What the First Romantics Claimed for Poetry

The idea

The first Romantics claimed that poetry is the voice of feeling and imagination, and that it belongs to common people and common life. They wrote out of revolution: the American, the French and the Industrial, with early hope that Wordsworth called bliss in that dawn, and disillusion after the Terror. Blake, an engraver who printed his own illuminated books, set Innocence against Experience in paired songs: the Lamb and the Tyger, two chimney sweepers, and London's mind-forged manacles, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he declared that without contraries there is no progression. Burns wrote in Scots of a ploughed-up mouse and a red, red rose; Charlotte Smith revived the sonnet; Barbauld and Wollstonecraft wrote against slavery, war and women's lack of education. Lyrical Ballads, in seventeen ninety-eight, joined Wordsworth and Coleridge, and its Preface defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity, written in the language really used by men. Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," the Intimations Ode and The Prelude turned nature and memory into the growth of a mind. Coleridge took the supernatural, the Mariner, "Kubla Khan" and Christabel, and in the Biographia set imagination above fancy and named the willing suspension of disbelief. Scott collected ballads before writing his historical novels, Clare wrote rural life from inside it, and Burke's sublime gave terror a place in art beside the beautiful. To answer a question on the period, ask how a poem joins mind to world, and tell Blake's contraries from Wordsworth's recollection and Coleridge's supernatural.