Introduction
Romantic poetry is divided into two generations of poets: the first and the second generation. This division into two generations corresponds both to the actual age difference between the two groups and to changes in the context where the poets wrote and in certain features of their works. The First generation is characterised by an emphasis on the self and its relationship with nature.
Romantic Poets: First Generation
The first generation is characterized by a shift in style and subject matter from the Neoclassical (who focused on reason, tradition and society). The focus of this first generation of poets was on the particular aspects of objects, people and events; incidents and situations from real life were used as the source of inspiration for the artists. Some other aspects included:
⦁ Nature was seen as a teacher and a place where the artists can look for isolation and inspiration. Poets glorified Nature and compared it to God. Being close to nature would cause intense emotion.
⦁ Feelings would be expressed by means of spontaneity and introspection. Being able to express one’s true feelings would lead the poet to a sublime state. Thus, reality and thought were subjective concepts.
⦁ Childhood was considered a time and a state of protected innocence but a time that could not be protected from the fallen world and its institutions.
⦁ Dreams were seen as a way to clarify reality.
As the poet wanted to be close to nature, life in the countryside was extremely valued for its simplicity and humble lifestyle. Two of the most famous poets from the first generation, William Woodsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in the best place in England considering the countryside: Lake District, in northern England. For this reason they are known as the Lake Poets.
Three of the most renowned poets of this first generation were:
⦁ William Blake (1757 – 1827) - Songs of Experience (1794) and Songs of Innocence (1789) were is most famous publications.
⦁ William Woodsworth (1770 – 1850) - his most famous work, The Prelude (1850), is considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.
⦁ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is his most famous work and was published in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a shared publication with Woodsworth. The poem is considered to be landmark of the Romantic Literature in England.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Blake was born in London in 1757, and this was the city where he spent most of his life. During his childhood, Blake spoke of having visions, such as seeing God put his head to the window and while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels. These visions were considered lies by his parents, who noticed he was different from the other children and did not encourage him to go to school. At the age of 10 he started taking drawing lessons. When he was fifteen, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, making plates from which pictures for books were printed. This experience would help him illustrate his own poetry later on.
In 1892 he got married to Catherine Boucher, an illiterate woman who Blake taught how to read and write. He died in 1827 and his last years were spent in great poverty. He was helped financially by a young artist, John Linnell, who also helped to create new interest in his work.
His works consisted of the following books:
All Religions Are One (1788)
America, a Prophecy (1793)
Europe, a Prophecy (1794)
For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820)
Poetical Sketches (1783)
Songs of Experience (1794)
Songs of Innocence (1789)
The Book of Ahania (1795)
The Book of Los (1795)
The First Book of Urizen (1794)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
The Song of Los (1795)
There Is No Natural Religion (1788)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
Major themes in Blake’s poetry:
⦁ Opposition: Blake’s work is set around the theme of opposition as a representative of the balance in this world, and a focus on one side over another leads to oppression and ignorance. He believed that examining ideas and objects in terms of opposites and allowing access to both sides of the scale, man would reach a true state of enlightenment rather than a repressed state where few benefit and most are held in bondage.
⦁ Oppression / Repression: Blake lived in a period of aggressive British colonialism, slavery, social casting, Revolutionary change in America and Europe, as well as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Being a member of the lower class, an uneducated artist (in the formal sense of the term, although Blake was clearly quite intelligent), and considered by many to be an inferior poet bordering madness, Blake experienced firsthand the struggles of oppression.
⦁ Innocence/ Experience: Blake constantly explored the moment of lost innocence. This repeated theme in Blake’s poetry is ideal for a combination of all the other themes so far discussed. The theme of the separation, transition, and difference between innocence and experience highlights the theory of opposition, cycling and repression.
⦁ Religion: Where Blake stood in terms of his beliefs in God is unclear. By inventing a mythology full of angels, demons, and Gods that mirror a lot of Milton’s writings, he seemed to be fascinated with religion as a literary allusion and infuriated with it as a means to suppress man’s natural desires.
⦁ Poetry/ Imagination: Blake felt poets needed to look for new ways to express their words and ideas and tried to step away from the Classic traditions of English poetry.
Romantic Poets: Second Generation
The poets of the Second generation suffered because of society because of society and its injustices, mostly because of the post-revolutionary disillusionment, violence and the threat of the Napoleonic Empire. For this reason they tried to escape from reality by travelling around the world. There was a refusal of the real world and a creation of a different world where they lived in, usually by means of drugs. They didn't want to just repeat what the romantics of the first generation were doing, but wanted to be different, and even better than them. Some of the themes addressed by the poets of the second generation included:
⦁ Interest in the history and folklore of the Middle Ages (magic and mystery)
⦁ Hellenism (Love for classical themes)
⦁ Exoticism (attraction for distant lands, usually more imaginary than real)
The three most important poets of this generation lived short but intense lives:
⦁ George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a melancholy and solitary man whose actions often defied social conventions. He was the prototype of the Romantic poet and was deeply involved with contemporary social issues. He left England and live on the continent and looked for adventure in Italy and Greece.
