THE COURSE MATERIAL IS DESIGNED AND

DEVELOPED BY INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL OPEN

UNIVERSITY (IGNOU), NEW DELHI, OSOU HAS BEEN
PERMITTED TO USE THE MATERIAL. BESIDES, A FEW
REFERENCES ARE ALSO TAKEN FROM SOME OPEN
SOURCES THAT HAS BEEN ACKNOWLEGED IN THE
TEXT.
 BACHELOR OF ARTS (HONOURS) IN
ENGLISH (BAEG)

BEG-5
British Romantic Literature

Block-1
Historical Overview: Romantic Revival and The Age
of Revolution
Unit 1 Romanticism

Unit 2 Romanticism and The Real World

BLOCK 1: BRITISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE:
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

BLOCK OBJECTIVE

The following block shall give us a clear perspective of the history of British Romantic
Literature. The British romantic period is one of the striking periods of Literature in
England. A lot of poets, writers and essayists evolved during this period and they have
made their names prominent enough and this has resulted in the success of the period
and the latter periods that followed. This Block is going to help us in reviving the
reminiscences of the History of the Romantic period and its whereabouts.
UNIT-1 ROMANTICISM

Structure
1.1 Objectives
1.2 Introduction
1.3 Defining Romanticism
1.4 The Romantic Epistemology
1.5 The Romantic Theory of Art
1.6 Imagination
1.7 Inspiration
1.8 Organicism
1.9 Forms of Poetry
1.9.1 Democracy
1.9.2 Nature and Spirit
1.9.3 Romanticism and Neoclassicism
1.9.5 Forms of Literature
1.10 Check Your Progress
1.11 Let us Sum up

1.1 OBJECTIVES

In this unit we shall offer you a broad introduction to the general concerns that went
into the shaping of British nineteenth century Romanticism. Subsequent units take up
the critical ideas of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and P.B. Shelley.
Here we shall talk of the general thrust of the movement as a whole. The following
unit shall also make you all aware of how there has been a paradigm shift in the nature
and culture of British Literature due to Romanticism.

1.2 INTRODUCTION

In its most coherent early form, as it emerged in the 1790's in Germany and Britain,
Romanticism is generally treated under the head 'the Romantic Movement' or '
Romantic Revival'. The stress was mainly on freedom of individual self-expression.
The ordered rationality of the preceding age (the Augustan Period) was viewed as
mechanical, impersonal and artificial. The new preoccupations came to be sincerity,
spontaneity and originality. These replaced the decorous imitation of classical models
upon which neo-classicists like Dryden, Pope and Johnson placed much value. The
turn now was toward emotion and inspiration seeing the artist as a kind of prophet or a
genius also came in the wake of such a general thrust. Most of the Romantic poets saw
themselves as free spirits expressing their own imaginative truth.

1
1.3 DEFINING ROMANTICISM

Romantic criticism serves as a convenient title for a body of critical writing with a
particular historical background and certain broad features which define its special
nature. The question of the definition of the term 'Romanticism' has occasioned a good
deal of controversy among literary critics. There are many critics who believe that in
literary theorizing and imaginative literature we come across not one particular
Romanticism but several Romanticisms.

This point of view is very cogently argued in A.O. Lovejoy's essay, 'On the
discrimination of Romanticisms'. This view is grounded in a sound truth about the
essential nature of Romanticism. As we shall see later, Romanticism places the
greatest emphasis on individuality and the subjective dimension of human experience.
This stress on individuality implies the autonomy of every individual and the
consequent variety and difference. The cardinal Romantic belief that every individual
is different from every other individual justifies the assertion that there cannot be any
one Romanticism but several Romanticisms. This very fact, however, helps us define
the common characteristic or characteristics of Romanticism. Viewing man as an
autonomous and individual entity, as Romanticism in all its various forms does,
entails a particular view of human life and man's relationship and external reality.

Rene Wellek is, therefore, right in identifying certain common features which define
Romanticism. In his view it is a compounded of a particular view of imagination, a
particular attitude to nature and a particular style of writing. A point that Wellek does
not, however, mention is the political dimension of Romanticism. It arises out of the
very affirmation of individual worth that Romantic poets and critics make from time
to time. It begins with the affirmation of the worth of the common man and leads to
the affirmation of universal brotherhood. Imagination, in this view, is a mysterious
creative faculty of which all arts including literature are, in a way, an expression and
which, in the end, determines man's relationship with external reality. To these
common characteristics we should also add the historical fact that we generally
associate the rise of Romanticism with nineteenth century Europe.

That, however, does not imply that Romanticism was something altogether new. In
fact the Romantic impulse has always existed side by side with another impulse
termed as the classical impulse which places more emphasis on external reality and
views art as a reflection on this reality.

The Western critical horizon was, however, dominated from the Greek and the Roman
classical times up to the eighteenth century by the view of art which accords primacy
to external reality. The Romantic impulse was either excluded or assimilated into this
predominant tendency as an unrecognizable component. In the neo-classical age this
approach was further strengthened by the ebullient and overconfident scientific
materialism. Aristotle, Horace and Quintilian continued to be the undisputed masters
and law-givers in the realm of art. The neo-classical emphasis, in addition to the
2
unquestionable principle of mimesis fell also on the end that art was supposed to serve
- the Horatian prescription that it should aim at delight and instruction. Towards the
end of the eighteenth century, however, we witness the beginnings of an orientation of
attitudes and values questioning the basis of the imitative-rationalist aesthetic and
paving the way for the Romantic view of life and art. The movement of Enlightenment
and writings emanating from what is known as 'Sentimentalism' strengthened this
tendency.

Pioneering work for this shift was done in Germany. The 'Strum Und Drang' (Storm
and Stress) movement whose leading lights were men like Goethe, Schiller and
Herder, began to assert the independence of the subjective dimension of the
individual. Kant and Fichte stressed the principle of subjective reference in preference
to the objective order. Fichte proclaimed that the non-Ego owes its existence to the
Ego and that the existence and shape of the world depend entirely on individual
imagination. The Schegel brothers - A.W. Schegel and Friedrich Schlegel - and poets
like Heine and Uhland formally inaugurated the German Romantic movement.

In England the first signs of unmistakable change become discernible when Kames
and Twining begin to distinguish between painting and sculpture as predominantly
imitative arts in contrast to music and poetry which are predominantly expressive.
Young's Conjectures on ‘Original Composition’ (1 7.59) was the most significant
assertion of the expressive view 7 of art in its day and had a tremendous influence on
the 'Strum Und Drang' movement in Germany although it did not attract as much
attention in England. Blake's theoretical pronouncements and creative output
emphatically reject the mimetic view of art in all its forms. The shift is almost
complete with the appearance of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The Roots of Romanticism

Often the term Romantic literature, particularly poetry, evokes the connotation of
nature poetry. Although nature is an important component in much Romantic
literature, Romanticism is much more than recording the beauties of the natural world.
And Romanticism is certainly not what modern readers usually think of when we hear
the words romance and romantic; Romanticism does not refer to romantic love.

Romanticism grew from a profound change in the way people in the Western world
perceived their place and purpose in life. Events such as the American Revolution in
1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Industrial Revolution restructured
society and the way individuals viewed themselves and their relationship to each other
and to the social order.

(https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/british-literature-through-history/s06-01-the-
romantic-period-1798-1832.html)

3
1.4 THE ROMANTIC EPISTEMOLOGY

The epistemology of the Romantic or the Expressive theory of art is radically different
from the one that underlies the mimetic or the imitative-rationalist aesthetic. The
components of the Romantic epistemology are:

(i) The active-projective view of human self or mind,

(ii) Distrust of reason and
(iii) Individualism

On the mimetic view, human mind is a passive recipient of external impressions and
does not in any way modify them. Plato uses the analogy of a mirror for it which
faithfully reflects external reality. Aristotle uses a different analogy, but means exactly
the same, when he compares the human mind to a piece of wax taking on the
impressions of a signet ring. This view of human mind continued to dominate the
thinking of the West with minor deviations here and there and squarely suited the
empirical worldview of the seventeenth century. Locke described human mind as
'tabula rusa' in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hartley explained the
working of the human mind in mechanical terms through his theory of association of
ideas and Hume came out with a more-or-less plausible scientific explanation of the
way in which this association of ideas worked. As he wrote in his Treatise of Human
Nature:

The qualities from which this association arises, and by which the mind is
after-this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz.
Resemblance, Contiguity of time and place, and Cause and Effect.

