THE ROMANTIC PERIOD: ITS HISTORICAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL

FRAMEWORK
Historians of English literature have traditionally given the name of “Romantic
period” to the span between the year 1798, in which William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, and 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died,
though according to others, it was the passage of the first Reform Bill that marked the end
of the period and therefore the beginning of the Victorian period, or according to some
critics, when Byron died in 1824. By the early 1830s all the Romantic writers had died,
with the exception of Wordsworth. However, no writer of the time thought of himself as a
“Romantic”, as the word was only applied to the period for the first time half a century
later by Victorian literary critics, who envisaged the Romantics as admirers of Medieval
romances, full of adventure and fantasy. Contemporary critics used to treat the authors of
the time as independent individuals, or grouped them into a number of separate schools
such as the “Lake School” (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey), the “Cockney
School” (Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt and John Keats) and the “Satanic School” (Lord
Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley). What all writers and thinkers of the age agreed on was
that this was a time of promise, a renewal of the world, a time of political and social
revolution, of agitation: the dawn of a new era.
The American, French and Industrial revolutions were the first evident signs that
the world was changing dramatically. And the French Revolution, in its idealistic early
stages, involved breaking out of the restrictive patterns of the past. The two generations
of English Romantic poets were each affected by it.
One of the many consequences of this new conception of life was the poets’ urge
to leave the contaminated city, a trend that favoured their interest in nature. Shelley
remarked, “Hell is a city much like London”. Wordsworth and Coleridge retreated to
the English Lakes. In his visions William Blake spoke of the need for a regenerated city.
The city was also a synonym of many of the social evils of the time: slave trade, the ill
treatment of the poor, and a new and a growing threat: industrialization. It is hardly
surprising that the Romantic poets turned to nature. For the Augustans, nature and man
were seen as allies working together productively, reflecting good government and a
benevolent Creator. However, the Romantics leaned towards a more “wild” vision of
nature, independent from man.
The Romantic contemplates nature, both the natural world around him and his
own inner nature. There are certain aspects of each which he is particularly concerned to
explore. There is an evolution in the English writer’s mind from an admiration of
ordered, cultivated nature of the Augustan period towards the worship of the wild, an
untamed mountainous nature of the Romantic period. An influential work in this context
is A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1756) by Edmund Burke (1729-97). For Burke the “beautiful” is
characterized by smallness, order and what might be called prettiness; the “sublime”, on
the other hand, is associated with the gigantic, the vague, the incomprehensible, and it is
to the sublime in nature that the Romantics are most powerfully attracted.
Critics believe there were two chronological generations of English poets: the
first generation, represented by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and the
second generation, represented by Byron, Shelley and Keats. The poets of the first
generation were young men when the French Revolution took place and were therefore
fired with revolutionary ideas. They were eventually disappointed due to the violent
course that it took (The Terror, Napoleon) and moved towards conservatism. They
considered themselves privileged to have experienced its idealistic ideas in their youth.
In his autobiographical The Prelude Wordsworth nostalgically remembers those days of
idealism and hope: “France standing on the top of golden hours / And human nature
seeming born again”. The second generation of poets grew up in a society which was
repressive towards freedom, revolution or an invasion. They exiled themselves from a
corseted England and travelled extensively in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean.
They “discovered” the freedom of its peoples and wrote generously and appraisingly
about them (Greece, Italy, Spain, etc.).

In the second generation of Romantic poets we find that that they had grown up
in a society dominated by the repression of a series of Tory governments apprehensive
that every request for freedom might open a Pandora’s box of revolution. To this was
added the idea of a threat of an invasion that never came. This second generation hence
turned away from England to the warmer and more generous climate of the
Mediterranean. Keats did not travel south, but responded to the beauty of mythological
Greece. Byron saw nothing but oppression and hypocrisy in English society and headed
for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Shelley also left England for Italy, and never
returned. Their search for new expatriate lives in southern lands was like an attempt to
“anglicize” the un-English Mediterranean. Greek art, culture, Italy and its art, and also
Spain, were “explained” to English readers through their poetry.

The relevance and literary quality of the second generation of Romantic poets
has diminished the importance of other very popular poets at the time such as George
Crabbe and John Clare. Crabbe, a parish priest, was Jane Austen’s favourite poet and
according to her biographers, she would sometimes say “in jest” that if ever she married
at all, “she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe”. Clare, a farmer and therefore “a natural
poet”, a “thresher poet” (i.e., a self-didactic poet living in the countryside), gained some
popular success with his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820). Alas, he spent most of
his mature life in a lunatic asylum and in his madness one of his repeated delusions was
that he was Byron.

