The Romantic Age (1789-1830)
The Romantic
period is sometimes called the Age of Revolutions too: American Revolution of
1776, and the spirit of ‘Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity of the French Revolution in 1789 made it a time of
hope and change. Romantic Age brought a more daring, individual, and
imaginative approach to both literature and life. The Romantic writers spoke
against social evils, tyranny, spreading evils of industrialism, urban blight,
polluted environment and alienation of people from nature. The Romantic writers
tended to believe that the eighteenth-century dedication to common sense and
experience, reasonableness, and tradition.
For Augustans,
feelings and imaginations were dangerous; for Romantics, reason and the
intellect were dangerous. The individual spirit rather than ordered society
became important. In literature, Romantic writing is mostly poetry: six major
poets emerged who permanently affected the nature of English language and
literature and changed the face of English literature forever.
Two Generations of
poets
There
are two generations of these poets;
William Blake,
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are regarded as the first generation of the Romantic poets,
writing most of their major works from 1786 to 1805.
Lord Byron, Percy
Bysse Shelley and John Keats are the second
generation, producing their major works between 1810 to 1824.
William Blake: (1757-1827)
William Blake was
born in London
in 1757 and lived all but three of his seventy years in a working-class section
of the city. Blake was educated through the efforts of his father and his own
avid reading in the Bible, philosophy, and poetry. He is considered as a poet,
painter, engraver, and spiritual visionary of extraordinary originality and
genius.
At age ten, Blake
expressed an interest in becoming a painter and was enrolled in a drawing
school and later learned to an engraver. His marriage in 1782 to Catherine
Boucher was happy, whom he taught to read, write, and assist him in his
engraving work. As a child Blake was deeply religious, having had an experience
of mystic revelation when he was only four. On one occasion, said that he had
seen a tree filled with angels and, on another occasion, he informed his
parents that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel in a tree. By the time of his
marriage, Blake had become so consumed in mystical beliefs that his wife is
said to have marked: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always
in Paradise.”
He,
as a painter was fairly gradual, as a poet he was precocious; already in his
early teens Blake had begun writing verse.
William Blake
achieved little fame in his lifetime, his poetry and art were largely ignored,
even derived as a work of a madman, but in the twentieth century he has come to
know to be recognized as a poetic genius.
Characteristics of
His Works:
Blake
wrote in a lyrical visionary style and developing, in the process, an
individual view of the world. A characteristic feature of his poetry and
central concept to his vision was a tendency to see the world in terms of
opposites. He wrote that ‘Without Contraries is no Progression’ and much of his
poetry illustrates this. The major opposition reflected in his poetry is a
contrast between the order of the eighteenth century and the sense of
liberation felt in the 1790’s as a new century approached.
Blake
also used symbolism in his poetry. Some of the symbols are straightforward:
innocence is symbolized by children, flowers, lambs, or particular seasons. The
symbolism in some of his later poems, such as the epic Milton,
and the use of tiger in his poem The
Tyger, its basic meaning is the natural and creative energy of human life,
an inspiring shape (‘symmetry’) which no one should try to control.
Tyger!
Tyger! burning bright
In
the forests of the night,
What
immortal hand or eye
Could
frame thy fearful symmetry?
Works:
He wrote,
illustrated, and printed his most famous collection of poetry, Songs of Innocence and Experience, published separately in 1789 (Songs of Innocence) and 1793 (Songs of Experience), and together in
1794, abounded in images of children in a world in which people were exploited.
The child in Blake’s poetry stands for the poet’s dissatisfaction with society
and for his belief in the power of uncorrupted feeling and imagination. Through
the images of childhood, Blake dramatizes the conflict between nature and
social order, between natural innocence and the pressures of social experience.
He prepared his own illustrative engravings for these poems by a process he
himself developed.
Absent
from Blake’s best known poems are the classical allusions and formal language
that characterized the work of his contemporaries in their place are a
childlike simplicity, lyricism and visual immediacy that link him to other
writers of the Romantic movement.
