Economides builds a case for wonder's central importance within romanticism, arguing that its political ethos reflects values associated with the beautiful rather than the sublime in aesthetic theory of the period. Moreover, she takes issue with Philip Fisher's assertion that wonder is unavoidably elegiac in romantic literature by contrasting the status of this aesthetic in William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing. Although Wordsworth typically associates wonder with lost childhood innocence, Coleridge's association of wonder with an open-ended quest for knowledge leads him to emphasize its enduring importance within adult perspectives on art and politics.