Chapter 15 Early Romantics

Principles of Early Romantic Poetry

• Revolted against
• Industrialization and modernity
• Aristocratic and urban values of the Age of Enlightenment
• Scientific rationalization of nature
• Supported
• Strong and sublime emotion (including terror, horror and awe) as the authentic source of aesthetic experience
• Rustic life and folk arts as noble
• Spontaneity of artistic expression
• Medievalism and exoticism (concern with the unfamiliar)
• The power of imagination to envision and to escape
The Age of Revolution
• A time of war: American Revolution (1775-83); French Revolution (1789-99) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815
• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) argued that America should free itself from Britain
• In the American Revolution, Britain lost all its colonies in the New World
• After the American Revolution, writers like the clergyman Joseph Priestley wrote travelogues describing America as the land
of the free
• Priestley had fled to America when he was attacked by the mob during the Birmingham riot of 1791
• Accounts like those of Priestley inspired Coleridge and Southey to devise the plan of Pantisocracy
The French Revolution
• Early phase of the French Revolution
• Absolute monarchy in France collapsed
• Working classes were liberated after years of oppression
• One of their slogans was “Liberté (freedom of the common man), égalité (equality of all men), fraternité
(brotherhood)”
• The Revolution gave expression to individualism and revolt that had spread across Europe at the end of the 18th
century
• At the time of the Revolution, in England, landlords had started enclosure farming and common people lost
their land and dwellings
• But the revolutionary spirit was confined to literature
Responses to the Revolution
• The Revolution provided a stimulus to writers, who welcomed it with joy, hope
• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Burns, Byron, Shelley
• Wrote poetry celebrating the Revolution as the beginning of a change in the society
• Wrote about common man rather than about the aristocracy and clergy
• Hegel & Schelling (Germany), Victor Hugo (France)
• However, Edmund Burke condemned it as a mere “war between the old interests of the nobility and the new
interests of money”
• Burke’s response provoked a pamphlet war, with over a hundred responses to it published
Revolution Controversy
• Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• Written in the form of a letter; sentimental denouncement of revolutionary violence
• Refused to accept that “natural rights” could be the basis of a society
• Defends aristocracy, constitutional monarchy, Church of England
• Provoked two famous responses from Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft
Paine’s Reply to Burke
• Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-92)
• Paine was an English-American revolutionary and friend of Burke

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 • Argued that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard its people and their
natural rights
• The French revolution is against the despotic interests of the monarchy, not against the king alone
• Opposes the idea of hereditary government
• Nearly 50,000 copies were circulated, and Paine was sentenced to death by hanging in his absence
• But Paine lived in France from then on and never returned to America to be hanged
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reply to Burke
• A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791)
• In the form of a letter to Burke
• Attacked aristocracy and hereditary privilege
• Defended republicanism
• This pamphlet was hugely popular and widely reviewed
• The reviews contrasted Wollstonecraft’s “passion” with Burke’s “reason” and spoke condescendingly of the text and
its female author.
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• The revolutionaries had made The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1793, which asserted that
the rights of man are universal. Wollstonecraft argued that the Declaration actively excluded women.
Other Revolutions
• The French Revolution fostered the spirit of nationalism
• Independence movements
• In Corsica (1793)
• In Ireland (series of failed rebellions against England) and
• In Greece (begun in 1821, against Turkey)
The Revolution and Wordsworth
• Visited France in 1791, before the Revolution took a gory turn (before innocents were guillotined by the Jacobins)
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!” (The Prelude)
• A spirit of revolt and indignation against all social iniquities pervaded Wordsworth, together with a sympathy for the poorer
and humbler members of the community
• England was at war continuously with the French revolutionary government from 1793 to 1802, which Wordsworth
abhorred
The Revolution passes into the Reign of Terror
• Wordsworth lost his trust in immediate social reform
• He turned to abstract meditation on man and society
• He was influenced by anarchist philosopher William Godwin’s recently published book Political Justice (1793)
• Godwin argued that government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that
it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge and the expansion
of the human understanding. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality.
• Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794) also is a call to end the abuse of power in legal and other institutions
• His idealism gave way to increasingly conservative and establishment views, and he was decried as “the lost leader”
The Revolution and Coleridge
• Attracted, like Wordsworth, by the ideals of the French Revolution
• Left Cambridge without a degree, and together with Southey planned to found a utopian community based on the
egalitarian ideals of the revolution, which they called Pantisocracy, meaning “equal government by and for all.”
• Lectured on the French Revolution
• After the trip to Germany, returned in 1800, with his views radically changed. He becomes a passionate religious
philosopher, a royalist, and even a critic of the French Revolution.

