No feature of Romanticism is more definitive than the glory it confers on the poet. He inherits the role of prophet, preacher, and priest from the receding Christian tradition; he is seen as the creator of imaginative worlds and national myths; he becomes a hero, almost a god. In the preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that the poet

And that was putting it mildly. “Hear the voice of the Bard!” Blake demands, in the “Introduction” poem of the Songs of Experience (1794), “Who Present, Past, & Future sees / Whose ears have heard, / The Holy Word, / That walk’d among the ancient trees.” Shelley concludes A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821, but not published until 1839) with these justly famous words expressing how poets are the vehicles of the spirit of the age, and the age to come: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”