ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an increasingly conscious allegiance to its ideal that the poetry of the Romantics differs from that of their predecessors. The romantic element is everywhere in English poetry. Ostensibly excluded in the eighteenth century, after the magnificent excesses of the Elizabethan age and the 'fair and flagrant things' which delighted the poets of the next generation? It creeps in, not only with Collins and Dyer and the Thomson of certain passages, but with the condemning phrases of its enemies, unsuspected, as in Johnson's protest against those who would 'number the streaks of the tulip', and in Pope's mocking Die of a rose in aromatic pain. Lionel Johnson himself exemplifies, for all his outer John Bullishness, that 'hunger of the imagination which preys on life', and anticipates Rossetti's admirable requirement that poetry should be 'amusing' in praising Coriolanus as 'one of the most amusing of our author's performances.
