The Writer and Reading Public

Finally, a mention must be made of the relationship between the writer and the reading public during this age. To the satisfaction of a growing number of readers, improvements in manufacturing techniques meant a larger quantity of books were being produced with greater ease and at lower cost. Indeed, the systems of patronage and subscription publishing, dear to writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, were disappearing in favour of a more modern and commercial form of publishing. Whereas writers had previously benefited from a close, direct relationship with a known circle of readers (and could skilfully prepare what was expected of them), they now had to deal with a more amorphous public, whose precise collective identity was more difficult to pin down. The sense of 'belonging', which characterized former relations between writers and their public, was gradually being replaced by feelings of detachment from a literary market whose identity was more impersonal.

The decline of patronage meant 'professional writers', who made a living from the pen, became more common. Contemporary poets were no longer bound to the intrigues and flattery customarily associated with their predecessors. They considered themselves to be more inspired visionaries than skilled craftsmen, and many believed their work possessed an intrinsic value which could not be compromised to the requirements and expectations of modern readers and critics. Hostility towards the public was nothing new, of course, but never before had the conflict been so open. Keats said "I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public", a sentiment echoed by the rebellious Shelley: "Time reverses the judgment of the foolish crowd. Contemporary criticism is no more than the sum of folly with which genius has to wrestle". If the special value of what they believed they were writing could not be appreciated, then they would leave judgment to posterity. It is perhaps no coincidence that this period witnessed not only a growing estrangement between poets and the reading public, but also the development of the idea that the literary artist was an independent, creative writer, whose autonomous 'genius' was subject to misinterpretation, misunder­standing and, at worst, persecution.

Romantic Poetry

In literary terms, poetry unquestionably provides the main source of what have conveniently been described as 'Romantic' ideas. To varying degrees, six of the most important poets in the English language succeeded in overthrowing what was left of the neo­classical literary regime. The fiercely held individual convictions and immense creative vitality of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats ultimately proved overwhelming in their social and literary impact, and history has certainly borne them out as being representative of the new Zeitgeist of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Despite stubborn resistance on the part of conservative-minded reviewers clinging to the inadequate notions of a bygone age, these pushed their point home forcibly and with courage, their creative vitality and intellectual dissent marking the culmination of a process which had begun earlier in the century.

Romantic poetry showed a much diminished concern with man as a 'social animal' and took as its main subject the individual. This emphasis on the individual self contrasted with an age whose poets had concentrated their energies on propounding recognizable ideas and experiences which could be shared by a smaller and more harmonious audience, Early eighteenth-century poets had dealt with experiences familiar to the reading public and been I tacitly supported by scientific and rationalistic j philosophies, which had done much to undermine the Value of aspiring - and perhaps irrational -individualism. In a strictly ordered and unchanging, mechanistic world, individual perception had beer I limited to physical objects and with little or no call for I interpretations which went beyond reassuring j descriptions of the familiar, sensible world. The more imaginative aspects of the individual creative process were, however, given a new importance by German philosophers and metaphysicians throughout the middle to late eighteenth century. Their emphasis on the creative potential of the individual human mind -the mind, or 'ego' as it was called, was seen to be the actual creator of the universe it perceived - did much to weaken former rationalist tendencies. In English Romantic poetry, too, subjective experience assumed a new importance, as the writings of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge testify.