Romanticism in English poetry is a reaction against neo-classical formalism of the 18th Century. The literary ideal of 18th Century England was bound by tradition, one ruled by formal observance of ancient modes and conventions. This was the natural outcome of an aristocratic outlook on life, which tried to hold fast to tradition.
But the challenges were very much in the air. The wind of freedom began to blow across Europe, and gradually it developed into a violent revolutionary storm, culminating in the French Revolution. It was hailed by the poets with enthusiasm—”Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”, prodaimed Wordsworth.
“The rank is but the guinea’s stamp”, sang Burns. At the same time, the economic unsettlement that came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution increased the miseries of the poor and created widespread discontent. There was a visible change in popular mind.
Restlessness, a vague discontent and desire for change, a yearning for a fuller and richer life gradually permeated the minds of men. Men now wanted to go back to Nature—nature that was neglected and was conspicuous by its absence in poetry of the previous Age.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The term Romanticism is applied generally to this mood that emerged in the then European society. Freedom was its life-breath; imagination was it instrument. Its passion for freedom made it revolutionary and iconoclastic.
Romanticism disfavors the existing tendency to roam in the realm of fancy. In one sense, it may be looked upon as the apotheosis or the worship or depression of the luxury melancholy; what could not be realized in actuality was glorified in the imagination in symbolic forms. This accounts for the co-existence in Romantic poetry of the ecstasy of aspiration and the agony of despair, the yearning for an ideal and the pain of non-realisation.
The agony and yearning of the Romantic mind arose out of its sensitive response to human sufferings; its imaginary dreams and visions gave it an artistic self-sufficiency. As a reaction against the imperfections or incompleteness of the human world.
Romantic poets tried to escape into an ideal world conceived by the imagination in various forms. Wordsworth sought in the beauty and peace of Nature the deepest realisation of this soul. Coleridge valued wandering in a symbolical world formed by escaping into the medieval world linked with his one mystical imgination. Scott went back to the past in order to idealise those grand feudal virtues.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Byron proclaimed his rebellion against human institutions, and laughed in scorn at the hypocrisies of the noble class to which he himself belonged; Shelley with breathless impatience pursued a mirage which he called love through sky and ocean and earth, seeking to embody it in dazzling but fleeting imageries. Keats discovered the soul of Universal Beauty in the Truths of life and Nature, the quiet haunts of beauty of the legendary medievalism, which enraptured him. All these illustrate the rich diversities of Romantic imagination, as well as their magnificent sweep.
Romanticism of the early l9th Century England has been defined as strangeness added to beauty. It is the renaissance (re-birth) through return to the of wonder open-air Nature and investing her with a new halo.
The Romantic poets were especially gifted with two qualities,—of reception and transmutation. Their keenly sensitive mind assimilated the beauteous shapes of nature, the colourful pageantry of the medieval world, the thrilling mystery of magic and superstitions of the Middle Ages, the far-flung Suggestions of idealistic philosophy, the aesthetic heritage of ancient Greece, and the revolutionary ardour of the contemporary world Instead of the stability of fixed farms, their restless mind hovered over these idealities which were truer to them than the real world.
These went to enrich their poetry in a thousand ways; with new images full of beauty and suggestiveness, extended horizons and ethereal heights.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
In a word, Romanticism brought back into English literature something of the range and vigour that belonged to the Elizabethans. The Romantic poets diversified the lyric measures to suit a variety of emotions. These writers created the historical novel and the Imaginary Conversation (London); they extended the scope of the essay and the range of literary criticism.
Romanticism thus became a literary phenomenon in which the revolutionary spirit of man found a rich satisfaction, and discovered unexpected sources of emotional experience. And this creative spirit tried to realise imaginatively the mystery of life, the beauty of Nature, the intensity of love, the haunting spell of beauty and romance.