Romantic Poetry deals with the art of discovering the essence of life and illuminating everything good and sublime about it. It is heartfelt, subjective and almost always rises above the ordinary. It is about life, death, love and the hope of a future, as well as being dark, morbid, philosophical, beautiful, and exceptional. Romantic Poetry had it's origins in the early 1800's with the writings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. After the middle of the 1800's Romantic Poetry almost completely disappeared only to have it reappear over a hundred years later in the writings of Sylvia Plath and e.e. cummings.
In Wordsworth, Romanticism is about recapturing memories that occurred in childhood, like in the poem "daffodils", and about discovering meaning, like in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", and is always made to seem beautiful and new and simple, yet complex.
No one should be able to enjoy life without first discovering and analyzing it. Like Socrates wrote..."The unexamined life is not worth living." William Blake also saw this point in his "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." He found that we are born free and the world eventually condemns us through its laws and religions. It is only through our imaginations that we can truly regain our freedom.
Coleridge was also a strict adherent of this principle. In "Kubla Khan" he believed that imagination gave our lives the liberty to live and to love, and that only in our artistic expressions can we truly be happy.
Shelley was by far the greatest romantic poet. He went to the extreme, living every moment as if it were his last. In "Ode to a Skylark" Shelley expresses his desire to be free...to live life like it could take him to heights his body could not go.
A hundred years later we see in e.e. cummings poetry that love is the only cure for our ills. That laughter can take us away from the mundane (see "anyone lived in a pretty how town").