1

Major conflicts and oppositions in English Romanticism. Romantic theories of the

poetic imagination



As we look back to-day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth
century, here just surveyed, the progress of the Romantic Movement seems the most
conspicuous general fact which it presents. But at the, death of Cowper in 1800 the movement
still remained tentative and incomplete, and it was to arrive at full maturity only in the work
of the great writers of the following quarter century, who were to create the finest body of
literature which England had produced since the Elizabethan period. All the greatest of these
writers were poets, wholly or in part, and they fall roughly into two groups: first, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Walter Scott; and second, about
twenty years younger, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the publication in
1798 of the little volume of 'Lyrical Ballads' which contained the first significant poetry of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a hard battle to
fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the founding and continued success of the first
two important English literary and political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The
Quarterly Review,' which in general stood in literature for the conservative eighteenth century
tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the Romantic poets.
Wordsworth, Coleridge.
William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, the most picturesque part of England. He
had the benefit of all the available formal education, partly at home, partly at a 'grammar'
school a few miles away, but his genius was formed chiefly by the influence of Nature, and,
in a qualified degree, by that of the simple peasant people of the region.
It was for an enlarged edition of the joint volume, published in 1800, that Wordsworth
wrote the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
In earnest realization of his grandiose conception of the poets role, Wordsworth started
work on The Prelude in 1798. Intended to be the introductory portion of a long work, The
Recluse, it undertook a preliminary survey of the growth of the poets mind and powers. As
such, it became itself a full-length study and, together with The Excursion represents what the
whole project eventually came to. In the first two books of The Prelude Wordsworth traces
the nourishing of the poetic spirit in childhood as he was fostered alike by beauty and by
fear at the hands of Nature herself.
The Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, included in Lyrical Ballads, track in
fine summary the autobiographical development surveyed in The Prelude. A work of
comparable distinction, the Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Poems is a subtle fabric of
rhymed and rhythmic architecture connecting the glory and the dream of childhood with the
notion of human pre-existence elsewhere.
Wordsworth, at his finest, has a sturdy simplicity of idiom that matches the profound
solemnities of country life he so feelingly recaptures. Michael tells the story of a shepherd
and his wife who part with their dear son Luke at a time of financial stress, for Michael cannot
bear that his fields should pass into a strangers hands, and there is hope that Luke will make
money in the town. The boy goes to the bad there. The sheepfold father and son were building
together remains symbolically unfinished, while the parents die, the estate is sold and the
cottage ploughed over. There can be few more moving poems in our literature. But
Wordsworths studies of man in nature are less often complete narratives than records of
personal encounters that have provoked the poet to reflections on the human situation.
2

The Old Cumberland Beggar is a comparably sympathetic study, and there is no more
compelling passage in The Excursion than the disturbing record in Book I of the cheerful and
devoted wife Margaret, gradually borne down by sufferings, her husbands sickness, his
disappearance and the death of her baby.
Wordsworth is the chief representative of some of the most important principles in the
Romantic Movement; but he is far more than a member of any movement; through his
supreme poetic expression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs among the five
or six greatest English poets.
In Wordsworth's long autobiographical poem The Prelude, the main concern is the
psychology of the individual. It is characteristic of the Romantic period that its major epic
poem should be about this subject. In many parts of The Prelude, and in poems such as
Tintern Abbey and Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth records a personal search for
the moments of insight and understanding which, he believed, only nature could give. Time,
and the passing of time, become recurring themes, as in 'Five years have passed' in Tintern
Abbey, where memory of the past, together with the effects of nature, allow the poetic 'I' 'to
see into the heart of things' in the present.
Wordsworth's language frequently moves towards the language of everyday speech and
the lives of ordinary people. It breaks with the artificial diction of the previous century,
creating a more open and democratic world of poetry.
The poets Wordsworth and Coleridge are of special interest not only from the primary
fact that they are among the greatest of English authors, but also secondarily because in spite
of their close personal association each expresses one of the two main contrasting or
complementary tendencies in the Romantic movement; Coleridge the delight in wonder and
mystery, which he has the power to express with marvelous poetic suggestiveness, and
Wordsworth, in an extreme degree, the belief in the simple and quiet forces, both of human
life and of Nature.
Coleridges contribution to Lyrical Ballads included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, on
which his high poetic status very largely, and justly, depends, being one of Coleridge's best-
known poems In the poem an old sailor or mariner narrates the terrible sequence of events
which followed when he shot an albatross and was cursed. His ship is becalmed, he is
subjected to nightmare visions and to a long period of suffering and his water supply runs out
in punishment for his deed. When the mariner blesses some sea-creatures, his offence against
the power of nature is forgiven and he is able to return home, revitalised through his shared
suffering. The whole poem is written in a form recalling that of a mediaeval ballad.
The conclusion, 'A sadder and a wiser man/He rose the morrow morn', underscores the
passage from innocence to experience, from past to present, which is central to a great deal of
Romantic writing.
How far drugs contributed to the calling up of dreamlike and nightmarish atmospheres is
a question brought sharply into focus by the remarkable opium-product, Kubla Khan, a
fragment which Coleridge was pouring spontaneously onto paper when he was interrupted by
a person from Porlock. There is rare beauty and colour in the rich, exotic flood of sensuous
image and symbol. It seems to well up from some deep source of verbal magic that is tapped
only rarely in the history of literature. The brevity and incompleteness are tantalizing.
It is important to compare and contrast the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. They
created a new kind of poetry, innovating in form, language and subject matter and creating a
lasting influence on English poetry. Although their particular styles and methods were
generally in contrast, it is necessary to stress that they shared important goals, particularly the
goal of making poetry closer to the rhythms and diction of everyday language.
In 1817 he published Biographia Literaria, which contains important discussion of the
workings of the poetic imagination and reveals the extent of his thinking about the nature of
3

