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Extending from about 1789 until 1837, the romantic age stressed emotion over
reason. One objective of the French Revolution (1789-1799) was to destroy an
older tradition that had come to seem artificial, and to assert the liberty,
spirit, and heartfelt unity of the human race. To many writers of the romantic
age this objective seemed equally appropriate in the field of English letters.
In addition, the romantic age in English literature was characterized by the
subordination of reason to intuition and passion, the cult of nature much as
the word is now understood and not as Pope understood it, the primacy of the
individual will over social norms of behavior, the preference for the illusion
of immediate experience as opposed to generalized and typical experience, and
the interest in what is distant in time and place.
The Romantic Poets
The first important expression of romanticism was in the Lyrical Ballads (1798)
of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, young men who were aroused
to creative activity by the French Revolution; later they became disillusioned
with what followed it. The poems of Wordsworth in this volume treat ordinary
subjects with a new freshness that imparts certain radiance to them. On the
other hand, Coleridge's main contribution, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
masterfully creates an illusion of reality in relating strange, exotic, or obviously
unreal events. These two directions characterize most of the later works of
the two poets.
For Wordsworth the great theme remained the world of simple, natural things,
in the countryside or among people. He reproduced this world with so close and
understanding an eye as to add a hitherto unperceived glory to it. His representation
of human nature is similarly simple but revealing. It is at its best, as in
“Tintern Abbey” or “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,”
when he speaks of the mystical kinship between quiet nature and the human soul
and of the spiritual refreshment yielded by humanity's sympathetic contact with
the rest of God's creation. Not only is the immediacy of experience in the poetry
of Wordsworth opposed to neoclassical notions, but also his poetic style constitutes
a rejection of the immediate poetic past. Wordsworth condemned the idea of a
specifically poetic language, such as that of neoclassical poetry, and he strove
instead for what he considered the more powerful effects of ordinary, everyday
language. Coleridge's natural bent, on the other hand, was toward the strange,
the exotic, and the mysterious. Unlike Wordsworth, he wrote few poems, and these
during a very brief period. In such poems as “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,”
the beauties and horrors of the far distant in time or place are evoked in a
style that is neither neoclassical nor simple in Wordsworth's fashion, but that,
instead, recalls the splendor and extravagance of the Elizabethans. At the same
time Coleridge achieved an immediacy of sensation that suggests the natural
although hidden affinity between him and Wordsworth, and their common rejection
of the 18th-century spirit in poetry.
Another poet who found delight in the far distant in time was Sir Walter Scott,
who, after evincing an early interest in the ancient ballads of his native Scotland,
wrote a series of narrative poems glorifying the active virtues of the simple,
vigorous life and culture of his land in the Middle Ages, before it had been
affected by modern civilization. In such of these poems as The Lady of the Lake
(1810) he employed a style of little originality. His work, however, was the
more popular among his immediate contemporaries for that very reason, long before
the full stature of Wordsworth's more impressive poetry was recognized. Some
of Scott's Waverley novels, a series of historical works, have given him a more
permanent reputation as a writer of prose.
A second generation of romantic poets remained revolutionary in some sense throughout
their poetic careers, unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Scott. George Gordon,
Lord Byron, is one of the exemplars of a personality in tragic revolt against
society. As in his stormy personal life, so also in such poems as Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-1824), this generous but egotistical aristocrat
revealed with uneven pathos or with striking irony and cynicism the vagrant
feelings and actions of great souls caught in a petty world. Byron's satirical
spirit and strong sense of social realism kept him apart from other English
romantics; unlike the rest, he proclaimed, for example, a high regard for Pope,
whom he sometimes imitated.
The other great poet-revolutionary of the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, seems
much closer to the grandly serious spirit of the other romantics. His most thoughtful
poetry expresses his two main ideas, that the external tyranny of rulers, customs,
or superstitions is the main enemy, and that inherent human goodness will, sooner
or later, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal reign of transcendent
love. It is, perhaps, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) that these ideas are most
completely expressed, although Shelley's more obvious poetic qualities—the
natural correspondence of metrical structure to mood, the power of shaping effective
abstractions, and his ethereal idealism—can be studied in a whole range
of poems, from “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark”
to the elegy “Adonais,” written for John Keats, the youngest of
the great romantics.
More than that of any of the other romantics, Keats's poetry is a response to
sensuous impressions. He found neither the time nor the inclination to elaborate
a complete moral or social philosophy in his poetry. In such poems as “The
Eve of St. Agnes”, ”Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to
a Nightingale”, all written about 1819, he showed an unrivaled awareness
of immediate sensation and an unequaled ability to reproduce it. Between 1818
and 1821, during the last few years of his short life, this spiritually robust,
active, and wonderfully receptive writer produced all his poetry. His work had
a more profound influence than that of any other romantic in widening the sensuous
realm of poetry for the Victorians later in the century.
Romantic Prose
Certain romantic prose parallels the poetry of the period in a number of ways.
The evolution of fundamentally new critical principles in literature is the
main achievement of Coleridge's Biographia literaria (1817), but like Charles
Lamb (Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808) and William Hazlitt (Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817), Coleridge also wrote a large amount of practical
criticism, much of which helped to elevate the reputations of Renaissance dramatists
and poets neglected in the 18th century. Lamb is famous also for his occasional
essays, the Essays of Elia (1823, 1833). An influential romantic experiment
in the achievement of a rich poetic quality in prose is the phantasmagoric,
impassioned autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821).