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INTRODUCTION
The beginning of the Romantic Age in English literature is usually taken as
1798, the year in which William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published
a book of their poems called Lyrical Ballads. The Romantic Age traditionally ended
in 1832, with the death of Sir Walter Scott. But it is a mistake to assign any definite
date to it. It was not a sudden outburst but the result of long and gradual growth and
development. There was a natural revolt against the classical spirit of the eighteenth
century which had given rise to artificiality in poetry, both in regard to subject matter
and style. This spirit of revolt was accentuated by the French Revolution, with its cry
for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. What the Renaissance had done to the release of
the human mind from the bondage of church and medieval scholasticism, the French
Revolution did in large measure in the social and political spheres. The ideals of
French Revolution inspired mens mind and inflamed their souls. The same unbridled
imagination, the same glow of passion that had characterised Elizabethan literature
was revived in the literature of the romantic period. Hence the literary movement was
on the one hand a revolt against the classical creed of the eighteenth century, and on
the other a revival of the Romantic spirit of the Elizabethan Age.
Since the spirit of Elizabethan poetry was akin to that of the Elizabethan age,
the Elizabethan literary forms and subjects were revived again- sonnet, lyric, ballad,
blank verse, and the Spenserian stanza. The same fullness of imagination, richness of
language, vastness of conception, lyricism, picturesqueness, suggestiveness and
sensuousness, which permeated the great Elizabethan works are found again in the
literature, especially poetry in the Romantic Age.

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The Historical Background The American Revolution & French Revolution:
These two Revolutions (happened outside England) disturbed the basic values
and structures of English society. Philosophically, the French Revolution seemed to
signal the victory of ever more radical democratic principles than those enunciated in
the American Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it was the most significant event
of the romantic period. In English the Crown and the ruling classes feared the effects
of the French Revolution from the beginning. But English liberals and radicals, who
themselves had been calling for the democratization of English society, saw in the
early stages of the French Revolution--in the Declaration of the rights of Man and in
the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, to release imprisoned political
prisoners--a triumph of popular democracy. Among the enthusiastic supporters of the
Revolution in its early stages were writers who would play a central role in English
Romanticism. Wordsworth visited France during the summer of 1790 and was filled
with hope and excitement as the country celebrated the first anniversary of the fall of
the Bastille. William Godwin (1756-1836), a philosopher and novelist who exerted
considerable influence on Wordsworth, Shelley, and other Romantic poets, predicted
in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) a peaceful version in England of
what appeared to be happening in France. In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt said that the
French Revolution seemed at first to announce that a new impulse had been given to
mans minds (XVII). The sense of being present at some apocalyptic event of history
was common at this time: hopes were high that mankind was about to see the end of
the old world and the beginning of a new and better one. Wordsworth, looking back at
this time over ten years later, gave expression to what must have been a widespread
feeling at the outset of the French Revolution:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy,
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For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
(The Prelude 1805. X 105-09)
But the promise and expectation aroused by the early of the Revolution in
France soon gave way to bitter disappointment as events took an increasingly violent
and repressive course. When revolutionary extremists gained control of the
government in 1792, they executed hundreds of the imprisoned nobility in what came
to be known as the September Massacres. The reaction in England to these events
in France was predicable. Even the most ardent supports of the Revolution were left
in disillusionment and despair. As Wordsworth expressed it in The Prelude:
Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defense
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for: and mounted up,
Openly in the view of earth and heaven,
The scale of Liberty. (The Prelude 1805. X 206-11)
During the years of violent political revolution and reaction for the spirit of
Liberty, another revolution was taking place throughout European society for the
economic growth.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution in England marked the beginning of the modern era,
and it caused profound economic and social changes with which the existing
principles and structures of government were totally undermined. Important cities in
central and northern England that had previously been stable and orderly centers of
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skilled labor developed into sprawling, dirty industrial cities. Working and living
conditions in these cities were terrible: women and children as well as men labored
for long hours under intolerable conditions, for wages that were barely enough to keep
them alive. Reports were not uncommon of young children being harnessed to coal-
sledges and made to crawl on their hands and knees in the mines. Wordsworths early
poems, for example, contained a number of figures whose undeserved suffering is
caused by an unfair and uncaring society. Blake pointed out the miseries of the
Londoners in his daily observation. In The Chimney Sweeper, he describes that the
Chimney-boy has been sold by his father to be a sweep when he is still so small that
he cannot even utter the /s/ at the beginning of words. He attempts to cry Sweep!