literature. It has become one of the most influential of works of criticism. Together with
Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it also reveals another aspect of the modern writer:
almost simultaneously the writer produces both literary work and self-conscious critical
reflections on that work and on literature in general. In more ways than one, the Romantics
are genuine forerunners of the Modern movement in literature and the arts.
With a better body and will Coleridge might have been one of the supreme English
poets; as it is, he has left a small number of very great poems andhas proved one of the most
powerful influences on later English poetry.
Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Lord Byron, who alone managed to eclipse Scotts primacy as the best-selling poet of
the second decade of the nineteenth century, but he never attempted to rival him as a novelist.
If the poetic eclipse was far from total, the appearance of the first two cantos of Childe
Harold gave Byron an immediate celebrity, or, as he famously remarked, I awoke one
morning and found myself famous.
Following his instinct for excitement and for doing the expensively conspicuous thing he next
spent two years on a European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey.
The first literary result of his journey was the publication of the first two cantos of 'Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a
dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author himself; but Byron
soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the series of descriptions of Spain and
Greece of which the first two cantos consist. The public received the poem with the greatest
enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his well-known comment: 'I awoke one morning
and found myself famous.' In fact, 'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works.
The long poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - the term 'childe' is a mediaeval word for a young
nobleman waiting to become a knight - was the work which made Byron's name. The hero,
Childe Harold, is often identified with Byron himself. He is a restless wanderer, alternating
between despair and great energy and commitment to new, usually forbidden experiences.
The poem was published when Byron was only 24 years of age. It made him famous
overnight and his public career as a popular and scandalous figure was launched.
The publication of the first two cantos of Byrons Childe Harolds Pilgrimage in 1812 took
the literary and social world by storm, and the succession of verse romances that quickly
followed (The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, The Corsair and Lara) proved that Byron could
beat Scott, if not artistically, yet commercially, at his own game.
Byrons friend and sometime companion in self imposed exile, Percy Bysshe Shelley
had an equally low view of public applause and an equally distinct distaste for the British
Establishments, literary and political. Unlike Byrons, his work derives from a consistent, if
malleable, ideology, one determined by a philosophical scepticism which questions its
Platonic roots as much as it steadily rejects Christian mythology and morality.
In Ozymandias the speaker recalls having met a traveler from an antique land, who told him
a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone
stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies half sunk in the
sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and sneer of cold command on the
statues face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions (or "passions") of the
statues subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue,
even though both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue
appear the words, My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty,
and despair! But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the lone and
level sands, which stretch out around it.
In Ode to the West Wind the speaker invokes the wild West Wind of autumn, which scatters
the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the
4

wind, a destroyer and preserver, hear him. The speaker calls the wind the dirge / Of the
dying year, and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him.
He says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from his summer dreams, and cleaves the
Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the sapless foliage of the ocean tremble, and asks for
a third time that it hear him.
The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry,
or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, the comrade of the winds wandering
over heaven, then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He
pleads with the wind to lift him as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! for though he is like the wind at
heart, untamable and proud, he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon
the earth.
The speaker asks the wind to make me thy lyre, to be his own Spirit, and to drive his
thoughts across the universe, like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth. He asks the wind,
by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the trumpet of a
prophecy. Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind
that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: If winter comes, can spring be far
behind?
That the quality of Shelley's genius is unique is obvious on the slightest acquaintance
with him, and it is equally certain that in spite of his premature death and all his limitations he
occupies an assured place among the very great poets.
John Keats, ever sensitive to criticism and ever open to the influence of other poets, both
living and dead, was also extraordinarily able to assimilate and then to transform both
criticism and influence.
In his later poetry the deeper force of the Greek spirit led him from his early Romantic
formlessness to the achievement of the most exquisite classical perfection of form and finish.
His Romantic glow and emotion never fade or cool, but such poems as the Odes to the
Nightingale and to a Grecian Urn, and the fragment of 'Hyperion,' are absolutely flawless and
satisfying in structure and expression.
Keats, like Coleridge, was also attracted to exotic settings for his narratives. These include
mythic classical backgrounds and mediaeval contexts of high Romance. The poems Isabella,
Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci explore familiar Romantic
themes: the relationship between emotion and reality; the impermanence of human love; the
search for an elusive beauty.
Keats's pursuit of the eternal truths of poetic art and the imagination are powerfully expressed
in Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the poem the urn itself suggests that: Beauty is truth, truth is
beauty, - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
The Grecian urn and the artistic carvings on it represent the permanence of art and celebrate
the power of the artist to immortalise human activity, to make it permanent, preserving it
against mortality and the passing of time. The beauty of art is seeing the real truth of
existence.
To Autumn. Keatss speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its
abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late
flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a
female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair soft-lifted by the wind, and
often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In
the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone,
but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the small gnats hum among the "the river
sallows," or willow trees, lifted and dropped by the wind, and full-grown lambs bleat from
the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their
coming migration.
5

La Belle Dame sans Merci is a ballad which exists in two versions, with minor differences
between them. The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical to other of Keats'
works. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. The poem is full of
enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
Summary: The speaker of the poem comes across a "knight at arms" alone, and apparently
dying, in a field somewhere. He asks him what's going on, and the knight's answer takes up
the rest of the poem. The knight says that he met a beautiful fairy lady in the fields. He started
hanging out with her, making flower garlands for her, letting her ride on his horse, and
generally flirting like knights do. Finally, she invited him back to her fairy cave. Sweet,
thought the knight. But after they were through smooching, she "lulled" him to sleep, and he
had a nightmare about all the knights and kings and princes that the woman had previously
seduced they were all dead. And then he woke up, alone, on the side of a hill somewhere.
'Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, were
the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric and
recovering for her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion'.