Paper-5 The Romantic Literature

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Name: Komal Shahedadpuri M.

Course: M.A English

Sem: 2 Batch: 2016-2018

Enrollment No: 2069108420170027

Submitted to: Smt. S.B Gardi Dept. of English MKBU

E-mail ID: komaltara1311@gmail.com

Paper No:  5 The Romantic Literature

Topic:  Romantic Poets

Romantic Age          

     The Romantic Movement was a strong reaction against the Neo-Classical rules and customs. A basic impulse of the romantics was to escape from 18th century. How the word Romantic came to be applied to this period is something of a puzzle. According to L.P Smith in his wards and Idioms connoted ‘false and fictitious beings and feelings, without real existence in fact or in human nature’. It also suggested “old castles, mountains and forests, pastoral plains, waste and solitary places and a love for wild nature like mountains and moors. The word passed from England to Germany and France late in the 17th century and became critical term for certain poets who rejected the models of the past. They have freedom from 18th century poetic codes. In Germany, especially the word was used in strong opposition to the term Classical.    

      The term ‘Romanticism’ is a kind the expression in terms of art of sharpened sensibilities and highlighted imaginative feeling. There is some definitions of it given by different people.

Rousseau says “Romanticism means the return to Nature.”
George says “ Romanticism emphasizes on emotions rather than reason, the heart opposed to head.”
Walter Scott says “Romanticism means the Renaissance of wonder.”
    

     Romanticism had  started actually  in  15th century, the romantic activities had started with the changes in discovery of new geography. Earlier it was slow but speedy development materialized finally in 18th century. The Romantic movement began as a reaction against the artificiality of the Pseudo-classics. The neo classicists were champions of common sense, reason, harmony and proportion, they rigorously suppressed whims and eccentricities of individual genius. On the other hand Romantic poets recognized the claims of passion, emotion and the sense of mystery in life. They replaced the Critical by the Creative spirit and wit by humor and pathos. ‘Return to Nature’ played a very prominent part in the revival of Romanticism. People were suffocated with the restricted rules and regulations. They were in search of Freshness of Nature. They wanted to return to the free and refreshing life of the world of leaves and flowers. After Renaissance, for the first time Nature came in a poem as a central theme ‘The Seasons’(1730) by James Thomson.
     

     Romanticism stands for Freedom and Liberty and therefore designated as “Liberalism in Literature”, freedom from all kinds of bondage of rules and regulations and  leaves its pursues in free delighted of their romantic fancy.
Poetry in Romanticism
   

      Poetry in 18th century was essentially poetry of Town life concerned with clubs and coffee houses. In the poetry of the romantic revival, the interest of poet was transferred from the town to country life and from the artificial drawing rooms to the natural beauty and loneliness of nature. Romantic poets started taking interest in the lives of the common people, the shepherds and cottagers .The feeling of humanitarianism covered poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron. In romantic poetry, freedom is breath in which poets breath freely. Romantic poetry was reaction against traditional poet’s measure ‘heroic couplet’ and the 18th century poetic diction  and made use of several metres such as Spenserian stanzas and Blank verse while Romantics made the couplet loose and flowing. They also wrote Lyrics, Odes, Sonnets, Elegy etc.
  

         In many ways , romantic poetry proved to be the poetry of escape from sorrows and sufferings of mundane life of their times to the middle ages where they found enough beauty and joy to feed the waning of flame of soul. Supernaturalism is another outstanding quality of romantic age. Subjectivity can also be marked in the poetry of this age. The poets of this period were in favor of giving subjective interpretation to he objective realities of life.

