Finally, Gothic literature

Some of my favorite stories of all time come from Gothic literature, so I was pretty excited when I realized this was a Gothic writer. Reading Matthew Lewis' poems was interesting to me because it seemed like a callback to Grimm Fairy Tales type of storytelling: that is, characters suffering the consequences of their actions in morbid, albeit exaggerated, manners. It's a vast difference from a majority of the texts we've read in class so far, with the exception being Charlotte Smith and Anne Finch. Lewis, like most Gothic writers, play up to the dark side of the life, and how we, as readers, like to travel there. So that begs the question: why is this a required reading in a Romanticism class? While Lewis' poems are  different from the texts we've read so far in class, Gothic literature shares a lot of common threads with traditional Romanticism, such as the use of vivid imagery, idealization of nature, and with techniques such as messing with form/meter. In a sense, Gothic literature is just an extension of Romanticism.