The Romantic age in English Literature

The Romantic Age (1798-1824)
Prof. Sanaullah Malik

Lyrical Ballads:
• The Romantic period is the most fruitful period in the history of English
literature.
• The revolt against the Classical school reached its climax during this
period, and some of the greatest and most popular English poets like
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats belong to this
period.
• This period starts from 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical
Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the famous Preface which
Wordsworth wrote as a manifesto of the new form of poetry which he and
Coleridge introduced in opposition to the poetry of the Classical school.
• The work included Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,”

• The “Preface” to the second edition (1800) contains Wordsworth’s famous
definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” and his theory that poetry should be written in “the language
really used by men.”
• In the longer preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, where
Wordsworth explains his theories of poetic imagination, he again returns to
the problem of the proper language of poetry.
“The language too, of these men (that is those in humble and
rustic life) has been adopted because from their intercourse,
being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their
feelings and notions in simple, unelaborated expression.”
• Common Language:
Wordsworth chose the language of the common people as the vehicle of his
poetry, because it is the most sincere expression of the deepest and rarest
passions and feelings.
• This was the first point of attack of the artificial and formal style of
Classical school of poetry.

• The other point at which Wordsworth attacked the old school was its
insistence on the town and the artificial way of life which prevailed there.
• He wanted the poet to breathe fresh air of the hills and beautiful
natural scenes and become interested in rural life and the simple folk living
in the lap of nature.
• A longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life drove him to
the mountains, where, as he describes in his Lines written above Tintern
Abbey.
• The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite.
• ‘’Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.’’
• ‘’Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.’’
• ‘’Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.’’

• By attacking the supremacy of the heroic couplet as the only form of
writing poetry, and substituting it by simple and natural diction; by
diverting the attention of the poet from the artificial town life to the life in
the woods, mountains and villages inhabited by simple folk; and by
asserting the inevitable role of imagination and emotions in poetry
as against dry intellectualism which was the chief characteristic of the
Classical school, Wordsworth not only emancipated the poet from the
tyranny of literary rules and conventions which circumscribed his freedom
of expression, but he also opened up before him vast regions of experience
which in the eighteenth century had been closed to him.
• His revolt against the Classical school was in keeping with the political and
social revolutions of the time as the French Revolution and the
American War of Independence which broke away with the tyranny of
social and political domination, and which proclaimed the liberty of the
individual or nation to be the master of its own destiny.

• Just as liberty of the individual was the watchword of the French
Revolution, liberty of a nation from foreign domination was the
watchword of the American War of Independence; in the same
manner liberty of the poet from the tyranny of the literary rules and
conventions was the watchword of the new literary movement which we call
by the name of Romantic movement.
• It is also termed as the Romantic Revival, because all these
characteristics—the liberty of the writer to choose the theme and
form of his literary production, the importance given to imagination and
human emotions, and a broad and catholic outlook on life in all its
manifestations in towns, villages, mountains, rivers etc. belonged to the
literature of the Elizabethan Age which can be called as the first
Romantic age in English literature.
• But there was a difference between the Elizabethan Age and the Romantic
Age, because in the latter the Romantic spirit was considered as discovery
of something which once was, but had been lost.

• The poets of the Romantic periods, therefore, always looked back to the
Elizabethan masters—Shakespeare, Spenser and other —and got inspiration
from them.
• They were under the haunting influence of feelings which had already been
experienced, and a certain type of free moral life which had already been
lived, and so they wanted to recapture the memory and rescue it from
fading away completely.
• Chief Characteristics of the age:
• In the poems which were contributed in the Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth dealt with events of everyday life, by preference in its
humblest form. He tried to prove that the commonplace things of life, the
simple and insignificant aspects of nature, if treated in the right manner,
could be as interesting and absorbing as the grand and imposing aspects of
life and nature.
• Wordsworth’s naturalism and Coleridge’s supernaturalism thus
became the two important spearheads of the Romantic Movement.

Wordsworth’s naturalism & Coleridge’s
supernaturalism :
• Wordsworth’s naturalism included love for nature as well for man
living in simple and natural surroundings. Thus he speaks for the
love that is in homes where poor men live, the daily teaching that is in:
Woods and rills;
The silence that is in the starry sky;
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
• Coleridge’s supernaturalism, on the other hand, established
the connection between the visible world and the other
world which is unseen. He treated the supernatural in his
masterly poem, The Ancient Mariner, in such a manner that it
looked quite natural.

• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott belong to the first romantic
generation.
• The second generation of Romantic writers—Byron, Shelley, Keats,
Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and others—who came to the forefront after the
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, revolted from the reactionary spirit
which was prevailing at that time in England against the ideals of the
French Revolution.
• The prose-writers of the Romantic Revival also broke with their immediate
predecessors, and discarded the shorter and lighter style of the eighteenth
century. They reverted to the ponderous, flowery and poetical prose of the
Renaissance and of Sir Thomas Browne, as we find in the works of Lamb,
and De Quincey.
• As the Romantic Age was characterised by excess of emotions, it
produced a new type of novel, which seems rather hysterical, now, but
which was immensely popular among the multitude of readers, whose
nerves were somewhat excited, and who revelled in extravagant stories of
supernatural terror.

• Mrs. Anne Radcliffe was one of the most successful writers of the school
of exaggerated romances. Sir Walter Scott regaled the readers by his
historical romances. Jane Austen, however, presents a marked contrast to
these extravagant stories by her enduring work in which we find charming
descriptions of everyday life as in the poetry of Wordsworth.
• Whereas the Classical age was the age of prose, the Romantic age was
the age of poetry, which was the proper medium for the expression of
emotions and imaginative sensibility of the artist.
• The mind of the artist came in contact with the sensuous world and the
world of thought at countless points, as it had become more alert and alive.
The human spirit began to derive new richness from outward objects and
philosophical ideas.
• The poets began to draw inspiration from several sources—
mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the
supernatural, medieval chivalry and literature, the arts and mythology
of Greece, the prophecy of the golden age. All these produced a sense of
wonder which had the be properly conveyed in literary form. That is why
some critics call the Romantic Revival as the Renaissance of Wonder.

• Instead of living a dull, routine life in the town, and spending all his time
and energy in to midst of artificiality and complexity of the cities, the poets
called upon man to adopt a healthier way of living in the natural world in
which providence has planted him of old, and which is full of significance
for his soul.
• The essence of Romanticism was that literature must reflect all that is
spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its
own fancy in its own way. They result was that during the Romantic period
the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to
singing.
• The glory of the age is the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley and Keats. In fact, poetry was so popular that Southey had to
write in verse in order to earn money, what he otherwise would
have written in prose.
• Summing up the chief characteristics of Romanticism as opposed to
Classicism, we can say that Classicism laid stress upon the impersonal
aspects of the life of the mind; the new literature, on the other hand, openly
shifts the centre of art, bringing it back towards what is most proper and
particular in each individual.

• It is the product of the fusion of two faculties of the artist—his sensibility and
imagination.
• The Romantic spirit can be defined as an accentuated predominance of
emotional life, and Romantic literature was fed by intense emotion coupled with
the intense desire to display that emotion through appropriate imagery. Thus
Romantic literature is a genuinely creative literature calling into play the highest
creative faculty of man.
• Romantic Poetry:
• Romantic poetry which was the antithesis of Classical poetry had many
complexities.
• Unlike Classical poets who agreed on the nature and form of poetry, and the
role that the poet is called upon to play, the Romantic poets held different views
on all these subjects.
• No age in English literature produced such great giants in the field of poetry.
• The only common characteristic that we find in the poets is their intense
faith in imagination, which could not be controlled by any rules and
regulations.

• In fact the most distinctive mark which distinguished the Romantic poets
from the Classical poets was the emphasis which the former laid on
imagination. In the eighteenth century imagination was not a cardinal point
in poetical theory. For Pope, Johnson and Dryden the poet was more an
interpreter than a creator, more concerned with showing the attractions of
what we already know than with expeditions into the unfamiliar and the
unseen.
• They were less interested in the mysteries of life than in its familiar
appearances, and they thought that their task was to display this with as
much charm and truth as they could command. But for the Romantics
imagination was fundamental, because they thought that without that
poetry was impossible. They were conscious of a wonderful capacity to
create imaginary worlds, and they could not believe that this was idle or
false. On the contrary, they thought that to curb it was to deny something
vitally necessary to the whole being.