In the mimetic view, again, man was important not as an individual but as a member
of the human race. All value was attached to what was general and in contrast
everything individual was considered special. Reason was regarded as an infallible
faculty and the ultimate guide and saviour.

The Romantic theory of knowledge is a questioning of this worldview. Human mind

or self is not passive but active and projective. It not only modifies what it receives
.but, in a significant sense, creates it. Man is an individual and autonomous entity, a
mysterious reservoir of boundless potential and it is not the general which is most
valuable but that which is individual and particular. Blake wrote:

To Generalise is to be an Idiot. To particularise is the lone distinction of merit.

Compare this with what Dr. Johnson wrote on the subject and you will grasp the
essence of the difference between the neo-classical rationalist epistemology and the
Romantic epistemology. In the History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia Johnson
speaks through Imlac:
4
 The business of the poet is to examine, not the individual but the species; to
remark general properties and large appearances... [He] must neglect the
minute discriminations, which one may have remarked and another neglected.

What Johnson recommends to the poet to neglect is the only thing of importance from
the Romantic point of view. This naturally accounts for the fact that Pope wrote the
Essay on Man and when Wordsworth attempted the same subject, he ended up by
writing The Prelude, an autobiographical poem, the story of a particular individual.
The projected grand poem of Wordsworth, The Recluse, of which The Prelude was to
be the first part, was to be a poem about Man, Nature and the Universe but
Wordsworth could not go beyond The Prelude.

Again, from the Romantic point of view, reason has a limited role in life and cannot
be regarded as an infallible guide. Blake mocked at what he called 'rational
demonstration' and Wordsworth believed that the 'meddling interest' misshapes the
beauteous forms of things and amounts to a murder of sorts. In Biographia
Literaria,Coleridge tells us that at a very early stage in his life he had found the
limitations of reason and its untrustworthiness as a guide. But in spite of these radical
assertions Wordsworth and Coleridge did not discard reason in its most exalted mood.
It would be in order to suggest, then, that instead of rejecting reason, as might at first
appear from their pronouncements, they sought to accommodate it.

1.5 THE ROMANTIC THEORY OF ART

The theory of art emerging from this epistemology places the whole emphasis on the
inner dimension of the individual artist. It rejects the mimetic conclusion that art 1s
imitation or at best an interpretation or that poetry is a matter of wit which makes up
agreeable pictures and pleasant visions by combining different ideas. Art is not
imitation or interpretation; it is not the presentation of a basic universal norm or the
denominator of a type but creation in the most significant sense. Poetry is the
expression of the inner man and if at all it reflects external nature it is external nature
modified by imagination. The cause of poetry is not, as Aristotle thought, 'formal',
determined by what the poet imitates, nor is the cause of poetry, as the pragmatic
critics believe, 'final', determined by the ends that poetry is supposed to serve. The
cause of poetry is 'efficient', determined by the inner impulse and creative imagination
of the poet.

The emphasis on expression, on the inner being made outer, is the common
denominator of the various definitions of poetry formulated by the Romantics
although they differ on points of detail. Wordsworth defined poetry as 'the
spontaneous overflow .of powerful feelings'; Coleridge, in 'Of Poesy of Art', remarks
that all fine arts are a revelation of the inner world of man; Shelley defines poetry as
'the expression of imagination' and Byron says that 'poetry is the lava of imagination
whose eruption prevents an earthquake.'

5
Central to the Romantic or expressive theory of art is a cluster of ideas which, in
practice, are woven together, but for our convenience they are discussed here
separately. These are the ideas of Imagination, Inspiration, Organicism and Emotion
as the principles of integration in art.

1.6 IMAGINATION

The imitative-rationalist aesthetic took on a predominantly mechanical colour in the

eighteenth century. Poetry was regarded as craftsmanship whose mastery depended on
following certain rules. Critics like Boileau and Racine sought to lay down, once for
all, standards of lasting validity in arts. The writing of a book was often compared
with the making of a clock or an engine. Gottsched laid down a grotesquely
mechanical recipe for the making of a tragedy:

Let the poet first choose a moral precept which he wants to impress on his
audience by means of the senses. Then he invents a general story to illustrate
the truth for famous people to whom something similar has happened and from
them he borrows names for the 'characters in his story in order to give it a
semblance of reality. After this he thinks up all the attendant circumstances
necessary to make the main story really probable, and these are called the
sub-plots and episodes. He then divides his material into five pieces, all of
approximately equal length, and arranges them so that each section follows
from the preceding section, but he does not bother further whether everything
corresponds to the historical happenings, nor whether the subsidiary
characters bore these or other names.

In such a view obviously there was no place for the creative imagination. The word
'imagination' did exist in the eighteenth century but it was used in a mechanical sense.
Images, it was believed, move across the mind's eye in succession. If they recur in the
same spatial and temporal order as in the original experience it is memory but if they
recur in a different order or combine to produce a new whole, it is imagination.

From the Romantic point of view, imagination is a mysterious creative faculty which
transcends reason. Its procedure is not analytical but synthetic. It grasps truth all at
once through an act of intuition and does not follow the circumlocutions and often
unsure route of reason. It does not merely reproduce external data but is active and
productive in character, determinative and not determined. In the famous Kantian
typology, it is the synthetic power which determines sense a priori in respect of its
form. In common language it bridges the gap between sensation and thought. By itself
sensation gives us a world which is chaotic and by itself thought cannot impose an
order upon this chaos. To bridge the gulf we require what Coleridge called 'the
shaping spirit of imagination.'

Among the English Romantics, Blake stands out for his denial of the existence of
anything except imagination. In his system, imagination is nothing less than God
6
operating in the human mind. He rejects Plato's theory of knowledge as recollection
and art as imitation. Plato worshipped the daughters of memory while Blake's muses
are the daughters of imagination.

Although imagination is not so central a concept in Wordsworth's theoretical

pronouncements, he, in his 'Preface' of 18 15, accords to it the same place as do the
other Romantics:

Imagination in the sense of the word as giving title to a class of the following
poems, has no reference to images that are merely a faithfully copy, existing in
the mind, of absent external objects; but is a word of higher import, denoting
operations of the mind upon those objects, and processes of creation or of
composition, governed by certain fixed laws.

This is a clear refutation of the mechanical view of imagination held by the neo-
classicists of the eighteenth century.

Wordsworth then proceeds to illustrate the operation of imagination by the use of the
word 'hang' in Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton, and by the use of certain other words
in his own poetry. After discussing 'the conferring, the abstructing and the modifying
powers of the imagination', he adds:

. .the imagination also shapes and creates:. . .by innumerable processes; and
in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity
and dissolving and separating unity into number, ... alternations proceeding
from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty
and almost divine powers..

Coleridge's theory of imagination is the most compact and comprehensive of all the
Romantic statements on imagination. In his view it is a vital and creative power
'which dissolves, diffuses and dissipates' in order to recreate. This theory deserves a
detailed treatment which is given to it in the following pages. (See Coleridge:
Biographia Literaria).

Shelley and Keats also affirm the importance of the role of imagination in the
production of art. Shelley's critical treatise, A Defence of Poetry, is examined
separately a little later. Keat's letters - a mine of original critical thought - contain
significant remarks on the subject. To him imagination is a surer guide to truth than
reason and comprehends truth in the form of beauty. In a letter of Benjamin Bailey, he
writes:

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of heart's affections and the truth of
imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.... The
imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth.

7
Imagination is such a central concept in the Romantic theory of art that its mode of
actual operation in poetry needs to be examined in greater detail. Wordsworth's poetry
supplies us with an ideal illustration of how imagination works in the process of
creation. Fortunately for us, he has himself chosen, in his 'Preface' of 1815. The poems
that he would use to explain the working of the imagination are 'There Was a Boy' and
'Resolution and Independence'.

'There Was a Boy' had been first published as an independent poem in the Lyrical
Ballads (1800). Now it forms a part of The Prelude. Here is the text of the poem:

There Was a Boy

There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs
And Islands of Winander! Many a time
At evening, when the stars had just begun
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would Ire stand alone
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering Lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Press closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through as instrument.
Blew, mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him. - And they would shout
Across the wat'ry Vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering pearls,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Or mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill.
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady Lake.

