Romanticism and the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats

As often happens in literature, at the end of the eighteenth century the pendulum swung from one extreme to another, from reason to passion. The distinction between a ‘classical age’ and a ‘Romantic age’ is one of the most vexed issues of literature; what follows can only hope to scratch the surface.