Romantic Poetry Essay

Inventive Ideals in Romantic Poetry Romantic poetry is the creative manifestation of the views of poets who penned during the Enlightenment era. Romantic poets sought not only to entertain with their art, but often to make grand social and political statements. Poets like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley used their medium to shed light on perspectives that would otherwise remain unwritten due to their controversial nature. Religion, love, and politics were often the prevailing themes of romantic poetry. Some poems were rebellious against establishment, some regarded lifelong battles with religion, and some simply recalled a drug-induced hallucination of a journey to Xanadu. Regardless of the topic, romantic poets provided a much

Although not every romantic poet dabbled in Atheism or an alternative to Christianity, differing religious ideals were a prevailing theme in romantic poetry. Percy Shelley was well known for his stance on religion, more so, he was very publicly against it. He even wrote The Neccessity of Atheism, a piece that he published in 1811, leading to his expulsion from Oxford University. In this essay, he states “if ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction”, implying that humans created God because they didn’t understand nature, but if we strive to understand and hone our environment, than there will no longer be a need for theism to explain the mysterious. He would go on to distribute The Necessity of Atheism to bishops and heads of colleges, preserving his radical reputation all the while. In his poem Queen Mab, Shelley even points out the hypocrisy in the church, implying that priests had blood on their hands, despite preaching about a “God of peace”. It would seem that Shelley based a great deal of his career on denouncing religion, despite being raised in a pious household. Similarly, William Blake also demonstrated interest in the use of logic and science instead of religion. William Blake’s Religion Essay described his views on spirituality as “defining the individual’s search for freedom”, and even created his own mythology based around “the marriage of man and nature”. (Religion Essay, 3.) One can infer that the ideals held by poets in this time began to deviate from mainstream Christian ideology as a result of the government and the church manipulating the message of God for profit, which left the everyday citizen to barely survive in the tumultuous climate Blake described in