The poem does not describe external scenes and sights as much as it tells 11s how
imagination, the subjective experience, interacts with external reality and dips it in
colours of its own so that something new is created or at least 'half-created' as
Wordsworth would put it in 'Tintern Abbey', another great poem of imagination. The
beauty of the poem, therefore, lies not in accurate description but in the passionate and
loving way in which the external world is perceived. As Blake, referring to himself,
said, the Romantics did got see through their eyes but saw with their eyes as the
instruments of a subjective power. Look at the way the boy enters into the scene with

8
jocund mimicry of the owls' hootings and watches the responses in an impassioned
state. Then comes a moment of revelation, an epiphany (Wordsworth called such
moments 'spots of time') when the boy has a brief pause. Suddenly a new reality
dawns on him:

. . . And, when there came a pause

Of silence such as baffled his best skills;
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heave received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
The following lines need special attention:
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice... .

Thomas de Quincey, in a marvellous comment upon these lines, singled out the use of
a particular word which metamorphosed everything. He said:

The very expression 'far' by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human
heat, and its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me
with a flash of sublime revelation.

'Resolution and Independence' (See Appendix for the text) is quoted by Wordsworth
to illustrate 'the conferring, the abstracting and the modifying power of the
imagination' and a perusal of the poem along the lines suggested by Wordsworth
reveals that it is a central poem for an understanding of the use of imagination in
poetry. The poem grew from an extremely ordinary, even petty, origin recorded by
Dorothy Wordsworth in her Journals. In the entry made on October 3, 1800, she
writes:

We met an old man almost double. He had on a coat

thrown over his shoulders, above his waistcoat and coat.
Under this he carried a bundle, and had an apron on and a
night-cap. His face was interesting. He had dark eyes and
a long nose. John, who afterwards met him at Wytherburn
took him for a Jew. He was of Scotch parents but had
been born in the army. He had had a wife, and 'a good
woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children'
All these were dead but one, of whom he had not heard
for many years, a sailor. His trade was to gather leeches,

9
but now leeches are scarce, and he had not strength for it.
He lived by begging, and was making his way to Carlisle,
where he should buy a few godly books to sell. He said
leeches were very scarce, partly owing to this dry season,
but many years they had been scarce - he supposed owing
to their being much sought after, that they did not breed
fast, and were of slow growth.

The poem was written in 1802 so that two years intervened between the event that
supplied the germ and actual writing of the poem. This is an apt illustration of
Wordsworth's way of composing poetry, of what he called 'emotion recollected in
tranquillity'. How has creative imagination performed its wonders here'! First the
beggar is transformed into a self-respecting leech-gatherer, who lives independently
and honourably, to be an appropriate vehicle of the message that he has to deliver.
Secondly he is invested with a prophetic grandeur and saintly purity. The poem opens
on an unusually bright and pleasant morning. 011 the previous night it has rained
torrentially but now the sun is shining warm and bright and the whole nature is
rejoicing including the poet. But suddenly from a climax ofjoy he sinks into a
dejection whose source is unknown and undefinable so that he thinks that it is the
unhappy lot of poets to experience such emotional ups and downs. Brooding on this,
he sinks deeper and deeper into the morass of despondency. The unseen must
intervene; a rescuer must appear and he does. But who is he? It is a decrepit leech-
gatherer but at the same time he is an excellent embodiment of fortitude, resignation
and independence.

Wordsworth sent the first draft of the poem to Mary Hutchinson, his future wife and
her sister Sara (later to be Coleridge's beloved). It seems that they commented on it in
detail but their comments are not available. What fortunately, we have is
Wordsworth's reply which is of immense value from the point of view from which we
are looking at the poem, Wordsworth wrote:

My Dear Sara,
I am exceedingly sorry that the latter part of the Leech-gatherer has
displeased you, the more so because I cannot take to myself (that
being the case) much pleasure or satisfaction in having pleased you
in the former part. I will explain to you in prose my feeling in
writing that Poem, and then you will be better able to judge whether
the fault be mine or partly both. I describe myself as having been'
exalted to the highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty
of Nature and then as depressed, even in the midst of those beautiful
objects, to the lowest dejection and despair. A young Poet in the
midst of the happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed by the
thought of the miserable reverses which have befallen the happiest of
all men, viz. Poets - think of this till I an1 so deeply impressed by it.
that I consider the manner in which I was rescued from my dejection

10
and despair almost as an interposition of Providence. 'Now whether
it was by peculiar grace A leading from above'. A person reading
this Poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and
controlled, expecting almost something spiritual or supernati~ral -
what is brought forward 'A lonely place. a Pond' by which an old
man was, far from all house or home' - 'not stood, not sat but 'was'
- the figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible. This
feeling of spirituality or super-naturalness is again referred to as being
strong in my mind in this passage - 'How came he here thought 1 or
what can he be doing?' I then describe him, whether ill w well is not
for me to judge with perfect confidence, but this I can confidently
affirm that, though I believe God has given me a strong imagination,
I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than. that of an old Man
like this, the survivor of a Wife and ten children, travelling alone
among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his
own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust state of society has
entailed upon him. You say and Mary (that is you can say no more
than that) the Poem is very well after the introduction of the old man;
this is not tried, if it is not more than very well it is very bad, there is
no intermediate state. You speak of his speech as tedious: everything
is tedious when one does not read with the feelings of the Author--
'The Thorn' is tedious to hundreds; and so is the Idiot Boy to
hundreds. It is in the character of the old man to tell his story in a
manner which an impatient reader must necessarily feels as tedious.
But Good God! Such a figure, in such a place, a pious self-respecting,
miserably infirm, and [ ] Old Man telling such a tale!
My dear Sara, it is not a matter of indifference whether you are
pleased with this figure and his employment; it may be
comparatively so, whether you are pleased or not with this Poem; but
it is of the utmost importance that you should have had pleasure from
contemplating the fortitude, independence, persevering spirit, and the
general moral dignity of this old man's character. Your feelings
upon the Mother, and the Boys with the Butterfly, were not
indifferent: it was an affair of whole continents of moral sympathy.
I will talk more with you on this when we meet - at present, farewell
and Heaven for ever bless you!

In spite of the self-righteous tone of Wordsworth's letter, he did revise the poem,
dropped a few tedious lines and inserted the marvellous ninth stanza beginning with,
'As a huge stone.. .'. On the operation of imagination in this final version Wordsworth
himself commented in his 'Preface' of 1815.

He draws our attention to stanza nine and the end of stanza eleven and adds that 'the
imagination is employed upon images in conjunction, by which they modify each
other.' And then he comments:

11
Inthese images, the conferring, the abstracting and the modifying
powers of the imagination, immediately and mediately acting, are
all brought into conjunction. The stone is endowed with something
of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of
some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the
stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of
bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer
resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged man; who is
divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring
him to the point where the Go objects unite and coalesce in just
comparison.

In other words, the imagination transforms one object into another. It also performs
another function to which Coleridge draws our attention in Biographia Literaria and
that is:

To give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous
to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom,
and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

Coleridge's ‘Dejection: An Ode' is another important poem which explains the

Romantic idea of imagination. Essentially it is a dirge on the gradual loss of the poet's
imaginative powers - 'the shaping spirit of imagination.' This shaping spirit enables a
poet to enter into a harmonious relationship with the external nature and produces 'joy'
the poise born of being at peace with one's own self and with the universe. As the
poet's imaginative powers depart, he is unable to see any beauty and charm in nature.
He is, therefore, led to the conclusion that:

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within
O Lady! We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

A close study of the Romantic view of imagination leads us to the conclusion that for
the Romantics it was an undefinable and mysterious faculty. Blake deifies it and
Coleridge presents it as a human analogy of the divine act of creation. Such a view
links imagination with inspiration.