Sweep! but his childlike voice turns out to be Weep! Weep! The double meanings
of sweep and weep immediately give us a pathetic impression of the state of his
slavery. More than ever England was sharply divided into two classes: a wealthy class
of property owners who held economic and political power, and a poor class of wage
earners deprived of rights and possessions. In response to the rapidly changed society,
Wordsworth shows his angers towards the sheer waste and sadness of life in his The
World is too much with us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! (1-4)
To the writers, the Romantic Age was a time of vast and unguided political
and economic changes. Most of the writers of this period were deeply affected by the
promise and subsequent disappointment of the French Revolution, and by the
distorting effects of the Industrial Revolution. In many ways, both direct and indirect,
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we can see the historical issues reflected in the main literary concerns of Romantic
poets. Much as the French Revolution signaled an attempt to break with the old order
and to establish a new and revitalized social system, Romanticism sought to free itself
from the rules and standards of eighteen-century literature and to open up new areas
of vision and expression. The democratic idealism, which characterized the early
stages of the French Revolution, have their parallel in the Romantic writers interest
in the language and experience of the common people, and in the belief that writers or
artists must be free to explore their own imaginative worlds. The main consequences
of the Industrial Revolution--the urbanization of English life and landscape, and the
exploitation of the working class-- underlie the Romantic writers love of the
unspoiled natural world or remote settings devoid of urban complexity, and their
passionate concern for the downtrodden and the oppressed.













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POETRY AND REVOLT
The Romantic Age was emphatically an age of poetry. The previous century,
with its practical outlook on life, was largely one of prose; but now, as in the
Elizabethan Age, the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man
to singing. The glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and Southey.
It is intensely interesting to note how literature at first reflected the political
turmoil of the age; and then, when the turmoil was over and England began her
mighty work of reform, how literature suddenly developed a new creative spirit,
which shows itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats
a wonderful group of writers, whose patriotic enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan
days, and whose genius has caused their age to be known as the second creative
period of period of our literature. Thus in early days, when the old institutions seemed
crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey formed their youthful scheme of a
Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, an ideal commonwealth, in which
the principles of Moores Utopia should be put in practise. Even Wordsworth, fired
with political enthusiasm, could write,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
The Romantic Age is the age of Revolution in the history of politics and of
what is broadly called the romantic triumph in that of literature. It is most important
for us to understand that the movement in literature was only one aspect of a
comprehensive general movement, another aspect of which is to be found in the
Revolution. At bottom both the political and the literary movements were inspired by
the same impatience of formulas, traditions, conventions, and the tyranny of the dead
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hand, by the same insistence upon individuality, and by the same craving for freedom
and the larger life. In the doctrines of the new poetry, as in the teachings of the
revolutionary theorists, there was indeed much that assumed the shape of challenge
and attack. The long-accepted rules of art, in fact prescribed rules of any kind, were
treated with open contempt; the reaction against Pope and the Augustan school
became aggressive; and the principle of spontaneity was everywhere thrust to the
front. The dominant spirit of the age was rather expressed by Keats when he wrote:
The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured
by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is
creative must create itself." A comparison of this passage with the couplet from Pope
which we have already quoted:
" Those rules of old discovered, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodis'd,"
will suffice to show the fundamental difference in principle between Augustan and
romantic poetry.
English poetry had an intimate association with the various stages of the
French Revolution and with the striking changes in the temper of European society
which these produced. The great outburst of 1789 sent a thrill of fresh life through the
whole civilised world. It came as the prophecy of a new day, and for the moment it
seemed as if, leaving behind it all the evils of the past, humanity at large was to pass
forward immediately into an era of realised democratic ideals of liberty, brotherhood,
and the rights of man. A wonderful humanitarian enthusiasm and gorgeous dreams of
progress and perfection were thus kindled in ardent young souls ; and in England,
quite as much as in France itself, men of generous natures were ready to catch fire by
contact with the passions which the French cause aroused because, as our later
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eighteenth century literature shows, there had been in England a steady growth of
many of the principles which the political revolution now promised to translate out of
abstractions into living facts. As Wordsworth afterwards wrote:
" But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy ;
France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again ";
and once more :
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."
But as the progress of the French movement soon proved, the glorious
promises of '89 were destined to remain unfulfilled. The excesses of the reign of
terror; the sensational rise of Napoleon ; the establishment of a military despotism ;
the long strain of the Napoleonic wars ; the restoration of the Bourbons ; the
determined attempt made by the crowned heads of Europe after Waterloo to destroy
democracy and popular government all these things were naturally productive of vast
disturbances in thought and feeling. Reaction set in; the principles of the Revolution
were discredited; and the failure of the great effort which France had made to initiate
a new and better order of things resulted in a general collapse of faith and hope. The
age of buoyancy and expectation passed away. The age of unrest and disillusion
succeeded. Thus we may expect to find an enormous difference in tone between the
poetry of the earlier and that of the later revolutionary period.
