Prepared by- Divya Choudhary
Course- M.A.
Sem- 2
Paper no. - 5
Paper name- Romantic Age
Enrollment no. - PG15101007
Batch- 2015-17
Email id-choudharydivya400@gmail.com
Submitted to- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Question- What are the salient features of William Wordsworth
and Coleridge as Romantic poets?
William Wordsworth was an eminent English
poet. He was born on 07 April 1770 in Cocker mouth, an old market town in the
district of Allendale in the country of Cumbria in the North- West of England.
Together until the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he launched the
Romantic period and school of thought of English literature with their Lyrical Ballads first published in 1798.
Wordsworth’s masterpiece however was his large
autobiographical poem entitled The Prelude (1850),
which focused on the formative experience of his youth. His first two
collections of poetry were published in 1793, five years after his first
published poem. They respectively entitled An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Both were strongly influenced by the writing
style of the Eighteenth century. Not long after this in 1795, Wordsworth would make a fateful meeting, that of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. In spite of, or perhaps, even because of their at times
stormy relationship, they manage to collaborate and produce the founding
document of the English Romantic movement, published in 1798; The Lyrical Ballads.
In 1807, the third edition of what was to
become a classical work was supplemented with a long- awaited introduction
written by Wordsworth. Having defined what poetry is according to Wordsworth,
he defines it as:
“ He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is
true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who
has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than
are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions
and volition's, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that
is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested
in the going-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where
he does not find them.”
Eventually, Coleridge and Wordsworth lived
close to each other in the North of England in the Lake District, which in
fact would end up earning them together with Robert Southey, the
label of “Lake Poets.” Wordsworth was clearly part of larger circles of
contemporary literary figures in England as well. Wordsworth is celebrated for,
among others, his Lucy poems, which are a series of five poems written
between 1798-1801.earlier versions
of four of them, however, had already been published in the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads in 1800. He was to
attempt to write in as pure as possible English and thus try and touch as much
as communicate through prose the high morals of love, beauty, nature, death and
longing amongt other ideals. In 1807, Wordsworth published poems in two
volumes which includes poems entitled “Resolution and
Independence”, “I wandered as a lonely cloud” (known as Daffodils), “My Heart
Leaps Up”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, “Ode to Duty”, “The Solitary
Reaper”, “Elegiac Stanzas”, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,
1802”, “London, 1802” and “The World is too much with us.”
The complete poetry work of Wordsworth is too
much big. It also includes Guide to the Lakes
(1810), The Excursion (1814), and Laodamia (1815). Both Durham University and Oxford University
awarded him with the honorary Doctor of Civil Law Degree in 1838 and 1839. When his friend and poet colleague Robert Southey died in 1843, Wordsworth became the new poet
Laureate in Great Britain, a title he would keep until his death. He died in 1850 at the age of 80 at Rydal Mount, a
house in the Lake District near Ambleside, made famous as the home where he
lived and died. The cause of his death was a re- aggravating cause of pleurisy,
which is an inflammation that prevents breathing by causing terrible pain when
one does so. It is typically the result of pneumonia. Life of both Coleridge
and Wordsworth, in particular, their collaboration on the important Lyrical
Ballads is at the heart of the film Pandemonium (2000). Some of his major
works are- “Lyrical Ballads”,
“Simon Lee”, “We are Seven”, “Lines written in Early Spring”, “Expostulation
and Reply”, “The Tables Turned”, “The Thorn”, “She Dwelt among the Untraded
Ways”, “I Traveled among Unknown men”, “Lucy Gray”. Now, when we talk about Romantic poetry, it is
the break from the set rules and regulations. The Romantics showed interest in
the country life. In their poetry, they discard the glamour’s of artificial
life and turn to the elements and simplicities of a life lived in closer touch
with the beauties and charm of nature. Every genius is a rebel and so was
Wordsworth. He protested against the traditions and usages setup by the poets
of the pseudo- classical school during the Eighteenth century. The three main
principles of his poetic diction are-
1) The language of poetry should be the
language really used by men but it should be a selection of such language.
2) It should be the language of men in a state
of vivid sensation. It means that language used by people in a state of
animation can form the language of poetry.
3) There is no essential difference between
the words used in prose and in metrical composition. The elements of simplicity
and ease that we come across in his poetry are principally due to his adoption
of a language well within the reach of common people.
Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction was
disapproved by Coleridge and in the pages of Biographia Literaria; he found numerous defects in Wordsworth’s
theory. In spite of his shortcomings, Wordsworth rendered remarkable service to
poetry by effectively putting an end to the use of false poetic diction. He
brought back the natural beauty and simplicity of poetry. Wordsworth’s poetry
exhibits Romantic characteristics and for his treatment towards Romantic
elements, he stands supreme and he can be termed a Romantic poet on a number of
reasons. The Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth century was a revolt
against the classical tradition of the Eighteenth century; but it was also
marked b y certain positive trends. Wordsworth was, of course, a pioneer of the
romantic movement of the Nineteenth century. With the publication of The
Lyrical Ballads, the new trends became more or less established. The reasons
why he was called a Romantic poet are-
1)
Imagination- where the Eighteenth century poets
used to put emphasis much on ‘wit’, the Romantic poets used to put emphasis on
‘imagination’. Wordsworth uses imagination so that the common things could be
made to look strange and beautiful through the play of imagination. In his
famous “Intimation Ode” it seems to him as to the child “the earth and
every common sight” seemed “appareled in celestial lights.” Here he says
“There was a time when
meadow, grove
And stream
The earth and every
common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in
celestial light.”
Moreover, in this poem, we find a sequence of
picture through his use of imagery. Through his imagination, he says,
“The
rainbow come and goes,
And
lovely is the Rose,
The
Moon doth with delight
Look
round her when the heavens are bare.”
Similarly, in the poem Tintern Abbey, the poet
sees the river, the stream, steep and lofty cliffs through his imaginative
eyes. He was enthusiastically charmed at the joyful sound of the rolling river.
Here he says,
“Once again
Do I behold those steep and lofty cliffs?
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion and
Connect
The landscape with quiet of the sky.”
In this poem, the poet seems that the nature
has a healing power. Even the recollection of nature soothes the poet’s
troubled heart. The poet can feel the existence of nature through imagination
even when he is away from her, he says,
“In lovely rooms and ‘mid the dim
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensation sweet.”
2) Nature- He is especially regarded as a poet of
nature. In most of the poems of William Wordsworth, nature is constructed as
both a healing entity and a teacher or moral guardian. Nature is considered in
his poems as a living personality. He is a true worshiper of nature: nature’s
devotee or high priest. The critic Cazamian says:
“To William Wordsworth, nature appears as a
formative influence superior to any other, the educator of senses or mind
alike, the shower in our hearts of the deep laden seeds of our feelings and
beliefs.”
He dwells with great satisfaction on the
prospects of spending his time in groves and valleys and on the
banks of streams that will lull him to rest with their soft murmur. For
Wordsworth, nature is a healer and he ascribes healing properties to nature in
Tintern Abbey. This is a fairly obvious conclusion drawn from his reference to
“Tranquil Restoration”, that his memory of the Wye offered him “in lovely rooms
and mid the in/ of towns and cities.”
3) Subjectivity- it is the key note of Romantic poetry. He
expresses his personal thoughts, feelings through his poems. In Ode: Intimation of
Immortality,
the poet expresses his own/ personal feelings. Here he says that he can’t
see the celestial light anymore which he used to see in his childhood. He says,
“It is not how as it hath been of yore
Turn wheresoever’s I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can
Seen on more”.
4) Pantheism and
Mysticism-
These two are almost interrelated factors in the nature poetry of the Romantic
period. Wordsworth conceives of a spiritual power running through all natural
objects- the “presence that disturbs me with the law of elevated thoughts”
whose dwelling is the light.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 and was
an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who with his friend Wordsworth
was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake
poets. He died on 25 July 1834. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan as well as the major prose work Biographia
Literaria.
His critical work, especially on
Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist
philosophy to English- speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and
phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence of Emerson
and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered
from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he
suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition not identified from poor physical
health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood
illness.
George McLean Harper,
who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem (1798) to describe the other poems as
well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge’s finest
verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, “With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner,
Kubla Khan, and Frost at Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive.” They
are also among his most influential poems. The last ten lines of Frost at
Midnight were chosen by Harper as the “best example of the
peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as
natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated
sonnet”. The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his
side:
“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet
To thee,
Whether the summer clothe the
General earth
With the greenness, or the redbreast sit
And sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare
Branch
Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh
Thatch’ Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the
Eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast, or if the
secret ministry of frost,
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
is one of the remarkable poets of Romantic period. He was a most intimate
friend of Wordsworth and their influence on one another was most
productive. Coleridge’s poems are removed from the gravity and high seriousness
of Spenser, Milton or Wordsworth.
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