Development of Romanticism in Poetry

One Romanticism, different imaginations

Throughout the 19th century, the idea of poetry underwent a series of gradual transformations. Previously understood as an imitation of human nature meant to amuse or educate, poetry became an expression of the poet’s emotions, a transformation that went hand in hand with the idea that the poet’s relation to poetry should occupy a central role as opposed to that with its audience. The aim of poetry became the discovery of the inner reality of things or of what lied beneath the surface of sensorial phenomena (The Roots, Berlin). Art thus ceased to imitate what it saw and reshaped it instead. Imagination itself, the creative and original power seen as different from fantasy, acquired the ability to give the world a new order and turn chaos into symmetry and perfection. This new faith in imagination replaced the faith in reason, and it contrasted with that of the Enlightenment and 18th-century neoclassical taste. 

This trend toward internalization and imagination, which projected the poet’s feelings and emotions on the surrounding nature, made poets romantic and individualist, with a penchant for exoticism, wonder, and abnormality. To ruminate on poetry became relevant for the quest of human meaning, and as a consequence, imagination makes poetry more profound and refreshing.

Three main concepts derived from this transformation. Veracity, namely the faith in the power of the imagination to grasp the truth of things, forwarded the idea that the truth by which the romantic method worked can be reached through profound ruminations on the nature, then later infusing society with them (Emerson 26). Morality, based on the critique of society and transcendence (Macdonald),[1] according to which nature is the grammar of God (Macdonald), looking at how stars shine, the sun heats the earth, the body asks for nourishment, or the heart needs companionship, the human soul can read the component “letters” of the book of God (Emerson 62).[2]

Enlightenment made people lose contact with human faith, but by interacting with the cosmos, everyone can grasp its meaning through the universe (The Roots, Berlin). The view of the universe, whose characteristics had been explained by Newton, is not often useful to articulate the purposes within it. The imaginative truths found in it are not empirically visible or rationally explicable but share the same value. If a person does not trust his first-person experience or his more insistent considerations of the soul, how can he trust his neighbor?

Therefore, the romantics personally objected Enlightenment’s position according to which only a combined work between science and intellect can lead to the truth. In their view, only imagination can reveal fundamental human truths related to the soul and the cosmos, and there are no poets that believed in that more than Blake. His imagination was visionary. He was as esoteric in his writings as he was in life: he based his works on personified creatures that are always at war with each other. Blake’s work was appreciated by both Coleridge and Wordsworth even though he did not receive the appreciation he deserved because of his writing style, sometimes considered just absurd.

Nevertheless, many see Blake as a precursor of Freud for his thoughts on the psychology of development: he asked himself what the elements that inspired both human mind and imagination were and sought to identify the different stages of imagination while we move from childhood to adulthood. These are questions vastly treated in “Songs of Innocence” (Blake, Lynch and Stillinger 118) and “Songs of Experience” (125) seen as the primary modalities found in every person with different imaginative frameworks: the former is not aware of the evil depths of the world, as it is not able to recognize the world as a broken place. Besides innocence, imagination is filled with wonder about the world and has an inherent faith in its perceptions;[3] it is the curious and inspired aspect of a person who loves to learn for his own sake. Blake admired the innocent imagination, he thought of it as something that adults should seek to recover to avoid disillusionment and get discouraged about the world nature; it can be harmed or taken advantage of, but cynicism does not inhibit its doors of perception. The latter, instead, is aware of the reality that exists outside, it has, in its turn, the strength to identify and know that the world is broken, but it has lost the sense of wonder or excitement for new experiences.

Blake then saw these imaginative outlooks as both valuable but at the same time insufficient. For example, the innocent one can see certain honest truths that the experienced has lost sight of, but meanwhile, he is unable to address evils that caused the deterioration of the society. On the other hand, the experienced imagination can see what is wrong and process a general diagnosis but unable to do anything to eventually turn the tide because it is accustomed to the world, its mind speaks a clichéd language. So, Blake thought that to make our imagination purified and strengthened, a person had to find both voices in himself:[4] to recover that sense of wonder typical of children keeping a firm grip to the evil nature of the world, then everyone will be able to deal with it with a renewed imagination.

The concept of transcendence is firmly rooted in the person of Wordsworth (Macdonald).[5] According to him, a person, when is silent and still, can feel himself in total connection with the reality. The loss of transcendence is one of the backbones behind Wordsworth’s works (Macdonald). By focusing on the concrete, on the particular, the truth that connects everyone can be revealed. The deeper our analysis on the experience of reality will be, the more the image will be able to link us to humanity. Through “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (Wordsworth, Lynch and Stillinger 334), primarily seen as a poetic essay about Wordsworth’s romantic method, he imagines having a walk above everything, namely on a cloud, guided by the wind and looking down at daffodils, personifying the millions of people living on Earth. The natural movement of the flowers makes a juxtaposition between people’s feelings and the daffodils to observe how they move: so, the flowers are part of Nature, so do humans who are led by Nature itself, an all-one with the movements of the Earth.

