The Romantic is excited by how things might ideally be, and judges what currently exists in the world by the standard of a better imagined alternative.
Poetry is a means of representation rather than ideation or escape as we saw perhaps in Keats we see poetry taking on a social function in the way that it had for the younger generation of Romantics.
The truth is, that the whole affair has been exalted by poets and romancers to an undue importance, and that love in its various developments is not a fitting object to consume the best energies of men.