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The Revolution and Byron
• Rebelled against authority
• Opposed all forms of tyranny and attempts of rulers to control man
• His characters are often in complete communion with nature
• Had faith in nothing – neither democracy nor equality
• Said “I deny nothing… but I doubt everything”
The Revolution and Shelley
• Was always against tradition, and questioned religion
• Supported the ideals of the Revolution till the end
• Incorporated into poetry ideas inspired by the Revolution
• Hatred of kings
• Faith in the natural goodness of man
• The belief in the corruption of present society
• The power of reason
• The desire for a revolution
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)
• After the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France
• Napoleon returned the country to a dictatorship much like the absolute monarchy which the Revolution had overthrown
• In 1804, Napoleon declared himself emperor of France for life, and waged war on neighbouring countries
• The series of wars declared against Napoleon’s French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815 were
together called the Napoleonic Wars
• Napoleon was finally defeated at the Waterloo (in Belgium) in 1815 by the Allied Forces commanded by Wellington
Free Trade
• The influence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), which inaugurated the trend of free-market economics
• Free-market or free-trade means that the government does not interfere in import and export
• This is also called laissez-faire system (French term meaning “allow to do”)
Population
• There was a dramatic rise in population, which more than doubled between 1771 and 1831
• The living conditions of the poor were worsening
• There was a widespread worry that the land would be unable to provide food for all
• In 1798, demographer Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on the Principle of Population
• Anticipated terrible disasters resulting from population growth.
• This was countered by William Godwin in a famous debate, who optimistically made claims about human
perfectibility
Riots
• Political agitations and riots were common; and all of these popular uprisings were dealt with harshly
• Food riots
• Slogans of “Bread or Blood”
• Riots for employment and increased wages
• Luddite Movement (1811 and 12) attacked machines that were intended to replace human labour; crushed by the
army
• Campaigns for voting rights
• The character Hawkins in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams upholds the voting right
Gordon Riots
• A series of Catholic Relief Bills were passed during the late 18th and early 19th centuries to remove certain restrictions and
prohibitions on British and Irish Catholics
• The Papists Act 1778 was the first of the Catholic Relief Acts passed during the reign of George III
• Gordon riots were named after Lord George Gordon (not Byron)
• Such measures of toleration towards the Catholics provoked the Gordon riots

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 • The rioters stormed and burnt the Newgate Prison and released the prisoners; and William Blake was among the first wave
of attackers
• Painted on the wall of Newgate Prison was the proclamation that the prisoners had been freed by the authority of "His
Majesty, King Mob"
Government’s Oppression
• The government clamped down on radicals
• With several “Gagging Acts”, which aimed at silencing the press
• Habeus Corpus (anyone imprisoned has a right to a trial) was suspended twice during the Romantic period
• Passed a series of Acts:
• Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act
• Training Prevention Act
• Seizure of Arms Act
• “Peterloo Massacre”
• On 16 August 1819, 60,000 men, women and children assembled in St Peter’s Field in Manchester for a peaceful
open-air demonstration and call for parliamentary reform
• The crowd was forcibly dispersed; 10 people killed, 100s injured
• Lamented in Shelley’s poem “England, 1819”
Corn Laws
• In 1815, Britain was in heavy debt and there was also a bad harvest.
• That year, the Corn Laws were passed by the Tory government.
• These trade barriers were against free trade and imposed high import duties on foreign corn.
• The Corn Laws were designed to protect cereal producers in Great Britain and Ireland against competition from cheap
foreign imports.
• The Corn Laws led to widespread discontent among the merchants, who demanded free trade.
• In 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed.
Race
• During the nineteenth century pseudo-scientific theories of race were advanced both by the scientific community and in the
popular press
• These theories placed the European above the African on the physical and intellectual scale
• At this time, British colonists imported slaves to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean
• The slaves were treated inhumanely
• Rights of slaves were beginning to be asserted during this period
• Society for Abolition of Slave Trade established in 1787
The issue of race in Mansfield Park
• In Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen, Sir Bertram visits the plantation he owns in Antigua, the source of the
family’s wealth.
• Upon his return, Fanny asks him about the slave trade and her enquiry is met with silence.
• It is to be noted that Fanny has the role of a servant in the Bertram household, and is not their equal.
• This incident in the novel has been regarded as an implicit criticism of the decadent British aristocracy of the period.
The Enlightenment and Romanticism
• Enlightenment immediately preceded the Romantic period
• Romanticism’s emphasis on imagination, the irrational, the superstitious, the mysterious is a reaction against
Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason
• Romantics, especially Coleridge, was influenced by German philosopher Kant’s philosophy that something exists beyond the
material world (transcendental idealism)
• The Enlightenment thinker John Locke emphasized empiricism (a belief in experience of the physical world) and stated that
the mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa)
• Locke’s empiricism is related to “romantic idealism” (the belief that the external reality is somehow created by our mind)
• Locke influenced Hartley’s associationism (which influenced Coleridge for a while, before he turned to German romanticism)