Furthermore, the sea becomes a finite representation of the infinite which has endless possibilities of movement in a wide surface, while the daffodil is forced to stay there where it is without chance of movement, nevertheless within its “community” results to be happy. This observation is, for Wordsworth, a real one, not just a subjective interpretation: the daffodil is satisfied to be. Throughout the poem, he talks about sitting on the couch thinking about all this: here it is where, thanks to the romantic reverie (Emerson 40),[6] he recovers a glimmer of hope reminding himself that from above he was able to notice that, despite responsibilities and difficulties, the mind can start floating away like a cloud. Even in “Tintern Abbey”[7] (Wordsworth, Lynch and Stillinger 288) the method described in the previous poem can be found: the abandoned monastery, very evocative, a religious imagination that reminds the voices, once an integral part of that place. It is a place where Wordsworth loved to wander in, close to a river that is very significant for him. Five years have passed, relatively few but in a particular age, Wordsworth can listen again to the water coming down the mountain, nothing has changed in the meanwhile. In that place, he can look again at small houses and the imagination of rural people. However, it is not only nostalgia that arises from a beloved old place, but the shape of this place is also an integral part of his mind, and the poet now has a sort of mental material that can resurface in an unfriendly and uncomfortable context. Later, Wordsworth thinks about those moments of grave doubt in which difficulties and challenges were weighing on him; he became convinced that, in that particular moment, the imagination wanted to tell him something right related to the world. It was the reliability of the moving but stable river that declares its reality and constancy while is moving as human life does, which starts from Earth and goes back to it. A memory that, despite the years, is still vivid in our mind, can infuse a profound meaning both to our nervous system and the spirit: because, not only joy, pain or fear distinguish our memories, but they can even flow from tranquillity and peace. Getting old, then, is not a negative note. Being young and full of energy helps to live fully any experience and according to Wordsworth, neither looking back at past as something to recover nor being overwhelmed by nostalgia about it: when a person gets old, he has more extensive internal space to intensively meditate on the experiences that had an impact on him.

Wordsworth goes on in the poem imagining a soul, namely his, which has a panoramic overlook of his life, it can look at his past, his present and his future, at his relationships. It is similar to the river mentioned before that has a past, a present, and a future as well. That being said, a person can assert to have the image of God in himself and a higher principle in his own imagination. If Wordsworth can do it, through what is dictated by Nature, for example, his aim in life, so each person has this imaginative capability which allows everyone to go in his or her pure minds and see that there is a highest imagination behind the order of all things. The idea that lies behind is that everyone derives from the same or original[8] principle which gives birth to our particular imagination and it is present in the cosmos. In the last section of the poem, the specific audience of it becomes evident in the figure of his sister, Dorothy (a talented writer herself), previously only directed at the reader. Wordsworth sees in her, not only a figure to share the experiences he is living with, but even a person who can carry on the poetic work with his method.[9] What Wordsworth is trying to do is to share with Dorothy a piece of his soul, just like when a person decides to share a beloved song with a friend, with the intention of saying something about himself.[10]

Coleridge, on his part, decided to adopt a different method to reach the romantic aim: meditative poems commonly referred to as conversation poems, ruminative works in which the author shares his reflections on life interrupted by deep contemplations. In “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge, Lynch and Stillinger 477), for example, a romantic principle can be found according to which meditating on nature through acute imaginative perceptions. The mind can find poetry in everyday life to make it available for the future. The author reflects on the social trappings that makes him stir-crazy and he looks for a way to escape from them (one is the sleep). Furthermore, he seeks a person who could listen to his disconnected thoughts dictated by imagination which needs more ‘relief valves’ other than a book. Aware of his youthful frustrated desires nullified by the elders, Coleridge shifts the attention on his child, comforted by the sound of his breath: he does not want his education to be a limited and inauthentic product of the society. On the contrary, learning by nature, Coleridge hopes he will be able to read the eternal language of God, how vast his imagination can be and that his imagination can be as a wildfire spreading in the landscape with curious joy to appreciate the beauties and comforts of Nature. Besides, Coleridge hopes that the same image will be able to take him away for a moment from the necessities of life and make him discover how the moon reflects on the “silent icicles” (479, line 73).

