The Romantic Age (1798-1824)

I- Introduction

The Romantic period is the most fruitful period in the history of English literature. The
revolt against the Classical school which had been started by writers like Chatterton,
Collins, Gray, Burne, Cowper, etc. reached its climax during this period, and some of the
greatest and most popular English poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and
Keats belong to this period.

This period started in 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and the famous Preface which Wordsworth wrote as a manifesto of the new
form of poetry which he and Coleridge introduced in opposition to the poetry of the
Classical school. In the Preface to the First Edition Wordsworth did not touch upon any
other characteristic of Romantic poetry except the simplicity and naturalness of its diction.
“The majority of the following poems”, he writes “are to be considered as experiments.
They were written chiefly with a view to ascertaining how far the language of conversation
in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”
In the longer preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, where Wordsworth
explains his theories of poetic imagination, he again returns to the problem of the proper
language of poetry. “The language too, of these men (that is those in humble and rustic
life) has been adopted because from their intercourse, being less under the influence of
social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple, unelaborated expression.”

Wordsworth chose the language of the common people as the vehicle of his poetry because
it is the most sincere expression of the deepest and rarest passions and feelings. This was
the first point of attack on the artificial and formal style of the Classical school of poetry.
The other point at which Wordsworth attacked the old school was its insistence on the town
and its artificial way of life. He wanted the poet to breathe the fresh air of the hills and
beautiful natural scenes and become interested in rural life and the simple folk living in the
lap of nature.

1
By attacking the supremacy of the heroic couplet as the only form of writing poetry, and
substituting it with simple and natural diction; by diverting the attention of the poet from
the artificial town life to the life in the woods, mountains, and villages inhabited by simple
folk; and by asserting the inevitable role of imagination and emotions in poetry as against
dry intellectualism which was the chief characteristic of the Classical school, Wordsworth
not only emancipated the poet from the tyranny of literary rules and conventions which
circumscribed his freedom of expression, but he also opened up before him vast regions of
experience which in the eighteenth century had been closed to him. His revolt against the
Classical school was in keeping with the political and social revolutions of the time as the
French Revolution and the American War of Independence which broke away from the
tyranny of social and political domination and proclaimed the liberty of the individual or
nation to be the master of its own destiny. Just as the liberty of the individual was the
watchword of the French Revolution, liberty of a nation from foreign domination was the
watchword of the American War of Independence; in the same manner liberty of the poet
from the tyranny of the literary rules and conventions was the watchword of the new
literary movement which we call by the name of Romantic movement. It is also termed as
the Romantic Revival, because all these characteristics—the liberty of the writer to choose
the theme and form of his literary production, the importance given to imagination and
human emotions, and a broad and catholic outlook on life in all its manifestations in towns,
villages, mountains, rivers etc. belonged to the literature of the Elizabethan Age which can
be called as the first Romantic age in English literature. But there was a difference between
the Elizabethan Age and the Romantic Age, because in the latter the Romantic spirit was
considered as discovery of something which once was, but had been lost. The poets of the
Romantic periods, therefore, always looked back to the Elizabethan masters—
Shakespeare, Spenser and other —and got inspiration from them. They were under the
haunting influence of feelings which had already been experienced, and a certain type of
free moral life which had already been lived, and so they wanted to recapture the memory
and rescue it from fading away completely.

In the poems which were contributed in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth dealt with events
of everyday life, by preference in its humblest form. He tried to prove that the
commonplace things of life, the simple and insignificant aspects of nature, if treated in the

2
right manner, could be as interesting and absorbing as the grand and imposing aspects of
life and nature. To the share of Coleridge fell such subjects as were supernatural, which he
was “to inform with that semblance of truth sufficient to procure for those shadows of
imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic
faith.” Wordsworth’s naturalism and Coleridge’s supernaturalism thus became the two
important spearheads of the Romantic Movement.

Wordsworth’s naturalism included love for nature as well for man living in simple and
natural surroundings.

Coleridge’s supernaturalism, on the other hand, established the connection between the
visible world and the other world which is unseen. He treated the supernatural in his
masterly poem, The Ancient Mariner, in such a manner that it looked quite natural.

Associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the exploration of the less known aspects of
humanity was Southey who makes up with them the trail of the so-called Lake Poets. He
devoted himself to the exhibition of “all the more prominent and poetical forms of
mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind.” Walter Scott, though he was
not intimately associated with the Lake poets, contributed his love for the past which also
became one of the important characteristics of the Romantic Revival.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott belong to the first romantic generation.
Though they were in their youth filled with great enthusiasm by the outburst of the French
Revolution which held high hope for mankind, they became conservatives and gave up
their juvenile ideas when the French Republic converted itself into a military empire
resulting in Napoleonic wars against England and other European countries. The
revolutionary ardour, therefore, faded away, and these poets instead of championing the
cause of the oppressed section of mankind, turned to mysticism, the glory of the past, love
of natural phenomena, and the noble simplicity of the peasant race attached to the soil and
still sticking to traditional virtues and values. Thus these poets of the first romantic
generation were not in conflict with the society of which they were a part. They sang about
the feelings and emotions which were shared by a majority of their countrymen.

