Nature was not only an important theme for the Romantic poets but it was a philosophical reservoir for them. A certain kind of shift of emphasis from urbanity to nature is part of the shift from Neo-Classical to Romantic poetics.
1. Rousseau's idea of a ' return to nature' was adopted as a slogan. The French Revolution, especially its philosophical background had a profound influence on the Romantics.
2. Nature and its focalization also meant a radical de-elitization of poetry from intellectual closetedness. The poet was now a regular language-user and a man talking to men, as Wordsworth said.
3. Nature was related to the omnipresence of divinity, in the minds of Wordsworth.
4. To Keats and a host of the Romantics, nature contained the paradox of static immortality and dynamic mortality. Fruition was death, as Keatsian Autumn would suggest.
5. Nature was related to the expansive power of imagination and humanistic emotion. Natural landscape in perfect blend with the rural folks is a typical Romantic theme.
6. As in Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, nature was seen in tandem with human nature--the creative psyche and its poetic development.
7. Nature was related to revolutionary change and the myth-making prowess as in Shelley's poems on the West Wind and the Cloud.
8. Nature was an 'addition of strangeness to beauty' to the Romantics and it had an intense bond with their mystical outlook.
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