I think that the statement is fairly valid.  It is so difficult to argue against the presence and importance of the poetry in the Romantic movement.  The Romantic artists like Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Byron all focused on the domain of poetry.  They believed that poetry was the "spontaneous overflow of emotions," and in doing so, their fundamental ideas were lucidly expressed through the poetry genre.  Yet, with that in mind, I think that it is important to not overlook the contributions of the novel to Romanticism.  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Austen's Pride and Prejudice were two of many novels that contributed to the understanding of Romanticism.  Both works were able to take many of the ideas in Romantic poetry and apply them to the domain of the novel and develop meaning through this format.  They helped to enhance the understanding of Romanticism and the meaning of the movement.  Poetry had its place in the Romantic movement, but it is as important to make sure that the contributions of art, music, and the novel are also a part of the Romantic movement.

Discuss your thoughts on the following statement:  "English Romanticism was a movement of far-reaching consequences, giving an altogether new direction to English poetry."

While I think that some of the Romantic writers and artists might not have seen themselves as part of a far reaching movement that would change how literature and art was viewed, the reality is that the statement is valid in how Romanticism gives a new direction to English poetry.  Romanticism's vaulting of the subjective as such an integral part of consciousness is where I think that all literature after it was directly impacted.  Any post- Romanticism literary movement had to address the role of the individual and their place in being.  In having to address it and create a statement on it, one sees how English poetry was impacted through Romanticism and the themes that emerge in it.  At the same time, I think that Romanticism had such a profound impact on English poetry because of its casting of the individual and their relationship to society.  This premise was vitally important to the Romantic poets and was something that they addressed in their work, leaving it to future writers to assess for themselves where they stood in this all important dynanic of how meaning is constructed in the world.  I would merely suggest that the statement might be more valid if we could expand the impact of Romanticism to poetry, in general, and not merely "English" poetry as so much of world literature has had to address the role of the subjective and its relationship to the external social order as part of its understanding about the nature of being in the world.