3
The second generation of Romantic writers—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt
and others—who came to the forefront after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815,
revolted from the reactionary spirit which was prevailing at that time in England against
the ideals of the French Revolution. The result was that the second generation came in
conflict with the social environment with which their predecessors were in moral harmony.
Moreover, the victorious struggle with the French empire had left England impoverished,
and the political and social agitations which had subsided on account of foreign danger,
again raised their head. The result was that there was a lot of turmoil and perturbation
among the rank and file, which was being suppressed by those who were in power. In such
an atmosphere the younger romantic generation renewed the revolutionary ardour and
attacked the established social order. Thus Romanticism in the second stage became a
literature of social conflict. Both Byron and Shelley rebelled against society and had to
leave England.

But basically the poets of the two generations of Romanticism shared the same literary
beliefs and ideals. They were all innovators in the forms well as in the substance of their
poetry. All, except, Byron, turned in disgust from the pseudo-classical models and
condemned in theory and practice the “poetical diction” prevalent throughout the
eighteenth century. They rebelled against the tyranny of the couplet, which they only used
with Elizabethan freedom, without caring for the mechanical way in which it was used by
Pope. To it they usually preferred either blank verse or stanzas, or a variety of shorter
lyrical measures inspired by popular poetry are truly original.

As the Romantic Age was characterised by excess of emotions, it produced a new type of
novel, which seems rather hysterical, now, but which was immensely popular among the
multitude of readers, whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who revelled in
extravagant stories of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe was one of the most
successful writers of the school of exaggerated romances. Sir Walter Scott regaled the
readers by his historical romances. Jane Austen, however, presents a marked contrast to
these extravagant stories by her enduring work in which we find charming descriptions of
everyday life as in the poetry of Wordsworth.

4
Whereas the Classical age was the age of prose, the Romantic age was the age of poetry,
which was the proper medium for the expression of emotions and imaginative sensibility
of the artist. The mind of the artist came in contact with the sensuous world and the world
of thought at countless points, as it had become more alert and alive. The human spirit
began to derive new richness from outward objects and philosophical ideas. The poets
began to draw inspiration from several sources—mountains and lakes, the dignity of the
peasant, the terror of the supernatural, medieval chivalry and literature, the arts and
mythology of Greece, the prophecy of the golden age. All these produced a sense of wonder
which had been properly conveyed in literary form. That is why some critics call the
Romantic Revival as the Renaissance of Wonder. Instead of living a dull, routine life in
the town, and spending all his time and energy in to midst of artificiality and complexity
of the cities, the poets called upon man to adopt a healthier way of living in the natural
world in which providence has planted him of old, and which is full of significance for his
soul. The greatest poets of the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence
of nature on the mind and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one another.

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. They
result was that during the Romantic period the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to
poetry as a happy man to singing. The glory of the age is the poetry of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats. In fact, poetry was so popular that Southey had
to write in verse in order to earn money, what he otherwise would have written in prose.

Main features

Central features of Romanticism include:

1. An emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity
2. The importance of self-expression and individual feeling. Romantic poetry is one of the
heart and the emotions, exploring the ‘truth of the imagination' rather than scientific truth.
The ‘I' voice is central; it is the poet's perceptions and feelings that matter.

3. An almost religious response to nature. They were concerned that Nature should not just
be seen scientifically but as a living force, either made by a Creator, or as in some way

5
divine, to be neglected at humankind's peril. Some of them were no longer Christian in
their beliefs. Shelley was an atheist, and for a while Wordsworth was a pantheist (the belief
that god is in everything). Much of their poetry celebrated the beauty of nature, or protested
the ugliness of the growing industrialization of the century: the machines, factories, slum
conditions, pollution and so on.

4. A capacity for wonder and consequently a reverence for the freshness and innocence
of the vision of childhood. See The world of the Romantics: Attitudes to childhood

5. Emphasis on the imagination as a positive and creative faculty

6. An interest in ‘primitive' forms of art – for instance in the work of early poets (bards),
in ancient ballads and folksongs. Some of the Romantics turned back to past times to find
inspiration, either to the medieval period, or to Greek and Roman mythology. See Aspects
of the Gothic: Gothic and the medieval revival.

7. An interest in and concern for the outcasts of society: tramps, beggars, obsessive
characters and the poor and disregarded are especially evident in Romantic poetry
8. An idea of the poet as a visionary figure, with an important role to play as prophet (in
both political and religious terms).