1.7 INSPIRATION

Ever since I.A. Richards propounded his materialistic aesthetic, the word 'inspiration'
has either fallen out of use or is used with a great deal of difference. In Romantic
criticism, however, it is one of the most central concepts. Literally, to be inspired is to
12
be breathed on by Apollo (the God of poetry in Greek Mythology) or in the Christian
context by the Holy Spirit. IR the Hindu and Islamic contexts the source of inspiration
will be Saraswati and Allah respectively. Modem psychology would explain the
phenomenon with reference to the individual subconscious or the Collective
Unconscious. The Romantics assert their faith in unmistakable teniis in the idea of
inspiration.

In Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', we come across the most marvellous account of the
inspired poet:

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'would win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air, 14
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle around him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.

To Shelley, poetry is the result of involuntary inspiration so that 'when composition

begins, inspiration is already on the decline.' Keats told Woodhouse that to write
poetry he waited for the happy moment and having written a poem, it seemed to him
somebody else's creation. In a letter he wrote:

If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

On this view the lyric would be the best form of poetry and the long poem an
impossibility, as inspiration cannot be sustained for too long a time.

1.8 ORGANICISM

How does a work of art which, on the Romantic view, is a result of inspiration
achieves form and unity? Plato would answer the question with reference to his belief
in innate ideas which unconsciously enter artwork of art and impart a form to it.
Others refer the presence of form in a work of art to instinct such as the one possessed
by bees and ants. The Romantics explain it by speaking of the work of art as an
organism. Blake rejects Burke's theory of art which is based on the dichotomy
between conception and execution. Other Romantics use metaphors from the animal
and the plant world to explain the unity of a work of art. Wordsworth, in his sonnet, 'A
Pet', exhorts the poet that his work should grow like a forest tree or a meadow flower.
13
Shelley describes the process of the poem's creation in terms of a childgrowing in the
mother's womb. Coleridge uses the marvellous analogy of a growing plant for a
poem's growth which assimilates every kind of nutriment - sunshine, water, manure -
to its genius and transforms it completely. In accordance with this he defines beauty in
art as 'multeity in unity.' In his view, even knowing is growing and, in the memorable
coinage of I.A. Richards, 'knowledge' is equated with 'knowledge'.

1.9 FORMS OF POETRY

The diverse elements of a work of art are mingled together, according to the
Romantics, by an informing and dominating passion or emotion. Blake, Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats express this in their different ways and Coleridge uses a very
cogent analogy to explain this. In a letter to Southey he compares the operation of
emotion or feeling in a poem with the movement of breeze through the leaves. He
believes in mechanism, in the theory of the association of ideas, to explain the
movement of the leaves without presupposing the existence of the breeze. In
Biographia Literaria (Chapter IV), Coleridge explains how the presence of an
emotion in a poem leads to an artistic fusion while its absence spells chaos.

As a result of the Romantic emphasis on subjectivity, individualism, emotion and

inspiration the forms of poetry also underwent a thorough revaluation. All forms of art
are determined by the aesthetic that underlines them. That aesthetic is, in turn,
significantly related to its intellectual and socio-cultural background. The Greeks
regarded gods as supreme and man as a puppet of fate and attached utmost importance
to the reality that lies outside of us. Very naturally, therefore, drama, particularly
tragedy, was the highest art form with them. In the post-Renaissance Europe the spirit
of quest and adventure not only informed forms of art but also drastically modified
them. The pragmatic and mechanical outlook of the neo- classical age effected a
corresponding modification in art-forms. Epic, prose-satire, comedy of manners and
long, didactic, verse 'essays' suited the new temperament.

From the Romantic point of view, the centre of interest was man and not the external
reality and this led to a total revaluation of the existing art forms. Blake found the
conventional modes of expression acting as a clog upon free expression. In Jerusalem,
Plate 3, he, therefore, announced that he was discarding the neo-classical verse forms
as 'fettered poetry', and 'fettered poetry fetters the human race.' Wordsworth's 'Preface'
to the Lyrical Ballads is, from one point of view, a manifesto of the new aesthetic of
free expression. It laid emphasis on spontaneity, sincerity and natural expression of
feeling in place of artificiality and conventionality. Coleridge buttressed the new
aesthetic by laying its philosophical foundation through his active-projective view of
human mind, his theory of creative imagination and his idea of organicism. In their
different ways Byron, Shelley and Keats - all emphasize sincerity and intensity as
criteria of value. Consequently, literary kinds and their ranking undergo a drastic
revision. The lyric now becomes the poetic norm t as it accords best with the
Romantic view of poetry as self-expression. Coleridge and I Mill regard the lyric as
14
the most poetic of all forms of poetry. The lyric in its various forms - elegy, sonnet
song, ode, etc. - is the purest expression of feeling, rendered generally in the first
person which is not the I-representative' (as Coleridge phrases it) but stands for the
proper person of the author.

1.9.1 Democracy

In the late 18th and early 19th century, concepts such as the Great Chain of Being,
which had long represented the way humans thought of themselves and their roles in
society, crumbled in the wake of new ideas about democracy. Rather than placing
themselves above or below other individuals in a hierarchy, people began to believe
that all men are created equal. Although it took more time to be accepted, the idea that
women and people of color are also created equal germinated in the fertile
environment of democratic ideals.

1.9.2 Nature and Spirit

European philosophers such as Rousseau and Spinoza maintain that innocence and the
potential for human goodness are found in nature; human institutions, such as
governments, produce pride, greed, and inequality. Thus nature, and people close to
nature, becomes the ideal for Romantic writers.

Nature takes on additional significance with the ideas of philosophers such

as Schelling who posits an identity of mind and nature: “Nature is visible spirit.…”
For poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, nature is a source of divine revelation, a
visible veil through which God may be discerned. For others such as Shelley, nature is
the means to tapping into the collective power of the human mind, what American
writer Ralph Waldo Emerson refers to as the Over-Soul. Nature is the source of
human innocence and goodness because nature is a manifestation of the Divine.

For Romantic writers, then, the source of poetry is not a conscious crafting of lines of
a certain number of syllables in a certain metrical pattern and rhyme scheme, like the
18th-century heroic couplet. Instead, the source of literature is the inspiration that
comes from connecting, through nature, with the divine or the transcendental
properties of the human mind. Romantic writers use the term Imagination to refer to
this connection. The power of God to create nature is parallel to the poet’s power to
create through the Imagination. In his A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley
states that the Imagination “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare
the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.” In his “Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth writes of “A motion and
a spirit, that impels / All thinking things…” that he finds in nature. In his “The Eolian
Harp,” Coleridge pictures all of nature, including humans, as harps creating music
when touched by the breeze of Imagination, the “One life” that is “in us and abroad.”

15
Sturm und Drang

One facet of Romanticism also recognizes the dark side of the human mind.
Originating in Germany, the Sturm und Drang (usually translated “storm and stress”)
movement pictures an anti-hero, a character dark in appearance, mood, and thought, in
rebellion against the restrictions of society. Ann Radcliffe and others wrote Gothic
novels that typically feature picturesque yet haunted medieval castles and ruins,
supernatural elements, death, madness, and terror. Gothic elements appear in many
Romantic works: Heathcliff and the ghost of Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights, the mad wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey delightfully parodies the Gothic novel. In poetry,
Byron’s narrative poems feature dark, brooding anti-heroes called Byronic heroes, a
role Byron played himself in his personal life. The Tate Britain provides an online
tour through a previous exhibit of paintings that illustrate Romantic Gothic art.

1.9.3 Romanticism and Neoclassicism

Romanticism is a reaction against many facets of Neoclassicism. The following chart

lists contrasting views of Neoclassicism and Romanticism.

Neoclassicism Romanticism
use and imitation of literary
use and imitation of literary traditions from the
traditions from ancient Greece and
Middle Ages (including the medieval romance)
Rome

beauty in structure and order beauty in organic, natural forms

art from applying order to nature art from inspiration

heroic couplets lyric poetry

focus on external people and events focus on self-expression of the artist

Great Chain of Being Democracy

reason Mysticism

Reason leads to spiritual revelation Nature leads to spiritual revelation

urban (glorifies civilization and rural (sees the evils of civilization and
technological progress) technological progress)

values wit and sophistication values primitive, simple people

Human nature needs artificial Restraints of society result in tyranny and

restraints of society oppression

the head the heart

16
1.9.4 Characteristics of Romantic Literature

 medievalism—Rather than looking for forms and subject matter from classical
literature, Romantic-era writers prefer nostalgic views of the Middle Ages as a
simple, less complicated time not troubled by the complexities and divisive
issues of industrialization and urbanization. Often a Romantic medieval vision
is not realistic, ignoring the violence and harshness of the Middle Ages with its
religious persecution, political wars, poverty among the lower classes in favour
of a fairy tale view of knights in shining armour rescuing beautiful damsels in
distress. Or, from another perspective, the castles and mysterious aura of the
so-called Dark Ages provide an ideal setting for Gothic literature.

