The Romantic Poets, Blake and Burns, challenged the societal and religious structures of their day. With different styles, they both defied the oppression of the class system and ridiculed those who thought they were above others. Burns, in his To a Louse, sarcastically probed the audacity of a bug crawling on the fancy dress and hat of a young woman in church who was so impressed with her own status. They also scorned the repression of the religious authorities and beliefs of their day. While Burns maintained his faith, he disagreed with the teachings of his day that virtually everything enjoyable in life was a sin. Blake, on the other hand, even challenged the belief in God as the benevolent creator, instead referring to him as an oppressive blind tyrant. He was such a sarcastic, angry writer that his poem The Tyger, written seemingly for children, was enough to possibly frighten those young minds. One common thread is that they wrote for the understanding of the common people, with Burns even writing in the Scottish laymen dialect he had grown up with.
The Lake Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, spent a good number of years in the Lake District of England. Their style and content much different than that of the Romantics, they rarely, if ever, used satire. Wordsworth wrote mostly of the beauty and peacefulness of the countryside that he called home, spending hours or pages describing the minutest details of the nature around him. When he was away, he wrote about his longing for this region. He seemingly spent a great deal of time in solitude, reflecting on the world around him. He and Coleridge were close friends, co-writing "Lyrical Ballads" together in 1798. They too sought to use the language of ordinary people in their poetry. While Coleridge did not spend a great deal of time describing or reflecting on the beauty of nature, his works seemed to have a great deal of the different aspects of nature as their backdrop.