The Romantic Style

The preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), by English poets William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also of prime importance as a manifesto
of literary romanticism. Here, the two poets affirmed the importance of feeling and
imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects.
Thus, as romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over reason,
emotions over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature
of great sensibility and passion. This literature emphasized a new flexibility of form
adapted to varying content, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving
plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the
sublime) and freer style.

6
No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed classical conventions, such as the
famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for
spontaneity and lyricism—qualities that the adherents of romanticism found in folk
poetry and in medieval romance—led to a rejection of regular meters, strict forms, and
other conventions of the classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse
largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry. The opening
lines of the swashbuckling melodrama Hernani (1830; translated 1830), by the great
French romantic writer Victor Hugo, are a departure from the conventional 18th-century
rules of French versification; and in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827; translated
1896), a famous critical document in its own right, Hugo not only defended his break
from traditional dramatic structure but also justified the introduction of the grotesque into
art. In their choice of heroes, also, the romantic writers replaced the static universal types
of classical 18th-century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters; and a
great deal of drama, fiction, and poetry was devoted to a celebration of Rousseau's
“common man.”

II- The Romantic Themes

A -Libertarianism

Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries were engendered by the romantic philosophy—the desire to be free of
convention and tyranny, and the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual.
Just as the insistence on rational, formal, and conventional subject matter that had
typified neoclassicism was reversed, the authoritarian regimes that had encouraged and
sustained neoclassicism in the arts were inevitably subjected to popular revolutions.
Political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic poetry and prose
throughout the Western world, producing many vital human documents that are still
pertinent. The year 1848, in which Europe was wracked by political upheaval, marked
the flood tide of romanticism in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France.

In William Tell (1804; translated 1825), by German dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, an
obscure medieval mountaineer becomes an immortal symbol of opposition to tyranny

7
and foreign rule. In the novel The Betrothed (1825-1827; translated 1834), by Italian
writer Alessandro Manzoni, a peasant couple become instruments in the final crushing
of feudalism in northern Italy. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who for some most
typify the romantic poet (in their personal lives as well as in their work), wrote
resoundingly in protest against social and political wrongs and in defense of the struggles
for liberty in Italy and Greece. Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, whose
admiration for the work of Byron is clearly manifested, attracted notoriety for his “Ode
to Liberty” (1820); like many other romanticists, he was persecuted for political
subversion.

The general romantic dissatisfaction with the organization of society was often channeled
into specific criticism of urban society. La maison du berger (The Shepherd's Hut, 1844),
by French poet Alfred Victor de Vigny, expresses the view that such an abode has more
nobility than a palace. Earlier, Rousseau had written that people were born free but that
everywhere civilization put them in chains. This feeling of oppression was frequently
expressed in poetry—for example, in the work of English visionary William Blake,
writing in the poem “Milton” (about 1804-1808) of the “dark Satanic mills” that were
beginning to deface the English countryside; or in Wordsworth's long poem The Prelude
(1850), which speaks of “... the close and overcrowded haunts/Of cities, where the human
heart is sick.”

B- Nature

Basic to such sentiments was an interest central to the romantic movement: the concern
with nature and natural surroundings. Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the
(presumably) innocent life of rural dwellers is perhaps first recognizable as a literary
theme in such a work as “The Seasons” (1726-1730), by Scottish poet James Thomson.
The work is commonly cited as a formative influence on later English romantic poetry
and on the nature tradition represented in English literature, most notably by
Wordsworth. Often combined with this feeling for rural life is a generalized romantic
melancholy, a sense that change is imminent and that a way of life is being threatened.
Such intimations were early evinced in “Ode to Evening” (1747) by William Collins,

8
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) by Thomas Gray, and The Borough
(1810) by George Crabbe. The melancholic strain later developed as a separate theme, as
in “Ode on Melancholy” (1820) by John Keats, or—in a different time and place—in the
works of American writers: the novels and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which probe
the depths of human nature in puritanical New England, or the macabre tales and
melancholy poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

In another vein in American literature, the romantic interest in untrammeled nature is

found in such writers as Washington Irving, whose Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent. (1819-1820), a collection of descriptive stories about the Hudson River valley
reflects the author's knowledge of European folktales as well as contemporary romantic
poetry and the Gothic novel. The Leather-Stocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper
celebrate the beauty of the American wilderness and the simple frontier life; in romantic
fashion, they also idealize the Native American as (in Rousseau's phrase) the “noble
savage.” By the middle of the 19th century, the nature tradition was absorbed by
American literary transcendentalism, chiefly expressed in the essays of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