 Mysticism—Romantic mysticism is the belief that the physical world of nature

is a revelation of a spiritual or transcendental presence in the universe.
Mysticism is not pantheism (worshipping nature). Romantic writers would
worship not the tree, but the spiritual, sublime element manifested by the tree.
Romantic literature, particularly poetry, is often characterized as nature poetry;
mysticism explains the evident love of nature. Romantic writers love nature
not only for its beauty but primarily because it is an expression of spirituality
and the Imagination.

 sensibility—When Jane Austen titled her novel Sense and Sensibility, she set
up the dichotomy between rationalism and the emotional enthusiasm that was a
reaction, often an exaggerated reaction, to the reason and logic prized in
neoclassicism. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined poetry
as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The overwhelming
emotional reaction to nature seen in Wordsworth’s poetry, the emotional
sensitivity to other individuals and their circumstances, particularly those from
the lower socio-economic classes, and the supernatural evocation of terror in
Gothic literature all are expressions of sensibility.

 primitivism and individualism—Arising from two sources, philosophical

theories that posit innocence is found in nature and the ideals of democracy,
Romanticism values the primitive individual, the person who does not have the
artificial manners of high society, the cultivated façade of the aristocracy.
Individuals who are closer to nature are better able to recognize and exemplify
goodness and spiritual discernment. Wordsworth espouses the common man
and incidents from ordinary life as the appropriate subject for poetry.
Romanticism places the individual in the centre of life and experience.

Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems written and jointly published by William

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. The volume is of such importance

17
that its 1798 publication date is often considered the beginning of the Romantic
Period. The poetry in Lyrical Ballads marks a distinct change in both subject matter
and style from the poetry of the 18th century.

William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads

In the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth includes a Preface, an introductory

explanation, to Lyrical Ballads to explain his theory of how poetry should be written.
The following points from the Preface delineate the characteristics that make these
poems markedly different from poetry of the preceding century:

 The language of poetry should be real language spoken by common people.

During the 18th century, many poets used what Wordsworth called “poetic
diction,” flowery or ornate words for ordinary things such as feathery flock
instead of birds or finny tribe instead of fish. Wordsworth protests that people
don’t use such expressions; therefore poetry shouldn’t either. Notice also that
much of Wordsworth’s poetry rejects the uniform stanzas and line lengths that
were popular in the 18th century. Much of his poetry is free in form—lines and
stanzas of varying lengths in the same poem, more like the “selection of
language really used by men.”

 The subject of poetry should be events from the real lives of common people.
Wordsworth believes that common, ordinary situations are worthy topics for
poems, events such as farmers plowing their fields. He further believes that
through the Imagination he could make his audience more aware of the
significance of common scenes that they might otherwise take for granted.

 “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “takes
its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Thus Wordsworth identifies
sensibility rather than reason as the source of poetry.

 A poet is a “man speaking to men” but an individual who is extraordinarily

perceptive. Wordsworth believes that the power of the Imagination enables
poets to perceive the spiritual dimension found in the ordinary, in, as Coleridge
says, all of animate nature. Sensibility allows the poet to understand and to
convey the inner being of man and nature.

1.9.5 Forms of Literature

 Novel
A novel, as famously defined in the Holman/Harmon Handbook to Literature,
is an “extended fictional prose narrative.” The novel flourished in the
Romantic Period, encompassing novels previously listed by Anne Brontë,
Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, and Ann Radcliffe; Sir Walter
Scott‘s historical novels, known as the Waverly Novels, set in medieval times

18
 and glorifying Scottish nationalism; and Jane Austen’s novels of manners,
portraying the genteel country life of the Regency era.

 Lyric Poetry
A lyric is a brief poem, expressing emotion, imagination, and meditative
thought, usually stanzaic in form.

 Romantic Ode
As used in the Romantic Period, the ode is a lyric poem longer than usual
lyrics, often on a more serious topic, usually meditative and philosophic in
tone and subject.

 Ballad
A ballad is a narrative poem or song. Ballads originated as songs that were part
of an oral culture, usually simple and regular in rhythm and rhyme. The typical
ballad stanza is 4 lines rhyming abab. Because of their simplicity and their role
as part of folk culture, ballads were popular with many Romantic writers.

(https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/british-literature-through-history/s06-01-the-
romantic-period-1798-1832.html)

1.10 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

 Differentiate between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, in your own words.

……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
…

 How are Democracy, Nature and Spirit associated with Romantic Literature.
……………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
19
 ……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………….........
.......................................

1.11 LET US SUM UP

Imagination, inspiration and organicism are all crucial to Romantic poets. Equal stress
is placed on freedom, individualism, emotions, spontaneity, sincerity and authenticity.
Distrust of rationality went with this. The inner life mattered more to the Romantics.
Theirs was an expressive theory of art. Lyricism dominated the age genre-wise and
formal perfection of the neo-classical kind was not sought after by most Romantics.
They believed in a kind of transcendentalism also and this made the supernatural a fit
subject for someone like Coleridge the poet. Liberty, fraternity and equality were
valued, the French Revolution being an obvious influence.

20
UNIT-2 ROMANTICISM AND THE REAL WORLD

Structure

2.1 Objectives
2.2 Introduction
2.3 The Romantics
2.4 Revolution
2.5 The Imagination
2.6 The Marginalized and the oppressed
2.7 Children, Nature and the Sublime
2.8 The Second Generation Romantics
2.9 Female Poets
2.10 The Gothic
2.11 The Byronic Hero
2.12 The Contraries
2.13 Romanticism, Emotion and Imagery
2.14 Political Discontent and Humanitarian Aspirations
2.15 Wonder of the Romantics
2.16 Awe and Wonder in Things Familiar
2.17 Check your progress
2.18 Let us Sum up
2.19 Block-end questions

2.1 OBJECTIVES

The following unit is going to help you give a wider view of Romanticism and the
Romantic. This unit will help you understand how Romanticism differs in terms of
existence and how does it act as an escape for the Romantic writers/authors. This unit
will further help you understand the peculiarities of Romanticism and how does it help
the Romantics.

2.2 INTRODUCTION

“The peculiar quality of Romanticism lies in this that in apparent detaching us from
the real world, it restores us to reality at a higher point.”

The Augustan poets took the urban society as their milieu. The British poets of the
early nineteenth century found this society not a society in perfection but being made
bad and unhygienic by the Industrial Revolution. Its polite character was being spoilt
by the increasing number of the uneducated, homeless workers in the towns. This
society became a symbol of greed and trickery, deceit and hypocrisy and the Romantic
poets, emerged from this old centre and base of culture and politeness. This may be

21
truer of Blake than of Keats but there would have been some agreement among the
Romantic poets on this issue.

This social change affected the thoughts of the people. The range of experience of the
previous age was found to be narrow and limited and the permissible interests and
sentiments few and limits of good sense and decency soon-reached. The new themes
thus were the child's experiences, or interests of peoples remote from the cities or even
national life or the unexplored human passions, sentiments and feelings that were
more a part of human existence than just reason. Coleridge 's The Ancient Mariner,
Christabel, and Kubla Khan demonstrate the effectiveness of the non-rational and
discursive in literature as vehicle for communicating states of mind and feeling that
cannot be readily justified in explicit statements. The Ancient Mariner is set in the
solitariness of the gruesome sea. It is a tale of adventure and more than that, a tale of
adventure into the unexplored areas of the psyche. The Mariner is afflicted by a
strange urge to tell his tale to someone who is fit for it. Still the morality is a mundane
one, but something that was not considered worthy of notice by the predecessors of
the Romantics:

He prayeth well who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

Christabel has the setting of a medieval castle, where an innocent girl like the kin of
the bridegroom in The Ancient Mariner is introduced into the complexity of a world
of love, witchery, supernatural elements and senility. All these poems express man’s
willingness to pay serious attention to facts of mind untainted by reason.