Also, in “The rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge, Lynch and Stillinger 443), a reflection can be found on the necessity of human imagination to soak in the natural edifying effect but, at the same, it is also a rumination on the struggle to produce poetic truth. The setting made by a wedding to attend to is crucial: the Mariner has taken the guests into a hero-journey essential for the artistic maturity. After being hit by a storm, his ship goes off course, and it ends up in the equator line where one of the most famous poetic symbols appears, an albatross. It represents a sign of goodwill by the local spirit who dwells in that area, who also makes the storm to calm, but the mariner, reflexively, after having seen it, shoots at it without explanations. Instead of denouncing the fact, the crew seems to praise the Mariner and so doing, not only they make themselves accomplices, but they decide unconsciously to join their collective imaginations related to the killing (this represents how often people actively participate to the failures of persuasive leaders). While men are waiting to die in a windless sea, a ghost ship on which Death, Life, and Death are sailing arrives: Death is the fear common to everyone, but Life and Death are the fears of the romantic imagination. When imagination dies, people become unresponsive ghosts living according to someone else’s ideologies without a sense of self. Death, Life, and death then, gamble on the men’s lives, Death wins the crew while Life and Death win the Mariner. Surrounded by the crew’s accusing eyes, the Mariner falls into a depression and wishes for his death to come sooner. He is now disgusted both by himself and by slimy snakes all over the ship. However, the sun sets and the moon, rising, gives the Mariner another right perspective. In the final section of the poem, firstly, thanks to the grace of God, the Mariner can see the miracle of life in the snakes, it is a miracle of his own life and being moved by sanctifying them starts to escape from the abyss of his journey. His imagination has expanded so much to appreciate the principles of life before spurned by the killing the albatross. Later, possessed by the spirit of the journey, he leaves the ship and sees it sinking as the albatross did. Afterward, a Hermit takes his confession: the Mariner is now both sadder and wiser, sad because his imagination has been darkened to the wonder of life but wiser because knowledge brings pain, but the pain is an opportunity to see more in-depth in the miracle of life.

Coleridge, then, asks himself if the imagination can improve ourselves, whether a “childlike” (Macdonald)[11] approach similar to that of “Frost at Midnight” or a Mariner-like approach which tries to overcome his sins, is needed. How will the poetic imagination help us reach that atonement? Unlike Blake, who blindly believed in it,[12] restlessness characterized Coleridge. He did not naturally lean on it how Blake did and was constantly looking for its power and effectiveness. Coleridge thought that an act of penance was required, to be held by that glittering eye, justified by Christian allegories in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley adopts yet another perspective. He thought that poetry could conduct a real social role, contributing to foster the conditions for a better future in which virtues such as love (Macdonald)[13] and freedom could get affirmed without struggles; those were essential conditions to let imagination, thought and intellectual beauty thrive. For this reason, Shelley defines the imagination as a revolutionary activity; he confers to poetry the role to contribute to the realization of an ideal society through a revolutionary process. This process must pass through the destruction of the existent system as a preliminary condition for the beginning of a new world, based on principles such as love and freedom. The thought emerges in the last passage of “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley, Lynch and Stillinger 791) that cites: “O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (lines 69-70).

In this revolutionary process, Shelley describes the poet with two precise functions. The first function is compared to that of a prophet, as he must be able to see that ideal world that others cannot even perceive and spread this vision among the people; so doing, he would start a healthy mindset and a union of intent towards the wished direction. However, this function implies the second function conceived by Shelley, namely the role of a titan, whose effort has to be an extensive range in order to promote that necessary way of thinking for the process he wants to realize. Also, in the essay “A Defence of Poetry” (Shelley, Lynch and Stillinger 856) Shelley talks about a concept called moral imagination: he explains how few people, unlike others, can obtain a high grade of wisdom in little time, so through this imagination, these people can see the world through each other’s eyes. It is clear that each person has his point of view. Therefore, an extraordinary kind of imagination is required to observe them all; but, if anyone always had good intentions, it would not be hard for these gifted people to reach determinant and useful choices for humanity.

However, the imagination is not always brought to bear through rainbows or peaceful landscapes. There is always something mysterious and dangerous that lies behind the surface with whom Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake fought. With Keats, who will face the theme head-on, a gothic flavour becomes apparent.

Few decided to read Wordsworth’s teachings with such ardent attention as John Keats did: he reacted to his readings depicting what the imagination could be. Namely, everything that the imagination can conceive must be right, whether it existed before or not. His profession in the faith of imagination was extreme, more extreme than how much Wordsworth could ever imagine, bound as he was to the strictures of meaning provided by Nature. Probably, Keats’ faith was too strong, too ardent in his youthful passion because of his thirst for reading, not only something new, for example, Wordsworth or Coleridge but even something old, including Virgil, Tasso or Shakespeare (Bertinetti). The poet aimed to reveal the aspects of his mind, his imaginative truth directly to the reader, becoming distinctive principles of his works such as “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats, Lynch and Stillinger 927). Despite his tender age, Keats was considered one of the cornerstones of romantic poetry having moved the lyrical eye of Wordsworth’s poetry to the negative capability, namely the capability of the poet to ruminate on specific ideas without giving a final opinion,[14] making use of the ode.