During this short period of barely thirty-five years, English society experienced a
drastic change from being a predominantly agricultural society (concentrated mainly in the
landholding aristocracy) to a modern industrial nation (where serious clashes between a
new class of large-scale employers and an increasingly restive working class became more
and more frequent). The American Revolution (1775–1783), soon followed by the much
more radical French Revolution (1789-1799), was the first sign of a society that was being
radically transformed. Soon these revolutions were followed by the Industrial Revolution,
based on a shift in the methods of manufacturing employed as a result of James Watt’s
invention of power-driven machinery to replace hand labour. Traditional rural England
became an industrialised England. This revolution gave rise to the birth of new social and
political classes, a fact that led to the division of the population in what Benjamin Disraeli
later called the “Two Nations”, the two classes of capital (the large owners or traders) and
labour (the workers), that is, the rich and the poor. Shelley was the first writer to dedicate
poems to the working class, the most famous of which are “A Song: Men of England” and
“England in 1813”. Women, another deprived “social” class, virtually devoid of any rights
and widely regarded as inferior to men, had an eloquent defender in Mary Wollstonecraft,
who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a milestone in feminist literature.
She asserted that women possess equal intellectual capacity as men and therefore deserved
greater rights.
The first stages of the French Revolution (that is, the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the storming of the Bastille) won the enthusiasm of the majority of the English
liberals, intellectuals, writers and artists. Radical social thinking was stimulated by the
French Revolution, to the extent of influencing relevant works such as Tom Paine's Rights
of Man (1791-92) or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Writers such as Wordsworth or Shelley, to
name but a few, were more influenced by William Godwin's Inquiry Concerning Political
Justice (1793), in which its author foretold a society where property would be equally
distributed and governments would finally disappear. With the exception of Edmund
Burke, who wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) attacking the French
Revolution and its message, all leading British writers -Robert Burns, Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, Wollstonecraft- devotedly supported it. As the French Revolution took
a violent and grim course (especially after the massacre of the French nobility and the
royal family from 1792, the massive guillotining under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and
the rise of Napoleon as dictator and emperor of France, a declared enemy of Britain), the
English sympathy for the movement faded away. But even so, the younger generation of
Romantic writers (such as Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley or Byron) insisted on defending its
original spirit.
THE LITERARY AESTHETICS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
The Romantic period is a complex and multifarious literary, artistic and cultural
phenomenon, especially as far as poetry is concerned. With Romanticism, Europe saw
the end of the dominance of the Renaissance tradition, thus opening the gates to modern
thought. And the gates from which the Romantic flow flooded Europe and Britain in
particular could be summarized in the following coexisting trends:
a) The English Romantics tended to see themselves as isolated from and in opposition
to their society. They tended to take upon themselves the heroic task of reforming
everything. They particularly wished to reform the world of art, rebelling against what
they saw as the dull formality of 18 th century Neo-classicism in the name of the
liberation of individual poetic genius. The solitary and miscomprehended poet becomes
the sole arbiter of artistic rules and he has generally an urge to be exploratory. The artist
sees himself not as a craftsman but as a hero, a Promethean figure prepared to rival and
defy God himself.
b) The Romantic period saw the fragmentation of consciousness away from the cultural
authority of classical Rome. One result was the rediscovery of local cultures and a
flowering of vernacular literatures. The literature of the common people, where the
classics had had little influence, ballads and folk-songs, were now collected and
compiled and imitated. This explains the popularity of Walter Scott as a poet. (Although
the younger poets would later declare their admiration for the Hellenic world, art,
literature, political thought, etc.).

c) Another trend was to look back in time, to medieval aesthetics, as in the vogue for the
“Gothic”.

