New Ideas

The social and political turmoil customarily associated with late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe was accompanied by an equally astonishing upheaval in the world of literary activity, especially in England. Revolutions - political in America and France, industrial and economic in Britain -represented a challenge to an early eighteenth-century ancien r gime whose political, social, religious, philosophical and artistic ideals were no longer considered adequate. The happy symmetry of early eighteenth-century society was in danger of collapsing under the weight of new ideas about man and nature, society and the individual, freedom and democracy and art and literature.

In France, Rousseau called into question the civilizing influence of 'reason' and placed a new emphasis on man's emotional capacities and imaginative powers. In Germany, the Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s attracted writers of the stature of Goethe and Schiller, whose rebellion against the rationalism of the Enlightenment led them to focus on the individual and reject virtually any form of organized creed: political, social, religious and literary systems were seen to represent facets of an undesirable status quo.

English writers were not immune to these shifts in philosophical mood, and if the 'Terror' of the 1790s constituted a betrayal of the revolutionary political ideals which most of them shared at the beginning of the revolution in France, a healthy spirit of intellectual rebellion continued to pervade much of their literary work up until the 1830s.

6. The Age of the Romantics

(1798-1837)

The proposals and conclusions offered by writers during this extraordinary period for English literature were, then, symptomatic of a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary literary and social mores, and their influence has remained with us to this very day. The most significant changes took place in the field of poetry, and, whilst poets of the time have been conveniently grouped together as members of a Romantic movement, it would be unwise to assume there was a single literary 'school' to which all ascribed. Indeed, although many of these poets were conscious of a new 'spirit of the age', none of them was aware either of the term 'Romantic' as we use it today, or of belonging to a self-styled movement.

It is, therefore, misleading to speak of a Romantic movement in English literature since this might suggest a unity of purpose and aim (of which writers of the period were clearly unaware). Only towards the middle of the nineteenth century were these writers conveniently grouped together under the term Romantic.

This might seem disorientating at first, and it may be more useful to think of these writers as having certain things in common - particularly the importance they ascribed to the role of the creative imagination – whilst retaining a high degree of individuality. In their difference, one from the other, lies the beauty and strength of English Romanticism.

Pre-Romanticism

The upheaval in English literature at the turn of the century should not be viewed as a sudden or improvised explosion, but rather as the culmination of a process which had its beginnings during the so-called Age of Sensibility around the middle of the 1700s. The novels of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne were, in their explicit sentimentalism, an early indication of a shift in taste: the expression of feelings and emotions was no longer to be dismissed as inappropriate. Just as sentimentalism and a fashionable vogue for the Gothic crept into English prose, so too a significant number of poets started hacking away at the rational tenets and artificial conventions of neo-classical verse.

Indeed, alongside Pope and Samuel Johnson, the great custodian of neo-classicism, we must set a whole range of Pre-Romantic poets whose works, while failing to mark a complete break with early eighteenth-century literary canons, succeeded in paving the way for the late eighteenth-century Romantic rebellion.

Pre-Romantic verse contained much that was considered new and, often, unacceptable to the literati of the day. There was the so-called graveyard poetry of poets like Edward Young (1683-1765) and Robert Blair (1699-1746). Their verse, like that of the 'elegiac poets', James Thompson (1700-1748) and William Collins (1721-1759), suggested a greater concern with individual feeling and emotions. The approach to nature was also changing. In the poetry of Thomas Gray (1716-1771) we witness a more pronounced sentimentalism and subjective feeling for nature, which represented a movement away from the more objective and less feeling descriptions to which neo-classical poets had clung. New sources of inspiration were found in the mysterious pagan traditions of Nordic and Celtic culture, and there was a new interest in the Middle Ages, as the publication of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Percy in 1765 showed. The success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns (1759-1796) was yet another indication of how literary taste was changing. Written mostly in simple Ayrshire dialect, these often beautiful lyrics took up the oral tradition and represented a real departure from the decaying conventions of English neo-classicism. The undercurrent of deviance which these and other writers embodied over the course of the eighteenth century was to reveal its true hidden strengths in the irresistible surge of literary activity which took place after the historical publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798.