Influence of French Revolution

       French Revolution began in 1789 and lasted until  1799. It brings Liberty, Equality and fraternity and greatly inspired people all over the Europe. The poets like Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Blake and other romantic poets highly inspired by French Revolution. The romantic writers responded strongly to the impact of new forces , particularly French Revolution and its promise of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The poets who generally spring to the mind are

William Blake(1775-1827)

William Wordsworth(1770-1850)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772- 1834)

George Gordon Byron(1788-1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)

John Keats(1795-1821)

Robert Southey(1774-1843)
       

      From these, there is grouping together of the so-called ‘Lake Poets’ that were Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. The romantic period includes the work of  two generations of poets. The first one was born during the thirty and twenty years preceding 1800, the chief poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Blake and  the second one was born in the last decade of 1800s,while Keats and Shelley belong to second generation along with Byron, all the three were influenced by poets of first generation, ironically the career of all the three were cut short by death, so that the poets of first generation were  still on the literary scene after the poets of second generation had disappeared. Another striking difference between two generations is that the poets of first generation exception of Blake, all gained literary reputation during their lifetime while poets of second generation only Byron enjoyed fame while he was alive but Keats and Shelley had relatively few readers while they were alive. It was not until the Victorian era that Keats and Shelley became recognized as major romantic poets.

William Blake 
     

     Of all the romantic poets of 18th century, Blake is the most independent and original. He seems to go back to the Elizabethan song writers for his models, but for the greater part of his life, he was poet of inspiration alone following no man’s lead and obeying no voice but that which he heard his mystic soul. He was a painter, poet and printmaker, he was a son of London Tradesman and a strong imaginative child whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with crowed of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he received education, but he begun to copy prints and to write verses at ten years of his age. He also begun a long course of study which resulted in his publishing his own books. As a child, he was visions of God and the angles looking at his window and as a man he thought ,he received visits from the souls of the great dead like Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante, Milton and he calls them “majestic shadows, gray but luminous”. To him all nature was a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils, angles, all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of flowers and stars.
   

     “ with the blue sky spread over with wings
      And the mild sun that mounts and sings
      With trees and fields full of fairy elves
      And little devils who fight for themselves”
                                                (Poems from Letters)
And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not  a matter of creed ,but the very essence of Blake’s life , strangely enough , he made no attempt to found a new religious cult but followed his own way, singing cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure, He was largely unrecognized during his lifetime, now he considered  as seminal figure in history of the poetry and visual arts of the romantic age.
His Poems
The Tyger
London
The Chimney Sweepers
The divine Image
The Little Blake Boy 
The Sick Rose
The French Revolution  and many others

William Wordsworth
   

     William Wordsworth was a great important figure of romantic poetry. He was greatly influenced by Rousseau and French Revolution. To understand his life in Tennyson’s words, “uttered nothing base”, it is well to read first ‘The Prelude’, which records the impressions made upon Wordsworth’s mind from his earliest recollection until his full manhood, in 1805. Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides itself naturally into four periods,1) his childhood and youth, in the Cumberland Hills, from 1770 to 1787 2) a period of uncertainty of stress and storm including his university life at Cambridge, his travels abroad  and his revolutionary experience from 1787 to 1797 3) a short but significant period of finding himself and his work from 1797 to 1799 4) a long period of retirement in the northern lake region, where he was born and where he lived close to nature for half of a century, her influence is reflected in his poetry. He was hailed by critics as the first living poet, and 

          one of the greatest that England had ever produced. On the death of Southey(1843), he was made poet laureate against his own inclination. Poetry was his life;  his soul was in all his work and only by reading what he has written we understand the man. He was famous for changing the diction thought acceptable in poetry, he replaced the formal language to simple one. His poetry emphasis nature in a lyrical and personal way. According o his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he was allowed to run wild in nature which became a kind of mother for him. Another his most famous poems, ‘Daffodils’, opens with a line ‘ I wandered lonely as a cloud’. Loneliness and Creativity are at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry and loneliness for him ,is a creative state. His famous one line definition of poetry is “Spontaneous overflow of powerful    feelings  from emotions recollected in tranquility”. His poetry is of stunning purity and power, one is ‘Lucy’, simple eight lines poem which later included in Lyrical Ballads which written by him and Coleridge together in 1798 which is known as a beginning point of Romanticism. His poetry is generally abut nature and human life.

