Political commitment had played an important role in providing contents and influencing literary practise ever since William Blake's [E1] [F1] [ES1] [I1] Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), while the great French Revolution [E1] [ES1] [F1] [I1], with its subversion of the static world of the Ancient Regime, had remarkably determined the spirit of the times even in self-isolated Britain. These were the times in which the literary "brotherhood" between William Wordsworth [E1] [I1] [F1] [ES1] and Samuel Taylor Coleridge [E1] [I1] [ES1] [F1] had given birth to the strong moral engagement of the Lyrical Ballads (notably, the all-famous Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, 1798).

While the democratic values of the new bourgeoisie were first twisted into personal ambition and colonialist strive by Napoleon Bonaparte [E1] [ES1] [I1] [F1] , and then brutally repressed by the wave of the Restoration [E1] [ES1] , the poetic mood shifted towards irony (and sometimes overt sarcasm) or direct criticism: in their works, the young poets of the second Romantic generation often gave voice to a deep disillusionment and to a sharp criticism of political power.

George Gordon Byron gave shape to an individualistic and rebellious hero and played with historic characters and events by means of a quite irreverent attitude, thus allowing his readers to see them from an "unofficial" point of view.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was more overt in his political commitment: his criticism of the obtuse brutality that lies behind repression went together with a strenuous strive towards justice and social equality. Poetry and poets were thus given the fundamental role of enhancing individual and social consciousness and of promoting a new model of society.

John Keats' escape into idealised Middle Ages and resorting to classical ideals as a measure of beauty hid the strenuous will of mending the political and social aberrations of the early Industrial Era.