The essay

In the late eighteenth century the French Revolution had begun and England was finishing up its quest to build a world empire. England had captured many countries during the seven year war including Canada and India, but had lost its colonies in the War of Independence in America. Life was changing rapidly by the end of the eighteenth century with the beginning of industrialization. Out of the ashes of all the war and turmoil throughout the world at that time, an art form we now refer to as Romantic Poetry was born. Young writers were trying to escape from life that in their mind did not make any sense. They had enough of scientific knowledge, factual data, and intellectual reasoning. Their focus and interests were on people's feelings, their emotions, and a love for nature. This was also a close connection to the French Revolution and the reasoning behind the war, to place the focus on the people. Their written words were simplistic and easy to understand by most. You could compare the Romantics to the hippie movement of the sixties; the romantic writers wanted a change of pace from the thinkers and scientists from the Age of Enlightenment.

Romantic poets and thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, encouraged individualism, the love of nature, passion within the hearts of people, and faithfulness. Theses artists also rejected the reasoning and principles behind classical art. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's first book of "Confessions", we see the accepted wisdom of the Romanticism movement early in his writing with, "I know my own heart and my fellow man" and "I felt before I thought" (Rousseau p.498). In these simple statements, he reflects the ideals of the Romantics where the ...

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...n the natural world. What he is really trying to express in his poetic illustration is a mindset change of political and moral values. It indicates through his life and death examples in the poem to the rebirth after the despair during those years.

English poet John Keats was born in London in the year 1795. He was leave parentless at a young age. At the age of fifteen he began studying medicine in a hospital and became a licensed apothecary-surgeon in 1816. It was at that time he decided that medicine was not his calling and began to write Romantic poetry. Keats died at the young age of twenty-five but had accomplished much in those few years. In his poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" written in the year 1819, Keats expresses both romantic and philosophical genuineness. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats p.760).