In lieu of the idea of progress, Coleridge adopted a different angle. His ideas placed sanctity in the whole of a person and not solely in the scientific ways and means to an end. Though Coleridge accepted that scientific study was needed, he recognized that more was essential than the “pure rationality of the age of reason,“ as he defined in Biographie Literaria. In this work, Coleridge argues that pure scientific study in incomplete and will not lead to continued human progess.
The industrial revolution had taken shape by the mid-eighteenth century. The newly adopted idea of progress was applied to industry. Romantics tended to reject this industrialized idea of progress. However, in hopes that a “new European society based on lib
erty and equality might emerge” Romantics accepted that idea when applied to politics and society. Sorely after the revolution had turned to bloody absolutism, the Romantic’s sang a different tune.
Why is “Ode to a Nightingale” a Romantic poem? “Because it finds reason insufficient in itself as a means of finding joy.” What makes Keats’ poem unique from Coleridge’s early poems is it also leaves imagination without. This poem made Keats use his individual ideas on the physical world as well as imagination and sense of history.
Aware of Coleridge’s criticisms of the idea of progress and amidst a “political and intellectual climate,” Keats wrote the infamous poem, “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poem was of Romantic style
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