Romanticism

• Poet as prophet, seer, visionary

• Definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (from Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, so that inspiration is as important as perspiration: "deep thinking requires deep feeling" (from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria)

• Organic vs. mechanical metaphors for describing the imagination

• Use of lyric as chosen verse form: "brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion creating a single, unified impression"

Nature Poetry

• Nature not for itself but as symbol (and inspiration) for imagination and thinking

• Symbolism is frequently an essential element of poetry and a key to understanding it

• Nature becomes (on occasion) a substitute for the divine

Glorification of the Ordinary and the Outcast

• Use common subjects, employ common language

• "[S]hatter the lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder in the everyday and the lowly" (17)

• Use imagination to make "the old world new again"

Supernatural and "Strangeness in Beauty"

• Use of folklore, myth, magic, and mystery

• Altered states led to dreamlike or visionary poetry

• Re-emergence of the gothic tradition and a revival of medievalism and romance