Individualism: the Romantic Hero.

Through the greater part of the eighteenth century, men and women had for the most part been viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and unchanging world. The Romantic Period, on the contrary, was an age of radical individualism. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal in his daily relations with his fellows, the Romantics saw him in his solitary state, self-communing. Where the Augustan emphasized those features that men have in common, the interests that bring them together, the Romantics asserted the importance of the individual and emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind.

The passions and aspirations of a Romantic hero often go far beyond an average person’s. A recurrent theme in English literature of the day was infinite longing (a desire of a moth for a star – Shelley). “Less than everything cannot satisfy a man” – Blake. Byron’s Manfred has a hero whose “aspirations were beyond the dwellers of the earth”. This view is epitomized by Goethe’s Faust.

Romanticism created its own literary types: the outcast (Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner; Byron’s Cain), the heaven-storming rebel (Shelley’s Prometheus). The characters either reject the society or are rejected by it. Sometimes this nonconformist hero is also a great sinner. Writers of that time were fascinated with the great outlaws of myth, legend or history – Cain, Satan, Faust, The Wandering Jew, and the great, flawed and contradictory figure of Napoleon.

A specifically Romantic type is artist-as-hero. Their favored literary form was a long poem about the formation of the self presented in a radical metaphor of an interior journey in quest of one’s true identity and destined spiritual home: Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude. Confessional prose narratives, such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater, as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron’s Childe Harold are related phenomena.

The Romantic Artist in Society

The Romantic poet was considered to be a supremely individual creator. The growth of literacy and emergence of book market made writers less dependant on noble patrons. For the first time in the history of English literature, a writer could find his audience in a free cultural context and truly be, as Wordsworth said, ‘a man speaking to men’.

Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth (in his Prelude) and later on Shelley, present themselves as what Wordsworth calls ‘a chosen son’, or ‘Bard’. The poet assumes the persona and voice of a poet-prophet, like the prophets in the Bible, and puts himself forward as a spokesman for Western civilization at a time of profound crisis. But often the Romantic writer saw himself as a prophet preaching in the wilderness, a gifted visionary who lived outside the respectable society. An important theme in Romanticism was the contrast between artist and middle-class “Philistine”. In their private lives they liked to emphasize their individuality and difference. The gulf between the ‘chosen’ artists and their uncomprehending public began to widen.

The Romantic poets are usually grouped in two generations. The poets of the first generation, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were greatly influenced by the French Revolution and considered it to be almost a physical realization of the ideals of Romanticism, representing as it did, a breaking free from the restrictive patterns of the past.

The initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution, however, soon dissipated, and within a decade disillusionment set in.

The beginning of the new era was marked by the book Lyrical Ballads (1798) written by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The two poets revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. No other book in English history announced so plainly a new literary departure. William Hazlitt described the effect: “the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me … the first welcome breath of spring”. The poems deal with low subjects – rural life, rustic characters – and are written in ‘simple and unelaborated expressions’.

The second edition of Lyrical Ballads included Wordsworth’s Preface, which became a sort of manifesto for the Romantic movement. In it Wordsworth theorizes about poetry, concluding that:

• the language of poetry should be simple language ‘really used by men’;

• the subject of poetry should consist of ‘incidents and situations from common life’;

• the poet’s imagination can reveal the inner truth of things to which the mind is habitually blind;

• the poet is ‘a man speaking to men’. He uses his special gift to show other men the essence of things.

Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory, and made them the rationale for his own massive achievements as a poet.

Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth created a new kind of poetry which was innovative in subject matter, language and form. Their work has had a lasting effect on all subsequent English poetry.

The poets of the second generation, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly and John Keats, all had intense but short lives. They lived through the disillusionment of the post-revolutionary period, in savage violence of the terror and the threatening rise of Napoleonic empire. The Britain they knew was fearful of the possibility of revolution and deeply repressive.

Shelly was perhaps the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. He was an individualist and idealist who rejected traditional institutions and rebelled against all forms of tyranny. Many of his poems address political and social issues. However, he is best remembered for his lyrical masterpieces.

Byron was, in many ways, the prototype of the Romantic poet. Like the heroes of his long narrative poems, he was a melancholy and solitary figure whose actions defied social conventions. Having been ostracized by society, he had to leave Britain. He pursued adventure in Italy and Greece, where he died. His romances and dramatic poems, as well as his notorious love affairs and dissipate lifestyle had a delirious effect on the European public, and he was the first English poet to achieve what today would be described as a ‘superstar status’.

Keats had serious health problems and died at the age of 26. The brevity of his life makes his poetic achievement even more astonishing. The main theme of his poetry is conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of beauty, imagination and eternal youth. Keats developed his own, a very distinctive style based on sensuous imagery and precise descriptive detail. With Wordsworth, he is still the most widely read of the Romantic poets.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the novel was the major literary form. The types of novel that flourished during the Romantic were the historical novel and the Gothic novel. There also developed during that period the form of the novel of manners, which, however, in the hands of Jane Austin, was chiefly un-Romantic.

Sir Walter Scott is generally regarded as the inventor of the historical novel. Like many Romantics, he stepped back into the past and set his novels in more passionate and exciting times. His method consisted in telling stories of fictional and real people against authentic historical backgrounds. Scott frequently used well-known historical figures, and gave a complete panorama of the political and social context in which they lived. He also showed the life of ordinary people and was one of the first novelists to portray peasant characters sympathetically and to recognize the important role that they played in history.

Scott’s interest in the past, his concern for common man, his use of regional speech and other forms of historical and local ‘coloring’ and his descriptions of beautiful natural settings placed him firmly in the Romantic tradition. The literary form he established, the historical novel, is still popular to this day, and his influence on English and European novelists was profound.

The public taste for the Gothic novel which had first appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century continued throughout the Romantic period. Gothic novels were tales of the macabre, the fantastic and the supernatural. They were usually set in haunted castles, ruins and wild picturesque landscapes. This type of novel satisfied the Romantic appetite for wild natural settings, and the unrestricted imagination.

The greatest Gothic novel of the Romantic period is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. This tale, which Mary Shelley wrote when she was only nineteen, has been interpreted as a parable of alienation, a warning against interference of man in nature and as a attack on overconfidence in the powers of science.

LECTURE 2

MAJOR WORKS

Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794)

Prophetic books

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794)

Milton

Jerusalem

LIFE

William Blake was born in London and raised in a state of economic hardship. He received very little formal education. He showed early signs of artistic talent and at the age of fourteen became an apprentice in an engraver’s shop where he worked and studied the craft.

The year 1783 marked the beginning of a period of great creativity. Blake published his first volume of poetry and invented a new method of printing, a mixture of engraving and painting. In 1789 he engraved and published his first great work, Songs of Innocence, followed in 1794 by Songs of Experience.

Lack of recognition drove Blake to depression which verged on insanity. From 1810 to 1817 he lived completely alienated from the material world and claimed that his work was inspired by visions of angels, spirits and prophets.

After 1818 he stopped writing poetry but continued to produce engravings. He died and was buried in obscurity.

POETRY

W. Blake’s poetry is noted for his highly distinctive mystic vision and based on personal mythology and symbolism. (“The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative”)

Blake’s lyric technique was that of compressed metaphor and symbol which explode into a multiplicity of references. An English encyclopedia describes him as “a solitary and deeply religious man”, who “had a hatred of materialism” and his poems as ranging “from the mystic and almost incomprehensible to the delightfully simple”.

William Blake was a poet and an artist. He did not only write poetry, but published his own texts and engraved illustrations in the mode of relief etching. So his work is an integral and mutually illuminating combination of words and design.