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Romanticism and Gender
• Big Six (male poets): Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats
• Female Romantics: Mary Shelley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, Hannah More, Alice
Trickey, and Joanna Baillie
• Masculine Romanticism (typified by Wordsworth): concerned with nature rather than society, introspective, looking beyond
the material world to something transcendent
• Feminine Romanticism: celebrates domestic affections, family and social bonds
Literature of the Romantic Period
• Most fertile period
• There was fresh inspiration for poetry
• Fruitful use of the novel
• Rejuvenation of the essay
• Unprecedented activity of criticism
• Great Range of Subject
• Classical themes (Keats, Shelley)
• Some turned to the Middle Ages for themes (Scott, Coleridge, Southey)
• Some depicted the modern times (novelists)
• Almost all the Romantics depicted nature
The Romantics’ Attitude to Nature
• Transitional poets
• Sympathetic observation of natural features
• Romantics had a mature and intimate relationship with nature
• Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially in their youth, had a love of nature amplified (glorified) into a religion
(pantheism)
• Byron did not idealize or deify Nature, like Wordsworth. For him, Nature complements human emotion and
civilization.
• For Shelley, nature represents a sublime world of sights, sounds and sensations, linked to ideas of Freedom or Love
• Keats’ relationship to Nature was simple; he loves Nature not because of any spiritual significance or divine meaning
but chiefly because of her external charm and beauty.
Periodical Writing
• New technologies in printing, wider literacy and increased political involvement of people led to more number of periodicals
• The Examiner (1808-1886)
• A Sunday newspaper started by Leigh Hunt and his brother John Hunt
• Contributors Byron, Shelley, Keats and Hazlitt
• Edinburgh Review (1802-1929)
• Whig newspaper
• Rival of Quarterly Review
• Attacked Lake Poets, especially Wordsworth
Quarterly Review (1809-1967)
• Tory newspaper
• Published by the well-known publisher John Murray (who was Byron’s publisher)
• One of the famous editors was John Gibson Lockhart
• Published scathing reviews against Walter Savage Landor, Mary Shelley and PB Shelley
• In 1817, John Wilson Croker attacked Keats in a review of Endymion for his association with Leigh Hunt and the “Cockney
School” of poetry
• “Cockney School” was a term originally used in Blackwood’s Magazine by John Wilson
Blackwood’s Magazine (1817-1980)
• Tory magazine
• Rival of Edinburgh Review
• Principal writer John Wilson wrote under the pseudonym Christopher North

