The Romantic Poetry Handbook

Michael O'Neill, Madeleine Callaghan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781118308721, 9781118308738
• eBook ISBN: 9781118308714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An absorbing survey of poetry written in one of the most revolutionary eras in the history of British literature

This comprehensive survey of British Romantic poetry explores the work of six poets whose names are most closely associated with the Romantic era—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, and Shelley—as well as works by other significant but less widely studied poets such as Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Along with its exceptional coverage, the volume is alert to relevant contexts, and opens up ways of understanding Romantic poetry.

The Romantic Poetry Handbook encompasses the entire breadth of the Romantic Movement, beginning with Anna Laetitia Barbauld and running through to Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Clare. In its central section 'Readings' it explores tensions, change, and continuity within the Romantic Movement, and examines a wide range of individual poems and poets through sensitive, attentive and accessible analyses. In addition, the authors provide a full introduction, a detailed historical and cultural timeline, biographies of the poets whose works are featured in the "Readings" section, and a helpful guide to further reading.

The Romantic Poetry Handbook is an ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate study of British Romantic poetry. It also will appeal to every reader with an interest in the Romantics and in poetry generally. 

Part 1
Introduction

The Romantic Poetry Handbook seeks to enhance an understanding and appreciation of British Romantic poetry. Its intended audience is readers at all levels of familiarity with the work that it addresses. It takes its cue from Coleridge’s comment in Biographia Literaria that ‘A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth’.¹ Coleridge does not finally outlaw ‘truth’, but he reminds us that poetry involves play, aesthetic delight, miracles of rare devices, ‘pleasure’. The word catches the professional literary critic off guard, with its seeming suggestion of something amoral, frivolous, irresponsible. Yet Coleridge invites reflection on the process and upshot of reading poems rather than, say, scientific papers. Certainly, the boldness of his investment in ‘pleasure’ – even when that pleasure takes the form of responding to the representation of difficult, painful or sorrowful experience – is one we take to be a clarion‐call for critical practice at a time when the word ‘pleasure’ is almost transgressively non‐utilitarian. Put simply, then, the book’s ‘immediate object’ is to convey the two authors’ enjoyment of Romantic poetry.

Jerome J. McGann argues that ‘The Romantic – prototypically Coleridgean – concept of poetic pleasure is a philosophic category of human Being’, claiming that ‘Though a subjective experience’ such pleasure ‘is metaphysically transcendent’. There is a link in Coleridge between the aesthetic and the metaphysical, but it is not our purpose to enlist Romantic poetry in support of the ‘transcendent Form of Being’ that McGann half‐stigmatizes.² Our purpose is simpler, to read the poetry as poetry and not another thing. As McGann’s work shows, the idea of ‘Romantic poetry’ is the subject of critical critique in recent decades. Much work has questioned assumptions underpinning the category of ‘Romantic poetry’. The current volume responds to the stimulating provocation supplied by much of this work, often associated with critics writing from a new historicist perspective, but it owes its existence to a belief in the arresting achievement of poets writing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and, principally, the first three of the nineteenth century, though beyond 1830 as well. Readings of a range of poems provide a concerted attempt to explore, illuminate, and define the nature of that achievement. At the outset, we would highlight, among the many pointers towards what makes Romantic poets original and significant, Wordsworth’s assertion in his Note to ‘The Thorn’ that ‘the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings’.³

Definitions

The idea of the ‘Romantic’ is entangled with seemingly endless problems of definition. When did British Romanticism begin? What, if any, are its essential characteristics? Is it merely a retrospective construction that bears witness to our need for an order to be imposed upon the flux and chaos of literary history? We acknowledge, in Stuart Curran’s words, that it is ‘possible that we are holding up a mirror to ourselves and calling the reflection Romanticism’.⁴ But we also note the contemporary awareness which Shelley proclaims in A Defence of Poetry of living through ‘a memorable age in intellectual [and poetic] achievements’.⁵ We concede that not every poet in the period betrays characteristics that can be termed ‘Romantic’ and that it is easy to overlook figures who don’t neatly fit or who challenge subsequent categorizations: the belated admission of Byron, the poet who felt that he and his contemporaries were ‘upon the wrong revolutionary poetical system’, into the canon of the major Romantics proves the point.⁶ We allow for possibly problematic overlaps and gaps between ‘Romantic poetry’ and ‘Romantic‐period poetry’, and we have responded enthusiastically to the expansion of the canon undertaken in work on Romantic poetry in recent decades.

