Romantic Poetry
Romantic poetry has surprisingly little to do with what we commonly label "romantic" love. Rather, Romantic poetry is part of a larger movement against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The imagination was celebrated as the highest faculty of the human mind; nature was embraced as an organic substitute for the mechanical science of the rationalist worldview; the lyric became the dominant form of poetry as it replaced metric conventionality with intuition and feeling. The early idealism of the French Revolution epitomizes the revolutionary energy of the Romantic poets themselves.