If you were to open up any book of Romantic poetry by any author, you would find hundreds of poems about birds and trees and spring, etc. all in tones ranging from awe-struck to melancholy. Contrary to traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason and the view of nature and the universe as a machine, Romanticists moved imagination to the highest function of the brain and preferred to view nature and the universe as a giant, organic work of art. Which is probably why nature played such a prominent role. Viewing rain as a spontaneous, natural work of art creates a much more fertile ground for the creation of a poem then just thinking ‘Ah, yes, the precipitation cycle….’  Romanticists knew about food chains and all the mechanics and cycles of nature, they were smart and there wasn’t any T.V. back then so I’m sure they read a lot of books, they just chose to look past all the boring stuff to how green and pretty the grass is and how the sound of rain is more like music then anything else. (Because we all know that a poem about chlorophyll and the precipitation cycle would be boring as hell) What is even more interesting than this total left turn from the usual, rational way of thinking, is how each artist used subjects taken from nature in different ways. Two good examples of this are William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Both were major Romantic poets and both had very different styles of writing and used nature in completely different ways.
To Wordsworth poetry was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Direct quote from the poet himself apparently). One can see this element in many of his poems. He could be out walking or just sitting there and looking at an old abbey and be overcome by an emotion or thought that he would have to write down. The poem Calm is all Nature as a Resting Wheel is a very good example of his “overflow of emotion” turning into words –
Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are crouched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky.
Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,
Home-felt, and home-created, comes to heal
That grief for which the senses still supply
Fresh food; for only then, when memory
Is hushed, am I at rest. My Friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would allay my pain;
Oh! leave me to myself, nor let me feel
The officious touch that makes me droop again.
Here he is struck, not necessarily by the beauty of the scene he is walking by, but the calmness and tranquility of it. How everything at that particular moment can seem stop turning for a little bit. He seems to take refuge in it. It is a resting wheel because everywhere else, in cities and his own house maybe, things are turning, turning, turning but here everything is quiet, the wheel has stopped for a bit and he can finally be at ease. Because when the wheel stops so can he, his memory and his troubles are forgotten about for a time because they have permission to stop too. This is very Romantic in thought. A rationalist could easily point out that nothing had stopped at all, that the grass and the horse and the kine were all part of an ever turning cycle and that his troubles were still turning and churning elsewhere, whether or not he was thinking about them. He knows all this already. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have told us to restrain from reminding him. He just chose to look past it. He’s letting himself stop for a moment to walk and rest his mind in the deceptively unturning field around him. So don’t bust his bubble, man.  Nature wasn’t just a subject for Wordsworth. It was essential to his writing. He needed to feel those overwhelming feelings caused by walking by a happy horse in order to feel alive and he needed to feel alive in order to write. If he got caught up in the mechanics of everything he’d lose the poem altogether. Which probably would have made him cry.
While Wordsworth usually let nature take the center spot of most of his poems and the feelings they created second, Shelley, however, did not. He seemed to prefer to focus more on the human aspect of things while letting nature act as a backdrop of sorts. One good example of this is the poem On a Dead Violet –
The odor from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The color from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!

A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,
It lies on my abandoned breast;
And mocks the heart, which yet is warm,
With cold and silent rest.

I weep--my tears revive it not;
I sigh--it breathes no more on me:
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.
Despite the title, this poem really isn’t about a violet at all. Not really. You can imagine the poor flower in your head, crushed, limp and dead, but, in the end, that’s not what Shelley wanted you to focus on at all. He wanted you to see how his heart felt like the violet, how, robbed of his love, he felt robbed of life. How love, when alive, is like a flower, fragrant and sweet and, how, when dead, is colorless and depressing to look at. Shelley didn’t always use elements of nature exclusively to compare and express emotions. He would also, like Wordsworth, write about a scene or idea that struck him as beautiful, but there was always, unlike Wordsworth, a very predominantly human element in those poems as well. Fragment: ‘To the Moon’ shows this human element rather well –
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,--
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
Unlike the poem about the love violet, this poem stays mostly true to the title. It is, for the most part, about the moon. But, while the moon takes the focal point, Shelley speaks to it as if it could hear. He treats the moon as if it really could feel weariness and loneliness. This gives the poem a very human feel. The moon is no longer the moon but an expression of emotional weariness. Which is probably why, after reading it, some people think, “Dude this is so like me. I can relate to this,” or speculate that Shelley was actually thinking of his own weariness while he was writing it. If this fragment poem had been just a description about the moon as Wordsworth might have done, then most would only think about the moon instead of themselves or what Shelley was thinking immediately after reading it. Both the love violet and the weary moon poems turn us back to ourselves because they feel human.
Some have said that Shelley was not as Romantic as Wordsworth was. I disagree. I believe they were both Romantic, just in different ways. Shelley viewed nature as a work of art just as much as any Romantic, he just chose to use it differently. He saw how people and nature were connected and decided to focus on that connection. Wordsworth probably saw this connection too, he just preferred to present nature and the thoughts it made him think just as they were when he was awe-struck. How an artist chose to focus on nature or any other common topic used in art back in the Romantic era didn’t determine whether or not they were a Romantic. What made a Romantic a Romantic was the complete left-turn from the usual, rational way of viewing nature as a well organized machine. Both Shelley and Wordsworth viewed nature as organic and beautiful, which made them both Romantic by the definition I’ve presented you with. Writing styles and subject matter differ with any artist’s personality and way of thinking in any era. If there weren’t any real variations in style and expression from artist to artist, art would cease to be art and become very boring.