Eaction against the previous age

During the Augustan Age the head controlled the heart, discipline controlled emotion and curbed fancy. For Augustans feelings and imagination were dangerous and to be kept under control.

Romantic art is a reaction against the previous age, a passionate revolt against all rules, conventions and limitations imposed upon poetry by neoclassicism. V. Hugo, the French Romantic writer described it as ‘liberalism in literature’. The Romantics rejected all rules and restrictions of the previous age, destroyed all cannons. Departures from old forms and subjects were now most welcome. The key words for Romantic aesthetics are subjectivity, spontaneity, originality, freedom of expression, imagination, and emotion.

The concept of Poetry

Eighteenth-century theorists had regarded poetry as primarily an imitation of human life – in a frequent figure, “a mirror held up to nature” – which the poet artfully renders and puts into an order designed to instruct and give aesthetic pleasure to the reader.

In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within.

Wordsworth repeatedly described all good poetry as “a spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings”. The source of poetry was thus located not in the outer world but in the individual poet. The essential materials for a poem were not external objects but the inner feelings of the author, or at any rate, external objects transformed or irradiated by the poet’s feelings.

The lyrical poem written in the first person became a major Romantic form, and was often described as the most essentially poetic of all genres. Moreover, the “I” in the poem was not a conventionally typical lyric speaker, but had recognizable characteristics of the poet in his own person and circumstances. Experiences and states of mind expressed by the lyric speaker often accord closely with the known facts of the poet’s life and personal confessions in his letters and journals.

In style, the Romantics preferred boldness to restraint, suggestiveness to clarity, experiment to “rules”. They promoted the concept of the artist as an inspired creator over that of an artist as technical master, or craftsman.

Imagination

Romantic poets considered imagination the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. For the Romantics Imagination was a dynamic, active power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even God. Imagination helps human to constitute reality, for (according to Wordsworth, for example) we do not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. On the other hand poetic imagination (‘secondary’ in Coleridge) is the primary faculty for creating all art.

NImagination is extolled for its synthesizing qualities, as it helps humans to bring together and reconcile differences and opposites in the world. The reconciliation of opposites is a central idea for the Romantics.

ature

The natural world comes to the forefront of poetic imagination. Nature provides the dominant subject matter; it becomes the major source of imagery, and even infiltrates into much of theoretical writing. Because of the prominence of landscape ‘Romantic poetry’ has to the popular mind become almost synonymous with ‘nature poetry’.

As opposed to 18^th cent materialistic views, Nature was now seen not as a system of ‘mechanical’ laws, but as an organically unified whole, a living entity which participates in the feelings of an observer. The Romantics imbued the landscape with human life, passion and expressiveness. The Romantics were interested in capturing ‘sensuous nuance’, but accuracy of observation or description was never sought for its own sake. Romantic poetry is essentially poetry of meditation. Wordsworth wrote: not nature, but “the Mind of Man” is “my haunt, and the main region of my song”.

‘Nature’ means a lot of things to the Romantics. It’s a healing power, a source of subject and image, a refuge from the mechanical civilization, an emotional solace, a stimulus to philosophical or personal meditations.

Nature itself was seen as a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. The Romantics often present commonplace objects as containing divine elements. Whitman, for example, refers to the ‘grass’ as a natural “hieroglyphic”, “the handkerchief of the Lord”; Shelley writes: “I always seek in what I see the likeness of something beyond the present and tangible object”. Nature to the Romantics is a symbolic system, a physical revelation parallel to the Revelation in the Scriptures.

The everyday and the exotic

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of ‘local colour’ or through popular literary forms.

Wordsworth stated that his aim in Lyrical Ballads was “to choose incidents and situations from common life” and to use “a selection of language really spoken by men”, for which the source and the model was “humble and rustic life”. This was more a social that distinctively literary definition of the proper materials and language for poetry. Strictly speaking, his aim was not to represent the actual world, but “to throw over situations from common life … a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”. His aim is to shake us out of the lethargy of custom, to refresh our sense of wonder – of divinity – in the everyday, the trivial, the lowly.

Coleridge wrote: “To combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and the privilege of a genius.

However, social realism in the Romantics was always subordinate to imaginative suggestion and ideals. Romantic art was, in part, an escape from modern realities.¹ Romantic imagination found little sustenance in the stale and mercantile world around and turned to other times and places. The Romantics were fascinated by various forms of the exotic as opposed to everyday subject. Walter Scott finds his ideal in the patriarchal past; John Keats – in classical antiquity; Byron travels to the exotic East, Southey writes Hindu tales, etc. The medieval and Renaissance worlds were particularly favored.

In such settings life seemed more dangerous, individuality more sharply defined, existence had a zest, an edge, lacking in conformist Britain. A central conflict in Romanticism is the conflict between dream (the ideal) and reality. The Romantics simultaneously long for the ideal, and realize that it is unattainable.

The Romantics even tried to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events. They opened up to poetry the realm of mystery and magic. Materials from ancient folklore, superstition and demonology, occult powers or unknown modes of being came to be used.

They were also interested in exploring the depth of human consciousness, the mysteries of the soul. Interest in psychology had been growing steadily in literature. But never before had the inner world been seen as self-sufficient, as an alternative to outward existence.

A new side to it was an interest in unusual modes of experience. Romantics explored ways of penetrating down to the levels of the subconscious: dreams, drugs, madness. The eighteenth century would have found this interest unhealthy

The cult of childhood

Another important element in Romanticism was the cult of childhood. The neoclassicists believed that children had savage instincts that needed to be civilized. It was only through social training that children could become sophisticated adults and contribute to society. The Romantics, on the contrary, saw the child as pure and uncorrupted. They believed that children were close to God and had powerful creative imaginations. Wordsworth called the child «The father of the Man” (My Heart Leaps Up)