Q.1. Write a note on the Romantic Revival in English literature of the early nineteenth century. What are the characteristic features of Romantic literature?
Ans. It is often asserted that the Romantic movement in English literature, starting in the last decade of the eighteenth century, was the immediate outcome of the French Revolution in 1789. But this is oversimplifying a complex phenomenon. In fact, the French Revolution, like the Romantic revival, was another manifestation of the wide-moving and restless spirit of change and new creation.The French Revolution was the most striking and flamboyant manifestation of the spirit of change. But many other factors were involved in the process.Men had become restless, agitated with discontent, and were yearning for some vague and impossible ideal. They had grown sick of the conventions of the past, and pined for a larger life, fuller outlook, and greater liberty) In politics, they had grown weary of that system of class-rule and autocratic domination which perpetrated intolerable tyranny to the large masses of people.
It was in France that this new spirit first broke out. The high priest and true inaugurator of the Romantic movement was Jean Jacques Rousseau rather than Voltaire. Freshness of Nature which is the hall-marks of the true Romanticist's genius.From France, the Romantic Movement extended to Germany where it took an exclusively literary form. Goethe was undoubtedly the most towering figure among his contemporaries, (Shelley was a more typical representative of the Romantic spirit than his greater contemporary, Wordsworth. Romanticism in English literature, it may reasonably be said, was the direct and immediate outcome of the thought movement in Germany. It was deeply influenced by the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, the criticism of Herder, and the philosophy of Kant. Two of the earliest exponents of the Romantic spirit in English literature Coleridge and Scott-were both steeped in the contemporary poetry and literature of Germany. Wordsworth caught the infection from Coleridge. Shelley was also touched specially by the idealistic philosophy of Germany.
The spirit of romanticism is best defined by Pater as 'Addition of strangeness to beauty. The root and bloom of the process is to be found in a fresh, imaginative approach to Nature. In English poetry it started with the early Romantics like Blake and Burns, with the precursors like Gray, Goldsmith, Collins and Cowper contributing their talents towards the development of the new outlook to life and literature.
The salient features of romantic literature, and especially the poetry of the age, may be briefly noted down.
It is highly imaginative: Imagination is a higher creative faculty than the Augustan fancy controlled by 'judgment. It has the power to perceive novelty and strange beauty in human life and nature. The Romantics let their imagination fly over the universe in a fit of 'fine frenzy'. It discovers new beauty even in commonplace things and renders a special significance to the whole experience of living. Imagination is such an all-inclusive quality that most of the virtues of Romantic poetry may be summed up under it. Hence, the title The Romantic Imagination has sufficed for Bowra' book on select important romantic poems.
It is marked by a strong subjective passion: This is related to the first quality mentioned above. The emotion in the romantic poems is essentially personal and its lyrical sincerity touches the hearts of readers spontaneously. Whether the passion is one of joyous elation or of depression or of wonder or fear, it flows out with an abundant desire to communicate. That is what Wordsworth means by 'spontaneous overflow of powerful things'.
Love for Nature as its main source of inspiration: The strange beauties of thought and vision found in the works of the great romantics are largely due to a special intimacy with, and deeper understanding of Nature. The eighteenth-century poets looked upon nature with 'unseeing eyes': to them it was nothing but a convenient passive background against which to set off the social life of human beings. But the romantic poets discover a meaning, a mystery and a living entity in nature, which palpably reacts with human responses. The romantic poets believe that man is most himself in solitude, when he is far from the madding crowd, and alone with nature. They make original myths out of their deep rapport with Nature.
Love of liberty is another basic quality of a romantic creation: It champions not only political liberty, but also freedom from conventions, social and institutional restrictions, and all that chokes the vital energies of creative art. Shelley's lyrics and lyrical dramas, Wordsworth's sonnets and many poems of Coleridge glorify this spirit of liberty.
Freedom of poetic form, style and diction is an inevitable corollary to the foregoing point: Whereas the eighteenth-century poets were mostly confined to heroic couplets as their medium of expression, the romantics freely employ all sorts of lyric measures to give adequate vent to their thoughts and feelings. They employ quatrains, blank-verse, alexandrines, stanzas of experimental length,and whatever forms they might think as fit for their subject, whether
sonnet, or elegy, or ode. The freedom of style allows them to combine
myth, history and science in their imagery.
A marked feature of Romantic poetry is medievalism: This is in keeping with the love for the past and the mysterious which is an elementary romantic quality, and is naturally related to the imaginative outlook of romantic poets. Coleridge and Keats revive the medieval atmosphere in their poems to achieve a strange beauty and a supernatural effect. The use of ballad measures in many poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge is frankly admitted in the very title of their historical joint publication. The Lyrical Ballads.
A note of wistful melancholy, resulting in occasional escapist mood, is yet another feature of romanticism: Personal dissatisfaction with social life, love-life and professional life often made acutely sensitive romantic poets unhappy and melancholy. This has inevitably found reflection in their lyrics, Shelley in particular, and Keats, have exalted songs which are sweetest because they tell of saddest feelings. It seems that they would escape this painful world if they could for the pleasures of the world of imagination. Yet, they feel no less for this earth and for humanity. They wish the world were transformed into a blissful planet and languished to see the huge difference between their Ideal and the Reality.
(The temper of a romantic poet is one of excitement.) No matter what the power of his subject, he is carried away on the wings of imagination: his eye rolls in fine frenzy and spans from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven. He enters into the very spirit of the thing, analyses it in his own individual way and throws a flood of new light on it, calling up in our minds a train of associations, each iridescent with a glow of passion and emotion.
(The romantic manner of treatment, as distinguished from the classical, sets at defiance all the rules and conventions of art. It picks up forms according to its choice and sometimes merges into pure lyricism)Round every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, even at the risk of confusing its outline. The imagination alone 'broods over the immense abyss and makes it pregnant. The romanticist creates interest even out of nothing.
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