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 • Despite conservative leanings, published works by radicals like Coleridge and Shelley
• Supported Wordsworth
• Parodied the “Byronmania” of Europe
• Unjustly attacked Keats, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt as the “Cockney School”
• London Magazine (1820–1829, etc)
• Founded in 1732, London Magazine was resurrected several times till the present
• Published Wordsworth, Shelley, John Clare, Keats, De Quincey, Lamb, etc
• Westminster Review (1824-1914)
• Paper of the radical group called “Philosophical Radicals”
• Founded by Jeremy Bentham
• The utilitarians, James Mill and John Stuart Mill published numerous articles
• Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) was assistant editor
• She and others were “evolutionists”, later associated with “Darwinism”, a term which first appeared in this
periodical
The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal
• F.L. Lucas, in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal identifies 11,396 definitions of “romanticism”.
• Published in 1936, this book provides a critical examination of the potential for excess in Romantic thought
• Lucas argues that Romanticism involves a form of excess which denies the reality principle in favour of the unbridled
exploration of the imagination
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• Born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, Lake District, Northwest England
• Third of the five children of John Wordsworth, who was always away from home being a solicitor to Sir James Lowther, Earl
of Lonsdale. Lowther was an irresponsible nobleman and owed John Wordsworth £4,000 at the time of the latter’s death
• His sister Dorothy was born the year after, and they were baptized together
• Wordsworth lost his mother when he was 8, and his father when he was 15; after this the children lived separately with
relatives.
Childhood
• Wordsworth’s interest in poetry developed from his father’s library as well as from Hawkshead Grammar School
• Met the Hutchinsons in his school days, including Mary, his future wife
• First poem to be published (in The European Magazine, 1787) was “On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of
Distress”
• After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, from where he got a BA degree in 1791.
A Walking Tour
• During this time, he set out on a walking tour of France, Switzerland and Germany
• Influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities
• Gave him first-hand experience of the French Revolution
• Toured the Alps extensively
• Aroused his interest and sympathy for the life, sufferings and language of the “common man”
• The two early collections of poems An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both published in 1793,
commemorate his walking tour.
• Poems in these collections draw heavily on eighteenth-century descriptive traditions
The French Years
• In 1791, during his visit to revolutionary France, Wordsworth fell in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon at
Blois, by whom he had a daughter, Caroline
• Wordsworth returned to England even before Caroline was born, and was separated from Annette and their
daughter for 10 years due to financial difficulties, the Reign of Terror, England’s war with France, etc
• Wordsworth visited Annette along with Dorothy in 1802, shortly before his marriage to Mary Hutchinson.
• Wordsworth saw Caroline for the first time and took a memorable seaside walk with the 9-year-old, which he recalls
in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free”
• At his wife Mary’s insistence, Wordsworth made a generous annual allowance to Caroline when she married in 1816

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 • The affair with Annette inspired the poem “Vaudracour and Julia”
Racedown Lodge
• In 1795, Wordsworth received a legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert, whom he cared for during a fatal illness.
• Later that year, Wordsworth and Dorothy were re-united, and having decided to stay together, settled at Racedown Lodge
near Pilsdon in Dorset, Southwest England.
• From the Pilsdon Pen (a small hill) behind their house, Wordsworth got breathtaking views of the countryside
• The Dorset peasantry now came to embody for Wordsworth the virtues he had noticed long ago in their Cumbrian
counterparts: courage, endurance, faith, compassion and love
• Mary Hutchinson came for a 6-month stay at Racedown, and Wordsworth married her in 1802
• Wordsworth was generally miserable at this time due to financial difficulties, a feeling of isolation, and a writer’s
block
Dorothy, Coleridge
• In 1795, Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Somerset (which is near Dorset, where they lived)
• The two poets became intimate friends
• Coleridge recognized in Wordsworth a genius, and the awakenings of a new type of poetry
• Coleridge usually walked nearly 50 miles to go to Wordsworth’s house and see him!
• In 1797, Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden House Somerset, within a few miles of Coleridge’s house in
Nether Stowey
• From this time, Dorothy became an inseparable companion of her brother, and a vital inspiration for his poetry
• Dorothy began her journals in Alfoxden in January 1798 but discontinued it 2 months later to recommence when they
moved to Grasmere in the Lake District, upon their return from Germany. These were posthumously published as The
Alfoxden Journal, 1798 and The Grasmere Journals, 1800-1803
The Borderers (1797)
• In 1797, Wordsworth completed his only play The Borderers.
• A tragedy on the theme of guilt, crime and punishment set during the reign of Henry III
• Wordsworth attempted to get it staged at Covent Garden, but it was rejected for being unactable.
• The play was published only much later, in 1842, after extensive revision.
The Publication of the Lyrical Ballads
• In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly brought out a collection of poems, the historic Lyrical Ballads
• Neither Wordsworth’s nor Coleridge’s name was given as the author
• The second edition (1800) named Wordsworth alone as the author, and had a short Preface
• The Preface, the manifesto of English Romantic criticism, was enlarged in its present form in the 1802 edition
• The volume was greeted with hostility by critics
• Believed to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• 1st edition 1798, with an “Advertisement”
• Stated that these poems were experiments written chiefly “to ascertain how far the language of conversation of the middle
and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure”
• Attempt to reduce stylization; poetry from naked experience, not within any tradition
• Preface added in 2nd edn, 1800, enlarged 1802
• 19 poems by Wordsworth; 4 by Coleridge
• First poem “Ancient Mariner”; concluding piece “Tintern Abbey”
“Tintern Abbey”
• “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”
• Five years have passed since he last visited this location, encountered its tranquil, rustic scenery. He describes the scenery
again, and reflects on their effect upon him
• Shows the development of Wordsworth’s attitude to nature:
• Stage 1: the animal pleasures of childhood
• Stage 2: adolescent passion for the wild and gloomy
• Stage 3: awareness of the relation between our perception of the natural world and our human and moral world

