Wordsworth and Coleridge
Question: What are the characteristics of Romantic poetry? Illustrate with examples from Wordsworth and Coleridge.
William wordsworth biography :
William Wordsworth, (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, Eng.—died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland), English poet. Orphaned at age 13, Wordsworth attended Cambridge University, but he remained rootless and virtually penniless until 1795, when a legacy made possible a reunion with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. He became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), the collection often considered to have launched the English Romantic movement. Wordsworth’s contributions include “Tintern Abbey” and many lyrics controversial for their common, everyday language. About 1798 he began writing The Prelude (1850), the epic autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years. His second verse collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), includes many of the rest of his finest works, including “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” His poetry is perhaps most original in its vision of the organic relation between man and the natural world, a vision that culminated in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God. The most memorable poems of his middle and late years were often cast in elegaic mode; few match the best of his earlier works. By the time he became widely appreciated by the critics and the public, his poetry had lost much of its force and his radical politics had
yielded to conservatism. In 1843 he became England’s poet laureate. He is regarded as the central figure in the initiation of English Romanticism.
Romanticism summary :
Romanticism, Literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that began in Europe in the 18th century and lasted roughly until the mid-19th century. In its intense focus on the individual consciousness, it was both a continuation of and a reaction against the Enlightenment. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Among its attitudes were a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator; an emphasis on imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; a consuming interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic. See also classicism and Transcendentalism.
His theory of poetry:
Wordsworth’s conception of a poet is an important part of his theory of poetry presented in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In the preface, Wordsworth discusses the definition, qualities and function of a poet.
Wordsworth defines a poet in the following lines:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to common among mankind.
From these lines and from the text we can identify the following qualifications of a b A poet is a simple man like other common human beings. This concept actually revolts against the 18th century glorification of a poet as somebody separate and different from other human beings.
However, a poet is not ‘‘different in kind from other man, but only in degree.’’ He has some extra qualities.
A poet is a man possessing a higher sensibility than others. It helps him observe and feel things more deeply than others can. By this he reacts more powerfully to the external impressions.
The poet’s enthusiasm, intense and keen, takes deep pleasure in the knowledge of the oneness of nature and man.
The poet’s imaginative power is greater than average human beings. By this, he can be “affected by absent things, as if they were present.’’
The poet is not only a man who has a lively sensibility, but one “who has thought long deep.’’
The poet is not a social instrument but an individual “pleased with his own passions and volitions.’’ He is not a mere copier, but a creator. Sensibility becomes more important than rationality.
The end of the poet to write poetry is to give pleasure with a purpose of enlightening and purifying which is not formally conceived.
A poet is also a teacher. Wordsworth in a letter expressed his view-“every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing.’’ However, pleasure is an essential condition of poetic teaching. Here we see that Wordsworth is close to the doctrine of Horace.
The poetic process of Wordsworth
Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’’ and its origin is in “emotion recollected in tranquility.’’ At the first glance, the two contentions may seem contradictory. Because, spontaneity is a forward process while recollection is a backward process. Therefore, how the spontaneous poetry is originated from recollected emotion is a question.
There are four stages in the process of poetic creation. These are observation, recollection, contemplation and imaginative excitement.
At the first stage, the poet observes some object, situation or phenomena of nature. However, the poetic expression does not take place at that very moment. Rather the observations are stored in the poet’s heart.
Next, in moments of tranquility, the poet recollects those emotions excited by the objects, situations or phenomena.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement,
was born on October 21, 1772, in Devonshire, England. His father, a vicar of a parish and master of a grammar school, married twice and had fourteen children. The youngest child in the family, Coleridge was a student at his father’s school and an avid reader. After his father died in 1781, Coleridge attended Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he met lifelong friend Charles Lamb. While in London, he also befriended a classmate named Tom Evans, who introduced Coleridge to his family. Coleridge fell in love with Tom’s older sister, Mary.
