Romantic > Poetry > Intro

Romantic poets such as Mary Robinson and William Wordsworth transformed the understanding of poetry in the 1790s, emphasizing ordinary language over what they saw as Neoclassical artifice, nature over history, literature and religion as the source of inspiration, and ordinary people rather than heroes as both subjects and writers of poetry. The lyric (a short expression of individual emotion from a first-person point of view) supplanted Neoclassical verse forms that celebrated important public occasions or famous people. A more open, supple and various meter and experimentation with unrhymed verse and dialogue also characterizes Romantic poetry.