When a reader approaches “Ode to a Nightingale,” he recognizes, not only Keats’ tragic life background but also painful remorse about the death of his faith towards romantic imagination. Initially, there is a description of his physical pain as well as the for his pain and the emotional turmoil throughout his life, but in the song of the Nightingale Keats recovers a bit of empathy for the pain and the poetic truth. Keats meditates on the death of his own body; he feels alienated by the true immortality promised by poetry as well as the song of a bird which usually represents immortality or afterlife, but not in this case, he accepts his mortality distancing himself from the Wordsworthian vision of positivity. “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow” (line 27) is indeed an accusation directed at the Wordsworthian faith. This accusation is first of all related to the ability of the meditation on the human sadness to bring one to goodness, consequently related to the imagination or the faith in poetry being a “deceiving elf” (line 74) which for a while sings in your ear making you feel better but the reality, thinks Keats, cannot be changed. So, which is the poetic experience that Keats would like to transmit through the nightingale, real? Visionary? A daydream? The music is no more there, and there is the idea that the bird is flying away as well as Keats’ faith in poetic imagination. According to him, this is neither a heroic defeat nor an overall defeat: his idea about the excellence of art relates to the intensity of art itself, and although he cannot find the comfort mentioned by Wordsworth, he has found one, but it is different. Although he feels broken he still can perceive the beauty of that moment, he is not sure to be either awake or asleep, but he is aware of the intensity of his pain to talk about that in poetic tones. Keats stated that in the poetry is very easy to make beautiful things or feelings sound beautiful, but if imagination could be able to make negative things like death, pain and despair sound beautiful as well, it would be a great achievement, powerfully romantic in his realization. It is clear then, with Keats, the transition from a pure romantic faith to the embracing of something more obscure.

Works cited

• Bertinetti, Paolo. English Literature. A Short History. Edited by Paolo Bertinetti. 2004
• Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Edited by Henry Hardy, 1965
• Emerson, Ralph Valdo. “Poetry and Imagination” Letters and Social Aims. James R. Osgood and Co., 1876, www.gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:pr:Z000731093:0. Last accessed 1 December 2018
• Lynch, Deidre Shauna and Stillinger, Jack. “The Romantic Period” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 10^th ed., vol. D, W. W. Norton, 2018
• Macdonald, George. A Dish of Orts. 1893. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/9393/9393-h/9393-h.htm#link2H_4_0012.  2005. Last accessed 1 December 2018
• Pascoli, Giovanni “Il fanciullino”. 1897

[1] Macdonald, George. The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture.

[2] Emerson called it “Transcendency” in his essay.

[3] Like a child is fascinated, for example, by a butterfly, his reaction is honest, without filters.

An example can be extracted from Italian literature depicting the same principle, “Il fanciullino” by Giovanni Pascoli, 1897.

[4] “The Child is father of the Man”, from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” (335 line 7): everything a person has been or done when he was a child has helped shaping both his behaviour and personality in the future.

[5] Macdonald, George. Wordsworth’s Poetry.

[6] State of daydreaming through which wandering about memories or images stuck on the mind.

[7] Diminutive commonly used for Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” Lyrical Ballads.

[8] This origin can be based on either an evolutionistic or a creationistic point of view.

[9] “When these wild ecstasies shall be matured / Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind / Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms” (line 138-140) from Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”. When the darkness will descend upon her, means Wordsworth, she will have shaped herself with some profound experiences: Wordsworth refers to a formation of identity born by the certainty of the Nature. She will have set fixed points, she will know herself so deeply that when difficulties will weigh on her se will not have to worry because her mind will be become a palace, a force of nature like a river or a mountain.

[10] Wordsworth highlights the fact that her sister and him are very similar and for that he is trying to convince her about his methods; his methods can bring him in contact with wisdom and she can as well if decides to follow them. Her life-journey will have its purposes, its disappointments, its “rivers” and its “Tintern Abbey”.

[11] See note 1.

[12] Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Lynch and Stillinger 148): supper scene with Ezekiel and Isaiah, Blake reaffirms the disruptive power of the imagination which is always been able to move mountains, but now it struggles due to the loss of capability of persuasion by people.

[13] Macdonald, George. Shelley.

[14] Comparison with Wordsworth’s habit of always giving a meaning to his poetry.