ents by because of her individuality.The Romantics worshiped many natural themes: the trees, grass, rainbows, sky, seas, animals, and simple primitive life. In nature they saw what is good and right about the world. In England, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge developed their lyrical ballads; a genre Wordsworth called the “poetic diction” of the time. The form, to be dictated by individual poets, included meter and had to be taken from “the real language of men,” he wrote. Living among the pastoral scenes of the Lake District, Wordsworth wrote works paying tribute to a rainbow, skylark, clouds, and evening. Coleridge’s masterpieces, Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Frost at Midnight,” pick up these natural themes. In the latter, the poet regrets his upbringing in urban London. For I was rearedIn the great city, pen ‘mid cloisters dim,And saw nought (sic) lovely but the sky and stars.(lines 51-53)By 1821, American William Cullen Bryant, after reading the Coleridge/Wordsworth collaboration, Lyrical Ballads,” remembered, “A thousand springs seemed to gush up at once into my heart, and the face of nature, of a sudden to change into a strange freshness.” In “The Yellow Violet,” Bryant describes his “love” of the “virgin air,” a “sweet flower,” and a “forest bare.” Another famous poem by him is “To a Waterfowl,” which is another example of the use of nature as a major theme in poetry. Artists displayed this worship of nature the primitive man in exotic paintings such as “The Lion Hunt,” by Eugene Delacroix. The work portrays men battling lions with primitive weapons. Throughout the exotic scene he shows the struggle between the forces of nature and the meager weapons and strength of man’s wit. Nature, portrayed by the lion, is seen defeating man with his horse an...