d) Poets could turn to other non-classical traditions such as the biblical ones, as Blake
did.
e) The Romantic period could be explained as a dramatic shift in religious ideas. This is
the first period in English literature where the answers to man’s troubles and
metaphysical reasoning were not looked for in the Church and her teachings or in
Christianity. Influenced by writers of the French Enlightenment such as Voltaire and
other contemporaries of his, a streak of rationalistic atheism is perceivable in the
English Romantics. Although the most radical, instead of being attracted to heaven by
Christianity, celebrated the glorious excesses of hell, the majority of them preferred to
draw on other traditions, particularly Platonism and Neo-Platonism and various forms
of dissenting Christianity, promoting a personal search for the spiritual, and many of
their poems are built around this search. For the search of spiritual truth, the Romantics
resorted to faculties previously discredited by rationalism: feelings and the imagination.
The imagination had not only the capacity for creativity; it also became a method of
apprehending and communicating truth. Imagination, the peculiar gift of the poet, was
now enlisted as man’s most important endeavour.

f) The poet was no longer a man of letters, but an artist, not always understood by
society and very rarely encouraged by it. (In fact, with the exception of Byron and Scott,
very few poets of the time were commercial successes or easily accepted by the
establishment). Their condition as misfits and sensitive poets made them easy prey to
suicide, depression and madness. The early deaths of the poets of the second generation
–Keats of TB, Shelley drowned and Byron of a fever– and Coleridge’s depression and
Clare’s madness helped to build this sense of social despair and tragic fate of the
Romantics which contributed to their legend.

g) Another typical theme of Romantic poetry was the introduction of mystery, magic,
superstition, demonology and occult powers. Such poems are usually set in the distant past
or in faraway places, or both: exotic places such as the Middle Ages and the Orient. The
world of dreams and nightmares is a frequent mode of allowing the poet to visit unknown
lands (most of the time either places in their imagination or exotic places) and to reach
unprecedented experiences (for some writers such as Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey,
the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater, with the help of their opium addiction).

h) The Hellenistic world was admired, as ancient Greece was considered to be the
epitome of an ideal society, where art and democracy had found its highest and most
perfect shape in Antiquity, especially for the second generation of Romantic poets.

i) Spain, as a newly-discovered land (it had been kept apart from the fashionable and
educational Grand Tour of the 18th century), thanks to the British participation against
the invading French armies in the Peninsular War (1807-14) was perceived as a land
immersed in a struggle for independence from Napoleon and for freedom from
despotism, a fact that assured the sympathy of the Romantic poets.

POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

An introduction to the topic of English Romantic poetry would have to start with a
description of the historical context in which the Romantic movement is inserted,
emphasizing the fact that it was a cultural European phenomenon that brought major
changes in philosophy, politics, religion, as well as in the arts of literature, painting and
music, that it was a reaction against the rationalism of the 18 th century (that is, a reaction
against the view of the world dominated by science), that it is against the emphasis of
the “reason” and the “common sense” that had ruled the preceding period and against
the previous Neo-classical theory, which insisted on the idea that poetry should be an
imitation of human life and nature. Romanticism brought about the spontaneous
awakening of feelings and sensations. The poet was an individual being, sometimes a
solitary person, who described in his poems his own imaginative world, his own deeper
feelings, his struggle for freedom. On top of that, he considered himself a God-chosen
privileged person, a prophet whose mission was to serve as a visionary spokesman of the
Western civilization and a declared worshipper of nature and its sudden changes, which
usually went hand in hand with his own cyclothymic changes of mood. He chanted any
type of bucolic life and the power of nature, the spontaneity of the illiterate, the children,
the peasants, etc., that is, the uncontaminated sectors of the society of the time, and praised
the powerful spirit of freedom of those who suffered imprisonment, persecution, tramps,
gypsies, rebels without a cause, nonconformists, iconoclasts and those fictional or real
characters that opposed the subduing power of the status quo: Doctor Faustus, Cain, Satan,
Prometheus, Frankenstein, Ambrosio, Don Juan, etc.
Wordsworth undertook to justify this new era of poetry by a critical manifesto or
statement of poetic principles in the form of an extended Preface to the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads in 1800, which he enlarged still further in 1802. He introduced and
explained the Romantic aesthetics by opposing it to the literary tradition of the “ancient
regime”. In contrast to neoclassic theory (which asserted that poetry was an imitation of
human life and nature), Romantic poetry is considered to be “the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”. The poet is an individual -often solitary- author who presents his poem
as his own imaginative vision. Therefore the Romantic poet expresses his individual own
mind, imagination and emotion. Besides, the poet considers himself “a chosen one” or “the
bard”, that is, a poet-prophet figure and a visionary spokesman of western civilization. The
emphasis in this period is set on the free activity of the poet’s imagination, instinct and
intuition, the feelings of the heart, in contrast to the purely logical faculty of the head that
dominated in previous literary periods.
“MASCULINE” AND “FEMININE” ROMANTICISM