Coleridge’s father had always wanted his son to be a clergyman, so when Coleridge entered Jesus College, University of Cambridge in 1791, he focused on a future in the Church of England. Coleridge’s views, however, began to change over the course of his first year at Cambridge. He became a supporter of William Frend, a Fellow at the college whose Unitarian beliefs made him a controversial figure. While at Cambridge, Coleridge also accumulated a large debt, which his brothers eventually had to pay off. Financial problems continued to plague him throughout his life, and he constantly depended on the support of others.
En route to Wales in June 1794, Coleridge met a student named Robert Southey. Striking an instant friendship, Coleridge postponed his trip for several weeks, and the men shared their philosophical ideas. Influenced by Plato’s Republic, they constructed a vision of pantisocracy—equal government by all, which involved emigrating to the New World with ten other families to set up a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Coleridge and Southey envisioned the men sharing the workload, a great library, philosophical discussions, and freedom of religious and political beliefs.
After finally visiting Wales, Coleridge returned to England to find that Southey had become engaged to a woman named Edith Fricker. As marriage was an integral part of the plan for communal living in the New World, Coleridge decided to marry another Fricker daughter, Sarah. Coleridge wed in 1795, in spite of the fact that he still loved Mary Evans, who was engaged to another man. Coleridge’s marriage was unhappy and he spent much of it apart from his wife. During that period, Coleridge and Southey collaborated on a play titled The Fall of Robespierre (1795). While the pantisocracy was still in the planning stages, Southey abandoned the project to pursue his legacy in law. Left without an alternative plan, Coleridge spent the next few years beginning his career as a writer. He never returned to Cambridge to finish his degree.
In 1795 Coleridge befriended William Wordsworth, who greatly influenced Coleridge’s verse. Coleridge, whose early work was celebratory and conventional, began writing in a more natural style. In his “conversation poems,” such as “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge used his intimate friends and their experiences as subjects. The following year, Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, and began the first of ten issues of a liberal political publication entitled The Watchman. From 1797 to 1798 he lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire. In 1798 the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. The collection is considered the first great work of the Romantic school of poetry and contains Coleridge’s famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
That autumn the two poets traveled to the Continent together. Coleridge spent most of the trip in Germany, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and G. E. Lessing. While there, he mastered the German language and began translating. When he returned to England in 1800, he settled with family and friends at Keswick. Over the next two decades, Coleridge lectured on literature and philosophy, wrote about religious and political theory, spent two years on the island of Malta as a secretary to the governor in an effort to overcome his poor health and his opium addiction, and lived off of financial donations and grants. Still addicted to opium, he moved in with the physician James Gillman in 1816. In 1817, he published Biographia Literaria, which contained his finest literary criticism. He continued to publish poetry and prose, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1830).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a Romantic Poet
Coleridge was a co-founder of Romanticism in English literature. In his rich romantic imagination, suggestiveness, symbolism, love of nature, fascination for the remote, treatment of the supernatural, medievalism, love of music, and the dream quality of his poetry, Coleridge is a Romantic poet up to every inch. Romanticism, in fact, reaches its acme in his poetry. In the words of a critic, his poetry is ‘the most finished, supreme embodiment of all that is the purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit.’
Wordsworth’s part in Romanticism was to extend the boundaries of thought and remove the veil of formality hung between Man and Nature. Coleridge, however, gave to this broader sphere its music; to the intellectual side of the movement, he gave its concrete beauty.
Besides, like Wordsworth, Coleridge held a higher ideal of poetry and fought bravely against the artificial style of the previous age. The simplicity of language, the variety of meter, flight of imagination, love of nature, humanitarian and democratic outlook are the major characteristics of Romanticism, and Coleridge possesses all these qualities in abundance.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan are his most famous Romantic poems that clearly depicts major artistic skills of Coleridge as a romantic poet. To quote C.M. Bowra:
“Of all English romantic masterpieces, they are the most unusual and the most romantic.”
Major Characteristics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a Poet
Coleridge’s best poems are ones that we distinguish to a remarkable degree by the perfection of their rhythm and metrical arrangement. It is this remarkable power of making his verse musical that gives a peculiar character to Coleridge’s poetry. He is not only a brilliant poet of imagination, but also the poet of thought and verbal harmony.