Quest for unseen world:
• Whereas the Classical poets were more interested in the visible world, the
Romantic poets obeyed an inner call to explore more fully the world of the
spirit. They endeavoured to explore the mysteries of life, and thus
understand it better.
• It was this search for the unseen world that awoke the inspiration of the
Romantics and made poets of them.
• They appealed not to the logical mind, but to the complete self, in the
whole range of intellectual faculties, senses and emotions.
• It was the task of the poet to transform it by his power of imagination, to
bring the dead world back to life. When we turn to The Ancient Mariner
and Christable it seems clear that Coleridge thought that the task of poetry
is to convey the mystery of life by the power of imagination. He was
fascinated by the notion of unearthly powers at work in the world, and it
was this influence which he sought to catch. The imagination of the poet is
his creative, shaping spirit, and it resembles the creative power of God. Just
as God creates this universe, the poet also creates a universe of his own by
his imagination.

• Wordsworth also thought with Coleridge that the imagination was the most
important gift that the poet can have. He agreed with Coleridge that this
activity resembles that of God. But according to Wordsworth imagination is a
comprehensive faculty comprising many faculties. So he explains that the
imagination:
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
• Shelley was no less attached to the imagination and gave it no less a place in
his theory of poetry.
• He called poetry “the Expression of the Imagination”, because in it
diverse things are brought together in harmony instead of being separated
through analysis.

• Keats had passionate love for the visible world and at times his approach
was highly sensuous. But he had a conviction that the ultimate reality is to
be found only in the imagination.
• What is meant to him can be seen from some lines in Sleep and Poetry, in
which he asks why imagination has lost its power and scope:
Is there so small a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination cannot freely fly
As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds
Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds
Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove’s eyebrow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows.
• Through the imagination Keats sought an ultimate reality to which a door
was opened by his appreciation of beauty through the senses. For him
imagination is that absorbing and exalting faculty which opens the way to
an unseen spiritual order.

Poets of the Romantic Age
• The poets of the Romantic age can be classified into three groups— (i) The
Lake School, consisting of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey; (ii) The
Scott group including Campbell and Moore; and (iii) The group
comprising Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
(a) The Lake Poets:
• The Lake Poets formed a ‘school’ in the sense that they worked in close
cooperation, and their lives were spent partly in the Lake district. Only
Wordsworth was born there, but all the three lived there for a shorter or
longer period.

• Linked together by friendship, they were still further united by the mutual
ardour of their revolutionary ideas in youth, and by the common reaction
which followed in their riper years.
• They held many of the poetic beliefs in common. Wordsworth and
Coleridge lived together for a long time and produced the Lyrical
Ballads by joint effort in 1798. They had original genius and what they
achieved in the realm of poetry was supported by Southey who himself did
not possess much creative imagination.
• The literary revolution which is associated with their name was
accomplished in 1800, when in the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge explained further their critical
doctrines.

William Wordsworth:
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the greatest poet of the Romantic
period. The credit of originating the Romantic movement goes to him.
• He refused to abide by any poetic convention and rules, and forged his own
way in the realm of poetry.
• He stood against many generations of great poets and critics, like Dryden,
Pope and Johnson, and made way for a new type of poetry.
• He declared: “A poet is a man endowed with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul,
than are supposed to be common among mankind.”
•

• Wordsworth wrote a large number and variety of lyrics, in which he can stir
the deepest emotions by the simplest means. There we find the aptness of
phrase and an absolute naturalness which make a poem once read as a
familiar friend. Language can scarcely be at once more simple and more full
of feeling than in the following stanza from one of the ‘Lucy poems’:
Thus Nature spoke—The work was done,
How soon my Lucy’s race was run.
She died, and left to me
This health, this calm, and quiet scene,
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
• Besides lyrics Wordsworth wrote a number of sonnets of rare merit
like To Milton, Westminster Bridge, The World is too much with us, in
which there is a fine combination of the dignity of thought and language.

• In the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth celebrates one of his most cherished
beliefs that our earliest intuitions are the truest, and that those are really happy
who even in their mature years keep themselves in touch with their childhood:
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling ever more
• Moreover, he discovered that there is an innate harmony between Nature
and Man. It is when man lives in the lap of nature that he lives the right type
of life. She has an ennobling effect on him, and even the simplest things in
nature can touch a responsive cord in man’s heart:
To me the meanest flower that blooms can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
• The genius of Coleridge was complementary to that of Wordsworth. While
Wordsworth dealt with naturalism which was an important aspect of the Romantic
movement, Coleridge made the supernatural his special domain, which was an
equally important aspect.
• He gave poetic expression to his political aspiration in Religious Musings, Destiny of
Nations and Ode to the Departing Year (1796).
• Coleridge was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will power and addiction to
opium prevented him from occomplishing much in the realm of poetry. Whatever he
has written, though of high quality, is fragmentary.
• His two best-known poems areThe Ancient Mariner and Christabel.
• Kubla Khan is another fragment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental
dream picture.

