1.5.3.

Robert Southey (1774-1843)

Closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge is Robert Southey; and the three, on
account of their residence in the northern lake district, were referred to contemptuously as the
“Lakers” by the Scottish magazine reviews. Southey holds his place in this group more by
personal association than by his literary gifts. He was born at Bristol, in 1774; studied at
Westminster School, and at Oxford, where he found himself in perpetual conflict with the
authorities on account of his independent views. He finally left the university and joined
Coleridge in his scheme of a Pantisocracy. For more than 50 years he labored steadily at
literature, refusing to consider any other occupation.

Southey gradually surrounded himself with one of the most extensive libraries in
England, and set himself to the task of writing something every working day. The results of his
industry were one hundred and nine volumes, besides some hundred and fifty articles for the
magazines, most of which are now utterly forgotten. His most ambitious poems are Thalaba, a
tale of Arabian enchantment; The Curse of Kehama, a medley of Hindu mythology; Madoc, a
legend of a Welsh prince who discovered the Western world; and Roderick, a tale of the last of
the Goths. Southey wrote far better prose than poetry, and his admirable Life of Nelson is still
often read. Besides there are his Lives of British Admirals, his lives of Cowper and Wesley, and
his histories of Brazil and of the Peninsular War.

Southey was made Poet Laureate in 1813, and was the first to raise that office from the
low estate into which it had fallen since the death of Dryden. A few of his best known short
poems include, “The Scholar”, “Auld Cloots”, “The Well of St. Keyne”, “The Inchcape Rock”,
and “Lodore”.

1.5.4. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley was of that second generation of Romantic poets that did not live to be old and
respectable. Shelley, in many respects was a Romantic poet par excellence. His strange, and brief
life with its eccentric unworldliness, his moods of ecstasy and lagour, his swooning idealism,
combined to produce a popular image of Romanticism.

Shelley’s life continued to be dominated by his desire of a political and social reform, and
he was constantly publishing pamphlets. When he was at the university, he wrote several
extraordinary pamphlets, one such work, The Necessity of Atheism, caused him to be expelled
from Oxford. His first important poem, Queen Mab, privately published in 1813, st forth a
radical system of curing social ills by advocating the destruction of various established
institutions.

In 1814, Shelley left England for France, with Mary Godwin, daughter of William
Godwin. During their first year together, they were plagued by social ostracism and financial
difficulties. However, in 1815, Shelley’s grandfather died and left him an annual income. Laon
and Cynthna appeared in 1817, but was withdrawn and reissued the following year as The Revolt
of Islam; it is a long poem in Spenserian stanzas that tells of a revolution and illustrates the
growth of the human mind aspiring toward perfection.

Shelley composed the great body of his poetry in Italy. The Cenci, a tragedy in verse
exploring moral deformity, was published in 1819, followed by his masterpiece, Prometheus
Unbound (1820). In this lyrical drama, Shelley put forth all his passions and beliefs, which were
modeled after the ideas of Plato. Epipsychidion (1821) is a poem addressed to Emilia Viviani,
whom Shelley met in Pisa, and developed a brief but close friendship.

His great elegy, Adonais (1821), written in memory of Keats, asserts the immortality of
beauty. Hellas (1822), a lyrical drama was inspired by the Greek struggle for independence. His
other poems include, Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude (1816), it is a long poem in blank verse and
is a kind of spiritual autobiography. “Ode to the West Wind”, “To a Skylark”, “Ozymandias”,
“The Indian Serenade”, and “When the Lamp is Shattered” are his shorter poems.

Most of Shelley’s poetry reveals his philosophy, a combination of belief in the power of
human love and reason, and faith in the perfectibility and ultimate progress of man. His lyric
poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur and mastery of language. Although Matthew Arnold
labeled him an “ineffectual angel”, 20th century critics have taken Shelley seriously, recognizing
his wit, his gifts as a satirist, and his influence as a social and political thinker.
1.5.5. John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats is perhaps the greatest of the second generation Romantic poets who
blossomed early and died young. Indeed one of the most striking things about Keats is the
independence with which he worked out his poetic destiny, the austere devotion with which he
undertook his own artistic training.

Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), Keats came to know Leigh Hunt and his literary circle,
and in 1816 he gave up surgery to write poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in1817. It
included, “I Stood tip-toe Upon a Little Hill”, “Sleep and Poetry”, and the famous sonnet, “On
First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Endymion, a long poem, was published in 1818. Although faulty in structure, it is

nevertheless full of rich imagery and color. Keats returned from a walking tour in the Highlands
to find himself attacked in Blackwood’s Magazine—an article berated him for belonging to
Leigh Hunt’s “Cockney School” of poetry—and in the Quarterly Review. The critical assaults of
1818 marked a turning point in Keats’ life; he was forced to examine his work carefully, and as a
result the influence of Hunt was diminished.