The close of the French Revolution did not mean the end of the revolutionary
movement, even in the field of politics. The peoples of Europe had been aroused, and
were not now to be crushed or pacified. Hence repeated disturbances in Spain,
Portugal, Italy, Greece, and much dangerous discontent in England. But meanwhile,
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as we have seen, a strong conservative reaction had set in ; many of the older
generation abandoned their early faith, and for a time the principles of progress and
popular government suffered eclipse. The complacency of toryism, however, was
impossible to many of the more fiery spirits among the younger men. Growing into
manhood just in time to realise the full meaning of what seemed to be the failure of
the democratic cause, they found themselves in a world which had emerged from the
long strain of revolutionary excitement, exhausted but not satisfied. The old
enthusiasms and hope had gone, and their collapse was followed here by apathy and
indifference, there by the cynicism which often results from exploded idealism, and
there again by the mood of bitter disappointment and aimless unrest. Such were the
conditions which naturally weighed heavily upon the English poets who were born
into the later revolutionary age. Yet every man will respond to the influences of his
time in accordance with the peculiarities of his own genius and character; and, though
the three chief poets of our younger revolutionary group, Byron, Shelley, and Keats,
breathed the same atmosphere, and saw the same forces at work about them, nothing
could well be more striking than the contrast between each and each in the quality and
temper of their poetry.








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CONCLUSION
The word Romantic has been used for so many purposes that it is impossible
to confine it to any single meaning, still less to attempt a new definition of it. The
Romantic Age in English Literature began in 1789 with Blakes Songs of Innocence
or with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and ended with the death of Keats
and Shelley. In the Romantic Age we have five major poets- Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, Byron and Keats.
The essence of Romanticism was that literature must reflect all that is
spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its own fancy
in its own way. This characteristic can be found in the work of Elizabethans who
followed their own genius in opposition to all the laws of critics. In Coleridge we see
this independence expressed in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, two dream
pictures, one of the populous Orient, the other of the lonely sea. In Wordsworth this
literary independence led him inward to the heart of common things.
The Romantics won their triumph by confining their art to certain field of
experience and excluding much less which has often belonged to poetry but did not
really concern them. Such a process seem inevitable to the progress of poetry. The
poet must do something new, but he cannot do it without casting aside what he thinks
outworn. More than this, he must find the right means to say what concerns him most
deeply, and since he is after all a limited human being, he rightly works in a field
where he is at home and able to act freely. This is true of the Romantics, who began
as revolutionaries in poetry, and were determined not to write like their predecessors
of the eighteenth century. The result was their art, despite its range and variety, is
confined within certain limits.
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In poetry they discovered many unknown tracts. The rural scene which
appealed to Wordsworth, Coleridges moonlit mystery between sleep and walking,
Shelleys ecstatic contemplation of ideas, and Keats attempt to find the bliss of pure
creation were subjects which few, if any, poets had attempted before. The romantics
rejected or neglected many subjects in which other men might find wonderful magic,
and it is significant that Byron, who did not share their beliefs, was able to compose a
more varied poetry.
The modern revolt against the romantics has been partly due to a conviction
that they, with their cult of solitude and strangeness, did not write a realistic poetry of
the world which they knew. They revived poetry by looking into themselves and
isolating unusual experiences in their inner biographies. This turning inward was their
answer to the previous age, with its insistence on the externality of things and its lack
of belief in the self. But we cannot complain that, by their devotion to mysteries of
life the romantics failed to appreciate life itself. It would be hard to think of another
man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest
compassion for the outcast and oppression. Even so devoted a lover of physical nature
as Keats came to see that a poet must not detach himself from mankind, but live in
compassionate understanding of it. And this understanding has a new tenderness
which is far removed from the aristocratic dignity of Augustans and the princely
splendours of the Elizabethans. In their attempts to understand man in the depths of
his being, the Romantics were moved by convictions which gave a special humanity
to their poetry.
The essence of Romantic Poetry is that in catching the fleeting moment of joy
it opens the door to an eternal world. This characteristic differentiates Romantic Poets
from those of classical antiquity and all who have followed their example. Romantic
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Poetry associated single sensible experiences with some undefined superior order of
things and thereby enriched our appreciation of the familiar world and awakened a
new awe and wonder at it. Such poetry is of course only one kind among many, and it
rises from an outlook not shared by all men. If a society has ever existed which is
completely content with what it has and asks for nothing else, it would not need such
comfort as the romantics have to offer. But to all who are dissatisfied with a current
order or a conventional scheme of this, this spirit brings not an anodyne but an
inspiration. From discontent it moves to a vision of sublime state in which the
temporal, without loosing its individuality, is related to the timeless, and the many
defects of the given world are seen to irrelevant and insignificant in comparison with
the mysterious which enclose it. The Romantic poets appeals to us because he does
something which we cannot but respect. He believes that in exercising his imagination
he creates life and adds to the rim of living experience. He wishes not to be a passive
observer but an active agent in a world which exists by perpetual process of creation.
He takes his part in this process by making men aware of the reality which sustains
the changing visible scene and is the cause and explanation of everything that matters
in it. We may not accept all his assumptions and conclusions, but we must admire the
spirit in which he approaches his task, and admit that the problems which he seeks to
solve must not be shrieked by anyone who wishes to understand the Universe in
which they live.