Its differentia specifica alias destinctive feature is the significant order it seeks to establish in terms of the structure of the lexicon. We are all of us familiar with the notion of sentence, as it has evolved in European cultural tradition. As it is being taught in our schools, it dates from the 19th century . It envisages a combination of an indefinite number of clauses, at least one of them a main clause, the others subsidiary clauses. The whole combination is known as a complex sentence.
Some sentences contain just one main clause and no subsidiary clauses.
They are known as simple sentences, e.g. I'll tell you tonight. The present study opens with a chapter that outlines the romantics' picture of the world, pointing out the diverse and often conflicting strands in it, the main directions of its evolution and its reverberations in the poetic theory. The latter is then discussed in four chapters, whose order has been determined by the internal logic of romantic poetics. The first of them concentrates on the poet, in whose sensibility, emotional responsiveness and intellective power poetry is grounded. The second discusses the creative faculty, its functions and its modes of operation, in close connection with romantic views on perception, as well as the process of creation and the qualities which poetry owes to the nature of this process.