"She Dwelt Amon the Untrodden Ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet Willian Wordsworth when he was 28 years old. He wrote "the Lucy poems" which is a series of five poems when he was staying in Germany for a short period. The poem is a meditation about his feelings of loneliness and loss and it is an ode to an idealized woman who lived unobserved by many people but not for the author. The title states that the lady lived remote and unknown both intellectually and physically. Isolated sensitivity is a charasteristic part of the Romantic period and this topic is pretty much related to this poem.
As stated by the literary critic Kenneth Ober, the poem describes the "growth, perfection, and death" of Lucy. If Wordsworth has declared his love for her is left unkown, and even whether she had been aware of the poet's affection is not told. However the poet's sentiments remain detached, and his final verse reveals that the matter of his affections has died alone. Lucy's "untrodden ways" are symbolic to the poet of both her physical isolation and the unknown features of her mind and life. In the poem, Wordsworth is worried not so much with his observation of Lucy, but with his experience when thinking on her death.
"Kubla Khan" or a "Vision of a Dream" was a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem describes an imaginary place "Xanadu" that is like the "Eden" or the Promised land for poets. The author himself told how he conceived the poem writing the following paragraph:
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimes:' 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'
Writing about ideal places is an feature that writers of the Romantic period did. Remember that Romanticism had to do with feelings and subjectivity
"Ode to the West Wind" is a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This poem is very linked to the Romantic period because authors in this period wrote to the nature; the Autumn is a prefered topic. This time the speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which spreads the dead leaves and scatters seeds so that they might be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,” and describes how it stirs up violent tempests, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.