Up to not long ago the Romantic canon revolved almost exclusively around
men’s poetry: the construction of British Romanticism has been almost exclusively
based on the writings of six male poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley
and Keats, all of them almost exclusively poets (with the exception of Coleridge), or at
least better known as such. However, let it be known for the record that currently the
Feminist critical approach has demonstrated the parallel “Romantic” trend that women
writers constructed to that of the male writers of the time. This is what they call
“Feminine Romanticism”. Indeed, even if considered from a mere statistical point of
view, we should take into consideration that at least half of the literary production in
England during the 1780-1830 period was written by women writers. There were over
200 publishing women poets and as many women novelists and considerable
differences between men and women Romantics can be easily perceived. This
alternative Romantic poetry written by uncanonised women poets is characterized by
the following key features:
 - Women writers tended to celebrate, not the achievements of the imagination, nor
the overflow of powerful feelings like their male counterparts, but rather the
workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated in the female as well as in the
male body, in itself a revolutionary approach.
- They also insisted on the equality of women and men and insisted on the
primacy of the family or the community and their attendant practical
responsibilities.
- They grounded their notion of community on a cooperative rather than
possessive interaction with Nature which was considered as a female friend or
sister.
- They promoted a politics of gradual rather than violent social change.
- Women writers tended to celebrate the workings of rational minds
- They showed a special interest in the study and exultation of the female and the
male body.
- They genuinely believed in equality of men and women.
- The primacy of the family, the community and their attendant practical
responsibilities was of paramount importance for them.
Another key issue to take into account is the relation of gender to genre in the
Romantic period. Some scholars have confronted the tyranny of the six canonical
Romantic poets by acknowledging the huge presence of women poets. The so called
“feminization of the discourse” affected both the novel and poetry. The fact that women
had not had easy access to education meant that they tended to confine their literary
production to the more lowbrow genre of the novel of feminine romance and Gothic
novels, whereas men concentrated on a highbrow type of philosophical novel.
As far as poetry was concerned, men (with the exception of the “thresher”
poets), due to their higher educational achievements, were more familiar with Greek and
Latin literary genres and could therefore devote their efforts to the highest poetic forms
such as epics (Jerusalem, The Prelude, Don Juan, Hyperion), heroic verse tragedies
(Prometheus Unbound, Manfred), elegies (Adonais) or odal hymns (Ode to the West
Wind, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Dejection: An Ode; Tintern Abbey), whereas the leading
women poets such as Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, Mary Tighe, Mary Robinson,
Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Letitia Landon or Jane Taylor, etc (heiresses of
the “Blue Stockings”,1 as they were derogatively called by the leading male poets of the
time) were mostly relegated to simple verse forms such as Spenserian romances, songs
and sonnets, odes, ballads, shorter verse narratives, “occasional verse” and nursery
rhymes. Who does not know or has not recited Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little
star”?

1
Bluestocking \BLOO-stok-ing\, noun:
1. a woman with considerable scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability or interest.
2. a member of a mid-18th-century London literary circle: Lady Montagu was a celebrated bluestocking.
...if you rolled the whole group into one girl, she would be what Norine said — a rich, assured, beautiful
bluestocking.
-- Mary McCarthy, The Group, 1963
She reads such deep books—all about facts and figures: she'll be quite a blue-stocking by and by.
-- Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 1864-1866
Bluestocking originally referred to cheap blue socks worn by men, in contrast to fine white silk stockings.
In the mid-1700s, these blue socks became associated with intellectuals who attended salons where
female intellectuals were highly valued. Eventually bluestockings came to be a pejorative term for
intellectual women, though it started out as a positive or neutral term.
 The writing of poetry thus became in theory a masculine occupation, and with
the odd exception, one associated especially with the aristocratic or leisured classes.
And on top of that, the male poets even self-appointed themselves as spiritual leaders of
their society. Byron adopted the persona of the “poet-statesman”, Shelley claimed that
poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, Keats aspired to becoming a
“Man of Achievement” through his poetry. The other tradition of poetic performance
appropriated by the male Romantic poets, led by Blake, was that of poet-priest, the
inheritor and transmitter of a Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition originating in the Bible
and passed on in England by Milton.