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“Tintern Abbey” as the Greater Romantic Lyric
• The 3 stages described by Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” correspond to those described by M.H. Abrams in the essay
“Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” (1965)
a) description of the scene
b) analysis of the scene’s significance with regard to the problem that troubles the poet
c) affective resolution of the problem that has been articulated
• Abrams’ term “greater Romantic Lyric”
a) Denotes an extended lyric poem of description and serious meditation
b) Other examples: Coleridge’s “conversation poems”
In Germany
• Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798, the day after the Lyrical Ballads was
published.
• They parted ways, and Coleridge travelled to university towns, learning German language and coming under the
profound influence of the German romantics
• The Wordsworths lived in the town of Goslar, suffering in homesickness and from a particularly harsh winter. Here,
Wordsworth wrote some of the Lucy poems, and began writing The Prelude
The Prelude
• Spiritual autobiography in blank verse
• Written between 1798 and 1805, extensively revised in later years
• Published posthumously in 1850 in 14 books (an earlier 1805 version has 13 books)
• Sub-titled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind”
• Prologue to the unfinished long poem The Recluse, which he did not complete
• Another portion of The Recluse was published as The Excursion
• Addressed to Coleridge (“Poem to Coleridge”)
• Present title suggested by Mary Wordsworth, when the poem was published
The Prelude
• The Recluse was intended to be an epic that would surpass Paradise Lost
• Wordsworth’s epic theme is his own development as a poet
• Offers remarkable insight into childhood experiences
• The theme of The Prelude was unconventional because the confessional mode in poetry was still undeveloped at this time.
• A constant concern in The Prelude is Wordsworth’s sense of himself as a chosen being, with an overriding duty to his poetic
vocation
Lucy Poems
• A series of five poems written between 1798 and 1801
• “Strange fits of passion have I known”
• “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”
• “I travelled among unknown men”
• “Three years she grew in sun and shower”, and
• “A slumber did my spirit seal”
• Four of these published in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads
• Wordsworth did not conceive of them as a group
• As a series they focus on the poet’s longing for the company of his friend Coleridge, and on his increasing impatience with
his sister Dorothy
“Michael” (1800)
• Written in 1800 and included in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads
• A pastoral poem in blank verse
• The lonely life in Grasmere of the old shepherd Michael and his wife
• Their beloved son Luke is sent away to a dissolute, degenerate city, where he disgraces himself, and disappears
• Michel dies in grief; his farm lies in ruins

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Back in Lake District
• Upon their return to England in 1799, Wordsworth and Dorothy visited the Hutchinsons in Lake District.
• They settled down in Dove Cottage in the neighbouring village of Grasmere. Nearby, in Keswick, lived Robert Southey and
Coleridge’s family (Coleridge has nearly abandoned them). Here, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be called the
“Lake Poets”
• In 1802, Wordsworth got £4,000, the money Lowther owed his father. This enabled him to marry Mary Hutchinson.
Dorothy lived with them.
• Subsequently, five children were born to Wordsworth and Mary; Wordsworth’s younger brother John died in a shipwreck,
and in 1812, their two youngest children died.
Immortality Ode (1807)
• Written while living at Grasmere
• Full title: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections from Early Childhood
• Irregular Ode (first written by Abraham Cowley)
• Inspired by Henry Vaughan’s The Retreat
• Profound exploration of the childhood experience of the natural world; its gradual fading into the “light of common day”;
the consolations of maturity when men can still retain “shadowy recollections” of former glory; affirmation of the poet’s
faith in the philosophic mind and the human heart
• Concept of pre-existence (Plato’s anamnesis: humans possess knowledge from past incarnations; learning is a re-discovery
of knowledge that already exists within man)
At Rydal Mount
• They moved houses within Grasmere due to the overcrowding of the household, finally settling down at Rydal Mount in
1813. It was Thomas de Quincey who took over Dove Cottage when the Wordsworths moved.
• The Wordsworths’ residence became a meeting place for the notable literary figures of the day including Thomas de
Quincey, Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, and William Godwin.
• By 1812, Wordsworth had parted company with Coleridge, when both he and Mary tired of his opium abuse and erratic
behaviour. However, the two were fully reconciled in the 1820s, and in 1828, they toured the Rhineland together.
The Lost Leader
• By this time, Wordsworth had gained some recognition.
• The themes of his earlier poetry – loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment – were given up
• Following the rise of Napoleon, Wordsworth left his radical ideals and became a conservative
• In 1813, Wordsworth accepted a government job
• This surrender of the poet’s independence was attacked by Leigh Hunt
• An anonymous poem in The Morning Chronicle, probably by Hazlitt, accused Wordsworth for abandoning his ideals
• Later this accusation was made more strongly in the poem “The Lost Leader” by Robert Browning.
As a conservative
• In 1843, Southey died, and Wordsworth succeeded him as Poet Laureate.
• Wordsworth’s former radicalism had completely given way to conservatism and establishment views by then.
• Byron in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” mocked Wordsworth as being “simple” and “dull.”
• Keats distrusted his “egotistical sublime.”
• In the poem “The Lost Leader”, Robert Browning accused that Wordsworth had betrayed his youthful ideas.
• However, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill venerated him for his work which, in an age of doubt, emphasized the
transcendent in nature and the good in man
Death
• By 1829, Dorothy’s physical and mental health deteriorated; Coleridge and Lamb both died in 1834; in 1843, Southey
• In 1847 Wordsworth’s much loved daughter Dora died of tuberculosis. He did not write much after this. A small field lies
between Rydal Mount and the main road, now called “Dora’s Field”, with hundreds of daffodil bulbs planted by him in
memory of his daughter.
• Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried St. Oswald’s Church at Grasmere.
• His lengthy autobiographical “Poem to Coleridge” was published as The Prelude after his death.
• Dorothy died in 1855 and Mary in 1859, and were both buried next to Wordsworth

