty. In fact, the contemplation of beauty is the central theme of Keats's poetry. It is mainly the Classical Greek world that inspires Keats. The expression of beauty is the ideal of all art. The world of Greek beliefs is re-interpreted with the eyes of a Romantic. Keats identifies beauty and truth as the only type of knowledge, as he affirms in the two last lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn.