Experimentation with Poetic Form in Romanticism
When we read the Romantics now, they seem old-fashioned. They say things like, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty/ That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Sounds fancy, right? To the modern ear, this stuff can seem pretty old school. But actually, the Romantics were groundbreaking in terms of challenging poetic tradition.
What the early Romantics—especially William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—wanted to do was revolutionize the way poetry was written. They were sick and tired of how artsy-fartsy poetry had become, especially the poetry of their predecessors. They wanted to make poetry conversational. They set out to write poems that used the language of ordinary speech, but which were still beautiful and poetic. This was the big project of Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge that marked the beginning of the Romantic period.
Chew on This
So how do Romantic poets transform the writing of poetry? Check out William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud (Daffodils)" to see how the poet simplifies language and diction in this poem.
Wordsworth's good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge also liked to play around with poetic conventions. See how he varies line lengths to create new effects in his poem "Kubla Khan"