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Wordsworth’s Petrarchan Sonnets
• Written mostly in the early 1800s
• Offers criticism of the decadent materialism of the time
• “The world is too much with us”
• Humans are too preoccupied with the material world, and have lost touch with the spiritual and with nature; he
wishes he had been born a pagan with a different vision of the world
• “London, 1802”
• The poet dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent era.
• “It is a Beauteous Evening”
• No moral or political outrage; a description of the evening as quiet “as a nun”, of man’s communion with nature
Other poems
• “The Solitary Reaper”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar”, “Daffodils”
• “Resolution and Independence”
• Describes the poet’s meeting of a leech-gatherer in Barton Fell
• Original title “The Leech Gatherer”
• Refers to the poet Chatterton as “the marvellous boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride”
• “Ode to Duty”, “Nutting”
Wordsworth as a Critic
• Criticism comprises
• Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800, revised 1802)
• Essay Supplementary to Preface (1815)
• Lyrical Ballads
• Experimental poems
• To overturn what they considered the priggish, learned and highly sculpted forms of 18th century poetry
• To ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the
purpose of poetic pleasure
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)
• Preface is in the nature of a defence of the theory that poetry must be written in the real language of men when in a state of
vivid sensation
• His poems were a revolt against the artificial poetic diction popular in the 18th century
Poetry and the Poet: Definitions
• Poetry is
• “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”
• the product of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which results from “emotions recollected in
tranquillity”
• A poet has “more than usual organic sensibility” and is one who has “thought long and deeply
Subject of Poetry
• The materials of poetry can be found “in every subject which can interest the human mind”
• The subject of poetry must be “incidents and situations from common life”
• Wordsworth drew themes from humble rustic life in his own poetry
• He asserted that “ordinary things should be presented in an unusual aspect” (supernaturalizing the natural)
• This was against the urban tone of the Augustan “Poetry of the Town”
Style of Poetry
• Wordsworth’s views on the style of poetry were revolutionary
• Rejected the century-old tradition of Alexander Pope
• Poetry should avoid gaudiness, poetic diction
• Poetry should be written in the language of the common man (“Real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”)
• Made the controversial statement that there is essentially no difference between the language of prose and poetry