Coleridge wrote mainly three types of poems: romantic, personal, and political. Coleridge’s most famous political poems include: The Ode on the Departing Year, Fears in Solitude, and The Destruction of Bastille. Among his famous personal poems are: Frost at Midnight, My Prison, The Eolian Harp, An Ode to Dejection etc. However, his greatest romantic poems include: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan on whom the reputation of Coleridge as a poet chiefly lies.
Characterstic of romatic poetry with examples:
What Is Romanticism?
Although it is hard to determine the starting date of Romanticism, scholars agree that it began during the late 1700s. At its core, Romanticism is the defiance of the establishment and the buttressing of individualism. Intellectuals advocated for individuals to follow ideals instead of established conventions. The embracing of individual liberty became a major poetic theme during the Romantic period. Major poets who ascribed to Romantic principles in their poetry were William Blake, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth.
Romanticism in poetry can be defined as the development of individualism and an embrace of the natural world in poetic form. Many Romantic poets revered idealism, emotional passion, and mysticism in their works. Furthermore, a large emphasis was placed on the imagination, which was in response to the neoclassic tradition, a movement that favored science and reason.
Characteristics
A main feature of Romantic poetry was the discarding of highbrow language, which was not accessible to the common man, in exchange for the everyday vernacular. For example, in William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, he prefaces the collection by stating, 'ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society' can be used in terms of poetry, and cites that readers accustomed to haughtier language may not enjoy the work. Wordsworth, like many other poets at this time, believed that poetry should be democratic, seeking to reach all men. Thus, many of the poems use common language and eschew scholarly language.
For example, the opening stanza of Wordsworth's ''We Are Seven'' discards heightened language for:
A simple child, dear brother Jim,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
The vocabulary is simple and does not overstretch itself, which was a common in poetry prior to Romanticism.
- 9 Key Characteristics of Romantic Poetry
Several characteristics distinguish romantic poetry from other forms of poetry. The following are key characteristics of the form:
1.A Reaction Against Neoclassical Poetry
2.Imagination
3.Nature
4.Escapism
5.Melancholy
6.Medievalism
7.Hellenism
8.Supernaturalism
9.
Subjectivity 1. A Reaction Against Neoclassical Poetry
Romantic poetry carries unique features which distinguish it from other kinds of poetry. It is in absolute contrast to neoclassical poetry. Neoclassical is the poetry of intellect and reason, while romantic poetry is the product of emotions, sentiments and the voice at the heart of the poet. It is a catharsis of the poet’s emotions, thoughts, feelings and ideas bound within their hearts.Romantic poetry is a reaction against the set standards, conventions, rules and traditional laws of poetry. That's the reason romantic poetry is acknowledged as a progressive form, at least in contrast to neoclassical.
According to William J. Long, “The Romantic Movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit.”
The Romantics were against the influence of reason in their poetry. They didn’t give any preference to reason and intellect in their poetry. On the other hand, neoclassical poets believed in the influence of reason. Alexander Pope said,
"True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d."
2. Imagination
Imagination is a hallmark of romantic poetry. It is part and parcel of romantic poets like John Keats, Coleridge and P.B Shelley. Unlike neoclassical poets who shunned imagination, romantic poets emphasized it and discredited the influence of reason and intellect in any form in their work. Coleridge considered imagination to be an integral part of his poetry.
In Biographia Literaria, he discussed two types of imagination—Primary and Secondary Imagination. He said, “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and a repetition in the finite of the external act of creation of the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode its operation.”
3. Nature
A love for nature is another important feature of romantic poetry and came to hold a pivotal position in Romantic poets' work. Nature was a wellspring of inspiration, satisfaction and happiness. It is pertinent to mention here that all the romantic poets differed in their views about nature. Wordsworth was considered a great lover of nature and recognised it as a living thing—like a teacher or a god. He was the true adorer of nature. He wrote,
"One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach you more of man
Of moral, evil and good
Than all the sages can."