In
the volume of Songs of Innocence and Experience, several poems are written in pairs, contrasting
states of human innocence and experience. In them, Blake reveals a profound
understanding of psychology and an ability to explore the spiritual side of
human existence, both of which are remarkably modern.
Before
his death, Blake reaffirmed the artistic creed to which he was faithful all his
life: “I have been very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in
spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth forever.
The
Songs of Innocence and Experience
contain the famous poems—Little Lamb who made thee? and Tyger, Tyger burning bright, we are impressed by their lyrical
quality. In other poems such as The Book
of The, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is the prophetic voice of Blake
which appeals to reader.
In
the words of Swinburne, Blake was the only poet of “supreme and simple poetic
genius, the one man of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old
great masters” of eighteenth century. Some of his lyrics are no doubt, the most
perfect and the most original songs in the English language.
William Wordsworth: (1770-1850)
The Child is father of the Man
(William
Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up)
Words worth was
born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a village on the edge of the Lake
District, a scenic mountain region in northwest England. He spent his childhood
years in researching a landscape of extraordinary beauty and variety. He
attended the school in the age of eight years, where his love of reading and
poetic tendency was strongly encouraged. He enrolled in college as a
scholarship student.
During
the summer of 1790, instead of studying for his comprehensive examinations,
Wordsworth undertook a walking tour of Switzerland
and France
from which he returned revolutionize in his political thinking and fired with
enthusiasm for the French Revolution. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!” is his description of that period in his
autobiographical poem, The prelude.
After graduation, Wordsworth returned to France to learn French well enough
to qualify as a tutor. Here he met and fell in love with Annette Vallon. He
returned back to the England
due to the lack of funds.
Two
developments marked a major turning point in Wordsworth’s life:
a bequest of nine hundred pounds
from a friend that enabled him to establish a home for his beloved sister
Dorothy and himself, and the beginning of his friendship and artistic
collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a creative association that would
lead, in 1798, to the publication of a revolutionary volume of poems and
ballads. Published without giving any name, Lyrical
Ballads contained twenty three poems (nineteen by Wordsworth and four by
Coleridge). Wordsworth alone was responsible for the important Preface, which
was to influence the whole of the Romantic movements and much subsequent poetry
in English.
In
the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, published
in 1800, Wordsworth stated the poetic principles that he and Coleridge believed
in:
First,
that ordinary life is the best subject for poetry because the feelings of
simple people sincere and natural; second, that the everyday language of these
people best conveys their feelings and is therefore best suited to poetry;
third, that the expression of feeling is more important in poetry than the
development of an action, or story; and finally, that “poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and “takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility”.
Actually
Wordsworth was the great Romantic poet. The credit of originating the Romantic
movements goes to him. He refused to abide by any poetic convention and rules,
and forged his own way in the realm of poetry. He stood against many
generations of great poets and critics, like Dryden, Pope and Johnson, and made
way for new type of poetry. By giving his ideas about the poetic language as
simple and natural, he opposed the gaudiness of classical style.
Wordsworth
was not merely a lyrical poet; he justly claims to be the poet of Man, of
Nature, and of Human Life. Though in his youth he came under the influence of
the ideals of the French Revolution, he was soon freed from illusion and came
to this opinion that emancipation of man cannot be effected by poetical
violent, but by his living a simple, natural life. He discovered that there is
a harmony between Nature and Man.
It is when man lives in the lap of nature that he lives the right type of life.
Nature has a dignity effect on him, and even the simplest things in nature can
touch a responsive cord in man’s heart.
Wordsworth
poetry is essentially empirical; that is, he records the evidence of his
senses, looking inward rather than outward. Sometimes he uses more complex grammar
and vocabulary in his writings. His poetry is also concerned with the everyday
world and with the impact of memory on the present. He gives detailed accounts
of the lives of ordinary people in poems such as The Old Cumberland Beggar and The
Leech Gatherer.