Coleridge however was not alone in this matter. Blake had gone farther than Coleridge
and imagined a whole world of beings. America, The Four Zoas, Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, and The Book of 'Un'zen ' are all inhabited by mythical beings of Blake's
creation. But analysed on the level of symbols like Urizen for reason they all explain
their validity and meaning.

Wordsworth took for the subject of his poetry the common people, uncorrupted by
civilization or the Child who has not allowed his innocence to get corrupted by
understanding. 'Michael', 'The Cumberland Beggar' and the girl in 'We are Seven' are
symbols of innocence. Michael gets corrupted by the new society which he joins.
Civilization has not reached others (in the two poems mentioned above), to corrupt
them.

In poems like 'The Daffodils' or 'The Sky Lark' or 'The Solitary Reaper' artefacts of
nature are seen as a personal, not a public object.

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work And o'er the sickle bending;-

22
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.

As the anarchism of Godwin professed man's complete independence from external

control the Romantics emphasized the autonomy of a poet's world.

Byron was not an escapist. He remained highly sociable. But while in the society, he
wished to fight with the despotism of his time. He set himself against all the
monarchies of his day. On the question of Greek independence he recalled Homer, the
battles of the Greeks against the Trojans; and nearer in time the memory of the
Crusades came surging over his mind. The poetry of The Vision of Judgment in theme
and treatment is of the previous age. Childe Harold and Don Juan are earthly and even
profane. But they are at a great remove from the setting of the poetry of Dryden, Pope
and Dr. Johnson.

Shelley was a revolutionary and joined Byron in his philhellenism. He declared - 'we
are all Greeks'. But his poetry is more airy and more than any other romantic poet,
worthy of Arnold's sneer.

It asserts the romantic heresy which the poetry of the age had committed in
proclaiming the self-sufficiency of the individual. 'To a Skylark' is perhaps the most
perfect example of airiness converted into the chams of poetry:

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee? From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from, thy presence showers a rain of melody,
In sublimating the concrete Shelley licenses our imagination to the extremes of flight
and offers a portrait of the purest of human aspirations, not of concrete objects.
Keats loved the vernal bloom, the taste of wine, the fragrance of flowers, the gentle
breeze and above all to be lulled to sleep by the one sweet call of a nightingale:
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Keats later repudiated his cult of beauty. In his later poetry such as 'Epistle to John
Hamilton Reynolds' he laments,
". , . Oh, never with the prize,
High reason, and the love of good and ill,
Be my award."
Or again,
Or is it that imagination brought
Beyond its proper bound, yet still confine’d

23
Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind,
Cannot refer to any standard law
Of either earth or heaven?

Still the standard law which Keats and his contemporary poets adhered to, and
recognized the short-comings of, did restore the honour and mystery that surrounded
human beings. It is in this sense that they portrayed reality but again it was a part of
the reality. In the change of focus if new areas had been discovered old ones had gone
into the shade, if not completely eclipsed.

2.3 THE ROMANTICS

Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term
‘Romanticism’ has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art,
literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The
‘Romantics’ would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied
retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century.In 1762 Jean-Jacques
Rousseau declared in The Social Contract: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains.’ During the Romantic period major transitions took place in society, as
dissatisfied intellectuals and artists challenged the Establishment. In England, the
Romantic poets were at the very heart of this movement. They were inspired by a
desire for liberty, and they denounced the exploitation of the poor. There was an
emphasis on the importance of the individual; a conviction that people should follow
ideals rather than imposed conventions and rules. The Romantics renounced the
rationalism and order associated with the preceding Enlightenment era, stressing the
importance of expressing authentic personal feelings. They had a real sense of
responsibility to their fellow men: they felt it was their duty to use their poetry to
inform and inspire others, and to change society.

(https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-englishlit/chapter/british-literature-
quotes-notes-4/)

2.4 REVOLUTION

When reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind
are William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (1772-1834), George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). These writers had an
intuitive feeling that they were ‘chosen’ to guide others through the tempestuous
period of change. This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in
parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English
Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets
tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about
political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror shocked them profoundly and

24
affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the Republican
cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.
(https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-englishlit/chapter/british-literature-
quotes-notes-4/

2.5 THE IMAGINATION

The Romantics were not in agreement about everything they said and did: far from it!
Nevertheless, certain key ideas dominated their writings. They genuinely thought that
they were prophetic figures who could interpret reality. The Romantics highlighted the
healing power of the imagination, because they truly believed that it could enable
people to transcend their troubles and their circumstances. Their creative talents could
illuminate and transform the world into a coherent vision, to regenerate mankind
spiritually. In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley elevated the status of poets: ‘They
measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit…’.[1] He declared that ‘Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This might sound somewhat pretentious,
but it serves to convey the faith the Romantics had in their poetry.

2.6 THE MARGINALIZED AND OPPRESSED

Wordsworth was concerned about the elitism of earlier poets, whose highbrow
language and subject matter were neither readily accessible nor particularly relevant to
ordinary people. He maintained that poetry should be democratic; that it should be
composed in ‘the language really spoken by men’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]).
For this reason, he tried to give a voice to those who tended to be marginalised and
oppressed by society: the rural poor; discharged soldiers; ‘fallen’ women; the insane;
and children.Blake was radical in his political views, frequently addressing social
issues in his poems and expressing his concerns about the monarchy and the church.
His poem ‘London’ draws attention to the suffering of chimney-sweeps, soldiers and
prostitutes.

2.7 CHILDREN, NATURE AND THE SUBLIME

For the world to be regenerated, the Romantics said that it was necessary to start all
over again with a childlike perspective. They believed that children were special
because they were innocent and uncorrupted, enjoying a precious affinity with nature.
Romantic verse was suffused with reverence for the natural world. In Coleridge’s
‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) the poet hailed nature as the ‘Great universal Teacher!’
Recalling his unhappy times at Christ’s Hospital School in London, he explained his
aspirations for his son, Hartley, who would have the freedom to enjoy his childhood
and appreciate his surroundings. The Romantics were inspired by the environment,
and encouraged people to venture into new territories – both literally and

25
metaphorically. In their writings they made the world seem a place with infinite,
unlimited potential.

2.8 THE SECOND-GENERATION ROMANTICS

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a

backdrop of war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his
outlook: indeed, second-generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt
that he had ‘sold out’ to the Establishment. In the suppressed Dedication to Don
Juan (1819-1824) Byron criticised the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, and the other
‘Lakers’, Wordsworth and Coleridge (all three lived in the Lake District). Byron also
vented his spleen on the English Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, denouncing
him as an ‘intellectual eunuch’, a ‘bungler’ and a ‘tinkering slavemaker’ (stanzas 11
and 14). Although the Romantics stressed the importance of the individual, they also
advocated a commitment to mankind. Byron became actively involved in the struggles
for Italian nationalism and the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule.Notorious for
his sexual exploits, and dogged by debt and scandal, Byron quitted Britain in 1816.
Lady Caroline Lamb famously declared that he was ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to
know.’ Similar accusations were pointed at Shelley. Nicknamed ‘Mad Shelley’ at
Eton, he was sent down from Oxford for advocating atheism. He antagonised the
Establishment further by his criticism of the monarchy, and by his immoral lifestyle.

2.9 FEMALE POETS

Female poets also contributed to the Romantic movement, but their strategies tended
to be more subtle and less controversial. Although Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)
was modest about her writing abilities, she produced poems of her own; and her
journals and travel narratives certainly provided inspiration for her brother. Women
were generally limited in their prospects, and many found themselves confined to the
domestic sphere; nevertheless, they did manage to express or intimate their concerns.
For example, Mary Alcock (c. 1742-1798) penned ‘The Chimney Sweeper’s
Complaint’. In ‘The Birth-Day’, Mary Robinson (1758-1800) highlighted the
enormous discrepancy between life for the rich and the poor. Gender issues were fore
grounded in ‘Indian Woman’s Death Song’ by Felicia Hemans (1793-1835).

