ed around concepts such as the collective "we" and the eradication of passion in human behavior. All of those ideas about literature were challenged by the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge both had strong, and sometimes conflicting, opinions about what constituted well-written poetry. Their ideas were centered around the origins of poetry in the poet and the role of poetry in the world. These theoretical concepts led to the creation of poetry that is sufficiently complex to support a wide variety of critical readings in a modern context
             Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Frost at Midnight epitomizes the change that gradually occurred in English poetry and world-view after the Augustan Age. The Augustan poets strove to express what is universal in man, the nature of man as it was thought to have always existed. This often resulted in the writing of vague social poetry. The Romantic poem 'Frost at Midnight,' on the other hand, emphasizes the uniqueness and concreteness of the individual experience. Alongside Coleridge's stress on individual experience in his text, we can observe the Romantic divinization of nature, alienation from the composers' disgust with urban existence, mention of folklore and local custom, cognition by illumination and introspection and, last but not least, the optimistic belief in the connection nature provides to the imagination and the divine. In expressing its central themes, "Frost at Midnight" relies on a highly personal idiom whereby the reader follows the natural progression of the speaker's mind as he sits up late one winter night thinking. His idle observation gives the reader a quick impression of the scene, from the "silent ministry" of the frost to the cry of the owl and the sleeping child. Coleridge uses language that indicates the immediacy of the scene to draw in the reader; for instance, the speaker cries "Hark!" upon hearing the owl, as though he wer...