C- The Lure of the Exotic

In the spirit of their new freedom, romantic writers in all cultures expanded their
imaginary horizons spatially and chronologically. They turned back to the Middle Ages
(5th century to 15th century) for themes and settings and chose locales ranging from the
awesome Hebrides of the Ossianic tradition, as in the work of Scottish poet James
MacPherson (see Ossian and Ossianic Ballads), to the Asian setting of Xanadu evoked
by Coleridge in his unfinished lyric “Kubla Khan” (1797?). The compilation of old
English and Scottish ballads by English poet Thomas Percy was a seminal work; his
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) significantly influenced the form and content
of later romantic poetry. The nostalgia for the Gothic past mingled with the tendency to
the melancholic and produced a fondness for ruins, graveyards, and the supernatural as
themes. In English literature, representative works include Keats's “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” the Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis, and The Castle of Otranto (1764)
by Horace Walpole. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), by Scottish writer Sir Walter

9
 Scott, and his historical novels, the Waverley series (1814-1825), combine these
concerns: love of the picturesque, preoccupation with the heroic past, and delight in
mystery and superstition.

D- The Supernatural

The trend toward the irrational and the supernatural was an important component of
English and German romantic literature. It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion
with 18th-century rationalism and on the other by the rediscovery of a body of older
literature—folktales and ballads—collected by Percy and by German scholars Jacob and
Wilhelm Karl Grimm and Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. From such material
comes, for example, the motif of the doppelgänger (German for “double”). Many
romantic writers, especially in Germany, were fascinated with this concept, perhaps
because of the general romantic concern with self-identity. Poet Heinrich Heine wrote a
lyric apocryphally titled “Der Doppelgänger” (1827; translated 1846); The Devil's Elixir
(1815-1816; translated 1824), a short novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, is about a double; and
Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story (1814; translated 1927), by Adelbert von Chamisso,
the tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil, can be considered a variation on the
theme. Later, Russian master Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky wrote his famous novel
The Double (1846), an analysis of paranoia in a humble clerk.

III- William Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800)

Summary

In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic
criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental". The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's
first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He

received a legacy of ￡900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing

poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly
developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to
Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey.

10
Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical
Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had
neither the name of Wordsworth nor Coleridge as the author. One of Wordsworth's most
famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only
Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was
significantly augmented in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered
a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the
elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which
avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his
famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". A fourth and final edition of Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.

I - Subject-Matter (Content)

A very Neo-Classical view of Art: it holds a mirror up to nature: its “object” is “truth, not
individual and local, but general, and operative”

His focus in particular is on human nature (the “great and universal passions of men”), its
universality in spite of “differences of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws
and customs”
Though he hopes there is “little falsehood of description” in his poetry, he admits that an
imitation cannot do justice to reality: his words most often fall far “short of that which is
uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions”.

Poetry is the most accurate form of knowledge. Sounding a similar note to Sidney,
Wordsworth argues that there is “no object standing between the poet and the image of
things”, whereas a “thousand” obstacles stand between the things themselves and the
“biographer and historian” and, he adds, the scientist.

11
Revolutionary view of the object of representation: his goal is to represent “incidents and
situations from common life”, especially “[h]umble and rustic life” (i.e. not just the rich
and powerful, but the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, etc.).

His goal is to trace the “primary laws of our nature, in particular, the “manner in which we
associate ideas in a state of excitement”. Wordsworth is particularly interested in capturing
how the human mind responds through the senses when it is excited or aroused by its
encounter with the physical world and how the ‘simple’ ideas that come to be formed
thereby are later associated or combined with others to produce ‘complex’ ideas. The
fundamental features of human consciousness, he thinks, are easier to glimpse in simpler,
less sophisticated sorts, that is, those who are untainted by wealth and city life.

II- Language

1. Diction: his goal is to imitate the “language really used by men”:

The language of humble country folk, once pruned of all the “vulgarity and meanness of
ordinary life”, is “purified” from “all real defects” in that it reflects the fact that “such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally
derived”.
Country folk “because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of
their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings
and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions”.

He avoids “personifications of abstract ideas” and “poetic diction” in general, that is, the
“large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been
regarded as the common inheritance of poets”. Given that the poet himself “thinks and feels
in the spirit of human passions”, how then can his “language differ in any material degree
from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly”?

2. He argues that he chose to write in verse because “words metrically arranged” give
more pleasure than mere prose. Where morally sound prose is only ‘utile,’ morally
sound poetry is also ‘dulce.’

12
3. Given that the “end of poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an
overbalance of pleasure”, the regularity provided by a particular rhythm function
to temper the feelings generated.

4. powerful descriptions of the deeper passions”.

III- The Poet

“What is a Poet?”, Wordsworth asks. His answer: the poet is a “man speaking to men”:
Poets are men who “being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also
thought long and deeply”.
Although the poet feels things more keenly than other people, the nature of his passions
and feelings is not different from those of others: they are the “general passions and
thoughts and feelings of men”. The poet is “nothing differing in kind from other men, but
only in degree”.
The poet is “chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel
without external excitement; and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings
are produced in him in that manner”.

13