2.10 THE GOTHIC

Reaction against the Enlightenment was reflected in the rise of the Gothic novel. The
most popular and well-paid 18th-century novelist, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823),
specialised in ‘the hobgoblin-romance’. Her fiction held particular appeal for
frustrated middle-class women who experienced a vicarious frisson of excitement
when they read about heroines venturing into awe-inspiring landscapes. She was
dubbed ‘Mother Radcliffe’ by Keats, because she had such an influence on Romantic
poets. The Gothic genre contributed to Coleridge’s Christabel (1816) and Keats’s ‘La
26
Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819). Mary Shelley (1797-1851) blended realist, Gothic
and Romantic elements to produce her masterpiece Frankenstein (1818), in which a
number of Romantic aspects can be identified. She quotes from Coleridge’s Romantic
poem The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In the third chapter Frankenstein refers to
his scientific endeavours being driven by his imagination. The book raises worrying
questions about the possibility of ‘regenerating’ mankind; but at several points the
world of nature provides inspiration and solace.

(https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-englishlit/chapter/british-literature-
quotes-notes-4/)

2.11 THE BYRONIC HERO

Romanticism set a trend for some literary stereotypes. Byron’s Childe Harold (1812-
1818) described the wanderings of a young man, disillusioned with his empty way of
life. The melancholy, dark, brooding, rebellious ‘Byronic hero’, a solitary wanderer,
seemed to represent a generation, and the image lingered. The figure became a kind of
role model for youngsters: men regarded him as ‘cool’ and women found him
enticing! Byron died young, in 1824, after contracting a fever. This added to the
‘appeal’. Subsequently a number of complex and intriguing heroes appeared in novels:
for example, Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Edward Rochester
in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (both published in 1847).

2.12 CONTRARIES

Romanticism offered a new way of looking at the world, prioritising imagination

above reason. There was, however, a tension at times in the writings, as the poets tried
to face up to life’s seeming contradictions. Blake published Songs of Innocence and
of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Here
we find two different perspectives on religion in ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’. The
simple vocabulary and form of ‘The Lamb’ suggest that God is the beneficent, loving
Good Shepherd. In stark contrast, the creator depicted in ‘The Tyger’ is a powerful
blacksmith figure. The speaker is stunned by the exotic, frightening animal, posing the
rhetorical question: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ In The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790-1793) Blake asserted: ‘Without contraries is no progression’.

Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) juxtaposed moments of celebration and

optimism with lamentation and regret. Keats thought in terms of an opposition
between the imagination and the intellect. In a letter to his brothers, in December
1817, he explained what he meant by the term ‘Negative Capability’: ‘that is when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason’ (22 December). Keats suggested that it is impossible
for us to find answers to the eternal questions we all have about human existence.
Instead, our feelings and imaginations enable us to recognise Beauty, and it is Beauty

27
that helps us through life’s bleak moments. Life involves a delicate balance between
times of pleasure and pain. The individual has to learn to accept both aspects:
‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know’ (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ [1819]).
(https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-bhcc-englishlit/chapter/british-literature-
quotes-notes-4/)

2.13 ROMANTICISM, EMOTION AND IMAGERY

'Intense emotion coupled with an intense display of imagery, such is the frame of
mind which supports and feeds the new literature. 'Discuss the Romantic Revival in
the light of this statement.

Intense emotions of love, beauty and patriotism generally accompanied with an

intense display of images. But when a poet meditates upon an object or an idea his
intellect provides him with philosophy or a sublime strain of poetry rather than the
glimmer of images.

Shelley's skylark is a product of quivering imagination. The bird has been compared
with a 'Cloud of fire', an 'un-bodied joy', a 'star of heaven', 'the arrows of that silver
sphere', 'a poet hidden in the light of thought', 'a high-born maiden', 'a glow-worm
golden' and 'rose’ embower'd in its own green leaves', and with these images go
intense emotions. To quote a few stanzas

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not,

OR
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee;
Thou lovest-but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
OR
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I sun listening now!

28
For Shelley, the bird becomes a symbol and then it grows until it becomes an agent
which participates with him in his flights of fancy, his passions of life, his yearnings
for freedom.

Keats is another pod whose emotional experience is conveyed through images. The
nightingale is called 'light-winged Dryad of the trees' and Keats thinks of the emperors
and clowns of the past:

Thou wast not Lorn for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
But Wordsworth's emotional response is for meditation. Much of his imagery is
replaced by a 'visionary gleam'. Still his Skylark is 'Ethereal minstrel pilgrim of the
sky I' And Wordsworth requests humanity to,
Leave to the nightingale her shady wood ;
A privacy of glorious light is thine,
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam –
True to the kindred point of Heaven and Home.

This coupling of emotion and imagery is true in other contexts as well. Byron's
portrait of the ocean is majestic and conveyed through bold images:

Roll on thou deep and dark and blue Ocean - roll !

Ten thousand fleets sweep over there in vain ;
Man marks the earth with ruin - his control
Stops with the shore ; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

The majesty and grandeur of the ocean is put in contrast with the littleness of man
through appropriate images.

The majesty and grandeur of the ocean is put in contrast with the littleness of man
through appropriate images.

Byron used such images for other purposes like the expression of love of the beauty of
women:
She Walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies

29
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
The lady is as beautiful and majestic as a cloudless night, full of stars,
Wordsworth finds the image of an 'apparition' in his 'phantom of delight':
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair,
Like twilight's too, her dusky
hair But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn.
A dancing shape, an image gay
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

2.14 POLITICAL DISCONTENT AND HUMANITARIAN ASPIRATIONS

'The Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century expressed the
aesthetic and emotional sensibilities of the age, the political discontents, and the
humunitarian aspiration’. Discuss.

George I and George II had been interested more in their province of Hanover from
where they had come than their new kingdom of Great Britain. George III ascended
the throne in 1760 and remained on it until his death in 1820. He wanted to get back
for himself what his two predecessors had lost, i. e, the power to reign as well as rule.
This involved a great deal of shady dealings and false play, unfair elections and
bribery of parliamentarians and voters. The society had become corrupt and the elite
wished a change. The days of despotic rule were over and democracy had dawned
across the Atlantic on their (The English men's) own kins in 1776 in the United States
of America. The poet of The Traveller recorded this passing away of reliance on the
king and the waning of the adoration of authority:

The narrowness of the urban society and 'good sense' in philosophy and in poetry, the
'ancient rules' and the crippling medium of the 'heroic couplet', were felt to be a
burden which the new age wished to discard. Writing about the metre of the previous
age, Blake wrote in his Poetical Sketches:

The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

But more than the disenchantment with the old medium was the asperity towards the
old subjects which desiccated the hearts of men, and narrowed the range of the
experience of the educated. These new romantic poets lived in remote places, away
from the control-room of the state. The poets of the previous age - Swift and prior to
Milton, Marvel Addison and Donne - were close to the powers that were.

30
Blake took for his subject the chimney sweeper or the village green and innocent
children. Wordsworth directed his interest towards the poor people like the
Cumberland beggar or Michael's father and mother. An innocent girl like Lucy or the
one in 'We are Seven' drew his attention as much as his own childhood, the 'fair seed
time' in which he was 'fostered alike by beauty and by fear. 'In this novel realization of
man as an autonomous being, his self-sufficient status, lay' the secret of Wordsworth's
poetic gleams, his aesthetic expressions:

An auxiliary light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour ; the melodious birds,
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves obeyed
A like dominion, and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye:
Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
And hence my transport.

Coleridge's imagination, however, did not turn to things so simple. His imagination
was conditioned by his addiction to laudanum. Poetry depicts man's response to
uncommon situations. 'Kubla Khan', said to be written in a dream is in its very
perfection in this class of poetry:

The 'measureless caverns' that Coleridge envisioned was a great fact of his
humanitarian aspiration and in accepting the remote and the farfetched as a theme for
his poetry, he countenanced the immense possibilities that man was capable of. This
conditioned the music of his poetry and ensured its charm:

The poetry of Coleridge re-enacts the medieval motif of Est in Arcadia ego - death in
Arcady, right in the heart of joy of life. It responds in this way to a deep seated
psychological aspect of the human mind.
But the romanticism of the early generation of the romantic poets did not go farther.
Wordsworth had written of the Fall of Bastille:

Bliss was it in that down to be alive

But to be young was very heaven

But when the dawn turned into a gory afternoon, repressive and conservative attitudes
took hold of the minds of men. Pit&, who was in favour of reforms set all his energy
against any liberal measure till the Battle of Waterloo relieved the British people of
the liberal sympathies upsetting the pattern of the society. The second generation came
to express views against oppression and in favour of liberalism, in support of reforms
and the utopian creed of anarchism of Godwin ad Bakunin and of the socialistic creed
of Robert Owen of New Lanark.

