Keats's sonnets...

I really think that it is very easy to find romanticism characteristics in every poem, especially in the ones which are closely related to this time of history.

First of all the main characteristic of romanticism that we can find in those sonnets is nature. For example it is represented in the first sonnet with the following sentence:

“Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;”

That sentence makes me think that nature is so important that it will always be the essential element of romantic poems, because nature is so full of feelings and interpretations that the reader can go beyond those simples words and focus on what they really want to mean.

The second sonnet also set nature as an important element of romanticism, but also it is combined with another element that really called my attention; death. For instance, the next part of the sonnet incorporates both, nature and death:

“My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”

I think that the theme which is closest to Keats’s lived experience is death and intelligence. He during his life was really close to death and poorness, so that is why his sonnets are related to that. Besides he studied medicine, which I think is the main aspect why he incorporates the brain, pain and books.

Coleridge: Nature and Poetry

I think that even though Samuel T. Coleridge wrote his poem " Kubla Khan: Vision in a Dream" being high, it is a great and very symbolic poem. Poetry is represented in simple things, like nature and human thoughts and affections. We can find those characteristics in Coleridge's poem, and it is very noticeable that the representation of nature is focused on, for example, the greenish that we can find in many places, love and death.

Also poetry makes us feel beyond the written words and makes us be able to put ourselves into the poem’s own history. For example when Coleridge says:

“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

By those lines I can see religion ideas which are mixed with love conceptions. It really incorporates simple elements such as chasm, hill and moon, which are very characteristic of poetry.

I truly believe that imagination plays an important role in poetry. When you write it and when you read it. Those quotations try to make us think beyond words, and Coleridge's poem allows us to flow our minds...