Emotion over Reason in the Romantic Poetry

The philosophical, literary, cultural, and artistic era of Romanticism was developed in the mid-18th century as a reaction to the prevailing enlightenment ideals of that time. This happened as more emotional, natural, and artistic themes were favored by Romantics. This influenced poetry in a great deal. A new form of poetry stressing on intuition over reason was actively being created. Proponents of this kind of poetry preferred the pastoral over the urban life. Efforts were made to use more colloquial language by repeatedly eschewing consciously poetic language.

By privileging emotion over reason, Romantic poets cultivated physical and emotional passion, individualism, idealism, reverence for nature, and an interest in the supernatural. They set themselves in opposition to the order. They strongly opposed the classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace freedom in their art and politics. Such poets included German's Johann Wolfgang van Goethe and Fredrich Schiller, Britain's Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, who were instrumental in propelling the romanticism movement in England. Others included Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe just to mention a few. As opposed to the poems themselves, the poets' discourses and manifestos on humans' nature, achieved through creative expression, perhaps stand out as the most profound writings of the period of Romanticism. Such include Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry.

In his and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads Preface, Wordsworth himself defined good poetry to be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth and Coleridge IV). He goes on to make a clarification of this statement in the same...

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...inary and the music of his poems, which put in vigorous action their own requiring urgent attention change. However, Keats embraces his poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn with the Romantic emotion over reason, with stating; "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," ( Lawell et al. pg. 760).

All in all, these novels bring us back to the beginning of the main theme, with the evidence unfolded through the Romantic emotion over reason, with expressing their own moral beliefs. Furthermore, with this English poetry the reader is able to define the Romantic emotions over reason, in discovering that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, with their true feelings of deep passion emotions are the despite of nature. Therefore, the reader could relate to these well-written poets, with the power of their nature in the philosophical Romantic beliefs.