Poetry During the Romantic Age

The 18^th-century Neoclassicists, writing mostly in heroic couplets, and thematically concentrating on London, were principally satirists, who scorned individual deviations from the norms of common sense, and valued good manners more than personal emotions. Despite the seeming order of the 18^th century, the opposite of the "classical" was underway, breaking out at the time of the French Revolution. It was connected with the individual's revolt against society and everything it stood for — firmly accepted good taste and artificial manners. The Romantic, as it later came to be called, is about a highly emotional, and generally impatient individual, rebelling against the restrictions of a stable society. Romanticists placed a high emphasis on free, unlimited imagination, on the essential role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of the "heart" that were to act in complex with the logical judgments of the "head", both for artistic and philosophical activities. As opposed to the official Neoclassicists, who were mostly children of the city and looked down on the country, Romanticists worshipped the countryside and simple people. They abandoned the heroic couplet and began experimenting with other forms, rediscovering blank verse along with the Spenserian stanza. Finally, in 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge with their publication of Lyrical Ballads inaugurated the Romantic movement. In the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, they collected various scattered ideas into a consistent theory and initiated new poetic principles.

The Romantic movement covers about half a century and one of its principal representatives was William Blake (1757-1827). His imaginative longer works, such as the prophecy Jerusalem (1818), as well as his fervent devotion to democratic principles and to revision of Christianity, signify the distinctive qualities of that epoch, those of creative diversity and introspective self-examination. The literary representatives of this period did not, however, consider themselves as "romantic"; this word was introduced by English historians about half a century later. Contemporary literary studies view them as independent personalities, or group them into several separate schools, like the Lake School of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and Robert Southey (1774-1843); the Cockney School, a negative term for the Londoners Leigh Hunt (1784- 1859), William Hazlitt (1778-1830), and associated writers, ^ including John Keats (1795-1821); and the Rebellious School of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and their followers, and those who resist classification like Robert Burns (1759-1796).

The canonical 18^th century literary critics took poetry as mainly a reflection of human life directed at instruction and s artistic pleasure. However, Wordsworth constantly insisted that "all good poetry is, at the moment of composition, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". According to those views, poetry written by the first person narrator, earlier mostly neglected, now became a major mode of expression. Romantic writers experimented in poetic language, versification technique and forms: e.g. Blake's symbolic lyrics and far-sighted poems; Coleridge's haunting narrative ballad of sin and revenge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's epic-like spiritual autobiography, The Prelude; Shelley's symbolic drama, Prometheus Unbound; Keats' odes on the contradictions in fundamental human desires; Byron's ironic inspection of European civilization, Don Juan. Some Romantic writers shut themselves away from society in order to extend their individual vision. In almost all Wordsworth's poems one constantly comes across the words single, solitary, alone. Coleridge, and moreover Byron and Shelley, represented a solitary hero rejected by or rejecting society, and in search of a spiritual home. Hence, there was fascination with the mythical or historical outlaws, such as Cain, Satan, or Faust.

Romantic poems usually regard the landscape as a human being, with its life and passion. Since landscapes were so important for Romantic poetry, it is usually identified with nature poetry. Indeed, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Keats' Nightingale, and others introduce natural scenes; yet they are subordinated to the central human activity, meditation.

The poets of the second generation of Romanticists died young: Byron at the age of thirty-six, Shelley at twenty-nine, and John Keats at only twenty-five. Keats' first poetic attempts are in a traditional mode, and most of his achievements were written in 1819. The poetic heritage of this apostle of Beauty ranks him among the greatest English poets.

The Romanticists were much preoccupied with the unusual which was previously largely ignored or considered too insignificant. Coleridge was interested in mesmerism, and, like Blake and Shelley, studied occult literature. Coleridge also shared with Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) an anxiety about dreams and nightmares. Byron often relied on the appeal to the forbidden and the terrifying Satanic hero.

As in earlier English history, women were generally viewed as second-rate to men in all but domestic talents and were discouraged from schooling or higher education, possessing almost no legal rights. During this revolutionary period, women obtained their expressive defender, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797), who defended the French Revolution in A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), and demanded a greater share of social, educational, and professional privileges for women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which became a classic of the women's movement.

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