With his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, Keats sailed for Italy shortly after the
publication of “Lamia”, “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, and other poems
(1820), which contains most of his important work and is probably the greatest single volume of
poetry published in England in the 19th century. He died in Rome (1821) at the age of twenty
five.

In spite of his tragically brief career, Keats is one of the most important English poets. He
is also among the most personally appealing. Noble, generous, and sympathetic, he was capable
not only of passionate love but also of warm, steadfast friendship. Keats is ranked with Shelley
and Byron, as one of the three great Romantic poets. Such poems as “Ode to a Nightingale”,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “To Autumn”, and “Ode on Melancholy” are unequaled for dignity,
melody and richness of sensuous imagery.
 Keats’ posthumous pieces include “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, in its way is an
evocation of Romantic medievalism as “The Eve of St. Agnes”. Among his sonnets, familiar
ones are, “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to be”. “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern”,
“Fancy”, and “Bards of Passion and of Mirth” are delightful short poems.

Some of Keats’ finest work is the unfinished epic Hyperion. In recent years critical
attention has focused on Keats’ philosophy, which involves not abstract thought but rather
absolute receptivity to experience. This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term “negative
capability—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought.”

1.5.6. George Gordon, Lord Byron ( 1788-1824)

Lord Byron, the third of the trio of second generation Romantic poets, was the master of
colloquial tone in verse and the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry.

His first volume, Fugitive Pieces (1806) was suppressed, revised and expanded, and later
appeared as Poems on Various Occasions in 1807. This was followed by Hours of Idleness
(1807), which provoked such severe criticism from the Edinburgh Review that Byron replied
with, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a satire in heroic couplets reminiscent of
Pope, which brought him immediate fame.

Byron left England the same year for a grand tour through Spain, Portugal, Italy and the
Balkans. He returned in 1811 with Cantos I and II of Childe Harold (1812), a melancholy,
philosophic poem in Spenserian stanzas, which made him the social lion of London. It was
followed by the verse tales, The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814),
Lara (1814), The Siege of Corinth (1816), and Parisina (1816).

In 1816, Byron left England, never to return. He passed sometime with Shelley in
Switzerland, writing Canto III of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon. Settling in Venice
(1817), Byron led for a time a life of dissipation, but produced Canto IV of Childe Harold
(1818), Beppo (1818), and Mazeppa (1819) and began Don Juan.
 Ranked with Shelley and Keats as one of the great Romantic poets, Byron became
famous throughout Europe as the embodiment of Romanticism. His good looks, his lameness,
and his flamboyant lifestyle all contributed to the formation of the Byronic legend. By the mid
20th century, his reputation as a poet had been eclipsed by growing critical recognition of his
talent as a wit and satirist.

Byron’s poetry covers a wide range. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and in The
Vision of Judgement (1822) he wrote 18th century satire. He also created the Byronic Hero, who
appears consummately in the Faustian tragedy Manfred (1817)—a mysterious, lonely, defiant
figure whose past hides some great crime. Cain (1821) raised a storm of abuse for its skeptical
attitude towards religion. The verse tale, Beppo is in the ottava rima, that Byron later used for his
acknowledged masterpiece, Don Juan (1814-24), an epic satire combing Byron’s art as a
storyteller, his lyricism, his cynicism, and his detestation of convention.

1.6 Prose Writers of the Romantic Age

Though the Romantic period specialized in poetry, there also appeared a few prose-
writers-Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey who rank very high. There was no revolt of the prose-
writers against the eighteenth century comparable to that of the poets, but a change had taken
place in the prose-style also.

Whereas many eighteenth century prose-writers depended on assumptions about the

suitability of various prose styles for various purposes which they shared with their relatively
small but sophisticated public; writers in the Romantic period were rather more concerned with
subject matter and emotional expression than with appropriate style. They wrote for an ever-
increasing audience which was less homogeneous in its interest and education than that of their
predecessors. There was also an indication of a growing distrust of the sharp distinction between
matter and manner which was made in the eighteenth century, and of a Romantic preference for
spontaneity rather than formality and contrivance. There was a decline of the ‘grand’ style and of
most forms of contrived architectural prose written for what may be called public or didactic
purposes. Though some Romantic poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron—wrote excellent
prose in their critical writings, letters and journals, and some of the novelists like Scott and Jane