Poetry
Blake,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful
as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little
conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of
the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their
feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the
age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state
of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary
thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with
which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art
inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c.
1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the
visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to
view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such
as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he
attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from
the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear
that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time,
he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and
to construct a new mythology centred not in 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 set out in The
First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished
manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to
about 1807.
Blake
developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and
Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he
portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the
possibility 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 illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon
after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his
allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying
to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the
pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity
as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined
Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion); the
second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he
was living in 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 volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane
instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written
a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature
faith in nature and humanity.
His
investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued
in 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 value for a
poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an
upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most
significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic
for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme
explored as well in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast,
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 the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he
devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social
prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming
disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by
Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human
mind. Poems such as “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 kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he
also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the
unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed
attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and 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 rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the
patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in
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 time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political
essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected
by 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 as the central section of a longer projected work, The
Recluse, “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.”
The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its
own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been
disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both
Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency,
which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on
Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his
volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was
published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own
development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made
an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at
Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his
age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious
writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.
Other
poets of the early Romantic period
In
his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by
contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse
narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse
writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte
Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received
with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his
patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of
Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the
British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk
(published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel
Rogers), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet
of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His
highly coloured narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his
satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only
significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann
Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon
(1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.
Robert
Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked
upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His
originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three
of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue
explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance
to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the
Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own
time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the
History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the
children’s tale “The Three Bears.”
George
Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his
diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He
differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter,
concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and
the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of
verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great
powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a
long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The
Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which
gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.
The
later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The
poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty
(now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to
learn from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply
interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of
William Godwin , whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in
1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay
“A Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald,
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial
change in opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervour burns throughout the
early Queen Mab (1813) , the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of
Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw
himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819)
makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake
to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his concern is with subtleties of
perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic
images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites
the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the
Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human
nature itself than the behaviour evinced and approved by society. In that sense
his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly
appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a
poet of excitement and power.
John
Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his
early work, such as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying
effect. As the program set out in his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows,
however, Keats was determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820,
when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to
live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish
intensity. He experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published
1820), an adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of
craftsmanship in its attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same
time a poem involved in contemporary politics. His epic fragment Hyperion
(begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published
posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery,
but Keats soon found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to
what he called “other sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in
the poems of 1819, Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the
great odes “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” These, with
the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement, showing what
has been called “the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the
complex themes being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb
letters show the full range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.
George
Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner,
was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics.
Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of sensibility
and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a
poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest
poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his
masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and
melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque
adventurer enjoying a series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic
vein was further mined in dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain
(1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now
remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo
(1818), in which he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting
style developed there became a formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire
on Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822).
Other
poets of the later period
John
Clare, a Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early success with
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel
(1821), and The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Both his reputation and his mental
health collapsed in the late 1830s. He spent the later years of his life in an
asylum in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there was rediscovered in the 20th
century. His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent
observation, his almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his
attitude to life make him one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas
Lovell Beddoes, whose violent imagery and obsession with death and the macabre
recall the Jacobean dramatists, represents an imagination at the opposite pole;
metrical virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical passages from his
over-sensational tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously,
1850). Another minor writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was
George Darley, some of whose songs from Nepenthe (1835) keep their place in
anthologies. The comic writer Thomas Hood also wrote poems of social protest,
such as “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs,” as well as
the graceful Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827). Felicia Hemans’s
best-remembered poem, “Casabianca,” appeared in her volume The Forest Sanctuary
(1825). This was followed in 1828 by the more substantial Records of Woman.
The
novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
Flourishing
as a form of entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel underwent
several important developments in this period. One was the invention of the
Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a politically engaged fiction in
the years immediately before the French Revolution. A third was the rise of
women writers to prominence in prose fiction.
The
sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with
Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of
Feeling (1771), and Charles Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind
Margaret (1798). Novels of this kind were, however, increasingly mocked by
critics in the later years of the 18th century.
