sts included, William Blake. He not only wrote books, but he also illustrated and printed them. Many of his conservative contemporaries thought he was insane because his ideas were so unusual. Among those “insane” ideas was his devotion to freedom and universal love. He was interested in children and animals. Another significant author of the Romantic period is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. No one had put more wonder and mystery into beautiful melodic verse than he did. His strange, haunting supernaturalism of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ have universal and irresistible appeal. A friend of Coleridge’s for many years was William Wordsworth. Together they wrote a volume of verse, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, which sounded the new note in poetry. This book really signaled the beginning of English Romanticism. Coleridge found beauty in the unreal, Wordsworth found it in the realities of nature. From nature Wordsworth learned that life may be a continuous development toward goodness. He believed that if man heeds the lessons of nature he will grow in character and moral worth. But before the Romantic movement burst into full expression there were beginners, or experimenters. Some of them are great names in English literature, one would be, Robert Burns. He was born on January 25,1759 in Alloway, Ayshire, in a home like he described in his poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. His father, William Burness was a Scottish tenant farmer and his mother was Agnes Brown Burness, Robert was the eldest of seven. As a young boy he worked long hours on his father’s farm, which was not successful. But in spite of his poverty he was extremely well read at the insistence of his father , who employed a tutor for Robert and younger brother Gilbert. Watching his father suffer, Robert began to rebel against the social conventions of his time, and the seeds of his poetry’s ...