– "The Tables Turned" by William Wordsworth
Shelley was similarly an extraordinary lover of nature, yet he didn't think about nature as an instructor, aide and a wellspring of pleasure. He believed that nature was a living thing and that there was a union between nature and man. Shelley likewise put stock in the recuperating force of nature like Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave nature a philosophical touch, while Shelly focused on the intellectual aspects.
4
. Escapism
As most of the romantic poets were in the grip of miseries, they tried to take asylum in their poetry's power. It was their most loved pastime to escape from reality and take asylum in the realm of their imagination. As an example, Keats desires to fly away with the nightingale to forget the miseries of the world:
"Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy."
– "Ode to Nightingale" by John Keats
5. Melancholy
Melancholy similarly occupies a prominent place in romantic poetry and was a major source of inspiration for romantic poets. Due to extreme melancholy, all romantic poets have a tendency to compose subjective poetry.
They write poetry that is the heart's voice and don’t try to compose philosophical or complicated poetry. Instead, they just wanted to vent their feelings and emotions in an attempt to ease their minds. They want to take a load off their minds. Look at the following example:
"………………………….for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
– "Ode to Nightingale" by John Keats
6. Medievalism
Romantic poets were against intellectualism, urbanism, industrialization and the humdrum of life. They wanted to get rid of these aspects of society by taking asylum in the far-off lands of their imagination. The Middle Ages greatly appealed to their taste; they adored weird, remote and recondite places and found that during the era more than in their own age. Look at the following example:
"O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing."
– "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats
7.
Hellenism
Hellenism implies love, commitment and unmistakable fascination with the antiquated society, values and individuals of Greece. Romantic poets displayed a love for Hellenism a great deal in their poetry. They loved to explore the ancient culture of Greece; Keats' poetry is the perfect example, as it was loaded with allusions to the art, literature and culture of the civilization.
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a perfect example in this regard. The pictures described in the Grecian Urn show Keats's love the Greek ideals, culture and art. Look at the following example:
"Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"
– "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats
8. Supernaturalism
Coleridge is the leading romantic poet in this regard. His poem "Kubla Khan" is the most romantic in the history of English literature and is completely the product of his imagination. The whole poem is a collection of supernatural elements. Look at the following example:
"And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His fleshing eyes, his floating hair!
weave a circle round him thrice and
Close eyes with holy dread for him on
Honey – drew hath fed and drunk the
Milk of paradise."
– "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Coleridge
9. Subjectivity
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the miseries, despairs, and personal stories of the poets; it is the poetry of sentiments, emotions and imagination of the poets. Romantic poetry is against the objectivity of neoclassical poetry, whose authors avoided describing emotions in their work.
They wanted to present a true picture of society, while the romantic poets avoided descriptions of their contemporary age. Keats is the leading poet in this regard, and his work is like a biography. He wrote poetry just for the sake of writing poetry, not wanting to convey any moral message to his readers. Instead, he wanted to create and prove himself to be the best poet of his age. Throughout his work, you can find numerous clues to his personal life. Look at the following example:
"or many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
– "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats
Conclusion:In Conclusion , romantic poetry is marked by a deep connection to emotion,nature and the individual's inner life , with a focus on imagination, freedom , and a yearning for the sublime , mystical and past eras.
Activity :
Here my connection with our victoria park activity in bhavanagar. We visited Victoria park on 31 August, Saturday we all had the fun and enjoyed all activities and collect a many pictures of nature . Some pictures I includes,
This picture I clicked when we enter the victoria park . This activity part of also our study connection with Wordsworth and Coleridge poetry. Also our activity based on poetry
Fist we walked long path and we were watching all nature of beauty and clicked many pictures after than we reached one place on there place we gad wanted food our and start our activity. Meghama'am and prakrutima'am also help us and they were give task based on writing. I wrote one poetry based on nature and also all students listened poetry .this task our first task after than we were going to lack ane than we cliked many pics and ma'am gave one more task they gave one page we had to write based On our life goal based on ikigai book.
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Here we had lunch and did two activitie.
Thank you
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