Not only is the immediacy of experience in the poetry of Wordsworth opposed to neo-classical notions, but also his poetic style constitutes a rejection of the immediate poetic past. Wordsworth condemned the idea of a specifically poetic language, such as that of neo-classical poetry, and he strove instead for what he considered the more powerful effects of ordinary, everyday language. Coleridge's natural bent, on the other hand, was toward the strange, the exotic, and the mysterious. Unlike Wordsworth, he wrote few poems and these during a very brief period. In such poems as “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” the beauties and horrors of the far distant in time or place are evoked in a style that is neither neo-classical nor simple in Wordsworth's fashion, but that, instead, recalls the splendour and extravagance of the Elizabethans. At the same time Coleridge achieved an immediacy of sensation that suggests the natural although hidden affinity between him and Wordsworth, and their common rejection of the 18th-century spirit in poetry.
Another poet who found delight in the far distant in time was Sir Walter Scott, who, after evincing an early interest in the ancient ballads of his native Scotland, wrote a series of narrative poems glorifying the active virtues of the simple, vigorous life and culture of his land in the Middle Ages, before it had been affected by modern civilisation. In such of these poems as The Lady of the Lake (1810) he employed a style of little originality. His work, however, was the more popular among his immediate contemporaries for that very reason, long before the full stature of Wordsworth's more impressive poetry was recognised. Some of Scott's Waverley novels, a series of historical works, have given him a more permanent reputation as a writer of prose.
A second generation of romantic poets remained revolutionary in some sense throughout their poetic careers, unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Scott. George Gordon, Lord Byron, is one of the exemplars of a personality in tragic revolt against society. As in his stormy personal life, so also in such poems as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-1824), this generous but egotistical aristocrat revealed with uneven pathos or with striking irony and cynicism the vagrant feelings and actions of great souls caught in a petty world.