(b) The Scott Group
• The romantic poets belonging to the Scott group are Sir Walter Scott,
Campbell and Thomas Moore.
• Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the first to make romantic poetry popular
among the masses. His Marmion and Lady of the Lake gained greater popularity
than the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge which were read by a select few.
• But in his poetry we do not find the deeply imaginative and suggestive quality which
is at the root of poetic excellence. It is the story element, the narrative power, which
absorbs the reader’s attention.
• His best known poems are The Lady of the Last Ministrel, Marmion, The Lady of
the Lake, Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles.
• Thomas Campbell (1774-1844) and Thomas Moore (1779-1852) were
prominent among a host of minor poets who following the vogue of Scott wrote
versified romance.

(c) The Younger Group
• To the younger group of romantic poets belong Byron, Shelley and Keats.
They represent the second Flowering of English Romanticism, the first
being represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.
• (i) Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
• During his time Byron was the most popular of all Romantic poets, and he
was the only one who made an impact on the continent both in his own day
and for a long time afterwards.
• He is the only Romantic poet who showed regard for the poets of the
eighteenth century, and ridiculed his own contemporaries in his early
satirical poem, English Bards and Scottish Reviewers (1809). That is why,
he is called the ‘Romantic Paradox’.
• Of all the romantic poets Byron was the most egoistical. In all his poems his
personality obtrudes itself, and he attaches the greatest importance to it.

(ii) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
• Shelley was the revolutionary idealist, a prophet of hope and faith.
He was a visionary who dreamed of the Golden Age.
• Shelley’s genius was constructive and he incarnated that aspect of the
French Revolution which aimed at building up a new and beautiful edifice
on the ruins of the old and the ugly. Whereas Byron’s motive impulse was
pride, Shelley’s was love.
• The essence of all his poetical works is his prophecy of the new-born age. In
his first long poem, Queen Mab,which he wrote when he was eighteen, he
condemns kings, governments, church, property, marriage and Christianity.
• ‘’ O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’’
• In 1820 appeared Prometheus Unbound, the hymn of human revolt
triumphing over the oppression of false gods. In this superb lyrical drama
we find the fullest and finest expression of Shelley’s faith and hope.

• Shelley’s reputation as a poet lies mainly in his lyrical power. He is in fact
the greatest lyrical poet of England.
• As the poet of Nature, Shelley was inspired by the spirit of love which was
not limited to mankind but extended to every living creature—to animals
and flowers, to elements, to the whole Nature.
• ‘’Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the
thorns of life! I bleed!’’
• ‘’ Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.’’
• ‘’We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our
arts, have their root in Greece.’’
• ‘’Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.’’

(iii) John Keats (1795-21)
• Of all the romantic poets, Keats was the pure poet. He was not only the last
but the most perfect of the Romanticists. He was devoted to poetry and had
no other interest.
• Keats came of a poor family, and at an early age he had to work as a
doctor’s assistant. But his medical studies did not stand in the way of his
passion for writing poetry which was roused by his reading of Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene, which revealed to him the vast world of poetry.
• He also became interested in the beauty of nature. His first volume of
poems appeared in 1817 and his first long poem Endymion in 1818, which
opened with the following memorable lines:
• A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us; and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and healthy, and quiet breathing.

• Of the odes, those To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn and To
Autumn stand out above the rest, and are among the masterpieces of poetic
art.
• In Ode on a Grecian Urn we see Keats’s love for Greek mythology and art.
It is this Ode which ends with the following most memorable lines in the
whole of Keats’s poetry.
• ‘Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty’,–that is all
Yea know on earth, and all ye need to know.’’