Accounts of the ‘Romantic’ that overlook the claims on our attention of writers who fail to fit a schematic critical version can be unnecessarily exclusive, and our readings indicate a wish to break away from fixation on the work of a few major writers. We by no means abandon the idea of literary or aesthetic merit, but we allow it to be explored and tested in the way that it is explored and tested by poets of the period. Our understanding of Romantic poetry has benefited from the work of those many critics and scholars who have made it possible and necessary to enlarge the number of poets writing in the period on whom critical attention can and should be brought. We acknowledge that challenges to a particular model of Romantic poetry mean that René Wellek’s pithy formulation of Romanticism (first published in 1949) as ‘imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style’ is under assault.⁷

And yet those ideas named by Wellek still hold a central role in thinking about Romantic poetry. Romantic poetry prizes the imagination, praises nature, deploys symbol, and reformulates myth. The prizing of the imagination found in the poetry and poetics of the period may not be to everyone’s taste; it doesn’t mean that it isn’t present. In addition, Romantic poetry often contains a powerful capacity for self‐critique. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan imagines a recreation of vision, but it does so in a spirit of conditionality. Wordsworth sees nature as a ministering force that ‘never did betray / The heart that loved her’ (123–4), yet earlier in the same poem, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, he worries whether trust in the gifts of insight and memory bequeathed by natural scenes ‘Be but a vain belief’ (50). Poets may reach for the image that embodies symbolic resolution of tensions. Yet often symbolic resolutions in Romantic poetry invite and seem aware of deconstructive energies; they participate in the dialogic instinct present in philosophers as diverse as Plato and Hume, whose influence on Romantic poetry lies more in their drive to present their thought through dramatic means than in their supposedly paraphrasable positions. In its dealings with analytical thought, Romantic poetry shapes procedures that put into the foreground the value of imaginative thinking and experiencing as ongoing actions of consciousness. One can speak of Adonais as showing the influence on Shelley of Platonic conceptions and imagery, yet to describe it as a poem written by a Platonist, someone who adopts fully a supposedly Platonic world‐view, ignores its self‐shaped existence as a drama of feeling and thought. Comparable energies are operative in the reworking of myth in Romantic poetry. The Romantics remake traditional myth, as in Keats’s Endymion, in ways that serve less to consolidate the truth of a new story than to remind us that all human stories can be endlessly reinterpreted. And yet this two‐sidedness does not mean that imagination, nature, symbol, and myth are not crucially important in the work of Romantic poetry.

Certainly doubleness and doubt haunt and energize Romantic poetry,⁸ and the imps that bedevil literary history mockingly disrupt any attempt to fix a point of origin: 1784, with Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets? 1786, with Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect? 1789, with Blake’s Songs of Innocence? 1798, with Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads?⁹ But the fact that there are multiple claimants for a point of origin does not invalidate the sense that something new has come into being. Our solution is to accommodate all four writers as occupying the field of the Romantic, to see Smith and Burns as participating in a process of adumbration of, approach to, and involvement in the Romantic, while Blake and Wordsworth are claimed – to the degree that comparative word‐length involves an implicit claim about significance – as figures at the heart of a process that then runs its generational course through to the later asylum poems of John Clare. Chronological messiness and complications are no reason to invalidate the emergence of a force and energy into literary history that we may justifiably call ‘Romantic’. We recognize the force of Seamus Perry’s point that, unless we think about the various functions that the word ‘Romantic’ has been made to perform, we risk ‘covert prescriptiveness’, but like him we see the word as serving an ‘organising’ function, allowing us to adopt ‘a way of learning about’ the particulars of Romantic poetry.¹⁰

Thought, Feeling, History

To return to our earlier quotation from Wordsworth, Romantic poetry gives prominence to ‘passion’: feeling at its most intense. But it is also often ‘the history or science of feelings’, less a licensed outpouring than a troubled exploration. T. S. Eliot contended that in and around the Romantic period poets ‘thought and felt by fits, unbal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Timeline of the Late Eighteenth Century and Romantic Period
• Part 3: Biographies
• Part 4: Readings
• Part 5: Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement