The early 19th century witnessed the dawning of a new era of poets known as the "Romantics". With leaders such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the world of poetry bursted with what these poets considered as "real emotions". Their idea of poetry, in contrast to the previous neo-classic poets, allowed for the free flow of sentiment, which encouraged a response from the soul, not the brain. In their poems, the poets created vivid images using simple middle class language, with tasteful descriptions. The two very famous poets during this time period that I have compared and contrasted are Wordsworth and Coleridge.
These two poets arose from the same time-period known as the Romantic era. They are similar in the manner that they both explored the lives of the middle or lower class people, and opened their eyes to the nature that was living around them. These Romantic poets also worked endlessly at creating a certain mood, or atmosphere that lingered through their poems. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth tended to connect beauty with the divine. In other words these two poets had the tendency to connect things in nature with God. The context of their poems can be interpreted as viewing nature as an equal with God. These two poets defined good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of feelings. Even though these two poets wrote poetry during the same era, they had many differences in their style, use of diction, and the symbols they used. .
Wordsworth's style was some what different from Coleridge's in the fact that Wordsworth developed a light, blissful ambience in many of his poems. Throughout his poem "Lines Written in Early Spring" , Wordsworth used phrases such as "I heard a thousand blended notes" while "the birds around me hopped and played" to illustrate the joyful serenity surrounding him. Even when he expressed his thought "Have I not reason to lament what man has made of man?" Wordsworth did not directly describe the grief and pain that man has created, but instead he allowed the reader to imagine that strife.
