The Romantic Poets
The Nature of Romanticism
As a term to hide the foremost distinctive writers who
flourished within the last years of the 18th century and therefore the first
decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a touch misleading: there
was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and therefore the great
writers of the amount didn't call themselves Romantics. Not until August
Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a transparent distinction
established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and
therefore the “mechanical” character of Classicism.
Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new
was happening within the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s
affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later
by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these
will give the planet another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote Keats ,
pertaining to Hunt and Wordsworth . Fresh ideals came to the fore; especially ,
the perfect of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to each
range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural
to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is that
the new role of individual thought and private feeling. Where the most trend of
18th-century poetics had been to praise the overall , to ascertain the poet as
a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and
having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of
poetry within the particular, unique experience.
Blake’s marginal discuss Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses
expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To
Particularize is that the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as a
private distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions,
taking as his basic material the workings of his own mind. Poetry was
considered conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it had
been to be judged.
The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest within
the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the sooner “cult
of sensibility”; and
it's worth remembering that Pope praised his father as having known no language
but the language of the guts . But feeling had begun to receive particular
emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth
called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John
Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only because
the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the simplest poetry was that
during which the best intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a
replacement importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of
Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of
the Neoclassical era to a replacement stress on imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination because the supreme poetic quality,
a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Johnson had
seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but
Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.”
The poets of this era accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the
unconscious , on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike
or primitive view of the planet , this last being considered valuable because
its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of
civilized “reason.”
Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked, and sometimes by those that were
ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the sort was adumbrated within the
“poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man. an extra sign of the diminished stress
placed on judgment is that the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be
spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily consistent with
the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You
feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and
proportions as a tree does from the life principle that actuates it.”
This organic view of poetry is against the classical theory
of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the sensation
that poetic sublimity was unattainable except briefly passages.
Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and therefore
the insistence on a replacement material went a requirement for brand spanking
new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers,
particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th
century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the
expression of their perceptions.
It couldn't be, for them, the language of feeling, and
Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back thereto of
common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his
theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800,
the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century
poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful because it is to trace the common elements in Romantic
poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. it's misleading
to read the poetry of the primary Romantics as if it had been written primarily
to precise their feelings. Their concern was rather to vary the intellectual
climate of the age.
Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the present
state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of up to date
thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with
which to face a world during which science had become trifling and art
inconsequential is visible within the satirical An Island within the Moon
(written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside
sophistication within the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for
renewal encouraged him to look at the outbreak of the French Revolution as a
momentous event.
In works like the wedding of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and
Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and
therefore the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic
reason in contemporary thought. because it became clear that the ideals of the
Revolution weren't likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to
revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a replacement
mythology centred not within the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive
figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped
by his contemporaries.
The story of Urizen’s rise was began within the First Book of
Urizen (1794) then , more ambitiously, within the unfinished manuscript Vala
(later redrafted because the Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807.
Blake developed these ideas within the visionary narratives
of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own
mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist because the hero
of society and suggested the likelihood of redemption from the fallen (or
Urizenic) condition.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution . Wordsworth, who lived in France in
1791–92 and fathered an bastard there, was distressed when, soon after his
return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the
remainder of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a
view of humanity that might be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual
human fates and therefore the unrealized potentialities in humanity as an
entire . the primary factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined
Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to make a part of the later Excursion); the
second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he
was living within the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge.
Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere
in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s
imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical
Ballads (1798).
The quantity began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
traditional Mariner,” continued with poems displaying enjoyment of
the powers of nature and therefore the humane instincts of ordinary people, and
concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a couple of Miles Above Tintern
Abbey,” Wordsworth’s plan to began his mature faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the connection between nature and
therefore the human mind continued within the long autobiographical poem
addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804
in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published
posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the worth for a poet of getting been a
toddler “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime
surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the foremost significant English
expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a subject for art and
literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a topic explored
also within the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of infancy
.” In poems like “Michael” and “The Brothers,” against this , written for the
second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and
potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic development during these years
paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and
therefore the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to
more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, like “Religious
Musings” and “The Destiny of countries .” Becoming disillusioned in 1798
together with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he
turned back to the connection between nature and therefore the human mind.
Poems like “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at
Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by
Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive
descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment.
“Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that
Coleridge said
came to him in “a quite Reverie,” represented a replacement quite exotic
writing, which he also exploited within the supernaturalism of “The Ancient
Mariner” and therefore the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany
in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in
nature and therefore the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters,
notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his
poetic output became sporadic.
“Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first
took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law,
memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”
The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs
during these years by the increase of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated
variety of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother
John, who was a captain within the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that,
while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to
sacrifice themselves. From this point the theme of duty was to be prominent in
his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain,
Spain and Portugal…as suffering from the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed
with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of
principle among statesmen.
When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of
Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem because the central section of
a extended projected work, The Recluse, “a philosophical Poem, containing views
of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan wasn't fulfilled, however, and therefore
the Excursion was left to face in its title as a poem of ethical and non
secular consolation for those that had been disappointed by the failure of
French revolutionary ideals.
0 comments:
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.