January 1, 2002

MODERN literary criticism reflects a strong bias against the romantic tradition of English poetry. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme criticized romantic themes and styles from different standpoints. Ezra Pound criticized its formless and dishevelled texture; T.S. Eliot traced an imbalance between emotion and reason in romantic sensibility; T.E. Hulme considered romanticism as a radical departure from the theological world view. These criticisms call for a fresh appraisal of romantic poetry.

The English romantic poets inaugurated a new tradition in poetry. They rejected the theological view of the universe, emphasized the pivotal position of the individual, considered imagination as the most superior of human faculties, glorified the world of nature, and asserted the rights of man.

Christian theology espouses a hierarchical philosophy of life epitomized in the concept of the chain of being. It stipulates that there are various orders of reality, one on top of the other. The divine being stands supreme in the hierarchy of creatures, followed by angels, men, animals, plants and, last of all, minerals. The eighteenth century thinkers Shaftesbury and Jenkins applied the theological concept of the ladder of perfection to the social world of man and considered social hierarchy as a facsimile of the ordered cosmos. By considering social hierarchy as God-ordained, they tried to provide a religious justification for social iniquities.

The romantic poets looked at the divine being not as a stern and remote presence, but as a spirit that pervades the universe. They propounded a pantheistic philosophy of life. A rock, a flower, human grace and beauty, the anguish of a stricken soul, and human aspiration towards eternity, all these are manifestations of a spiritual power:

A motion and a spirit that impels.

All thinking things, all objects of all thought;

And rolls through all things (Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey)

Romantic poetry exudes a sense of relationship known inwardly through the rising springs of life and outwardly in an interplay of recognition and response:

Coercing all things into sympathy

To unorganic natures I transferred

My own enjoyments

(Wordsworth: Prelude Book II)

The romantic poets rejected the doctrine that man is a helpless creature reaping the bitter harvest of the original sin. The image of man projected by them springs from a keen awareness of human potentialities. Man is no longer a victim of dark forces external to himself; he becomes a captain of his own soul and a measure of all things — symbolized by the newly created Adam Michelangelo painted during the high noon of the renaissance.

The romantic poets popularized the cult of the individual that harked back to the renaissance. For them, human moods transcend even objective realities:

And nature in our minds alone doth live;

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud

(Coleridge: “Ode to rejection”) Wordsworth finds in ‘the goings-on of the universe’ a projection of his own ‘purposes and volitions’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). Stealing birds from a snare, he finds projected in the mountains his own moral conscience:

I hear among solitary mountains;

Low breathings coming after me;

(Prelude Book I)

For Shelley, the west wind, with all its sound and fury, serves as a counter-suggestion. He is painfully reminded of his own atrophied self and the drying up of his creative powers:

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee.

(Ode to the west wind)

The song of the nightingale induces in Keats a state of intense imaginative experience:

Charmed magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

(Ode to the nightingale)

As man is the pivot of the universe, so is imagination the central faculty of man. “Poetry fettered”, wrote Blake in Preface to Jerusalem, “fetters the human race. The world of imagination is the world of eternity. Furnaces roar, so that light and life may live”. Romantic critical theory equates the imaginative inventiveness of man with the creativity of God: “The primary imagination is the prime agent of human perception — a repetition in finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge: Biographia Literaria). Coleridge rejects the empirical theory of knowledge that mind is a passive recorder of sense impressions impinged on it from the outside. Poetic imagination, he claims, is a highly creative faculty:

Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

Enveloping the earth (Coleridge: “Ode to dejection”)

Victor Hugo defines the power of imagination in a beautiful quartet:

Imagination

First a dazzling prism

Then an expiatory mirror

In which purple looks like blood

(Les Peux)

The human mind is not only a mirror that reflects the outer world, but also a lamp that sheds its own radiance. (M.H. Abrams: The mirror and the lamp).

In theology, the physical universe is viewed as the sphere of fallen angels. Curiosity about nature is a re-enactment of the Fall; its end is damnation. Marlowe dramatized the dilemma of the renaissance man trying to get out of such medieval notions so deeply embedded in his consciousness. Faustus is torn between the two worlds. John Milton makes a reference to the ‘guilty bosom’ of nature:

She woos the gentle air To hide her guilty bosom with innocent snow

And on her naked shame Pollute with sinful blame (“On the morning of Christ’s Nativity”)

The romantic poets not only rejected the theological view of nature but also gave it a new meaning. For romantic poets, nature was no longer a centre of beautiful scenes but a vital element in human life. Wordsworth regarded nature as a formative influence on man in his moral and spiritual education:

Fair seedtime had my soul and I grew

Fostered alike by beauty and fear (Prelude Book I)

The prelude is a spiritual autobiography — a highly poetic account of how nature shaped Wordsworth’s imaginative life:

And sanctifying by such discipline

Both pain and fear, until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart (Prelude Book I)

“There was a boy” by Wordsworth establishes the reality of unconscious interaction between man and nature. The boy, instead of hearing the counter-shouts of owls, gives his ear to the sound of waterfall ‘penetrating far in his heart’. Coleridge finds “In leaves and flowers” lessons of love and piety. Wordsworth and Coleridge look at nature with a certain detachment, but Shelley regards it as a symbolic projection of something deep within himself. He rhapsodises on the west wind:

Be thou spirit fierce

My spirit, be thou me, impetuous one (“Ode to the west wind”)

The theological sense of disharmony between man and nature contrasts with the romantic vision of man and nature as corresponding to each other. Medieval romance depicts stern landscapes and tempest-tossed men as contrasted with the bright and florid background of renaissance paintings. Yeats attains a vision of traditional rural life beating in unison with the rhythms of nature in “Among schoolchildren”.

O’ chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer

O’ body swayed to the music, O brightening glance

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The romantic poets demonstrate the value of personal judgement and individual response to experience. Romantic poetry, unlike the poetry of Dryden and Pope, does not lend itself to stereotypes and generalities. Each poet has an individual idiom and mode of perception. Blake indulges in visionary ecstasy, which is intense but perfectly expressed:

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of night

What Immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry (“The Tyger”)

Kubla Khan by Coleridge is unique in inspiration and expression — a poem in which diverse images and multiple layers of consciousness are thrown up in a beautiful short piece:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair

Weave a circle round him thrice

And close our eyes with holy dread

For he on honey dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise

Keats blends sensuous images with starting effects:

O, for a beaker full of the warm south

Full of the true, the blushful Hippoerene

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim

The romantic mode of perception is intensely subjective. The poet seeks to find an objective correlative for his inner tensions and conflicts. Rousseau wrote: “Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men” (Confessions). The most striking feature of romantic poetry is the central role of individual thought and feeling. While the eighteenth century poets dwelt upon the contemporary social ethos, the romantic poets delved deep into their own selves and found value in their particular experiences. Blake was rather curt on this point: “To generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit”. Shelley expressed the quintessential character of the romantic poet in a beautiful image: “ a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds”.

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