di Romantic Age (1800-1851)
Romanticism was an European movement started in the end of the 18th century. Many poets and artists had started reacting against the dehumanization of new urban industrial society, these artists were called Romantics. The term “romantic” assumed the meaning connected with feelings, imagination and it was used to describe the expression of personal emotion. In the world of industrial the romantics took refuge and consolation and inspiration in Nature. The romantic writers looked inward to their soul and their imagination to find private truth, they are a creator who used imagination to explore the unfamiliar and the unseen. For them was important childhood, because they saw the child pure and uncorrupted. Romantic poets are usually divided in 2 groups: 1st generation and 2nd generation. Wordsworth and Coleridge belong to the 1st generation, while Byron, Shelley and Keats belong to the 2nd generation of romantic poets.
Poetry
The English romantic period was dominated by poetry. The language was affected by new ideas. Artificial poetic diction was replaced by a selection of language really spoken by men. The heroic couplet, which had been the favourite poetic form of the 18th century, gave way to a return to earlier versus forms, such as blank verse(Wordsworth, Shelley); the sonnet (Wordsworth, Keats, etc); the Italian terza rima, the Italian ottava rima; the folk ballad stanza( Keats, Coleridge)
Task of the poet
The artists, and the poet in particular came to be seen as someone unique in his creative faculties, a prophet divinely inspired, enjoying the same freedom as God himself, in the sense that, in the act of creation, he was free from external rules. The poet considered poetry as an expression and a vehicle of the most profound truth of experience.
