Romantic Poets and Irrationality

The period of Romanticism in English literature was in many senses a reaction to the Enlightenment which preceded it. The objectivity and sheer rationality of the Enlightenment was held in disdain by the Romantics, who saw it as a period “which did not allow feeling and imagination to outweigh reason”. The essence of Romantic thought springs from a soul which “protests against whatever exists, aspiring to something else without knowing what it is” (Thorlby 22). This unrest within the Romantic movement induced writers to explore aspects of the individual further, notably the consciousness and the self. Notions of dreams and man’s spiritual side were of particular interest to the likes of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, as Day points out; “a number of Romantic writers suggest that the mind possesses a faculty which enables it to see through the forms of the material world to a greater, spiritual reality behind it” (58).

In this way, the Romantics turned towar...