ABSTRACT
The great poets of the English romantic movement constitute a fairly coherent group, with the same view of poetry and the same conception of imagination, the same view of nature and mind. The affinity of the concepts of imagination among the English romantic poets scarcely needs demonstration. William Blake considers all nature to be 'imagination itself.' The poet becomes a living soul who 'sees into the life of things.' The whole of the Prelude is a history of the poet's imagination which, in a central passage of the last book, is called another name for absolute power and clearest insight, amplitude of mind, and Reason in her most exalted mood. Percy Bysshe Shelley's Defense of Poetry is almost identical, in general conception, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theory. Imagination is the 'principle of synthesis.' Poetry may be defined as the 'expression of the imagination.' William Wordsworth is the romantic poet farthest removed from symbolism and mythology.