The
comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way. John
Moore gave a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors in
Zeluco (1786) and Mordaunt (1800). Frances Burney carried the comic realist
manner into the field of female experience with the novels Evelina (1778),
Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796). Her discovery of the comic and didactic
potential of a plot charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the altar
would be important for several generations of female novelists.
More
striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace
Walpole’s invention, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as
the Gothic novel. Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of
“ancient romance” with the realistic characterization of “modern” (or novel)
romance. Characters would respond with terror to extraordinary events, and
readers would vicariously participate. Walpole’s innovation was not
significantly imitated until the 1790s, when—perhaps because the violence of
the French Revolution created a taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of
fiction—a torrent of such works appeared.
The
most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished
between “terror” and “horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of
“uncertainty and obscurity.” Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific.
Radcliffe’s own novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The
Italian (1797), were examples of the fiction of terror. Vulnerable heroines,
trapped in ruined castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to
be illusions.
Matthew
Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the hero
commits both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman’s
imprisonment in a vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of
Gothic fiction have more-sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science
fiction. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) is a subtle study of religious mania and split personality. Even in its
more-vulgar examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious
political and psychological issues.
By
the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the
ideas of the French Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in
the process. One practitioner of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best
remembered for Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), in which a “natural”
hero rejects the conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas
Holcroft published two novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh
Trevor (1794), influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself
produced the best example of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or,
The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic
novel to enliven a narrative of social oppression.
Women
novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such as
Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798),
Elizabeth Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma
Courtney, 1796) celebrated the rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists
such as Jane West (A Gossip’s Story, 1796; A Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia
Opie (Adeline Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-Control, 1811) stressed
the dangers of social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably
Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth,
whose long, varied, and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary
Ladies (1795) to Helen (1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent
(1800), an affectionately comic portrait of life in 18th-century Ireland,
influenced the subsequent work of Scott.
Jane
Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in
novels that incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly
into love stories that many readers are unaware of them. Three of her
novels—Sense and Sensibility (first published in 1811; originally titled “Elinor
and Marianne”), Pride and Prejudice (1813; originally “First Impressions”), and
Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817)—were drafted in the late
1790s. Three more novels—Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion
(1817, together with Northanger Abbey)—were written between 1811 and 1817.
Austen uses, essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded
but neglected heroine is gradually acknowledged to be correct by characters who
have previously looked down on her (such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and
Anne Elliot in Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-deceived
heroine (such as Emma Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and
Prejudice) belatedly recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with
the partner she had previously despised or overlooked. On this slight
framework, Austen constructs a powerful case for the superiority of the
Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism, and rationality to the new
“Romantic” values of imagination, egotism, and subjectivity. With Austen the
comic brilliance and exquisite narrative construction of Fielding return to the
English novel, in conjunction with a distinctive and deadly irony.
Thomas
Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate knowledge of
Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic debates
rather than conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817),
and Nightmare Abbey (1818) are sharp accounts of contemporary intellectual and
cultural fashions, as are the two much later fictions in which Peacock reused
this successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll Grange (1860–61).
Sir
Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a
Romantic novelist. After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose
fiction in 1814 with the first of the “Waverley novels.” In the first phase of
his work as a novelist, Scott wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th
centuries, charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern
world in a series of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815),
The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with
Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with
Quentin Durward in 1823, he added European settings to his historical
repertoire. Scott combines a capacity for comic social observation with a
Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the
novel in ways that equip it to become the dominant literary form of the later
19th century.
Discursive
prose
The
French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political
principles, a debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical
prose. Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered
by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important
early statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next
century.
The
Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the
period, particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most
vigorous writing is that of William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic
whose most characteristic work is seen in his collections of lectures On the
English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819) and in The Spirit
of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even
more personal essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed
portrait of himself—charming, whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As
his fine Letters show, however, he could on occasion produce mordant satire.
Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example of the charm and
humour of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colourful account of his
early experiences in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and
enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare is
best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach” and “On the Knocking at
the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”
(1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at
its best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary
Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The
critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The
Quarterly Review (begun 1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun
1817). Though their attacks on contemporary writers could be savagely partisan ,
they set a notable standard of fearless and independent journalism. Similar
independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken journalism, particularly
in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William Cobbett,
whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a
telling picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his
day.
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