The Romantic Poets

Romanticism reshaped poetry as decisively as it reshaped music. Wordsworth defined good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, putting personal emotion at the center of the art. Keats and Shelley wrote about beauty, loss, and the natural world with an intensity that made the poet's inner life the true subject. That lineage runs straight to today's confessional and spoken-word poetry.

Romantic composers also taught music to tell stories. In program music, a piece follows a narrative or paints a scene instead of just exploring abstract form. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830) traces an artist's feverish dreams about a lost love, complete with a march to the scaffold. This idea — that instrumental music can carry plot and emotion — runs directly into the modern film score.