English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830

J.R. Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896050
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

On its first appearance English Poetry of the Romantic Period was widely praised as on of the best introductions to the subject. This edition includes updated material in the light of recent work in Romanticism and Romantic poetry. The book discusses the concerns that linked the Romantic poets, from their responses to the political and social upheavals around them to their interest in the poet's visionary and prophetic role. It includes helpful and authoritative discussions of figures such as Blake, Clare, Coleridge, Crabbe, Keats, Scott, Shelley and Wordsworth.

Chapter 1
The Poet

Prophecy

Thomas Gray's The Bard was published in 1757. It was founded, according to the Advertisement,

on a Tradition current in Wales, that EDWARD the First, when he completed the conquest of that country, ordered all the Bards, that fell into his hands, to be put to death.

Presumably this was because poets were capable of encouraging a spirit of national resistance to tyrants: the poem is a political statement of the strongest kind. In this case the Bard is portrayed in the Welsh landscape, blown by the wind, denouncing the conqueror and frightening the bravest of his soldiers:

'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
'Confusion on thy banners wait,
'Tho' fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing
'They mock the air with idle state . . .'
Such were the sounds, that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array.
Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance:
'To arms!' cried Mortimer, and couch'd his quiv'ring lance.

(II. 1-4, 9-14)

This is a deliberate tour de force, a dramatic encounter between a single poet and a vast army, between a doomed, powerless figure and the legendary medieval warrior-heroes; it is an extraordinary feat of imaginative reconstruction on Gray's part, which involved a radical rediscovery of the spectacular figure of the inspired poet and a sympathetic awareness of the sublime and savage landscape. Both Bard and landscape stand inviolable: the Bard in his integrity, the landscape in its sublimity, together defy the conqueror to do his worst, and the foretelling of history which follows makes it clear that the Welsh nation will survive, to emerge again triumphantly in the figure of Henry Tudor. This fore-knowledge makes the triumph of Edward I seem empty as well as cruel, and adds more force to the portrayal of the Bard as the poet of defiance, right, and truth. He, and the landscape in which he stands, are emblematic of inspired and justified anger:

On a rock whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
(Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air)
And with a Master's hand, and Prophet's fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.
'Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave,
'Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
'O'er thee oh King! their hundred arms they wave,
'Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe . . .'

(II. 15-26)

According to Gray's note, this portrayal was taken from 'a well-known picture of Raphael, representing the Supreme Being in the vision of Ezekiel'. The occurrence of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel here suggests that Gray owed a debt to a long-standing prophetic idea, to the tradition of the inspired, nationally-conscious prophet-poet: he was inspired to complete the poem by the visit to Cambridge of a blind Welsh harper, Parry who was a living example of the traditional Celtic bard. As a blind instrumentalist, Parry was the living successor of the ancient poets and prophets, in a line which went back to Homer and Teiresias; the remembrance of their greatness had been a comfort to Milton when confronting his own blindness, mindful of

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineas, prophets old:

(Paradise Lost, III. 35-36)

and as John Dixon Hunt has pointed out, Gray called The Bard 'the British Ode' (British in the sense that it was concerned with the history and development of Britain, and not just of England).¹ As the many paintings of the subject indicate, it was a powerful localizing of an ancient tradition, and it became a great encouragement to the Romantic poets in the development of the bardic or prophetic strain in their poetry and of national consciousness. John Martin painted the Bard, looking down upon the tiny armies below, thus producing an image of the superior poet-figure even in defeat; and the image lingered on in Blake. According to Charles Lamb:

he has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon . . . and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo but not better, as they had precisely the same retrovisions and prophetic visions. . .²

Gray's image indicated that the prophetic tradition could become a British tradition, in response to the stirring times and in the figures of inspired poets, who saw their role as responding to events with the same kind of uncompromising integrity as the defiant figure on Snowdon.

