Modernism and Romanticism: A Comparative Study of the Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats and John Keats

Romantic poetry was especially concerned with the themes of country life which is also known as pastoral poetry; moreover it also employed mythological and fantastic settings. Romanticism focuses more on the individual than society. The Romantics were fascinated especially by the individual imagination and individual consciousness. “Melancholy” was quite the exhortation for the Romantic poets. A firm loosening of the persistent rules of artistic expression, during earlier times, was observed in the Romantic era. In English literature, modernism has its roots in 19th and 20th century; the age was characterised by an unexpected and sudden release from conventional ways of viewing the world and interacting with it. Individualism and Experimentation, which were often heartily discouraged in the past, became the modern virtues. The modernist period in English literature was an intuitive response towards the prevailing aesthetics and culture of the Victorians culture of the 19th century. At the turn of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals blamed the writers of earlier generation for misleading the society, thereby resulting in a dead end. They had the ability to predict hence they could foresee that world events were escalating into a mysterious territory.