In
Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The
Prelude (1805; final version 1850) the main concern is the psychology of
the individual. He revised The Prelude
throughout his life; in each version he tries to capture more accurately the
lasting insights of his past.
He is famous for
his lyrics, sonnets, odes and short descriptive poems. His The Recluse should treat of nature, man and society, and The Prelude treating of the growth of
poets’ mind. He also wrote a number of sonnets of rare merit like To Milton, Westminster Bridge, The World is too much with us, in
which there is a fine combination of the dignity of thought and language. In
his odes, as Ode to Duty and Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,
he gives expression to his high ideals and philosophy of life.
There is not a
single line in his poetry which has not got the dignity and high moral value
which we associate with Wordsworth who, according to Tennyson, “uttered nothing
base.”
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: (1772-1834)
Coleridge’s
poetry frequently communicates a sense of the mysterious, supernatural and
extraordinary world. Wordsworth and Coleridge both contributed to Lyrical Ballads, he wrote four poems out
of twenty three in that audition of Lyrical
Ballads. Coleridge was very possibly the most versatile and stimulating
mind of his generation—a poet, critic, philosopher, theologian, lecturer,
journalist, and charismatic personality. He was simultaneously self
destructive, impulsive, and contradictory.
In
his teen age, Coleridge was spoiled, precocious and restless, continually lost
in his dream world. His father died when he was ten years old Coleridge was
sent to school in London, a time of loneliness and intense intellectual growth
that he recalls in his poem, “Frost at Midnight.” At age nineteen he went up to
Cambridge. Here
he spent a studious year before falling into bad habits and sinking deeply into
debt. Robert Southey, another Romantic poet, was his friend. He became engaged
to Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey’s fiancée.
In
one outstanding year, 1798-1799, Coleridge began his stimulating association
with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, wrote three of his best poems (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla
Khan,” and the first part of “Christabel”), and was given 150 pounds a year
for life, relieving him of oppressive financial burdens.
Wordsworth
dealt with naturalism which was an important aspect of the Romantic Movement;
Coleridge made the supernatural his
special domain, which was an equally important aspect. In his youth Coleridge
came under the spell of French Revolution, he gave poetic expression to his
political aspiration in Religious
Musings, Destiny of Nations and Ode
to the Departing Year.
Coleridge
was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will power and addiction to opium
prevented him from fulfilling much in the realm of poetry. In the fields of theology, philosophy and literary
criticism that he exercised a tremendous and lasting influence. His two
best-known poems The Ancient Mariner
and Christabel represent the high
watermark of supernaturalism.
In
The Ancient Mariner which is a poetic
masterpiece, Coleridge introduced the reader to a supernatural realm. In it an
old sailor or mariner tells the terrible sequence of events, the intense curse
of the albatross, the opposite spirit, the magic breeze, and a number of other
supernatural things and happenings. The whole poem is operated with the color
and glamour of the middle Ages and yet Coleridge makes no slavish attempt to
reproduce the past in a mechanical manner. The
Ancient Mariner is made actual and vital to our imagination by its faithful
pictures of nature, its psychological insight and simple humanity. In it the
poet deals in a superb manner with the primal emotions of love, hate, pain,
remorse and hope.
It
is simple, in ballad form, its intense imagery, the sweet harmony of its verse,
and the aptness of its phraseology, all woven together in an artistic whole,
make this poem the most representative of the romantic school of poetry.
Unlike
Wordsworth, who concentrates on the everyday world of the present, Coleridge
turns to the romance and mystery of the past. Christabel, also written in a mediaeval ballad form, and an
unfinished poem, is another allegory in which dangerous and unpleasant images
from a distant past have an everyday reality. It is a fragment, seems to have
been planned as the story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of
sorcerer in the shape of the woman. In artistic power it is inferior to The Ancient Mariner; it has supernatural
terrors of the popular hysterical novels.