Prophecy and imagination

Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

(Ezekiel 1.1)

It may seem strange to introduce a study of the Romantic imagination with a quotation from the Old Testament, but it is not entirely random: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge knew the first chapter of Ezekiel well, and quoted from it; and, as we have seen, Gray's The Bard contains a portrait based on Raphael's picture of Ezekiel's vision. Ezekiel was traditionally thought of as the most imaginative of the major prophets, and in his opening verse he is a prototype of the Romantic poet as visionary. He carefully records both time (the thirtieth year, the fourth month, the fifth day) and place (by the river of Chebar) and circumstance (among the captives) before announcing that 'the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God'. The pattern is one that is common in Romantic poetry: the visionary moment is preceded by a careful note of time, and place, and circumstance. In The Prelude, for instance, the boat-stealing experience is preceded (in the 1805 text) by information that the young Wordsworth was at Patterdale, a schoolboy staying the night on his way home for the holidays; the so-called 'dedication' passage in Book IV comes on the way home after a dance; and the great apostrophe to imagination itself comes after a confused and disappointing moment in the Alps. Similarly, the fine sublimities of 'Tintern Abbey' are given the circumstantial and almost pedantically accurate title, 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13 1798'. The vision is associated with the specific moment; more important, it indicates the ever-present possibility of vision. When Blake painted his water-colour, Ezekiel's Wheels, he drew Ezekiel lying, not beside the river but half in it, emerging from the water which is, for Blake, the symbol for materialism; a figure totally immersed in 'the sea of time and space' is Newton, whose understanding of the world Blake deplored because it was, in his view, 'single vision' - that is, scientific and empirical, bound by material evidence. Blake, who had dined with Isaiah and Ezekiel, knew differently.

The ability of the Romantic poet to use his imagination in such a way is a fundamental feature of his art: it enables him to transform his world and to escape from it. The restrictions of his day-to-day existence can vanish as he either exercises a power over the world, or enters a world of his own: in the latter case Keats, in the 'Ode to a Nightingale', can fly away with the bird 'on the viewless wings of Poesy' into a dark, sweet-smelling world of beauty and immortality, through which he follows the nightingale's voice back in time and even beyond time, into a land where the song

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

(II. 69-70)

Once this possibility is recognized, as the Romantic poets so clearly do, the imagination enjoys a creative freedom which it consciously seeks to exploit, either for the revelation of spiritual truth, or for political change, or purely for excitement and wonder, for the enriching of life by the extraordinary, the marvellous, or the sinister. This creativity of the imagination is God-like, in that its work parallels that of God in creation. 'For Blake', wrote C. M. Bowra, 'the imagination is nothing less than God as He operates in the human soul.'³ And, as Bowra points out, Coleridge sees the parallel too: 'The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.'⁴ The word 'imagination' is sometimes written thus, in capitals, to emphasize its importance, as Blake, for instance, writes in a letter (to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799): 'I know that This World Is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision.' The passage is notable for its emphasis on the importance, not just of the imagination, but of the individual use of it:

I see Everything I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.⁵

By the last sentence, Blake was suggesting something which is more important to the visionary than the Keatsian escape, and that is the domination of the external world by the imagination. The discussion of the miser and of the green tree is an example of the way in which Blake saw the apprehension of the external world as shaped by the internal mind. Wordsworth saw the relationship between the mind and the external world as one of joyous harmony, in which the world influenced the poet's mind, and his mind responded to provide a reciprocal influence on his apprehension of the world. Such ideas about the mind mark a major transition from the eighteenth-century philosophies of the mind, principally those of Locke and Hartley, in which the mind was thought of as the recorder of sense impressions. In Hartley's 'Theory of Association', for instance, the impressions were placed upon the receiving mind, usually by the eye, and they remained there to combine with other impressions, building up from simple ideas to complex ones. Coleridge (who had at one stage been very impressed by this theory, and had called his son Hartley) attacked this view in Biographia Literaria (1817) on two grounds: that it did not allow free will (since all actions were determined by the accumulation of sense impressions), and that it could give no idea of God, since the reliance on the information of the senses precluded any speculation as to the cause of those impressions. As a counter to Hartley's theory, Coleridge proposed his own scheme of mental operation, which involved a division of the faculties into three: fancy, the primary imagination, and the secondary imagination. Some critics have questioned the validity of this,⁶ but for most readers of Romantic poetry the distinction between fancy and imagination corresponds to something which is quite easily recognizable, the operation of the mind at different levels of inspiration and achievement. Indeed, Coleridge claimed that his discovery was itself based upon experience, in his case an early reading of Wordsworth's 1793 poem, Descriptive Sketches.⁷ He describes how he became convinced

that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at furthest the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.⁸

As this passage indicates, fancy and imagination had been generally thought of as synonymous, in Dr Johnson's dictionary for example, and in Blake's letter to Dr Trusler quoted above, which continues: 'This World is all One continued Vision o...