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The Poetic Process
• An experience is converted into a composition in 4 stages:
• Observation
• Observation or perception of some object, character or incident which sets up powerful emotions in the
mind of the poet
• Recollection
• Revisiting past experiences stored in the memory
• Contemplation
• The memory is fused with thought and purged of non-essential elements to make his experience
communicable to all men
• Composition
• In this stage, poetry is actually written, and the poet becomes a man speaking to men
Wordsworth: Theory and Praxis
• In subject, he conformed to his theory; in style very often not
• When he conformed to his theory, often fell to prosaic banality
• He was aware of the dangers of his theory
• In his greatest verse of emotional stimulus, style simple, joyous, of Miltonic sweep and resonance
Features of Poetry
• Inequality of quality
• It is said that his best work stops with The Prelude
• No sense of humour or dramatic power
• Characterized by egoism: due to adoration of wife and sister, most poetry deals with himself or his experiences
• Lyrical quality inferior to Burns or Shelley,
• Excels in reflective, analytical mood
• Treatment of Nature
• Accurate, first-hand; describes with eye steadily fixed on the subject
• Personal note, joy, pantheism
You Tube
• Listen to recitations of Wordsworth’s poems (along with text) uploaded by “SpokenVerse”
• There is a documentary uploaded by “Impossible Paradise”: “William Wordsworth – Documentary”
• The tour-videos of Lake District available on You Tube are also worth watching.
Arnold on Wordsworth: Essays in Criticism
• Wordsworth was at the height of popularity between 1830 and 1840, at Cambridge
• But after his death, he was not well-received in Europe
• However, Arnold asserts that Wordsworth’s name should stand above “our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare and
Milton”
• Arnold’s views in a nutshell
• Though Wordsworth is not popular at that time, he deserves to be among the greatest poets
• His best work is the dozen short pieces
• He deals with life in a powerful, inspired manner
• However, he relied too much on inspiration & nature
S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834)
• Poet, critic and philosopher
• Born in Devonshire, as the youngest of 14 children of a vicar
• After his father’s death in 1781, he attended Christ’s Hospital School, where he met his lifelong friend Charles Lamb, as well
as Leigh Hunt. Here he also fell in love with Mary Evans, his classmate Tom Evans’s sister.
• Charles Lamb later recorded their school life in the essay, “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago”
At Cambridge
• Intended for the Church, Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge in 1791
• However, soon his views began to change.

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 • At this time, he had two troubles at least: his increasing debt, and his rejection by Mary Evans.
• Coleridge abandoned his studies in December 1793, and impulsively enlisted in the army under the name of Silas Tomkyn
Comberbache. This turned out to be a mistake, from which his brothers rescued him.
• During this time, he began getting bouts of depression, which continued throughout his life.
Coleridge meets Southey
• Back at the university, during a walking tour, he met a student named Robert Southey in June 1794, with whom he struck an
instant friendship
• While exchanging philosophical ideas, they made a plan, on the basis of Plato’s Republic, to found a utopian society, called
Pantisocracy (equal government by all). They decided to emigrate to the New World with ten other families to set up a
commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Here the men would share the labour and their rewards
in Christian selflessness, engage in philosophical discussions, and have freedom of religious and political beliefs.
A hasty marriage
• An essential part of the plan for Pantisocracy was marriage. Southey was engaged to Edith Fricker, and Coleridge reluctantly
decided to marry her sister, Sara Fricker.
• Coleridge’s marriage to Sara Fricker (1795) proved to be an unhappy one, and Coleridge spent most of his time away from
his wife.
• In 1795, Coleridge and Southey collaborated on a play, The Fall of Robespierre.
• Southey now abandoned the plan for Pantisocracy in order to pursue a career in law.
Early Poems
• Coleridge’s first poems had appeared in The Morning Chronicle in December 1794. These poems were conventional and
celebratory.
• In 1795, Coleridge met William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and they spent much time discussing poetry, politics, and
philosophy. This intellectual relationship greatly influenced Coleridge’s verse.
• At this time, Coleridge wrote some of his conversation poems
• “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Frost at Midnight”, “Fears in Solitude”, “The Nightingale”
• Used his intimate friends and their experiences as subjects, with characteristic emotional frankness
The 8 Conversation Poems
• Coleridge has written 8 conversation poems in all:
• “The Eolian Harp”
• “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement”
• “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
• “Frost at Midnight”
• “Fears in Solitude”
• “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem”
• “Dejection: An Ode”
• “To William Wordsworth”
Conversation Poems
• Examination of a particular life experience which leads to the poet’s meditation on nature and the role of poetry.
• Conversational language while examining higher ideas
• Themes: virtuous conduct and man’s obligation to God, nature and society
• Idea of “One Life”, a belief that people are spiritually connected through a universal relationship with God that joins all
natural beings
1796-97
• In 1796, Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects
• At this time he also published ten issues of a liberal political periodical called The Watchman.
• The Watchman was printed every eight days in order to avoid a weekly newspaper tax.
• In the same year, Coleridge’s first son, Hartley David (who became a poet) was born, named after the philosopher David
Hartley, whose associationism influenced Coleridge for a while.
• The enigmatic fragment Kubla Khan was written in 1797

