A mind-boggling array of tendencies and poets can be found
throughout the history of English romanticism. Some critics have even claimed
that the arch-Augustan Pope's Windsor Forest and Elegy to the Memory
of an Unfortunate Lady provide a prelude to it. It has been interpreted as ‘Return
to Nature’ in James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1730), Lady Winchilsea's Nocturnal
Reverie (1714), and John Dyer's Grongar Hill (1726). Rousseau and
the sentimentalists have presented it as ‘Awakening of Feeling’, and it is
associated with the bitter-sweet sorrow of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard (1750), Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742), and Robert
Blair's Grave (1743). It is anticipated in the poetry and criticism of
Joseph and Thomas Warton as well as in Bishop Percy's ballad collection, The
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), as a revival of interest in the
Middle Ages and in native folk-poetry and culture as an opposition to the
dominant classicism and internationalism of the Augustans. The Wartons
rekindled interest in Spenser, and Joseph Warton produced a poem aptly titled The
Enthusiast, or The Lover of Nature. The Scottish scene and song
became literature thanks to Burns.
Humanitarianism, democracy, the idea that man is perfectible,
and organicism — a reaction against the Newtonian mechanistic cosmos of
science — have all been associated with English romanticism. Therefore, without
exercising sufficient caution, it should not be limited to a single idea.
English romanticism is similarly non-theoretical, loose, and forgiving of
contradictions as English neo-classicism. English poets typically initially
created the poetry before deciding what it meant, in contrast to German
romantics who formed a clear critical agenda. The closest thing to a clear
romantic tenet is Coleridge's explanation of the goals of the Lyrical
Ballads, which was published long after the artistic events that gave rise
to it. The poets had no idea that a romantic school was emerging. However, if
we take care to make romanticism a sufficiently broad term, it is
understandable and useful. A sense of the boundless human potential, an organic
perspective of the mind and nature, respect for imagination and poetic truth,
and a change from poetry as imitation to poetry as creation are all distinct
facets of the same idea. The dominant romantic stream can be found in the works
of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, although Scott, Burns, and
Byron are also romantics.
Versification and poetic genres remained mostly unchanged during the Romantic period. The classic genres persisted, albeit less tightly separated from one another than they had been under the Augustans. Versification and poetic genres did not fundamentally change during the romantic period. The traditional genres persisted, albeit with less rigorous distinction between them than under the Augustans. The poets picked up their studies of Chaucer, the great Elizabethans, and Milton again, whom they now viewed in a different light. Although they opposed the Augustans, they still used them because romanticism is a re-synthesis of reason and feeling, of the head and the heart, rather than a rejection of reason. In contrast to the Augustans, romantic poets were adventurous and varied in their versification, but they were rarely truly radical. The reflective poem was typically continued in blank verse by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the sonnet was once again practised, particularly by Wordsworth and Keats, the metrical romance was widely current and popular, Byron and Landor wrote classical epigrams, the Elizabethan song was revived in Blake and Shelley, and the epic was attempted unsuccessfully by Southey in Madoc and Thalaba and inconclusively by Keats in his splendid unfinished Hyperion (1818). Satire continued to be written, most notably in Byron's The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–24), which, along with Wordsworth's The Prelude, were in various respects the epics of the 19th century. In Shelley's Adonais, the elaborate pastoral elegy that the Augustans neglected and Dr. Johnson criticised returned.
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