Dr. Kate Lister

but it was like, we want to do away with medieval superstition and belief in folklore and magic where people have science and where people have rational principles.

And it was really built on that.

So the romantics come along to counteract that.

They are about like, okay, well, ration and reason is a great thing, but what about emotions?

What about how you feel?

What about your imagination and how that is unlimited?

So they're pushing back

against this very, no, we want rational sense and reason of the Enlightenment.

So the Romantics come in and now there's a heavy emphasis on imagination, passion.

They took a lot of solace in nature and the natural world because the revolutions that are coming up, and it's the start of the Industrial Revolution as well, that was quite scary.

So finding solace in nature, the idea that we go back to how we naturally were, and obviously sex is in that mix as well.

That's what the Romantic poets did.

were largely about.

There were other people writing at the time, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and Byron shits all over them.

He thinks it's really funny.

If you want someone to say something nasty about someone at the time, go to Byron.

He was merciless about absolutely everybody.

He called Wordsworth turdsworth.

He said that Keats wrote piss-a-bed poetry.

He said it was mental masturbation.