ABSTRACT
The difficulty of defining what is distinctively 'Romantic' about Romantic literature has been with us for as long as critics have been aware of the need to establish it. An obvious place to look was in the words of those poets who were undoubtedly representative of the movement. This chapter presents the gulf that opens up between the two prime architects of the Romantic movement in England on matters concerning precisely such issues. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this discussion, it is more important to recognise that the simultaneous decline of the sensus communis and the traditional concept of the artist as a type of maker conforming to divine Archetype was not merely coincidental. Ever since M. H. Abrams's influential study of the radical changes in the Romantic movement, the established terms for understanding the change in the sense of 'common sense' is in relation to a shift from a mimetic to an expressive poetics.
