All the major English poets labeled Romantics, occasionally caricatured as ‘Christian,’ rejected the orthodox Christian picture of the world as merely a ‘vale of tears.’ John Keats transformed it into a ‘vale of Soul-making,’ where suffering forges individual identity, while ironically feeling his own name was ‘writ in water,’ and then tragically dying at twenty-five. Wordsworth found in memory and nature the gradual education of consciousness. Coleridge argued that the imagination actively creates the world it inhabits. Shelley saw tyranny and dogma—not God—as the true causes of suffering, believing moral greatness lay in enduring pain without hatred. The Romantics viewed the mind as a dynamic battlefield. They all believed that a mature human identity cannot simply be handed to you; it must be hammered out through direct, creative engagement with the hardships of life. From this consensus, three principles emerge from their works and biographies that seem to me quintessentially ‘Roma...