You’ve got it. My reference to this phrase comes from several discussions in Senior Sem exploring the fact that, particularly in the Romantic period, it was the wealthy elite who could afford the time to ponder their existence. In a grand departure from the Augustans who focused on generalizations in order to instruct the masses, Romantic poets were privileged enough to indulge in the self and the process of the poetic moment. Sadly, they did this on the backs of the working class. Leading up to this, the pre-romantic poets often evidenced this divide within their poetry. Gray, for instance, valorized the country swain and wanted to be closer to nature by sitting in a cemetery pondering the lives of the working class he could see in the fields. He absolutely romanticized the burden of their labor without joining in with his own two hands. It was also his desire to elegize them for what they “could have been” had they been educated. Thinking them noble for dying unrecognized, he was buried with them but left an epitaph and headstone they didn’t have the ability to read. This was a clear, if unconscious, demarcation of the differences between them.