Kubla Khan is another fragment in which
the poet has painted a gorgeous oriental dream picture. He personified the
essence of the poetic imagination. The subtitle of the poem is A Fragment. It
was reported that Coleridge did not complete the poem due interruption of a
visitor during his composition. The poem is indeed a fragment of a powerful
vision. The whole poem came to Coleridge in a dream one morning when he had
fallen asleep, and upon awakening he began to write hurriedly.
Coleridge
complained that poetic inspiration had left him and he wrote no poetry during
the last thirty years of his life. Instead he dedicated himself to philosophy
and to literary criticism. In 1817, he published Biagraphia Literaria, which has become one of the most influential
of works of criticism.
Though
Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love,
The Dark Ladie, Youth and Age, Dejection: an Ode, which has great,
outstanding and touches of personal emotion but his reputation as a poet rest
on The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan where he touched the
heights of romantic poetry.
John Keats: (1795-1821)
John
Keats was born in London.
His father was killed in road accident when he was nine. Six years later, his
mother died due to tuberculosis and his brother also died due to the same
disease. Keats attended a small school and distinguished himself as a brilliant
student and got his passionate love of English poetry. The family was very
poor, that’s why in his early age he had to work as a doctor’s assistant.
Although he spent some time working in London
hospitals and qualified to practice as a chemist, he soon left this profession
to devote his time to literature.
Of
all romantic poets, Keats was the pure poet. He was not only the last but the
most perfect of the Romanticists. He was devoted to poetry and had no other
interest. Unlike Wordsworth who was interested in reforming poetry and
upholding the moral law; unlike Shelley who advocated impossible reforms and
predicted about the golden age; and unlike Byron who made his poetry a vehicle
of his strongly egoistical nature and political dissatisfied of the time;
unlike Coleridge who was a metaphysician, and Scott who enjoyed in
story-telling, Keats did not take much notice of the social, political and
literary turmoil, but devoted himself entirely to the worship of beauty, and writing poetry as it suited
his temperament. He was, about all things, a poet, and nothing else. His nature
was entirely and essentially poetical.
With
support from the critic Leigh Hunt, the poet William Wordsworth, and the
Essayist Charles Lamb, Keats at age twenty-one began his literary career. His
first volume of poems appeared in 1817 and his first long poem Endymion in 1818. This poem was severely
criticized by contemporary critics, which must have shocked Keats. Keats
brought out his last volume of poems in the year 1820 (which is called the ‘Living Year’ in his life.) The
Poems of 1820 are Keats’ enduring memorial. They include the three
narratives, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia: the unfinished epic Hyperion; the Odes, La Belle Dame Sans
Merci, and a few sonnets.
Though
deeply influenced by his reading of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, Keats
looked Wordsworth as his chief poetic guide, believing with him that poetry
should be the creation of concrete sensual images in the service of profound
creative thought.
The
landmark of Keats is Great Odes. He is generally regarded as one of the masters
of the form. In them, he used escapism i.e. escape from harsh realities of life
and took refuse into an ideal world. It is the kind of entertainment which
helps you forget unpleasant things. He wrote six odes; Ode to Psyche, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, On a Melancholy, On
an Indolence and The Ode to Autumn.
In
Ode to a Nightingale we find a love
of sensuous beauty, and a touch of pessimism. In Ode on a Grecian Urn we see Keats’s love for Greek mythology and
art. It is this Ode which ends with the following most memorable lines in the
whole of Keats’s poetry.
Beauty
is Truth, and Truth Beauty, -- that is all
Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The Ode to Autumn, in which
Keats has glorified Nature, is a poem which for richness and color has never be
exceeded. Normally autumn considers as a symbol of sad but he gave a beautiful
picture of autumn.
