page_title: Romantic poetry
section_title: English Romantic poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Romantic poetry / English Romantic poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of Karel Hynek Mácha in Petřín Park, Prague Español: Estatua de Mácha en Praga
context_page_description: Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850.
context_section_description: In early-19th-century England, the poet William Wordsworth defined his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's innovative poetry in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798):
  "I have said before that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." 
  The poems of Lyrical Ballads intentionally re-imagined the way poetry should sound: "By fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men," Wordsworth and his English contemporaries, such as Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Blake, wrote poetry that was meant to boil up from serious, contemplative reflection over the interaction of humans with their environment. Although many stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was still greatly concerned with the difficulty of composition and of translating these emotions into poetic form. Indeed, Coleridge, in his essay On Poesy or Art, sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of English Romantic poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create meaning.
caption: In the Western cultural context, romanticism substantially contributed to the idea of what a real poet should look like. An idealized statue of a Czech man Karel Hynek Mácha (in Petřín Park, Prague) represents him as a slim, tender and perhaps unhealthy boy. However, he had in reality a strong, robust and muscular body.
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