English romanticism and the first English romantists.

The previous lecture concerned the poets, whom we may call the forerunners of Romanticism. But the real flourishing of this literary trend, the real Romantic Age came with the 19^th century.

Romanticism is opposed to the reasonable, calm and classical period of the 17^th -18^th centuries. This new trend is irrational, agitated, dubious and troubled. If the classical literature of the 17^th century likes company, this new one will love solitude, if one side flourishes in cities, the other will want remote and the least inhabited parts of the country – the mountains, the forests. If one side believes in a highly civilized and artificial style of life, the other will turn away from it in disgust and will praise all that is simple, natural, even primitive. If one side proclaims there is no mystery left in the universe the other will see mystery everywhere – in an tower, a tree, a cloud, a star. If the writing of one side is a kind of public performance, the writing of the other will be intensely private.

The breakthrough was inevitable sooner or later, and it came sooner owing to the extraordinary influence of the 18^th century man of genious, a Swiss philosopher and writer who worked mostly in France –Jean-Jacques Rouseau. It will not be exaggeration to say that his ideas hurried on both the French Revolution and the whole Romantic movement.

It should be noted that Romanticism was a European movement, though it did not succeed in all countries at the same time. It was seen first in Germany, then in England, then in Russia and then belatedly but brilliantly, in France as late as 1830. It’s main influence on both North and South America was later still.

As a period in English literature, Romanticism can be said to extend from about 1798 (which marks the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s “Lyrical Ballads”) to the mid – 1830’s, when Queen Victoria began her reign and most of the Romantic poets had died.

There is a poet, though writing in the age of reason, but referred to Romantic poets. William Blake. He was a religious mystic in the age of reason, a unique creator who ignored the strict poetic rules of the classicists to follow his own original style. Born in a poor family, Blake received practically no formal education though he attended a drawing school. Later he illustrated not only his own poems, but Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Dante’s “Divine comedy” and even the Bible. All his life Blake devoted himself to expressing his mystical faith, and his version of a heavenly world. The delicate images and fancifulness of his earlier poems appealed to the later Romantic poets. Compare his two poems in which the author passes questions and speaks symbolically of the power of God and Nature.

“The lamb”, “The lamb the tiger”.

Unable to find a publisher for his further works, Blake started to engrave his own works on copper, texts as well as illustrations, thus coming simultaneously as poet, artist and printer. He thus remained independent of the taste of the market. In this way he printed in 1789 his songs of Innocence, which revealed his mysticism.

Depending his creative independence, Blake lived in poverty. he gladly welcomed the French bourgeois revolution, devoting to it his poem “The French Revolution”. In it he justified the overthrowing of tyranny.

The song of Innocence include the best of Blake’s lyric poems. They express his optimism and his utopian viewpoint. There is no direct reasoning in these songs. Blake expresses his admiration for the unselfconscious innocence of the infant. The playful infant is presented as a model of contemporary humankind and a symbol of its future:

In the “introduction” of the poet tells us that

“Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud he laughing said to me:

Pipe a song about a lamb!”

The child encourages the poet to sing his songs of happy cheer, and to write them “in a book, that all may read”.

“And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear”.

So the whole spirit of the songs of Innocence is joyfulness, light-heartedness and innocence. In them Blake expresses utopian nature-philosophy. There is no contradiction, no struggle and evil is altogether nonsexist. There is only the singing of birds and the bleating of lambs, laughter and merriment:

“ … The green woods laugh with the voice of joy,

And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;

… The air does laugh with our merry wit,

And the green hill laughs with the noise of it”.

Although the true Romantic poets from Coleridge to Keats appealed to be always writing about the past, they had not in fact the solid interest in it that Walter Scott had, and that historians or archeologists have. This is an important point without which Romanticism cannot be properly understood. W. Scott wrote about the Middle Ages because he was genuinely interested in this epoch and wanted to tell stories about it. But the real Romantic poets and story-tellers all over Europe, who began to give their poems and stories a medieval background, were not so much turning to the past as deliberately turning away from the present, from the objective reality to their inner world of dream and desire, mysterious hopes and fears. In order to separate this inner world from the ordinary outer world, to make it all different, they used a kind of medieval dreamland. Their poems and talks are not really about the Middle Ages, but are concerned with their own inner selves.

The Romantics made frequent use of rather vague medieval settings just because the Middle Ages of their imagination seemed to them simpler yet more picturesque and, what is more important, they seemed more magical. Any setting that was strange, remote in time or space, served this purpose. Thus, Shelley and Keats turned to Greek mythology, giving a new significance to ancient figures of legends. Byron made use of the people and landscapes of what we now call Near and Middle East. Wordsworth made his home in the north of England in the heart of the Lake District at that time not often visited and not easily accessible.

The same “strangeness”, originally, mystery concerns female characters in Romanticism – they must be strange and mystical. Thus, Romantic love poetry is filled with mysterious beings – nymphs, water sprites, oriental queens and princesses, savage gypsy girls – in fact, with any beautiful feminine creature who couldn’t possibly live next door.

Because it is itself one-sided, never moving a toward between the outer and inner worlds, between what is real and what we feel ought to be real, Romanticism always tends, as it loses itself in the inner dream world, to find existence less and less satisfying. This is why the Romantic poets are always praising the last Kingdom of the childhood, where dreams and reality are not yet separated.

So the literature of Romanticism, as we can easily discover in the poetry of this age, is filled with melancholy and regret and hopelessly unsatisfied longing. This mood is more characteristic of the young men, that older man, who ought to know better and arrive at some balance. It is significant and symbolic that Coleridge stopped writing poetry as he grew older; that Wordsworth, except for a few occasional flashes, later wrote dull and dutiful verses; and that Keats, Shelley and Byron all died young.