Romantic poetry

Most critics identify the beginning of romanticism with the moment when William
Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, 1789, but no writer in Wordsworth’s
lifetime thought of himself as a romantic. The word was applied with half a
century later by English and German historians. However, there was a peculiar
intellectual climate of the time, called the Spirit of the Age. Wordsworth
undertook to justify the new poetry by a critical manifesto of poetic principles in
the form of an extended Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800, to
which Coleridge also contributed. But the friendship was so close (the letter even
finished some poems which Wordsworth had left unfinished) that it’s impossible
to define the share of each two poets in the elaboration of those poetical and
theoretical doctrines, which they seemed to hold in common, unconscious of the
deep differences between them.

Some of the concept of this influential essay can be taken as a point of departure
for a survey of the distinctive elements in the theory and poetry of the romantic
period.

1. The concept of poetry

In classic theory, poetry had been regarded as primarily an imitation of
human life designed to instruct and give artistic pleasure to the reader,
Wordsworth defines all good poetry as ‘’the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings’’. It takes its’ origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility. He located the source of poetry not in the outer world, but the
individual poet and identified as it’s essential material.

2. Poetic spontaneity and freedom

In traditional aesthetic theory, poetry had been regarded as art reflected by
endeavors which could be practiced successfully by a craftsman who was
aware of the rules governing the kind of poem he was writing. To
Wordsworth, although the writing of a poem may be proceeded by
reflection and followed by second thought and revisions, the immediate act
of composition must be spontaneous i.e. (that is) unforced arising and free

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 of all rules. Keats and Shelley also insisted on total autonomy and
spontaneity of the poetic activity. However, despite the theoretical
insistence, the worksheets of romantic poets showed that they worked and
reworked their texts at least at the craftsmen of earlier ages.

3. Romantic nature and poetry

A glance at the table of contents of any collection of poems in that period
will indicate the astonishing degree to which the natural scene, flora and
fauna have become poetic subjects. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and
Keats described natural phenomena with an astonishing accuracy of
observation. As consequence of prominence of landscape, romantic poetry
became synonymous with nature poetry to the popular mind. Romantic
nature poems are descriptive meditative poems in which the scenes
described usually serve to raise an emotional response.
4. The glorification of the common place
Wordsworth stated in the Preface that the aim of Lyrical Ballads was to
choose incidents and situations from common life and use a select of
language merely spoken by man. The source and the model for this
language, said Wordsworth, is ‘’Humble and rising life’’.

5. Supernatural and strangeness in beauty

When Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, With a Few other Poems,
most of the poems have been written by him, Coleridge contributing with 4
poems to the collection. Wordsworth’s share consisted in his precise
observation of nature and common life. To this, Coleridge added his
metaphorical gifts. Wordsworth was to make wonderful the familiar and
ordinary and Coleridge was to make familiar the wonderful and strange.
Wordsworth’s subjects were events of everyday life by preference in its’
humblest form, while Coleridge’s share had to do with the supernatural.
His Kubla Khan opened up to the English poetry the realm of mystery and
magic in which ancient folklore and superstitions are used to startle
sophisticated readers by impressing them in the sense of occult powers.
Such poems are usually set in the distant past or faraway places.
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 6. Nonconformity and individualism
Through the greatest part of the 18th century, man was viewed as a limited
being in an essentially unchanging world. The romantic age was a period of
radical individualism in which both philosophers and poets put immensely
high estimation on man’s potentialities. The aspects of man, which to the
moralists of preceding age had been either his essential scene or his tragic
error, now became his glory and triumph. The greatest classic writers had
dealt with man as a member of organizational society and of this society
the author regarded himself as an integral part.
The romantic writer, on the one hand, deliberately (?) themselves from
society. In almost all of Wordsworth’s poems the words single, solitary, by
himself, alone constituted a leitmotiv. Coleridge also, and more strikingly
Byron and Shelley liked to deal with a solitary protagonist who is separated
from society because he has rejected it or because society had rejected
him.  the theme of exile was introduced, of the disinherited mind which
can’t find a spiritual form in its’ native land and society, or in a whole
modern world. The solitary romantic was also a great scenarist, writers of
the time were fascinated by the outlaws of legend and history: Cain, Satan,
Faustus and Napoleon, about whom they wrote and on whom they
modeled a number of villains or heroes.

