The Romantic poetry was limited to a few poets, still, those few altered the aspect of literature forevermore. In a group of such prominent poets were George Crabbe and Thomas Moore who gave vivacious renderings of natural scenes with Romantic emotionality.
George Crabbe was one of the first poets whose works provided the link between Pre- Romanticism and Romanticism. He was a great bard of nature who portrayed it as strange being and arresting as no other Romantic poet did and therefore was named by Byron as “Nature’s sternest painter”. Throughout the age, Crabbe persisted in his precise, realistic portraits of rural life and landscape, writing mainly in the heroic couplets of the neoclassical age. His poems described village manners without …show more content…
His most distinctive achievements, however, were the writings which started with fact and moved into macabre fantasy and especially those which began as quiet autobiography and developed into an elaborate construction made up from the materials of his reveries and dreams. In such writings he widely wrote on the nature of dreams and anticipated modern psychological studies in relation to childhood experience and imaginative creation. Of these compositions the most celebrated and notable was “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater”. This study of addiction and hallucination, of the induction of dreams as much as of the impossibility of forgetting a personal past, moved far beyond a merely Gothic fascination with the dark and contorted architecture of the soul. It was a work of considerable psychological daring, prefiguring Freudian theories and preoccupations, as much as an intricate personal apologia which interweaved recollections of human kindness, nightmarish recalls of childhood trauma, and an equivocating justification of drug-taking. In this achievement De Quincey penetrated the depths of the subliminal world, describing the simultaneously macabre and ecstatic experience with great preciseness, imaginative acuity and lyrical intensity. He opened up to English literature the dark side of human consciousness, with its grotesque strangeness, and its pervasive sense of guilt and