What is the definition of Romantic poetry?

It's not
possible to provide a hard and fast definition of Romantic poetry, but we can still identify
some notable characteristics all the same. The Romantic approach to poetry was marked by a
tendency to abandon the quite formal, rigid standards of Neo-Classicism, both in relation to
prosody and subject matter. The Romantics consciously broke with this tradition, creating an
entirely new poetic language of their own.

Up until the late 18th century or
so, it was widely thought that poetry should strive for objectivity, emulating an unchanging
natural order that provided much-needed stability and moral guidance in human lives. Unlike
their Neo-Classical forbears, however, the Romantics did not attempt to mirror the world around
them, but they attempted to express their individual selves. They embraced a more subjective
style of poetry, one that was concerned with the unique and the strange, the unusual and the
idiosyncratic. The emotional life of the poethis loves, his feelings, his desiresbecame an
acceptable subject matter in its own right. What had once been thought self-indulgent and
eccentric was suddenly elevated to a high art form.

A notable feature of
Romantic poetry, especially in the early work of Wordsworth, was the way in which it often dealt
with the lives of ordinary working people. The tenets of Neo-Classicism had held that such
uncultivated livesnasty, brutish, and shortwere hardly a fit subject for poetry. Yet in works
such as Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems and "Resolution and Independence," we are
treated to a sympathetic portrayal of the rural poor, whose harsh, stunted lives provide ample
material for an elevated insight into the human condition.

The role of nature
took on huge significance for the Romantics. The natural world was regarded as almost a force in
its own right, complete with its own unique personality. Nature wasn't just an object of study,
or something pretty to look at; it had the power to inspire, to meld with the individual poet's
imagination to conjure up a deeply philosophical vision. As Wordsworth wrote in "Tintern
Abbey":

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me
with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the
blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all
objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Neo-Classicism distrusted the imagination, seeing it as leading to flights of
self-indulgent fancy. Yet for the Romantics, it was a faculty whose free exercise was essential
for the creation of art. The imagination combined with nature to generate poetry of depth and
sublimity, which gave the fullest expression to all elements of the human soul, both rational
and instinctual. Romantic poetry was holistic, rejecting the more narrowly rationalistic
approach of Neo-Classicism to embrace the whole person.