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Who were the major poets of the Romantic era in England?
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Romanticism
Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830; in the Louvre, Paris.
The major poets of the Romantic era in England are often divided into two generations. The first generation, active in the 1790s and early 1800s, included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake. They established the movement's core principles, emphasizing individual thought, personal feeling, and the power of imagination.
The second generation, flourishing from around 1805 to the 1830s, featured poets such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. These writers continued to explore themes of nature, emotion, and the individual, often with a focus on the exotic and supernatural, rejecting the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality.123