⦁ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. His ideas were anarchic and he was considered dangerous by the conservative society of his time. He was an individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of family, church, marriage, and the Christian faith.
⦁ John Keats (1795-1821) had a really brief life. The main theme of his poetry is the conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of beauty, imagination and eternal youth.
George Gordon Byron
George Gordon Byron, or simply Lord Byron is considered to be one of the most notorious English Poets who is still read nowadays. Born to an aristocrat family on 22 January 1788, Byron was famous for leading a life of aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumors of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. Byron's first poems were published when he was 19 and his travels began at the age of 21. He left England forever at the age of 28 and the next eight years of his life were memorable for their poetic activity, and within them almost all his main work was done. He died during the war of Greek Independence at Missolonghi, April 1824, aged 36.
His major works were:
⦁ The First Kiss of Love (1806)
⦁ Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination (1806)
⦁ To a Beautiful Quaker (1807)
⦁ The Cornelian (1807)
⦁ Lines Addressed to a Young Lady (1807)
⦁ Lachin y Garr (1807)
⦁ Epitaph to a Dog (1808)
⦁ Maid of Athens, ere we part (1810)
⦁ She Walks in Beauty (1814)
⦁ My Soul is Dark (1815)
⦁ Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan (1816)
⦁ When We Two Parted (1817)
⦁ Ode on Venice (1819)
⦁ So, we'll go no more a roving (1830)
Major themes in Byron’s poetry:
⦁ Liberty: Several of Byron’s poems, mostly those which were based on his travels, raised the problem of oppression around Europe and defended the need for liberty. He believed that liberty was a right of all human beings and thought of the denial of this liberty as one of man’s greatest failings.
⦁ Nature: Byron saw Nature as a powerful complement to human emotion and civilization and as a companion to humanity. He believed that natural beauty was preferable to human evil and to the problems that were inflicted on civilization.
⦁ Love: Throughout his life, Byron looked for the perfect object of his affections, which ended up making him a fickle and unstable lover to many women (and men).
⦁ Classical culture: Byron was a friend of the classical world who seemed to grieve what seemed to him as the decay of its cultural achievements and traditions.
⦁ Realism: Although Byron was a Romantic poet, he saw most of his best work as descriptions of reality as it existed, not how as he imagined it to be. The subjects of many of his poems come from history and personal experience.
John Keats
John Keats was born in London in 1795 and his early life was marked by a series of personal tragedies: he lost both parents before his fourteenth birthday and one of his younger brothers died in infancy. After his parents’ death, his grandmother appointed two merchants as guardians. One of them, a tea merchant took the bulk of the responsibility and was responsible for his education. In 1816, Keats became an apothecary but never practiced it as he decided to dedicate his life to poetry. In 1817, he published his first book of poems, On Solitude, which was not a great success.
In 1819, he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawn, his neighbour in Hampstead. Sometime later he began to show the first signs of tuberculosis, and after overseeing the publication of his final book of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, he left England for Italy, arriving in Naples in late 1820 and then moving on to Rome, where he died in February 1821.
His major works were:
Poetry
Poems (1817)
Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)
Prose
Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848)
Drama
King Stephen: A Dramatic Fragment (1819)
Otho The Great: A Dramatic Fragment (1819)
Major themes in Keat’s poetry:
⦁ The Inevitability of Death: Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. He believed that small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he advertised these small mortal occurrences.
⦁ The Contemplation of Beauty: Keats believed that the contemplation of beauty was a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Even though we must die one day, we can choose to spend our time alive looking at beautiful objects and landscapes.
⦁ Departures and Reveries: In many of Keats’s poems, it can be observed that the speaker departs from the real world to explore a transcendent and mythical reality. At the end of the poem, the speaker returned to his ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a new understanding.
⦁ The Five Senses and Art: Keats imagined that the five senses corresponded to and connected with various types of art. He believed that each of the five senses had to be involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, would lead to the production of art.
⦁ Music and Musicians: Music and musicians appeared throughout Keats’s work as symbols of poetry and poets. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.
⦁ Nature: Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration. Nature is not only used as a springboard from which to ponder, but also used in similes, symbols, and metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states Keats wanted to describe.
⦁ The Ancient World: Keats had an deep interest in antiquity and the ancient world. He believed that an ancient myth and antique objects had a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the temporary nature of life. Besides, Keats saw In ancient cultures the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator.
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