The First Romantics

Unit eleven ended on a century that trusted reason and then tested it with feeling. This unit is where feeling takes over. Its governing idea is that the first Romantics claimed poetry as the voice of feeling and imagination, belonging to common people and common life, and that each of them claimed it differently. This first part moves in three steps: what Romanticism names and the revolutions it wrote out of; then Blake, with Burns, Charlotte Smith, Barbauld and Wollstonecraft; and then Lyrical Ballads, its Preface, and Wordsworth from Tintern Abbey to The Prelude, closing on Dorothy's journals and the arrival of Coleridge.

We begin with the word itself, the revolutions behind it, and its claims for imagination and nature.

First, where the period sits on the exam.

ENL 1101 The Romantic Period on This Exam

The Romantic period carries twenty percent of the questions. It runs roughly from Lyrical Ballads in seventeen ninety-eight to the mid-eighteen twenties, when Shelley and Byron died. This course gives it two units: the first Romantics, then the second generation and Romantic prose. Twenty percent; two units. Romanticism is a movement, not only dates.

Romantic names more than love.

ENL 1102 Romanticism: What the Word Names

Romanticism, a name given after the fact, prized subjectivity, imagination, emotion and nature against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The anchor stresses that it is neither romance nor prettiness, but closer to a repudiation of the eighteenth century's reason, decorum and classical models. Imagination, feeling, nature, the self. Romantic does not mean romantic love.

The movement wrote out of upheaval.

ENL 1103 Revolution, War and Reform

The Romantic era was shaped by the American, French and Industrial Revolutions. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake first hailed the French Revolution; Wordsworth wrote, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." The Terror chastened them, and England answered with repression and war against Napoleon. Hope, Terror, repression, war. Early enthusiasm for France later cooled.

The first claim is for imagination.

ENL 1104 Imagination Against Reason

The Romantics placed imagination above reason as a power of perception and creation. The anchor describes the imaginative individual forming an ideal from nature and seeking it in the world, and it notes their attention to children, rural workers and poets as minds uncorrupted by convention. Imagination over logic. Children and poets are Romantic touchstones.

The second claim is for nature.

ENL 1105 Nature in Romantic Poetry

Nature in Romantic poetry is a teacher, a mirror of the mind and a source of feeling from love to terror. The anchor notes that nature's awe-inspiring forms joined the poet to the sublime, and that images like the skylark and midnight frost unite mind and world. Nature as teacher and mirror. The poems are about the mind as much as nature.

Now Blake, who engraved his own books, and the poets and thinkers who wrote beside him.

First, a poet who printed his own books.

ENL 1106 William Blake: Engraver and Poet

William Blake, a London engraver, little known in his lifetime, claimed visions from childhood. He printed his poems as illuminated books, joining text and image, and built his own mythology, refusing to be "enslaved to another man's system." The Bible was his chief source. Engraved words and pictures. Blake printed and illustrated his own books.

His songs come in pairs.

ENL 1107 Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence appeared in seventeen eighty-nine; in seventeen ninety-four Blake joined it to Songs of Experience, subtitled Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Many poems come in matched pairs, and the anchor stresses the two states coexist as contraries. Paired poems, two contrary states. Read each poem against its pair.

The most famous pair asks questions.

ENL 1108 "The Lamb" and "The Tyger"

In "The Lamb," from Innocence, a child asks, "Little Lamb who made thee," and answers that its maker is meek and mild. In "The Tyger," from Experience, the speaker asks what "immortal hand or eye" could "frame thy fearful symmetry," and "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" A gentle question; a terrifying one. "The Tyger" asks questions it never answers.

Another pair concerns child labour.

ENL 1109 The Two Chimney Sweepers

Both books contain "The Chimney Sweeper." In Innocence, a sold child sweep consoles himself with a dream of heaven and duty. In Experience, a sweep says his parents have gone to church to praise God and the king, "who make up a heaven of our misery." Consolation in one; accusation in the other. The innocent poem's comfort is itself ironic.

Blake walked the chartered streets.

