The Romantic Period

• many writers of the period from 1785 to 1830 were aware of  a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some called "the spirit of the age." This spirit was linked to both the politics of the French Revolution and religious apocalypticism. 
• Wordsworth influentially located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology and emotions of the individual poet.
• The lyric became a major Romantic form.
• It was held that the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous - arising from impulse and free from rules. 
• Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion and expressiveness.
• The prose essay, the drama and the novel flourished during this epoch.