Heady imaginative freedom of romanticism

In our earlier piece, we saw some features of Romantic English Poetry. This week too we shall come to know more about the poetry.

Although the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and others used the external world for their sources, their poetry had a strong inward quality. That is to say that they used their source as a means of expressing a personal viewpoint or opinion. If we go through the poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Blake especially, we will find this inward quality. They trusted to their own interpretation and intuition to set down what they saw and felt.

Their poetry reveals spiritual loneliness as if they considered themselves fugitives from their fellow men and sought to expose from the rude world. They were escapists pressed up with the demands of the time. They had the Narcissist tendency to see them nakedly in all respects. Some poems of Shelley's were like that. Ecstasy (as in Ode to the Nightingale), Fantasy, Mysticism age some more interesting traits in their poetry.

According to Lilian R Furst (The Critical Idiom -Romanticism), "the concept of the creative imagination is a more nearly reliable criterion of Romanticism than ant other single factor." Speaking of creative imagination one could ecplain it in the words of C M Bowra: "The Romantics certainly created worlds of their own, but they succeeded in persuading others that they were not absurd or merely fanciful"

John Keats

The Romantic poets were certainly gifted with a high degree of physical sensibikity. Their business was to create and through creation to enlighten the whole sentiment and conscious self of man." Therein lays their importance.

Let us note that Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats were individualists. They did not work together in a movement. It is true that the influence of Wordsworth was felt to some degree on Shelley and Keats, but there was more disagreement and dissension among them than collaboration or even sympathy. But they had certain qualities in common (the trends of the Romantic Age- roughly between 1790 and1839), which set them apart at least from their predecessors- the neo-classicists or pre-romantics.

But before we see what these common factors are it is interesting to define what Romanticism is. Lilian R Furst has this to say on the subject:

"Romanticism was considered to be Protestantism in literature and the arts, or liberalism or simply poetry as ageist prose, or the expression of a sensitive heart, or a pre-dilection for the grotesque and fantastic, and so forth?

"the term 'romantic' and the associated words 'originality', 'creation' and 'genius' could only came to the fore as a result of the basic reorientation of human values that affected not only styles of writing but the total view of nature and man.

It was the culmination of that long process of change... Romantic revolution was itself in fact the product of protracted process of revolution... It was a combination of ore-Romanticism, but was more than that in one crucial point: its evaluation of imagination."

From the above quotation we see the importance of the Romantic Imagination.

The Romantic looked in the eye of the imagination, which allowed them to see beyond surface reality to the innermost ideal. But our quarrel would be in relation to the acceptance of that ideal.

The English Romantics - Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - have in common, lofty conception of poetry. "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge"- Shelley. "Herd melodies are sweet but the unheard are sweeter" - Wordsworth. This shows their interpretation of poetry in slightly different approaches.

They were concerned with poetic diction -language. Look what Shelley says: A perpetual 'orphic song' which rules with daedal harmony, a trig of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.."

Here is another quote: "The English Romanticism embraced both the realism of Wordsworth's adherence to nature and the idealism of Shelley's visionary transcendallism "L R Furst.

Harold boom goes to the extent of defining: Romanticism was a health-restoring revival of the instinctual life, in contradistinction to the 18th century restraints that sought to sublimate the instincts in the united names of reason and society"

Let us now list the special characteristics of the Romantic poets:

* The Romantics cultivated imaginative freedom, though in various ways, and this encourged them to use a variety of sometimes very loose poetic form.

* Instead of using an established type of lofty poetic diction they cultivated the everyday speech of actual people.

* Instead of confining themselves to a few established verse forms like the English heroic couplet, thy experimented with every conceivable type of metre and stanza.

* The Romantic Movement is perhaps at its greatest in lyric o poetry, for it basically allows an emphasis on individuality and the lyric is the ultimate in direct personal expression.

* Lyric poetry had not flourished under neo-classicism because of the strong tendency towards the submergence of the individual, but now it burst into a chorus.

We shall stop here and explore a little more in the fascination stage in the growth of poetry in English next week.

[email protected]