What makes Wordsworth poem a Romantic poem?
Wordsworth and Coleridge (and Southey) deliberately set out to write a sort of poetry which was different from the poetry that was around at the time they began writing. In time this new kind of poetry would be called Romantic poetry – but at the time it didn’t have a name, it was just different from the sort of poetry everyone else was writing. The style of poetry before Wordsworth and Coleridge was called Augustan. People nowadays sometimes have trouble understanding what was so different about Romantic poetry, because they don’t really understand what Augustan poetry was like. Augustan poets (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay, Thomson, Graves, Collins, Johnson) liked poetry to be very neat and straightforward. They liked poems which were in riming couplets, which told a good story, which were easy to understand (no deep thinking, no pausing to wonder over what was going on in a poem). They liked poems about ordinary people doing ordinary things, and especially they liked poems with a clear m