The Romantic period usually refers to the half century from about 1780-1830. It was a time when Britain underwent the first industrial revolution and so emerged with an economy more radically constructed than in Britain's history. Therefore it brought about different work habits, different leisure patterns, different prospects and even different sex lives for most people. At the same time the French Revolution and the American War of Independence changed the way those countries were govern and made old certainties questionable and new possibilities feasible for everyone else.

The cultural, political and economic structures were being laid down by three revolutions - The American, French and Industrial. The American revolution had started in 1776 when the thirteen colonies had declared their independence from Britain, and ended after seven years of war with

British recognition of that independence in 1783.

The fall of the Bastille in July 1789 is the moment when the French Revolution struck British consciousness. Coleridge was only 16

Very comparable, but much more dramatic poetic terms are used in some of their work such as Coleridge. Terms such as: Culture and civilization, progress and permanency, hear and intellect, dream and reverie, allegory and symbol, can be compared.

The long wrestle with Napoleon in Spain (1808-12) exhausted the country. At home she was on the verge of bankruptcy, starvation, and revolution. From 1815 to the grudging, tardy reforms of 1832, the history of the country is a "long repetitions of rebellion, unrest, public protest and blind, draconic repression by an ignorant government. The poor marched and re-marched across, up and down England, exhorted by the demagogues to pillage and destroy."4 The shame of Peterloo is only the most notorious of succession of such fights.

at the time and celebrated the event soon afterwards in 'Destruction of the Bastille'. Soon followed in successive events was Britain's war with France beginning in 1793, The Reign of Terror in 1793-4 and Napoleon's coup in 1799.

There are different ideas involved when thinking of Romantic Literature - not as escapist but as literature that tries passionately to come to terms with "the modern world, as it emerges through a series of wrenching changes" 8

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 in rural Devonshire. Coleridge and Wordsworth soon became friends. Thus began the great collaboration that would culminate in the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. In 1817 he finished and published the Biographia Literaria, which he begun and worked in intermittently since 1815. Coleridge died in 1834.

"Romantic poetry does not turn it back on all these shattering changes and wander off up an Alp to sniff flowers and contemplate eternal verities."2

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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)