By Lechi Eke
Romanticism was birthed in England in 1798, in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. With their joint publication in 1798 titled Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge started the Romantic period in English Literature.
Wordsworth is considered the father of Romantic poetry. His poetry was inspired by the beautiful and lonesome English countryside where he lived quietly at a lake district. He was first taught how to read and write by his mother, Mary, before going off to a low quality school near him. Later, he was transferred to a school of repute and later after his mother’s death in 1778, attended Hawkshead Grammar School, and then Cambridge.
His first attempt at literary work was in 1787 when he published his first poem, a sonnet, in The European Magazine. Wordsworth had access to his father’s library when he was growing up, and he had a younger sister who later became famous called Dorothy Wordsworth, a poet and diarist.
Being exposed to nature, first at the moors as he spent time with his maternal grandparents, was one of the early influences of nature on the poet’s life. Also, as he spent his holidays during his Cambridge years on walking tours of beautiful landscapes, and Europe, touring the Alps, France, Switzerland and Italy, he fell under the spell of nature.
In France, Wordsworth fell in love with a Frenchwoman who fell pregnant and had a girl for him. Although he didn’t eventually marry her, he made sure, encouraged by his wife, Mary, that his daughter, Dorothy by the Frenchwoman was well settled. With his wife, he had five children, three of who died before them.
Wordsworth in his work, preferred what he called “a new type of verse…one really used by men.” Simple language formed an important part of the features of Romanticism. In so doing, he avoided the poetic diction of the Enlightenment poets.
This famous poet described their poetry as, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Robert Southey (1774-1843 ( British Poet Laureate for 30 years – 1813-1843 – he coined the word zombie from French in his 1819 work titled The History of Brazil) – his works were eclipsed by the towering achievements of fellow Lake Poets: Wordsworth and Coleridge), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and William Blake (1757-1827) are the first generation of the Romantic movement.
Romantic poetry is an imitation of medieval lyrical poetic form, dealing with epic and fantastic unrealistic topics, often written anonymously –just like our folklore that have no bylines.
The simple language of Romanticism can be seen in these exemplary poems: John Keats’ “There was a naughty boy and/ a naughty boy was he”; P. B. Shelley’s Ozymandias – “I met a traveller from an antique land/Who said-” compared to the Enlightenment John Milton’s poem, When I Consider How My Light Is Gone – “Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide/And that one talent which is death to hide/Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent…” )
These poets loved and eulogized nature as seen in their poems: William Blake’s The Tyger – “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright/in the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” William Blake’s Ah Sun-flower – “Ah Sun-flower! Weary of time/Who counts the steps of the Sun…” and his The Sick Rose – “O Rose thou art sick/The invisible worm/That flies in the night…”
They criticized social convention but supported the ideals of freedom and equality of the French revolution. They had a deep interest in ruins and the relics of the Ancient past as represented in P. B. Shelley’s Ozymandias and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Also their interest in the Classical Period was portrayed in their romance with the themes of rebellion, heroism, emotion, sense and sensuality, sublime, etc.
Their simple language poetry adopted fairy-tale, fantasy, the supernatural, like Mary Shelley in her Midas, writes about the satyr – Silenus, the supernatural in everyday themes.
The second generation of Romantic poets waged a total war against the Enlightenment. Byron, Shelley and Keats delved into extreme individuality (Byron), excess freedom and equality (Shelley), and the new ethical philosophy which borders on beauty and truth (Keats). They returned to a new complex versification.
All three of them died young: Shelley – 29 (of boat mishap: drowning), Byron – 36 (fever); Keats – 26 (tuberculosis).
The first generation Romantic poets lived longer, maybe because they were not as wild as the first. For instance, Wordsworth’s political radicalism did not lead him to rebel against his religious upbringing like P. B. Shelley. In fact, Wordsworth wrote in his 1822 Ecclesiastical Sketches, that he’s willing to shed his blood for the Church of England.
His 1814 long poem, The Excursion, which became extremely popular in the 19th century, features three characters: the Wanderer, the Solitary who is portrayed as having experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution, and the Pastor who dominates the last third of the poem, shows that the poet had some respect for religion.
We should remember that Romantics believed in values contrary to the Enlightenment writers. They believed in knowledge gained through intuition rather than deductive practice. They believed in nature and unmodified beauty, the wild uncultivated life (both in man, plants and animals), in order words, Romantics did not believe in civilsation, in being tamed. Whatever was natural, whatever had not received control or taming was acceptable to them. They preferred the wild, the savage, and the ferocious! Their poetry is dominated by affection. They believed that beauty is Truth; Truth is Beauty.
Looking at the lifestyle of the younger or the second generation of Romantics, you will see this uncultured lifestyle played out. They did not believe in human control, but in innocent childhood and uncultivated emotions which they believed caused life to soar.
However, the father of the Romantic Movement was a respectable man.
Scottish poet and playwright, Joanna Bells, in 1837, wrote of her long acquaintance with Wordsworth, “He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say.”
Wordsworth received two separate honorary doctorate degrees from Universities of Durham and Oxford in 1838/39 respectively.
In 1842, he was awarded a Civil List pension of 300 pounds a year. And upon Robert Southey’s death in 1843, the British Prime Minister, Robert Peel, appointed him the Poet Laureate which he protested of but was promised that he would be exempted from writing official verses by reason of his age.
However, when he lost his first daughter, Dora, by his wife Mary, he became depressed and stopped writing altogether. Dora died at 42 in 1847. Wordsworth became depressed and died of “aggravated case of pleurisy” three years later in 1850.
Wordsworth’s magnum opus (his masterpiece) is considered to be The Prelude, published by his wife, Mary, in the year of his death, months after he expired. It was a kind of autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge.
Here is an excerpt from Wordsworth 1798 collection of poems, Lyrical Ballads (1798) titled:
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. – Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and you
This plot of cottage-ground, this orchard-tuft,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedges-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
