Explain the “act of creation” of Romantic poetry.

The Romantic age was a period which created as a rebuttal
to the preceding period (Realism or The Age of Reason). Therefore, the Romantic period
explored emotion and intuition over reason. Romantics also explored the importance of
nature and imagination.  Given that the Romantics found power within nature to explore
their own imaginations and justify the importance of imagination, the "act of creation"
came about so as to allow imagination to balance out any oppositions created through,
and within, the experiences of the world. The "act of creation" famously became the
great "I am" and was ultimately driven by a desire to find true
self-assertion.

One poet who discussed the "act of
creation" was Calvin Coolridge. Two aspects which Coolridge associated with the "act of
creation" were primary and secondary imagination.

Primary
imagination exists when "the living power and prime agent of all human perception . . .
a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite
I am."

Secondary imagination exists
as "an echo of the [primary], coexisting with the conscious will . . . indentical with
the primary in the kind of its agency . . . differing only in the
mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, disipates, in order
to recreate."