ENL 1110 "London"

In "London," from Experience, the speaker wanders "thro' each charter'd street" and hears in every voice "the mind-forg'd manacles": the city's suffering, from the chimney-sweeper's cry to the soldier's sigh and the harlot's curse, comes from church, state and the mind's own chains. Chartered streets, mind-forged manacles. The chains are both social and mental.

Blake also wrote proverbs of Hell.

ENL 1111 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, of seventeen ninety, Blake argues, "Without Contraries is no progression," and offers "Proverbs of Hell," such as "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Here he wrote that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Contraries, proverbs, energy. Blake's Hell means energy, not evil.

A farmer wrote songs in Scots.

ENL 1112 Robert Burns and the Scots Lyric

Robert Burns, a farmer's son, is regarded as Scotland's national poet and the best known poet in the Scots language, often in a light Scots dialect readable beyond Scotland. He preserved over three hundred traditional songs, including "Auld Lang Syne." Scots, song, the farmer-poet. Burns wrote in Scots and in English.

Two Burns poems the exam knows.

ENL 1113 "To a Mouse" and "A Red, Red Rose"

"To a Mouse," of seventeen eighty-five, addresses a mouse whose nest the poet has turned up with his plough, an emblem of human dominion and shared hardship. "A Red, Red Rose," of seventeen ninety-four, is a love song in Scots built on traditional sources. A ploughed-up nest; a love song. Both are in Scots, from common life.

One poet revived the sonnet.

ENL 1114 Charlotte Smith's Sonnets

Charlotte Smith wrote Elegiac Sonnets, published in seventeen eighty-four while she shared her husband's debtor's prison. The collection is credited with reviving the sonnet in England and with turning it into an expression of woeful sentiment. She wrote to support her children. The sonnet revived, in sorrow. Smith comes before Wordsworth's sonnets.

Another wrote for children and against war.

ENL 1115 Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a Dissenter, poet and writer for children, published Poems under her own name in seventeen seventy-three. Her Epistle to William Wilberforce condemned Parliament's rejection of abolition, and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven attacked Britain's war, drawing hostile reviews. Children's teacher, political poet. Barbauld wrote on slavery and war.

One thinker argued for women's education.

ENL 1116 Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, of seventeen ninety-two, argued that women only appear inferior because they lack education, and called for equality in moral responsibility and schooling. She married William Godwin and died after giving birth to Mary Shelley. Education, reason, equality. Her argument rests on reason, not feeling.

Now Lyrical Ballads, its Preface, and the poet who wrote it.

First, the book of seventeen ninety-eight.

ENL 1117 Lyrical Ballads, 1798

Lyrical Ballads, published by Wordsworth and Coleridge in seventeen ninety-eight, is generally considered the beginning of English Romanticism. Coleridge contributed four poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Wordsworth wrote most of the rest, ending with "Tintern Abbey." Two poets, one book, seventeen ninety-eight. The Preface came in the second edition.

Its Preface made a manifesto.

ENL 1118 The Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth's Preface to the eighteen hundred edition, called the manifesto of Romanticism, chose incidents from common life, related in a selection of the language really used by men, coloured by imagination so ordinary things appear unusual. It rejected the artificial poetic diction of the past. Common life, real language. The Preface attacks eighteenth-century diction.

The Preface defines poetry.

ENL 1119 "Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings"

The Preface states that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and adds that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." The feeling is spontaneous, but the poem comes later, when the remembered emotion is contemplated. Overflow, then tranquil recollection. Do not drop the second half of the definition.

Next, the poet's own life.

ENL 1120 William Wordsworth's Life

William Wordsworth, born in the Lake District, went to France in seventeen ninety-one, embraced the Revolution and fathered a daughter with Annette Vallon before returning alone. He settled at Grasmere with his sister Dorothy and later his wife, and became Poet Laureate. France, return, the Lakes. His radical youth gave way to conservatism.

His great poem of return.

ENL 1121 "Tintern Abbey"

"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," of seventeen ninety-eight, is in blank verse paragraphs. Returning to the Wye, "Five years have passed," the speaker traces how nature fed his mind, and now hears "the still, sad music of humanity" and senses "something far more deeply interfused." Return, memory, a presence in nature. The abbey itself never appears in the poem.

The poem moves through stages of life.

