ROMANTICISM IN POETRY

Romanticism is an aesthetic attitude born out of a late eighteenth century reaction to the Enlightenment, stressing powerful feelings, originality, the individual response and a return to nature. {1} {2} {3} {4}

To repeat a previous simplification: Classicism, Realism and Romanticism all deal with the outside world, but Realism shows the world as it is, Romanticism as the heart tells us it should be, and Classicism as it would be in some ideal incarnation. Contemporary literature, by contrast, is commonly a retreat into the writer's consciousness — to make autonomous creations that incorporate diverse aspects of modern life (Modernism), or free-wheeling creations constructed of a language that largely points to itself (Postmodernism).

The early Romantics strove to understand the world through imagination, not reason, and they distrusted the world set out for them by Church and State. {8} To these hate figures in the later nineteenth century they added commerce and science, creating a split in outlook that pushed Romanticism into extreme positions — Symbolism, Surrealism, Dada, Modernism and Postmodernism. Some antagonism is a feature of most societies — Suffism versus Sharia in Islam, and Daoism versus Legalism in imperial China — but only in western societies have created such elaborate and at times fantastic theories to protect the Romantic position.

Can the world be understood by imagination? Can poetry discover realms of significance beyond the conscious and rational?

Symbolism, Surrealism, Dada, Modernism and Postmodernism are all examined in more detail in this section, but it is worth making some general points.

1. Romanticism has generally and needlessly resorted to theory, where Classicism has simply generalized from experience, saying when cleared of individual entanglements, these sorts of things work. . . Romanticism created or strengthened much of what we take for granted — universal suffrage, individual rights, religious freedom — and its ideas are still feeding through contemporary literature. Romanticism can stand on its record, and equally generalize from its successes.

2. Men do not live by bread alone, and poetry has little to fear from commerce or science. Economics is spectacularly unsuccessful in its predictions, and the newer theories of metaphor, hermeneutics, brain functioning and complexity bridge many of the chasms between the old worlds of art and the sciences.

3. Recent work in brain functioning and metaphor theory, plus older views in religion and depth psychology, suggest that consciousness and perception are indeed susceptible to cultural change. Matters can be overstated — the world's 4,000 languages are all inter-translatable, and no one believes that Hopi Indians have no concept of time — but poetry (and the arts in general) do create new entities, and these entities have existence outside the poem or artwork concerned to the extent that are useful to society.

4. The besetting sin of the theory emanating from Romanticism has been reductionism, the attempts to extract a few simple laws in the manner of science, and explain the many and multiform in these terms. Art is not science, and the narrowing focus of the various post-Romantic movements — Symbolism (rarefied symbols), Imagism (visual), Futurism (anti-history) Surrealism (irrational), Dada (anti-society) — created not strength but only thin and quickly changing fashions.

William Blake: e.g. The Tyger {9}
William Wordsworth Ode: e.g. Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood {10}
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: e.g. Kubla Khan {11}
George Gordon, Lord Byron: e.g. She walks in beauty, like the night {12}
Percy Bysshe Shelley: e.g. Ode to the West Wind {13}
John Keats's Ode to Melancholy {14}

Among the Victorians:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: e.g. The Lady of Shalott {15}
D.G. Rossetti: e.g. Soul's Beauty {16}
Ernest Dowson: e.g. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae {17}

Twentieth-century poets:

W. B. Yeats: e.g. The Lake Isle of Innisfree {18}
Edna St. Vincent Millay: e.g. What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why {19}
Dylan Thomas: e.g. Fern Hill {20}
Edwin Muir: e.g. The Horses {21}