The Evolution of English Romanticism: Poets, Rebellion, and Disillusionment

What is The Beginning of English Romanticism?

In England, Romanticism, announced and prepared by Thomson, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Blake and Burns, produced a marvellous harvest in the earlier part of the XIXth century. The Romantic period proper may be dated from the publication of Lyrical Ballads, a volume of verse written jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. With the names of these two poets is closely associated that of Southey, and all three are often designated as the Lake poets, an appellation only justified by the fact that Coleridge and Southey dwelt at some time of their lives in the Lake District, which was the home of Wordsworth for sixty years. There was much friendly intercourse between them, and they occasionally wrote in collaboration, but the idea of a literary “cenacle” should be set aside. Contemporaneous with the so-called Lake Poets are Walter Scott, a Scotchman, now beat remember as a novelist, and Thomas Moore, who may be remember as the national poet of Ireland.

The Rebellion of Romanticism

Romanticism was the outcome of a revolt against:

a) the artificiality and conventionalism of the “Classicists”;

b) the abstract and rationalistic tendencies of the XVIIIth century. It has therefore two aspects, being: a) a return to nature, as opposed to convention, both in subject and in style (and in this respect Romanticism has a decidedly realistic side); b) a revival of imaginative sensibility, both in the domain of the senses and in the domain of the spiritual

Differences Between Wordsworth and Coleridge

That these two tendencies, although they may be allied and even harmoniously blended, as the Lyrical Ballads testify, are nevertheless divergent, is illustrated by the immense differences between the poetry of Wordsworth and that of Coleridge. It should o0n the other hand be observed that, whatever may have been the zeal of the reformers, the poetic standards of the preceding age were not completely discarded. There is a marked contrast between the two generations of Romanticists.

Delusions and Reconciliations

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey reached manhood in the earlier years of the French Revolution. They were thoroughly imbued with revolutionary ideas, and conceived boundless hopes of regeneration of mankind. They were disappointed when they realized that the French Revolution deviated from its aims, and that the golden age promised by politicians was receding into an ever-remoter future. They accordingly reconciled themselves to more orderly notions. Il may be noted that all three died old. Coleridge, despite his deplorable addiction to opium, reached the age of sixty-two, Southey the age of sixty-nine and Wordsworth the age of eighty.

The New Romantic Generation

Byron, Shelley and Keats came of age at the very moment when Europe was smoking with ruins and the Holy Alliance was dictating its orders to exhausted peoples. They had inherited the noble aspirations of their elders, but felt frustrated in their very youth; hence a feeling of melancholy, a weariness which Byron – an English René – poured forth complacently into his verse. Byron sought for a remedy to his “ennui” in action: he travelled and fought, and he died on the soil of Greece, aged thirty-six. Shelley filled with revolutionary spirit to the core, tried to carry out his principles in life: from his misery he found a refuge in the worship of intellectual beauty and in the composition of poems expressing his belief in the ultimate triumph of justice and goodness, he died in his thirtieth year. Keats, the frailest of the three, drew aside from the turmoil of the world and died at twenty-six.

Prose and Novels of the Period

Closely connected with the career of these great poets is that of several prose-writers: Lamb, the intimate friend of Coleridge, De Quincey, who was the neighbour of Wordsworth for twenty-five years and wrote Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets. Apart from the romantic movement stood Jane Austen, who is, next to Walter Scott, the greatest novelist of her time.