A Romantic Poet is a poet who believes emotions to be universal and nearly inexpressible.  They believe that every love has a common base, every hate a common structure etc, so that by expressing one version of love, a poem may touch the hearts of many lovers.  This is despite any extenuating circumstances, for even the most specific love flows from the same source as all the others, and thus shares a bond of mutual understanding.  Even if, as Wordsworth declares, a poet writes of an imagined feeling, that imagined feeling found its inspiration in the real feeling, or else in a circumstance likely to produce the real feeling in its experiencer, and so the poet can not deviate entirely from the feeling, but rather can express it more generally, so that most would agree and understand the poem.

Now, to express these "shadows" of a feeling a poet does not at all use the language common to others who experience the full feeling, but rather alters his language through acquiring a "greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels."  And so the language and feeling are both altered, and yet the poets goal remains to express the inexpressible to the best of his or her abilities, so that everyone may understand who has once felt that feeling.  This would seem nearly impossible, if the poet and the poem are both so far removed, but it is better to say that they are not removed, but generalized, specifically engineered to reach a large audience, and so simplified is the feeling and beautified is the language used.

However, according to the Romantic Poet any feeling is impossible to accurately express.  This is, in fact, why a poet practices and trains so hard to become pleasing and understandable to his or her reader, getting closer with each poem to expressing how he or she actually feels, but never in their mind acquiring the goal.  Feelings are supposed to be high, fully inexpressible things, and so the work of a poet is both gratifying in its closeness to the feeling so that others may understand, and torturing in its distance from the actual feeling the poet tries to express.

And so a Romantic Poet is one who expresses what he or she can of what is considered inexpressible, hoping to please and touch readers with the similarities they may find in the poem to their own feelings.