Themes During the Romantic Age The Romantic Age consists of many different authors that come from many different backgrounds. The authors that make up this era never group themselves together. The focuses of various ideas throughout their works are why Victorian critics first identified this group of authors as “the Romantics” (Greenbalt 1418). Hays says the writers of this time period “were joined by shared ideals” and they “were, in many respects divided, but were also united by their oppositional politics, by the depth of their convictions, and by their youth” (xix). Another reason many critics group these particular authors together is the reoccurring themes they use throughout their stories and poems. Three main themes these romantic authors use are nature, imagination, and individualism.
The Romantic Age writers focus on the theme of nature throughout many works. Keats directly compares writing and nature together by saying, “if poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all” (qtd. in Coombs 41). Romantic writers “were interested primarily in universals, in looking at nature as the mirror of universal truth seen not in its particulars, that is, in celandines, daisies, birds, one man’s life, or remote regions of the past, but rather in the ordered harmony of sun, moons, stars, and seasons, and in the lives of men in general” (Coleridge in his Time 31). Coombs also states nature “offers a completely new set of spiritual values” (40). Many writers during this time had entire poems on the theme of nature, like William Wordsworth’s poem “The World is too much With Us”. Beach states that the theme of nature is continuous with Wordsworth (31). In the article “Coleridge in His Time: The Romantic Tradition”, it says Wordsworth “saw in the meanest flower that blows thoughts that lay too deep for tears; indeed, in the whole of