7. The innovation in form

Romantic poetry experimented in poetic language, versification and design.
They continued to cultivate a number of forms current in the 18th century,
including the sonnet and combining description and meditation. Their
longer poems struck out in new direction and in a space of a few decades
they produced an astonishing variety of forms constructed on new
principles of organization and style.

Wordsworth’s vision of the world Is not a fantastic one of his invention, but of the
world of all of us. His originality is to be sought in his poetry of nature and of men,

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and lies in the ordinary faculty of giving utterance to some of the most elements
and deepest sensation of man confronting with natural phenomena.

Poetic psychology is his triumph in There was a boy – it’s one of the most striking
instances of Wordsworth’s power. The sudden revolution to the boy of the fair
landscape, his thrill of delight at discovering the beauty of nature is additional to
the man’s knowledge and enjoyment of his own sensations.
Among the pictures Wordsworth had left us about the influence of nature on
human character, his long poem Peter Bell: a Tale marks one end and Lucy the
other end of the scale. Peter Bell lives in the face of nature, untouched alike by
her terror and charm. Lucy’s whole being is modeled by nature’s self. She is
responsive to sun and shadow, silence and sound. Between these two things,
there are many other possible shades of feeling. In Ruth, nature’s influence is only
there as long as she is inkeeping with man.

Many of Wordsworth’s nature poems are still famous. One of them is I wandered
Lonely as a Cloud also known as Daffodils, which came to be known as a classic of
English romance and was included in Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807.
The 4-6 line stanzas in iambic tetrameter were inspired by a walk that the poet
took with his sister, Dorothy during which they discovered a field of daffodils with
their heads tossed by the wind blowing upon them, from the lake.
The poem creates a strong image in the reader’s mind and offers feelings of
complete reconciliation between man and environment. T
o the same belongs The Solitary Reaper, consisting of 4-8 line stanzas written in
iambic tetrameter, in which the poet describes his emotion at the sight of a girl in
the Scottish highlands, reaping grain alone and singing in a solitary field. Although
he doesn’t understand the words, the poet is impressed by a song ( that creates a
blissful mood in him ). Wordsworth was as interested in man as he was in nature.
On his first contact with the French revolution, he realized the irresistible claim of
human nature upon his interest and for a while, nature took second place in his
mind. He set himself with stubborn tenacity to express to the purest, simplest
human beings : beggars, disabled women, countrymen, mentally defected people.

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He found in the elements feelings and passions of humble people the same
beauty, power, mystery which he knew in the form and forces of nature.

The two words were: 1. People weren’t symbols but lining men and women like
the girl singing in the field, or like the leech gatherer in the pound in another
poem, Resolution and Independence (Poems in Two Volumes) or the shepherd
building his sheep fold in a mountain valley in Michael (Lyrical Ballads).
Wordsworth admired these people’s independence, their habit of influence and
solitude, their capacity of understanding life intuitively. He attributed to these
humble creatures a mysterious power that united them with nature. It was this
aspect of irritation that he sometimes exaggerated as in the long narrative poem
The Idiot Boy (Lyrical Ballads), which is setting the countryside and speaks in plain
language about common emotions of a mother and her friend. Started as an
imitator of passion heroic (couplet?) of the period, but soon set out to pull down
the rhetoric poetic style of the age.

In Lyrical Ballads, he adopts and adapts ballad meters and a variety of simple
stanza forms and attains a simplicity, a living force in language, which are
uniquely his own.
In Tinter Abbey, maybe the most elaborate poem of Lyrical Ballads, tightly
structured blank verse. The full title of the poem refers as to its’ origin ‘’Lines
composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye
during a tour, July 13, 1798’’. Poem unrhymed, mostly in iambic pentameter and
continuous elements of the old and the dramatic monologue.