The poets of the Romantic period wrote during the tumultuous era of the French Revolution. It is because of the time period in which they lived and created that these writers came to value that which is common and serene and beautiful. One of the elements that the Romantics valued is the imagination. Poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge called upon the powers of imagination to bring relief and peace to their chaotic worlds. John Keats illustrated what effects the imagination can have when it is allowed to permeate reality. Both of these poets demonstrate how imagination shapes reality and how these images are projected onto the natural world. In "Frost at Midnight," Samuel Taylor Coleridge sees nature as a support for his imagination. In the poem's opening, Coleridge is sitting alone in the dead of night. The only other thing that stirs is the "film which fluttered on the gratethe sole unquiet thing," a piece of soot in the fireplace. This is when imagination takes hold of him. It exaggerates and amplifies his senses, "freaks the idling Spiritand makes toy of Thought." His imagination is able to augment his world. He goes on to more "abstruse musings" and begins to daydream about his youth. In his dream, he remembers the bells that signified the start of the fair in his childhood. It is the sound of these bells, not the fair that they announced, that brings back a feeling of joy for Coleridge. They bring him imaginable pleasure, which for him is preferable to actual pleasure, a kind of happiness that might lead to disappointment. Coleridge finds himself imagining that he was again in his youth; that he was again wishing for the fair to come, feeling that anticipation that came from the bells. The regrets of his own childhood bring his thoughts to his son. Coleridge wants his son to have a better life than he did. He hopes that his son will "learn far other lore / and in far other scenes[and] wander like a breeze / b...