A
main theme of Keats’s poetry is the conflict between the everyday world and
eternity: the everyday world of suffering, death and decay, and the timeless
beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination. According to
Keats point of view, after melancholy, beauty and success will come which is
everlasting. He shared the Coleridge’s view that suffering is necessary for an understanding of the world and that
great poetry grows from deep suffering.
Keats
died young in the age of twenty-five due to tuberculosis on February 23, 1821.
He had only a few years in which he could effectively write poetry. He lays
buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome under the epitaph he wrote for
himself, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Percy Bysshe
Shelley: (1792-1822)
The lone and level sands stretch far away
(Percy
Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias)
Shelley was an
exceptionally controversial personality, whose reputation was marred by
scandal. He was well known for his personal, charm, opposition to tyranny, and
great gifts. He was revolutionary idealist, a prophet of hope and faith. He was
the visionary who dreamed of the Golden Age. Shelley’s genius was
constructive as compare to other poets of Romantic age. His motive impulse was love.
Shelley
was the eldest son of a well-to-do country squire who never was able to control
his maverick child. During his school years, Shelley cruel fellow by the older
boys because of his slight build and moody shyness; he became known at his
school as “mad Shelley” because of his odd ways. At Oxford his rebelliousness behavior caused him
severe problems. Soon after leaving for London,
Shelley eloped with sixteen-year-old Harriet, with whom he had two children.
After three years he fell in love with William Godwin’s, (a philosopher),
daughter, Mary, and eloped with her to Switzerland. There he married to
her.
In
his early days Shelley came under the influence of William Goodwin’s Political Justice. He began to imagine
the new world which would come into existence when all the error and hatred had
disappeared. In his first long poem, Queen
Mab, which he wrote when he was eighteen, he condemns kings, governments,
church, property, marriage and Christianity. The Revolt of Islam is a sort of transfigured picture of French
Revolution is charged with the young poet’s hopes for the future regeneration
of the world. His Prometheus Unbound
is the hymn of human revolt triumphing over the oppression of false gods. His
poetry is not too much romantic. He talked about the freedom of Irish people
and spoke against the Peterloo Massacre of 1819
Shelley’s
other great poems are Alastor, in
which he describe the chase of an unattainable ideal of beauty; Julian and Meddalo in which he draws his
own portrait; The Cenci, a poetic
drama, which deals with the terrible story of Beatrice who takes his life in
revenge. Adonais, the best-known of
Shelley’s longer poems, which is an elegy dedicated to Keats. Another poem that
he dedicated to Keats is The Triumph of
Life.
He
is in fact the greatest lyrical poet of England. Besides the longer poems,
Shelley wrote a number of small lyrics of Exquisite beauty, such as ‘To
Constantia Singing’, the ‘Ozymandias’ sonnet, the ‘Lines written among the
Euganean Hills’, the ‘Stanzas written world! O life! O time’. It is in fact on
the foundation of these beautiful lyrics, which are absolutely complete and
there is no chance of improvement the whole range of English lyrical poetry
that Shelley’s real reputation as a poet lays.
As
the poet of Nature, Shelley was
inspired by the spirit of love which was not limited to mankind but extended to
every living creature—to animals and flowers, to elements, to the whole Nature.
In
1822, when Shelley was approaching his thirtieth birthday, he was drowned while
sailing off the Italian coast. His dead body washed ashore ten days later. A
volume of Keats was found in one pocket and a volume of Sophocles in the other.
Shelley’s ashes were buried near Keats’s grave. Describing his valued friend,
Byron called Shelley, “the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew
one who was not a beast in comparison.”
In
one of his best known lyrics, Ode to the
West wind, Shelley makes the wildness of the wind a controlled symbol of
his deepest personal aspirations for human freedom. In this, he talked about
the freedom of the man and his own freedom. He used symbolism in it.
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life
of care
Which I have borne and
yet must bear.
These are some poets of romantic
era, their poetry is not only for their era, but actually it is universal. It is
still read with full passion and students of all type like and appreciate them.