Prose-Writers of the Romantic Age
• Though the Romantic period specialised in poetry, there also appeared a
few prose-writers-Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey who rank very high.
• (i) Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
• Charles Lamb is one of the most lovable personalities in English literature.
He lived a very humble, honest, and most self-sacrificing life. He never
married, but devoted himself to the care of his sister Mary, ten years his
senior, who was subject to mental fits, in one of which she had fatally
wounded her mother.
• In his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833), in which is
revealed his own personality, he talks intimately to the readers about
himself, his quaint whims and experiences, and the cheerful and heroic
struggle which he made against misfortunes.
• ‘’My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.’’
• It is this wonderful combination of personal and universal interest
together with his rare old style and quaint humour, which have given his
essays his perennial charm, and earned for him the covetable title of “The
Prince among English Essayists”.

(ii) William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
• As a personality Hazlitt was just the opposite of Lamb. He was a man of
violent temper, with strong likes and dislikes. In his judgment of others he
was always downright and frank, and never cared for its effect on them.
• His friends left him one by one on account of his aggressive nature, and at
the time of his death only Lamb stood by him.
• Hazlitt wrote many volumes of essays, of which the most effective is The
Spirit of the Age (1825) in which he gives critical portraits of a number
of his famous contemporaries.
• ‘’A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work
wonders and accomplish miracles.’’
• ‘’The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of
ourselves.’’
• ‘’Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.’’

(iii) Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)
• De Quincey was a highly intellectual writer and his interests were very
wide. Mostly he wrote in the form of articles for journals and he dealt with
all sorts of subjects—about himself and his friends, life in general, art,
literature, philosophy and religion.
• His most perfect historical essay is on Joan of Arc. His essays on
principle of literature are original and penetrating.
• He also wrote very scholarly articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller and
Shakespeare. Besides these he wrote a number of essays on science and
theology.
• Of his autobiographical sketches the best-known is his Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater, in which he has given us, in a most interesting
manner, glimpses of his own life under the influence of opium.

Novelists of The Romantic Age
• The great novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Scott, but
before them there appeared some novelists who came under the spell of
medievalism and wrote novels of ‘terror’ or the ‘Gothic novels’.
• The origin of this type of fiction can be ascribed to Horace Walpole’s (1717-
97) The Castle of Otranto (1746).
• (i) The Gothic Novel
• The most popular of the writers of the ‘terror’ or ‘Gothic’ novel during the
Romantic age was Mrs. Ann Radciffe (1764-1823), of whose five novels
the best-known are The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Italian. She
initiated the mechanism of the ‘terror’ tale as practiced by Horace
Walpole and his followers, but combined it with sentimental but effective
description of scenery.
• The novels of Mrs. Radcliffe became very popular, and they influenced
some of the great writers like Byron and Shelley.

(ii) Jane Austen (1775-1817)
• Jane Austen brought good sense and balance to the English novel which
during the Romantic age had become too emotional and undisciplined.
• Giving a loose rein to their imagination the novelist of the period carried
themselves away from the world around them into a romantic past or into a
romantic future. The novel, which in the hands of Richardson and Fielding
had been a faithful record of real life and of the working of heart and
imagination, became in the closing years of the eighteenth century the
literature of crime, insanity and terror. It, therefore, needed castigation and
reform which were provided by Jane Austen.
• Living a quiet life she published her six novels anonymously, which have
now placed her among the front rank of English novelists.
• As Wordsworth made a deliberate effort to make poetry natural and
truthful, Jane Austen also from the time she started writing her first novel—
Pride and Prejudice, had in her mind the idea of presenting English country
society exactly as it was, in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs.
Radcliffe and her school.

• In all Jane Austen wrote six novels—Pride and Prejudice, Sense and
Sensibility, Emma, Mansefield Park, Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion. Of these Pride and Prejudice is the best and most
widely read of her novels.
• Among her contemporaries only Scott, realised the greatness and
permanent worth of her work, and most aptly remarked: “That
young lady has a talent for describing the involvements
and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me
the most wonderful I ever met with…’’
• ‘’ It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’’

(iii) Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
• Walter Scott’s qualities as a novelist were vastly different form those of
Jane Austen. Whereas she painted domestic miniatures, Scott depicted
pageantry of history on broader canvases.
• Scott is the first English writer of the historical novel, and he made very
enduring contributions to its development in Englandas well as in Europe.
• He had the zest of the story-teller, and a natural heartiness which made
him love life in all its manifestations.
• His first attempt at a historical novel was Ivanhoe(1819) followed
by Kenilworth (1821), Quentin Durward (1823), and The Talisman (1825).
He returned to Scottish antiquity from time to time as in The
Monastery (1820) and St. Ronan’s Well(1823).
Thank You

The Romantic age in English Literature

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