... was, to them, an essential qualification. Underlying the era as a whole is a pervasive sense of the collapse within the individual of the systems of moral, religious and psychic control, constraint and limitation which were being shaken apart at the public or institutional level by the American and French Revolutions. Whatever the personal politics of the author, the Romantic poet assumes the mantle of prophet, seer and legislator. He is either a solitary dreamer, or an egocentric plagued by guilt and remorse but, in either case, a figure who has seen through the established world to some deeper truth, more often than not through excesses of emotion, imagination or other irrational means such as drug use or occultism. In his world nature is a mirror for the subjective creative power of the mind and soul. In many cases, this disillusionment resulted in corresponding revolutionary or radical sentiment, clearly seen in ...

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