The Lake Poets

Literary review: The Romantics

The Romantic Age concerns literature in the late XVIII and early XIX centuries. Many of the writers turned away from values and ideas of the Age of Reason towards more individual and imaginative approach. They tended to be optimists who believed in the possibility of progress and improvement, for humanity as well as individuals. Thus they espoused democratic values.

These beliefs and values were closely linked to the French Revolution, which posed the cry “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”.

Whereas the writers of the Age of Reason tended to regard evil as the very part of human nature, the Romantic writers generally believed humanity was originally good, but corrupted by the society and its institutions of religion, education and government. It may be said that Romanticism represented an attempt to rediscover the mystery and wonder of the world, attempt to go beyond ordinary life into the deeper, less obvious levels of individual human existence. A belief in the healing power of the natural world became more important as the Romantic movement flourished in the early XIXth century in the poetly of Blake, Wordesworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.

The Lake Poets

William Blake (1757- 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Though largely unrecognised during his lifetime, today his works are popular.

Blake hated slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: "As all men are alike". He retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, but was often forced to resort to cloaking social idealism and political statements in protestant mystical allegory. Blake rejected all forms of imposed authority; His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (in 1794), in which Blake showed his own distinction between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ), whom he saw as a positive influence. Blake thought that we have war, unjustice and unhappiness because our way of life is founded on mistaken beliefs. We cannot truly know reality through our five senses until we learn to trust our instincts, energies and imaginations. Many of his poems are called either visions or prophesies.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) was a major English romantic poet, his masterpiece is The Prelude, an autobiographical poem. It contains some of Wordworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature.

1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and they produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement.. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey," was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner". This Preface to "Lyrical Ballads" is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility. "

George Gordon Byron (1788- 1824) was an Anglo-Scottish poet and leading figure in Romanticism. Among his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings, but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, allegations of incest and sodomy and an eventual death from fever after he travelled to fight on the Greek side in the Greek War of Independence. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

He also was the member of the House of Lords and strongly advocated social reform; was also a defender of Roman Catholics. Byron was inspired to write political poems such as "Song for the Luddites" (1816) and "The Landlords' Interest" (1823). Examples of poems where he attacked his political opponents include "Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and "The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818). Lord Byron had a reputation that still astonishes by its sheer brazenness and multiplicity. He was all-inclusive - boys, siblings, women of all classes. Ultimately he was to live abroad to escape the censure of British society, where men could be forgiven for sexual misbehavior only up to a point, one which Byron far surpassed.

Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as poet is higher in many European countries than in England or America, although not as high as in his time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, etc

John Keats (1795 - 1821) was one of the principal poets in the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks (critics called his verse ‘Cockney School of poetry’, hinting at his low birth), and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats's poetry is characterized by an exuberant love of the language and a rich, sensuous imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.

Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819 including: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, ( source of another famous quotation: ‘Beauty is Truth, truth – Beauty’) Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. This series of odes is nearly universally considered to be among the most perfect poetry ever written in the English language, ranking with the best of Shakespeare and Milton.

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