31
2.15 WONDER OF THE ROMANTICS

'The 'wonder' of the Romantics is the enthralling discovery, the progressive lightning-
up of an inner horizon, which extends beyond the limits of clear consciousness. ‘How
far is this is an adequate assessment of the Romantic Movement it1 English literature?

The great neo-classical poets from Dryden to Dr. Johnson wrote on themes of peoples,
which the titles of their poems bear out - 'An Essay on Man', 'An Essay on criticism',
'London', 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' or 'The Village School-Master' The
Romantic poets took private themes and glorified the individual. In the absence of
public themes they looked for private matters as the proper stuff for poetry.

Children, birds, beauty of nature, flowers, remote lands, mysterious and even fear
inspiring landscape or seascape became their themes for poetry. Hence there could not
emerge an organized society and a familiar set of norms to which Pope claimed to
conform:

That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long

But stoop'd to Truth, and moralized his song

Keats's and in some ways the dilemma of all romantics was whether they were
'fanatics', i.e, of the dreamer tribe or poets.
Fanatics have their dreams,
Wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect;
The savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven;

As 'physicians' that the Romantic poets were, they reclaimed imagination for the polite
society. A child was born with the 'glories of the imperial palace' whence he had
come. Wordsworth beholds
. . . the child among his newborn blisses
A six year's darling of a pigmy size !
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses
With light upon him from his father's eyes !

But this was common. What others could not see was

. . . at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life
Shaped by himself with newly learned art ;

32
Whether Wordswort11 succeeded in persuading his contemporaries of the 'Mighty
prophet ! Seer Blest' we do not know but he did incite curiosity into a new field or
rather a dormant field of human interest.

'The Daffodils' records another aspect, towards which the romantic poets looked with
wonder:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude ;
I And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The beauty of flowers extended to all things of nature. Shelley heard in the West Wind
the 'trumpet of a prophecy";
O wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale and hectic red,

This mighty force gradually goes far away, beyond the range of clear-sight of the poet
somewhat like the two children, in 'Dream Children' who from realities slip to the
spectral unrealities oh the shores of Lethe or like the Sky lark which floats and runs
'like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun' –

Higher still and higher.

From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire ;
The blue deep thou wingest
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.

Coleridge's imagination hardly woke up from the forgetfulness imposed upon him by
opium. He heard mysterious voices in the air, in the ghostly moonlit nights, in the
striking of the clocks, and in the howls of an old toothless mastiff:

Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

And the owls have awakened the crowing cock ;
Tu-whit ! - Tu - whoo!
' And hark, again !. The crowing cock
How drowsily it crew.

What wonder enwrapped the inland objects with the medieval bit motif was given a
ghostly tinge when the scene was the sea or the 'ancestral voices prophesying war' '
when the same was Kublai Khan's palace in China.

33
2.16 AWE AND WONDER IN THINGS FAMILIAR

'By associating single sensible experiences with some indefinable superior order of
things the Romantics have enriched our appreciation of the familiar world and
awakened a new awe and wonder a; it. ' Discuss’.

It is often assumed that there is no human emotion that cannot be found in

Shakespeare. Dryden said, ' . . . he had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All
the images of Nature were still present to him . . . ' Nature, to Dryden and his
contemporaries meant far more than it means to us and included human nature as well,
but the treatment of nature that we find in the poetry of the Romantic poets was a
revolution in literature.

The case of 'the daffodils' of wordsworth may be taken for example. wordsworth
reports,

Ten thousand saw I at a glance

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

But these 'ten thousand' flowers are immediately seen against the background of the
milkyway, the dance of the waves and the dance of the flowers themselves. As it were,
the entire creation is seen in a cosmic dance. We are forced to question whether
Wordsworth knew something about the cosmic dance of Shiv. Ultimately, he thinks of
the value of this encounter with a 'never ending line' of daffodils;

For oft when on my couch 1 lie

In vacat or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils

By the time we reach these lines we start questioning about the sources and aims of
romantic poetry. Is Romantic Poetry about nature? Or is it about man. Romantic
poetry is primarily about man and only secondarily about nature, but it is naturepoetry
because nature is the measure of all things and both the medium and object of the
search. The poets of the classical age had the urban society as the standard, the
romantic poets replaced it with nature. The song of the solitary reaper reminds
Wordsworth of a grand order: 'of old unhappy far off things 'and battles long ago' of
the nightingale and the cuckoo, the traveller in a desert and the voice of the cuckoo
from Hebrides in spring. Once again a common song is heard against the background
of entire creation as it were. Once again we get tempted to know whether Wordsworth
had any knowledge of the 'Natya Shastra' of Bharata and our concept of Rasas for in
one lyric Wordsworth invokes the entirety and our experience becomes universal. The
same applies to fearful sights as well. Wordsworth saw his own boating experience
34
against the background of fearful forms, of the rock extending toward him like a ghost
and the mountains all around. All his childish delinquencies, he admits, were reproved
by nature's 'ministries of fear'.

It is for such a treatment 'of nature that common experiences became so valuable to
the people of nineteenth century Britain. Coleridge decided to keep his child in the
midst of nature:

. . .thou my babe, shall wander like a breeze

' By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain and beneath the clouds

It was Wordsworth's influence, besides being the influence of the age that made him
think that nature was the repository of grand forms and of Eternity.

. . .So shall thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy god .
Utters who from, eternity doth 'teach ..
Himself in all and all things in Himself.

Hence it was a common belief among the poets of the romantic revival tha! in nature ,
existed something more than the casual more than-the eye could meet without the
assistance of the seeking mind. Nature could be a reflection of God himself, was what
Coleridge felt. The matin bells, or the bark of the toothless mastiff are agencies of
some preternatural beings. Caverns to him were measureless and passed into the
sunless sea. The experience of marriage was to be seen against the perspective of the
experiences of the Ancient Mariner who felt a pain, at certain hours and must tell his
experiences to others.

Keats and Shelley see things and evaluate experiences less against the background of
mysterious forces and supernatural visitations. To the former, love and immortality are
the connecting principles. To the latter, human aspirations of freedom and liberty

and revolution and reform and the amelioration in the condition of mankind take the
place of Wordsworth's 'ministries of nature'. The nightingale's voice cannot be
overlooked by generations to come:

Thou wast not born for death immortal bird,

No hungry generations tread thee down,
The voice I hear this passing night was heard,
In ancient days by emperors and clowns.

And it was heard in ancient days by the 'emperors and clowns' just like Yeats's
handwork;

35
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold or gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past or passing or to come.

But the difference is all the more pronounced. While the 'golden bird' is a classical
image - Yeats eager to live in his peculiar classical past - the nightingale is something
that communicates with us in our real existence. The golden bird is part of a bardic
pose. The nightingale is the passionate dream of the poet's life. The bird singing on the
golden bough is avowedly unreal and elevates the familiar; the nightingale so common
to our daily life becomes thing unreal and awful.

2.17 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

 Write a short note on Political Discontent.

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………

 Explain Imagery in not more than 200 words.

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
36
 …………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………

2.18 LET US SUM UP

In this unit you reviewed the poetry of the Romantic Revival as a whole and gained
insights into the craft of writing answers of critical questions that you may be asked in
the term-end (i.e, final) examination. Hope you found the unit useful for your self-
study. Would you like to read out some of your essays before your friends at the Study
Centre or a self-organised group as some students did in this class?

2.19 BLOCK END QUESTIONS

 Define Romanticism in not more than 200 words.

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………...……………………………………………….

37
 What is ‘Romantic Epistemology’? How is it different from ‘Romantic
Literature’?
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………...………….
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………..……….

 Elaborate the difference between ‘Romaticism’ and ‘Neo-Classicism’.

……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………..……………..

38
 Write a short note on Emotion, Romanticism and Imagery.
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………

 How does ‘Imagination’ affect ‘Romanticism’?

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………..……….

 Write a short note on the ‘Romantic Theory of Art’.

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
39
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………….

40