he belief in the importance of Imagination. What they did not share was the religious beliefs and social truths of their society. For the first time in English Literature the poets failed to find Christianity satisfying. Through Imagination, romantic poets were able to seek out their own concept of spiritual truth. In actuality Imagination was the key to their existence. They believed that without it they were nothing, and with it they could glimpse the inner most secrets of the Universe. It was John Keats that once wrote I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Hearts affections, and the Imagination. The Romantics fascination with Imagination also accounts for another of their concerns-childhood. They believed that children saw things more clearly than adults did. Children did not have reason, habit, and customs to cloud their innocent minds. They valued the freshness and immediacy of child like intuition over adult reasoning and experience. Another favorite subject of the Romantic poets was the poet himself. Examples of this would be Wordsworths The Prelude, or Byrons Don Juan. In these poems the poet expressed the world as he experienced it. For the Romantic artist the individual was a being of infinite potential. When discussing the Romantic Era we must remember that the term Romantic itself was not applied to any of these poets during their lifetime, either by others or by themselves. The importance of this was that they were not consciously following any school of thought and not trying to prove any particular theory. The very essence of the Romantic Movement was not the rebellion against society, rules, and conformity; the very essence was the poems themselves. As a society today we have lost the vision, the power of words, and the imagination the romantic poets once shared. We have distorted the term romantic to mean something shallow in comparison to what it once meant. We have, in a sense, become e...