ENL 1122 "Tintern Abbey": Memory and Return

"Tintern Abbey" moves through three stages of the speaker's relation to nature: boyhood's animal pleasure, youth's passion, and maturity's thoughtful sense of a spirit in all things. It ends by addressing his sister, in whom he sees his former self, and whose memories will sustain her. Boy, youth, man; then the sister. The loss of youthful joy is offset by gain.

Five lyrics mourn an unknown girl.

ENL 1123 The Lucy Poems

The Lucy poems are five short lyrics, written mostly in Germany between seventeen ninety-eight and eighteen-oh-one, including "Strange Fits of Passion" and "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways." They mourn a girl who has died. Wordsworth never revealed who Lucy was; some critics conjecture Dorothy. Five lyrics, an unknown girl. Lucy's identity is unknown.

His most famous lyric is about memory.

ENL 1124 "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," written in eighteen-oh-four, recalls a host of golden daffodils that Wordsworth and Dorothy saw beside Ullswater. Its last stanza enacts the Preface: the daffodils "flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude." Dorothy's journal records the walk. Daffodils remembered on the couch. The poem is about memory.

One sonnet praises a city.

ENL 1125 "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"

"Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is a Petrarchan sonnet describing London and the Thames from the bridge in the early morning, the sleeping city calm and beautiful. Its true date of composition was the thirty-first of July, when Wordsworth and Dorothy were travelling to France. The city at dawn, still and beautiful. Wordsworth praises a city here, not nature.

Another sonnet attacks getting and spending.

ENL 1126 "The World Is Too Much With Us"

In the Petrarchan sonnet "The World Is Too Much With Us," Wordsworth criticizes an industrial world absorbed in materialism and cut off from nature. In the sestet he would rather believe a pagan "creed outworn" and glimpse the sea gods Proteus and Triton. Getting and spending; pagan sea gods. The sestet answers the octave.

An ode mourns childhood's glory.

ENL 1127 The Intimations Ode

The "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," completed in eighteen-oh-four, mourns a lost childhood glory: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," and we come "trailing clouds of glory." The child, nearest heaven, loses the vision, but the man finds consolation in memory and "the philosophic mind." Childhood glory lost, then consoled. The child is the poem's prophet.

Wordsworth's epic is about himself.

ENL 1128 The Prelude

The Prelude, an autobiographical poem in blank verse subtitled Growth of a Poet's Mind, was addressed to Coleridge and revised for decades. Wordsworth never titled it, and it was published only in eighteen fifty, three months after his death. A two-part version dates from seventeen ninety-nine. An epic of the poet's own mind. Published only after his death.

It records his revolutionary hope.

ENL 1129 The Prelude and the Revolution

The Prelude recounts Wordsworth's experience of revolutionary France, and the anchor quotes its most famous line on that hope: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive." The anchor records that the Reign of Terror then chastened Wordsworth, as it did his fellow early Romantics. Revolutionary hope, then disillusion. The line records hope later lost.

His sister kept exact journals.

ENL 1130 Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals

Dorothy Wordsworth recorded daily life and landscape in her Alfoxden and Grasmere journals, written with the expectation that William would read and use them. The Grasmere Journal, first published in eighteen ninety-seven, records the daffodils that became his poem. Exact notes on weather, walks, people. Her prose fed his poems.

His partner in the book was Coleridge.

ENL 1131 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic and philosopher, planned a utopian commune with Robert Southey, collaborated with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, and introduced German philosophy, especially Kant's, to England. The anchor notes his fear of separation and his search for unity. Poet, critic, philosopher. Coleridge took the supernatural; Wordsworth the natural.

This first part showed feeling taking over. We explained what Romanticism names, imagination, feeling, nature and the self, and the revolutions it wrote out of. We read Blake's paired songs, the lamb and the tyger, the two sweepers and London's manacles, and his contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. We met Burns, Charlotte Smith, Barbauld and Wollstonecraft. We stated the Preface's definition in both halves, overflow and tranquil recollection. And we walked Wordsworth from Tintern Abbey to The Prelude, with Dorothy's journals behind him and Coleridge beside him. Part two turns to Coleridge's supernatural and the rest of the first generation.