Study Guide to The Romantic Poets

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for the best-known English Romantic poets, including William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats. As defenders of imagination and spirituality, these celebrated poets are recognized for their collective protest against the principles of the English Neoclassical period.

As a collection from the English Romantic era, these works reflect the subjectivity, emotionalism, and lawlessness that defined the spirit of Romanticism. Together, these works capture the values of one of the largest and most influential artistic movements in history. This Bright Notes Study Guide includes notes and commentary on literary classics such as Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey, " Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, " Byron's "Don Juan, " and Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn, " helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

THE ROMANTIC POETS

INTRODUCTION

 

The so-called Romantic Period in the history of English literature extends from the late eighteenth century to the third decade of the nineteenth century. The dates are necessarily imprecise. History cannot be as tidy as some historians would like it to be.

Some landmarks useful in the description of the period can be listed:

1. The outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 with its emphasis on individual rights and the principle of self-determination.

2. The publication in 1783 of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches.

3. The French Revolution, which began in 1789.

4. Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published anonymously in 1798. The Preface to this famous volume, written by Wordsworth and published with the second edition in 1800, is one of the most important accounts of what the new, “Romantic,” poets were trying to do.

5. Sir Walter Scott’s collection of old ballads entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802.

6. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 in England, which gave voting powers to members of the lower middle-class who had not before this enjoyed these rights.

7. The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

The label “Romantic” that has been attached to this period (roughly 1783-1837) is not altogether satisfactory. It directs attention to a notable interest in the Middle Ages (Scott’s collection of ballads and novels like Ivanhoe, Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes) but it fails to suggest that the poets of this generation were very much involved in the political and social issues of their day.

It is not easy to give a definition of Romanticism. It is, perhaps, best understood as a kind of revolutionary philosophy, a violent reaction against convictions and habits of mind that had prevailed in England and Europe from the middle years of the seventeenth century.

NEOCLASSICISM

In 1642 growing dissatisfaction with the policies of the Stuart monarch, Charles I, erupted into civil war and led to the establishment of what was called the Commonwealth, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. On Cromwell’s death in 1658, England found itself without effective leadership and in 1660 invited the exiled son of Charles I to return to the throne of England as Charles II. The Restoration was felt to mark the beginning of an new era. Deliberately setting out to rival the accomplishments in arts and letters that graced the reign of Augustus Caesar when the Roman Empire was established, men of the Restoration spoke of being part of a new Augustan Age.

Although this new classical movement (Neoclassicism) was ambitious, progressive, and forward-looking, it was also characterized by a sense of tradition. Poets, for example, felt obliged to imitate great poems of the past. It was believed that in the course of centuries men had come to agree on certain fixed ways of doing things. Thus there were Rules for pastoral poetry, for satire, for the epic. The first outstanding characteristic of neoclassical poetry, therefore, is its imitativeness.

It should be stressed that this imitativeness does not derive from intellectual timidity. Rather is it the result of a belief that we cannot effectively communicate with one another and thus make progress in the understanding of the world about us unless we agree on certain conventions. This concern for effective communication can be described as the neoclassical emphasis on clarity. Clarity can be listed as a second characteristic of neoclassicism.

Related to the ideal of clarity is that of Objectivity. It is painfully clear to all of us that we are not only rational animals but are also, at the same time, victims of our individual quirks and oddities. An admirable part of the neoclassical effort was the attempt to look beyond surface eccentricities into a central human nature. Put in other words, an important characteristic of neoclassicism is Objectivity.

Existing side by side with a deep reverence for the artistic accomplishments of classical antiquity was a general consciousness, already mentioned, that a new day had dawned. The discovery of the New World had widened the horizons of European man, and the astonishing growth of scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century gave man a fresh confidence in his powers, particularly in his reason. Rationalism, accordingly, must be included in any list of characteristics of the neoclassical period. Indeed, sometimes the period from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century is called The Age Of Reason. Sometimes, too, it is called The Enlightenment.

This sketch of English neoclassicism is, of necessity, brief and incomplete. The period, like virtually all periods of human history, is bewildering in its complexity. Its great writers, like all great writers, defy easy classification.

ROMANTICISM

Enough has been said, however, to make possible a few introductory notes on the nature of English Romanticism. It is perhaps best understood not so much a movement back toward the spirit of the Middle Ages as manifested in Arthurian romances, in tales of high adventure, of encounters with giants and dragons, of wild and passionate love, but rather as a protest against almost all that was most typical of neoclassicism.

SUBJECTIVISM

It has been noticed that the neoclassical writer, typically believed in an intelligible world. He believed that he possessed faculties, notably a mind, that enabled him to make some kind of sense out of the universe. He also believed that what was dark and obscure was probably not worth man’s attention. And he believed that all men (at least all educated men) shared his convictions and attitudes. The Romantic writer, on the other hand, typically was interested in the uniqueness of his response to the world, to historic events, to external nature. The Romantic writer typically looked inward and examined the peculiarity, the particularity of his own, private emotional history.

