The First Romantics

Part one ended as Coleridge arrived, the partner who took the supernatural while Wordsworth took the natural. This second part begins with him. The unit's governing idea still holds: the first Romantics claimed poetry for feeling, imagination and common life, and each claimed it differently, which is what lets the exam ask which poet wrote a passage. We move in two steps. First, Coleridge, the Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poem and his criticism, then Scott, the essayists and Clare. Second, the period's categories and four procedures, for telling Blake from Wordsworth, for reading a nature poem, for reading a Blake lyric, and for matching works, before the common errors, the Lake Poets and the capstone.

We begin with Coleridge, poet of the supernatural and the period's great critic, and then the writers around him.

First, a guest held by a stranger.

ENL 1132 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which opened Lyrical Ballads, tells how a mariner holds a Wedding-Guest "with his glittering eye" and recounts his voyage: "With my cross-bow / I shot the ALBATROSS," and the becalmed ship has "Water, water, every where." A guest held, a bird shot. The listener cannot choose but hear.

The Mariner's crime is a bird.

ENL 1133 The Mariner: Albatross and Ballad Form

The Mariner uses the old ballad stanza and archaic diction; an eighteen seventeen version added a prose gloss. The albatross is hung around his neck "instead of the cross." Its moral: "He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small." Ballad stanza, the bird as burden. The killing is unexplained; the penance is not.

Next, a dream poem left unfinished.

ENL 1134 "Kubla Khan"

"Kubla Khan," written in seventeen ninety-seven, published in eighteen sixteen, opens, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree." Coleridge's preface says it came in an opium dream and was cut short when "a person on business from Porlock" interrupted him, leaving a fragment. Xanadu, a dream, an interruption. The Porlock story is Coleridge's own account.

Coleridge also wrote quiet poems.

ENL 1135 "Frost at Midnight" and the Conversation Poem

Coleridge's conversation poems are familiar blank-verse meditations. In "Frost at Midnight," of seventeen ninety-eight, he sits by his sleeping son Hartley, recalls his own city schooling, and hopes the boy will grow up a child of nature, while frost performs "its secret ministry." A father, a sleeping son, the frost. Conversation poems speak to a silent listener.

Another poem is a fragment.

ENL 1136 Christabel

Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Coleridge in two parts, the first reputedly written in seventeen ninety-seven and the second in eighteen hundred. Wordsworth advised leaving it out of Lyrical Ballads, and it was published, unfinished, in eighteen sixteen alongside "Kubla Khan." A Gothic ballad left incomplete. Like "Kubla Khan," it is a fragment.

Coleridge drew a famous distinction.

ENL 1137 Biographia Literaria: Fancy and Imagination

Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, of eighteen seventeen, distinguishes the primary imagination, "the living power and prime agent of all human perception," and the secondary imagination, which recreates, from fancy, which "has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites." Imagination creates; fancy assembles. Fancy is lower than imagination for Coleridge.

He named the reader's bargain.

ENL 1138 Coleridge on Willing Suspension of Disbelief

In chapter fourteen of the Biographia, Coleridge explains the plan of Lyrical Ballads: he would make supernatural subjects seem real, procuring "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," while Wordsworth made ordinary things seem new. Supernatural made real; ordinary made new. The reader agrees to suspend disbelief.

Scott was poet before novelist.

ENL 1139 Walter Scott: Poet and Novelist

Walter Scott began as a collector of ballads and a narrative poet, author of Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. From eighteen fourteen his Waverley novels, among Europe's most widely read, established the historical novel as an exemplar of European Romanticism. Ballad collector, poet, historical novelist. Scott wrote poems first, then novels.

Three essayists wrote in the period.

ENL 1140 The Romantic Essayists: Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey

Three essayists defined Romantic prose. Charles Lamb wrote the Essays of Elia and, with his sister Mary, Tales from Shakespeare. William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, portrayed his contemporaries in The Spirit of the Age. Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Elia, the Age, the Opium-Eater. Unit thirteen covers each essayist.

A labourer wrote the countryside.

ENL 1141 John Clare

John Clare, a farm labourer's son from Northamptonshire called "the Peasant Poet," published Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in eighteen twenty. His biographer Jonathan Bate calls him the greatest labouring-class poet England has produced. Clare spent his later years in asylums. A labourer writing the countryside. Clare wrote from inside rural life.

Now method: four procedures for this period's passages, its categories and errors, and the capstone.

Here is the method for telling two poets apart.

