SOURCE: "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by M. H. Abrams, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1960, pp. 25-36.

In the following essay, originally published in 1954 in The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt examines the various poetic structures used by Romantic poets, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, in works with naturalistic themes.

Students of romantic nature poetry have had a great deal to tell us about the philosophic components of this poetry: the specific blend of deistic theology, Newtonian physics, and pantheistic naturalism which pervades the Wordsworthian landscape in the period of 'Tintern Abbey,' the theism which sounds in the 'Eolian Harp' of Coleridge, the conflict between French atheism and Platonic idealism which even in 'Prometheus Unbound' Shelley was not able to resolve. We have been instructed in some of the more purely scientific coloring of the poetry—the images derived from geology...