This does not mean, of course, that the Romantic could not be at times, indeed often, objective. What it does mean is that classical or neoclassical view of reality is fundamentally matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, objective and that the specifically Romantic point of view is subjective.

EMOTIONALISM

Subjectivism, of course, implies an interest in one’s emotions. Romantic poetry, accordingly, tends to be more self-consciously emotional than neoclassical poetry. The distinction cannot be pressed too far, but neoclassicism tends to be a religion of the head, Romanticism a religion of the heart. Neoclassical writers strove for common sense, Romantic for heroic madness. The difference can best be sensed by reading a typical neoclassical poem, for example, Pope’s Essay on Man and then a typical Romantic poem, say Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes.

It must be emphasized that neoclassical poets were not cold. They were intensely interested in emotions and they knew that poetry had to have intensity and fire. At all times, however, they acknowledged their responsibilities as thinking human beings. The Romantics remind us that there are times when we had better trust our feelings rather than our sober judgments.

LAWLESSNESS

It must be borne in mind that the Romantic age was one of high aspiration and of noble endeavor. In 1660, as has been remarked, England felt that it was entering a new golden age. There had been the golden age of the first Queen Elizabeth. It was followed by the disillusioning reign of King James. When Charles I came to the throne, civil war broke out and through the succeeding tumultuous years the arts of peace were, on the whole, neglected. In 1660 there was a new burst of creative energy. English poetry is permanently richer for the superb achievements of Dryden and Pope. There is some evidence, however, that the creative impulse that had made itself unmistakably felt at the Restoration was beginning to show signs of exhaustion by the time of Pope’s death in 1744. The true Augustan Age ends with Pope. Men still went on believing in the “classical” values that shaped the Augustan age, and some, such as Samuel Johnson, working within this set of values made an abiding place for themselves in the history of English literature. But it was time for a change. In 1775 Americans asserted their independence. Not too many years later the French were to storm the Bastille and to challenge the elaborate system of privileges and prerogatives that we now call the ancien regime, the old established order of things.

One should distinguish between revolution and lawlessness, but revolution cannot take place until men are willing to re-examine the validity and the structure of their laws. Romanticism is, in a sense, one manifestation of this willingness.

A neoclassical faith in a body of “rules” that can guide all writers of all times and of all places is unquestionably the invention of systemizing historians. But it must be conceded that neoclassical writers were, generally speaking, more docile than their aggressive successors, the Romantic writers. In the eighteenth century there was a proper way to enter a drawing-room, a proper way to drop a curtsy, a proper way to manage a fan; as the new revolutionary spirit more and more asserted itself, men came to feel that these niceties were of little importance. This skeptical and critical attitude, naturally, soon left the drawing room and exhibited itself in every area of human activity. Poets, for example, stopped being willing to be told how they should write an ode or an elegy.

There is no question but what Romanticism can be seen as a protest against a neoclassical docility toward “rules.” It should be noticed, however, that the best Romantic poetry shows a concern for form, a sense of voluntary self-discipline that is every bit as scrupulous as that found in earlier poetry. There is a Romantic “lawlessness,” perhaps best seen in the career of Byron, but, even when one studies Byron’s art, the lawlessness is a highly qualified lawlessness. Some of the Romantic poets were what we today would call “radical.” One thinks of Blake and his defiance of traditional religions, of Shelley and his proud atheism. The “lawlessness” of the Romantics, however, is a quality of mind rather than a consciously espoused principle. It shows itself in different ways in different poets. It is not a constant through the entire career of any major Romantic poet with the possible exception of Byron. Insofar as it points up, however, a contrast between Romantic and neoclassical basic attitudes toward life, it is an ingredient of Romanticism that retains some value.

THE CHIEF ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS

It is generally agreed that the following are the major English Romantic poets:

William Blake (1757-1827)

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

John Keats (1795-1821)

THE ROMANTIC POETS

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

THE PRE-ROMANTICS

It must always be kept in mind that there is no such thing as a purely Classical or purely Romantic writer. We can, however, detect habits of mind, attitudes, ways of feeling that are more characteristic of one age than another. In every age, on the other hand, and in almost every writer, there are tendencies that move against the prevailing spirit of the times. When historians seek, for example, to find the origin of the Classical temperament, they must go much farther back than the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. They must, ultimately, go back to the literature of Greece and Rome - and here, of course, they will observe a literary theory that helps us to understand later manifestations of Classicism, and, unless they are willfully blind, they will also detect the Romantic outlook on life. The Aeneid of Virgil, for example, is a self-conscious imitation of the ancient Homeric epics. In his feeling the importance of artistic discipline Virgil is demonstrably Classical; the deep melancholy that pervades his poem, ho...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to The Romantic Poets
• 2) The Romantic Poets: Textual Analysis
• 3) Essay Questions and Answers
• 4) Bibliography
• 5) Suggested Topics for Research Papers