His poems 
The Solitary Reaper
The Tables Turned
 Michel 
Elegiac Stanzas 
 The Idiot Boy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

     Coleridge was a British Philosopher, a literary critic and a poet. He is today remembered mare for latter two of his activities but he remains an important philosophical thinker as well. He was a youngest of a thirteen children in a family. He studied at Jesus Collage at Cambridge University, in 1792 he got the award for the best Greek Ode which focus on slave trade. It was at this time also that he begun to indulge in both alcohol and laudanum. He became passionate about politics and falls in love with high ideals of French Revolution. Then, He decide to abandon his studies and leaves Cambridge without a degree. In 1794, he became friend of a poet Robert Southey, who shares his ideas  and together they plan to found  a utopian community based on the egalitarian ideals of the revolution which they call Pantisocracy ,means ‘equal government by and for all’. In 1795, Coleridge lectures on the French Revolution and reluctantly gets married to Southey’s sister in law. The  same year he makes a crucial meeting for the evolution of his poetic work, that of William Wordsworth. A fruitful and mutual stimulation ensues between the two poets who would became the forerunners of the English Romantic movement. In 1798, Coleridge  published with Wordsworth the critically acclaimed Lyrical Ballads, which contains Coleridge’s poem The Rime of Ancient Mariner, which is his longest of the major poems that he wrote. To sooth his rheumatism and neuralgic disorder, physician of the time prescribe Coleridge to take Opium, another substance to which he would became addicted. In fact, one of his greatest  poems, Kubla Khan is inspired by a dream he had while taking this substance. Most Modern critics see Kubla Khan as one of his three great poems together with Christabel and The Rime of Ancient Mariner . It was a magnificent poem but it would take years for critics to openly admire the work. Eventually Coleridge would move close to Wordsworth in the North of England in the Lake district, which earned them with Southey , the name of Lake Poets 

Themes of his Poems
Childhood
Innocence
Man’s relation with Nature
Dreams/sleep
Imagination
Happiness
Evening/ Night
       He introduced dream like quality  element of mystery wonder and supernatural. He sought to give the charm of novelty to the things of everyday objects by making  it supernatural. He went to middle ages and created the atmosphere of magic/mystery. He was master of Melody.

Gearge Gordon Byron

      Byron was a British Poet, politician and leading figure of the romantic movement. He is regarded as one of greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential due in part of his ability to reverse accepted and acknowledged gender stereotypes. He lived for seven years at Italy with the struggling poet Shelley. Later, he joined the Greek War of Independence.
   

    There are two distinct sides of Byron and his poetry, one good and other bad and those who write about him generally describe one or other side in superlative. Before his exile from England in 1816, the general impression made by Byron is that of a man who leads an irregular life, posses as a romantic hero. His poetry of this first period is generally , though not always shallow and insincere in thought  and declamatory or bombastic in expression. He influenced by Shelley in Italy and partly to his thought and expressions works. He often surprising us by being manly and sincere. Thus, in third canto of Childe Harold, he written just after his exile ,he says,

      ‘In my youth’s summer I did sing of one
       The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’
     

        The real tragedy of his life is that he died just as he was beginning to find LIFE. He was born in London in 1788, a year preceding French Revolution, then he became victim of his wn weakness and of un fortunate surroundings. The  poetic results of his trip to Europe and the Orient were the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with their famous description od romantic scenery. The work made  instantly popular and his fame overshadowed Scott’s completely. As he says himself, ‘ I awoke one morning to find myself famous’. The worst element in Byron at this time was his sincerity ,he continual posing as the hero of his poetry. His best works were translated  and his fame rapidly spread in England. Even Goethe was deceived and declared  that a man so wonderful in character had never before appeared in literature and would never appear again.
 

      In reading Byron,it is well to remember that he was disappointed and embittered man,not only in his personal life but also in his expectations of a general transformation of human society. As he pours out his own feelings, chiefly in his poetry. One who wishes to understand  the whole scope of Byron's genius and poetry will do well to begin with his first work, 'Hours of Idleness', written when when he was a young man at the university.