ENL 1142 Blake or Wordsworth? Reading the Difference

Blake and Wordsworth both write about children, nature and the city, so decide by method. Form: Blake writes short songs in simple rhymed stanzas, often in a child's or bard's voice; Wordsworth writes long blank-verse meditations, sonnets and lyrics in his reflective voice. Nature: for Wordsworth it teaches and consoles, a presence far more deeply interfused; for Blake it is a symbol in a spiritual drama, as the Tyger is. Target: Blake accuses church and state, the mind-forged manacles; Wordsworth turns toward memory. Paired contraries point to Blake, recollection in tranquillity to Wordsworth.

Here is the method for any nature poem.

ENL 1143 Reading a Romantic Nature Poem

A Romantic nature poem is usually about the mind meeting the world. Find the scene and moment, often a return after absence, as in Tintern Abbey. Track the feeling as description becomes reflection. Find the inward turn, where landscape becomes memory or spirit, as when the daffodils flash upon the inward eye. Ask what nature gives: consolation, teaching, the sublime, or loss. Notice the listener, a sister or a child, who carries the experience forward. Then state what the poem claims about mind and nature; the answer is rarely that it describes a landscape.

Here is the method for any Blake lyric.

ENL 1144 Reading a Blake Lyric

Blake's lyrics look simple and are not. Place the poem, Innocence or Experience, because one title can mean opposite things in the two books. Identify the speaker, often a child or bard, and ask what the speaker does not understand; the innocent sweep's moral, "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm," is ironic because duty has delivered him to misery. Read the symbols, lamb, tyger, chartered street, manacles. Compare the poem with its contrary. Then state what it exposes, a church, a state, a parent or a state of mind.

The ballad came back.

ENL 1145 The Ballad Revived

In the eighteenth century collectors such as Bishop Thomas Percy published old popular ballads, and Scott, inspired by Percy, collected them in Scotland. Romantic poets then wrote literary or lyrical ballads, borrowing the ballad's simple stanza, narrative and supernatural matter, as in the Mariner. Folk ballads collected, then imitated. A literary ballad imitates the oral ballad.

The period named kinds of landscape.

ENL 1146 The Sublime and the Picturesque

Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry argued that the sublime, vast, obscure and terrifying, differs from the beautiful, smooth and gentle. William Gilpin introduced the picturesque in seventeen eighty-two, praising roughness and irregularity, in his Observations on the River Wye. Sublime awe, picturesque roughness, gentle beauty. The sublime involves terror; beauty does not.

Here is the method for matching first-generation works.

ENL 1147 Matching First-Generation Romantic Works

Sort by author and form. Blake wrote the Songs and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Wordsworth wrote Tintern Abbey, the Lucy poems, the daffodils, the two sonnets, the Intimations Ode, The Prelude and the Preface. Coleridge wrote the Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Christabel and the Biographia. Burns wrote To a Mouse in Scots, Smith the Elegiac Sonnets, Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Then use clues: contraries and a child's voice suggest Blake, memory and blank verse Wordsworth, the supernatural and a captive listener Coleridge. Do not swap the Preface and the Biographia.

Four misreadings need correcting.

ENL 1148 Common Errors About Romanticism

Four common errors cost points. Romantic does not mean about love. The movement prized imagination but did not reject thought; Coleridge was a philosopher. "Spontaneous overflow" omits "recollected in tranquillity." And the Romantics wrote of cities and politics as well as nature. Four misreadings, corrected. Romanticism has politics.

Three poets got a hostile label.

ENL 1149 The Lake Poets

The Lake Poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey, who lived in the Lake District. The Edinburgh Review named them only to disparage them, and the term began as an insult, "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes." Three poets, one region, a hostile label. The Lake School history rests on one source.

The capstone gathers the first Romantics.

ENL 1150 What the First Romantics Claimed for Poetry

The first Romantics claimed that poetry is the voice of feeling and imagination, belonging to common people and common life. They wrote out of revolution, with early hope that Wordsworth called bliss in that dawn and disillusion after the Terror. Blake set Innocence against Experience and declared that without contraries there is no progression. Burns wrote in Scots, Charlotte Smith revived the sonnet, and 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. Wordsworth turned nature and memory into the growth of a mind. Coleridge took the supernatural and set imagination above fancy. Scott collected ballads before his novels, Clare wrote rural life from inside it, and Burke's sublime gave terror a place beside the beautiful. Ask how a poem joins mind to world, and tell Blake's contraries from Wordsworth's recollection and Coleridge's supernatural.

This second part showed each poet claiming feeling differently. We described Coleridge's Mariner, Kubla Khan and the conversation poem, and his imagination set above fancy. We identified Scott, the three essayists and Clare. We told Blake from Wordsworth by method, and read a nature poem for its inward turn and a Blake lyric through its limited speaker. We explained the literary ballad, the sublime and the picturesque. And we matched the works and corrected the common errors, closing on the capstone's three marks: contraries, recollection, the supernatural. Unit thirteen, The Second Romantics and Romantic Prose, follows the next generation.