The easiest way to differentiate these three Romantics is to think about the scope and intent of their poetry.

Coleridge is best known as the author of elaborate, sometimes drug-inspired, symbolic poems with spectacular imagery. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge creates a kind of moral allegory through the story of the mariner and his spiteful killing of the albatross, a symbol of innocence and spirituality.

Byron, on the other hand, is known for the creation of the aptly named "Byronic hero," a mysterious figure with a dark past who contends with nature. Whereas Coleridge's mariner is humbled by his sin, Byronic heroes, like Manfred of the poem of the same name, struggle against God and the universe and see their own personality as somehow equivalent.

Keats, a member of the "second generation" of Romantics, writes in a different register. Keats's poetry is concerned with the personal and with capturing in exquisite verse the ways the individual psyche resonates with and is inspired by the natural world. His famous maxim at the conclusion of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is at once a kind of aesthetic expression of the larger Romantic sensibility and a much gentler interpretation of man's relationship to the universe.