His poems
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
She walks in Beauty 
Manfred
Darkness
Beppo
The Giaour and others

Percy Bysshe Shelley

        Shelley was one of the major English romantic poets and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric as well as most influential poets in the English Language. He did not see fame during his lifetime but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. He was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets including Byron, Peacock, Hunt and his second wife Mary Shelley, the author of 'Frankenstein'. He was a poet,author and playwright, born in Broadbridge Heath, England in 1792 , is one of the epic poets of 19th century and he best known for his classic anthology verse works such as 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'The Masque of Anarchy' and also for well known long form poetry including Queen Mab and Alastor. As the oldest of their seven children, Shelley left home at age of 10 to study at Syon House Academy. After two years , he enrolled at Eton Collage where he was severely bullied,both physical and mentally, by his classmates. Shelley retreated into his imagination. Within a year's time he had published two novels and two volumes of poetry, including St Irvyne and Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. Shelley and his friend Thomas Hogg had authored a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism.  Themes of his poems are 
1.The power of Nature found in poems like Mutability, Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark and Adonais. 2.Atheism , the idea of a godless universe can't be separated from Shelley's continuous reference to the inspiration he received from Nature. 
3.Oppression/Injustice/power/tyranny, this is common theme of Shelley's work. If there is the element of social theory to take from Shelley's poetry, it should be his determination to inspire the oppressed classes to engage in revolution. 
4.Revolution/Mutation/Change/Cycle, he believed in,  cynical nature of our universe and of humanity and argued that man had right and duty to live actively  like in poems Mutability, Mont Blanc, Song to the men of England etc.
Inspiration and Narcissism/Vanity/ Self it found in poems like Hymn of Intellectual Beauty, The Indian Serenade and A Dirge.
 Immortality vs Mortality

John Keats

     He was renowned poet of the English Romantic Movement, wrote some of the greatest English language poems including 'La Bella Dame Sans Merci',' Ode To a Nightingale and Ode on Gracian Urn'. He is the tragic figure of the romantic movement who died young, but during his brief life he created some of the best known and enduring poetry of the 19th century. He born in London in 1795, he pursued a medical career as an apprentice surgeon but gave up the practice shortly after performing his first operation in 1816, an experience that affected him profoundly. He had literary circle of friends who encouraged Keats to write poetry. He suffered much criticism after his first major effort, Endymion which was published in 1818, but he continued to write ans examined his work more closely. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other, poems , published in 1820 is widely regarded as some of the best poetry to have been written during the period.
   

     But in 1820 the first sighs of consumption occurred, Despite moving to Italy to try and improve his condition, Keats knew from his medical training that his cause was lost. He died in Rome in 1821 at the tender age of 25. Keats wrote his own epigraph, which describes his belief that he would not be remembered, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. His death was to influence Shelley in particular, who wrote the poem 'Adonais' in his honor and attacked critics for their harsh treatment of Keats' early work.

Robert Southey
     

     Robert Southey  was an English poet of the romantic school , one of the so -called 'Lake Poets' and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 until his death in 1843. Although his fame has been long overshadowed by that of his contemporaries and friends  William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was also a prolific letter writer, literary scholar, essay writer, historian and biographer.
     

     He was born at Bristol in 1774, studied at Westminster school and at Oxford , where he found himself in perpetual conflict with the authorities on account of his independent views. For more than fifty years , he labored at literature ,refusing to consider any other occupation. He considered himself seriously as one of the greatest writers of the day, and reading of his ballads which connected him at once with romantic school. Southey gradually surrounded himself  with one of the most extensive libraries in England and set himself to the task of writing something every working day. He became Poet Laureate in 1813 and was the first to raise that office from the low estate which it had fallen since death of Dryden. The opening lines of Thalaba, beginning,'How beautiful is night, A dewy freshness fills the silent air'
       

    His best short poems like 'The Scholar','Auld Cloots', The Wall of St Keyne',' The Inchcape', 'Lodore' will repay the curious reader. The beauty of Southey's character , his patience and helpfulness , make him a worthy associate of the two poets with whom he is generally named.  
   

    Thus, all these romantic poets gave new taste two English poetry through their new and revolutionary ideas like individual  genius, Natural atmosphere, simplicity and represent the life of common man.

References

Wilipedia
Study Material
History of English Literature by W. J Long

www.buzzle.com/articles/romantic-poetry-characteristics.html