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“Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream”
• A fragment, and “a psychological curiosity”
• The poet explains in the short preface that he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” (opium)
• Chant-like, musical incantations of “Kubla Khan” result from Coleridge’s masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating
rhyme schemes
• Before falling asleep, he had been reading in Samuel Purchas’s pilgrimage a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the
building of a new palace
• Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed—while sleeping—some two or three hundred
lines of poetry
• Waking after about three hours, the poet began writing this incomplete poem
“Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream”
• Xanadu, the palace of Kubla Khan, a Mongol emperor and the grandson of Genghis Khan, is first decsribed.
• The speaker tells us about a river that runs across the land and then flows through some underground caves and into the
sea. He also tells us about the fertile land that surrounds the palace.
• Near the river is a canyon, a haunted place, where a woman wails for her demon lover. The river leaps through the canyon,
first exploding up into a noisy fountain and then finally flowing through the underground caves into the ocean far away.
“Kubla Khan”
• The speaker then goes on to describe Kubla Khan himself, who is listening to the river and thinking about war.
• Suddenly, the speaker tells us about another vision he had, where he saw an Abyssinian woman playing a dulcimer and
singing.
• The speaker then imagines himself singing his own song, using it to create a vision of Xanadu.
• At this point, the poem becomes more personal and mysterious
• The speaker describes himself as a terrifying figure with flashing eyes, almost godlike: “For he on honey-dew hath fed/And
drunk the milk of paradise”
Lyrical Ballads
• The best poems of Coleridge’s poems were written in 2 years—1797 and 1798
• In 1797-98, Wordsworth and Dorothy lived near Coleridge’s house in Nether Stowey, Somersetshire.
• In 1798, the two young poets jointly brought out a volume of “experimental poems” entitled Lyrical Ballads, which
contained Coleridge’s most famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
• Soon after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Dorothy travelled to Germany.
“The Rime of Ancient Mariner”
• First published in Lyrical Ballads; revised version in Sybilline Leaves
• Bizarre moral narrative in ballad stanzas; archaic language; scholarly explanatory notes
• A mariner tells his story to three Wedding Guests
• Near the South Pole, he shot an albatross that travelled with his ship; ship is cursed; dead albatross hangs round his neck; a
skeleton ship approaches where Death and Life-in-Death are playing dice; ship vanishes and all the crew die; dead bird falls
from mariner’s neck; cursed to travel from land to land and teach the value of love and reverence for God’s creatures.
Interpretations of Ancient Mariner
• Meditation on the original sin
• Re-enactment of Fall of Man or Crucifixion
• Dark and unyielding form of medieval Catholicism
• An allegory of what Coleridge calls in “The Eolian Harp” as the “One life within us and abroad”
In Germany
• Coleridge parted ways with his friends and travelled alone, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and
G.E. Lessing
• Learnt the German language and began translating German works into English
• Helped introduce German idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant in England
• Interested in the literary criticism of the 18th century dramatist Gotthold Lessing
• Back in England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German classical poet Friedrich Schiller into
English

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Back in Lake District
• Coleridge returned to England in 1800, and settled with family and friends at Keswick, near the Lake District. The Southeys
also lived nearby, while Wordsworth and Dorothy lived at Grasmere, 12 miles away.
• At this time, Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson (whom he called Asra, and for whom he wrote the “Asra poems”),
the sister of Wordsworth’s future wife. Though he never married her, this relationship caused the poet much domestic
trouble and despondency, as expressed in “Dejection: An Ode” (1802).
• By now, Coleridge was increasingly dependent on laudanum, an elixir of opium
Asra Poems
• A series of poems discussing love dedicated to Sara Hutchinson
• Inspired Coleridge’s visit to the Hutchinson family farm at Sockburn
• “Asra” is anagram of “Sara”
• Includes “Dejection: An Ode”
• Eventually, Coleridge cut himself off from Hutchinson and renounced his feelings for her, which ended the problems
discussed in the poem
Opium and The Friend
• Over the next two decades Coleridge lectured on and wrote about literature and philosophy.
• In 1804-1806, he was on the island of Malta (a southern European country near Sicily, where the climate is warm) as a
secretary to the governor in an effort to overcome his poor health and his opium addiction.
• He separated from his wife Sara in 1808, and the Southeys cared for his family
• The Friend was a weekly periodical written almost entirely by Coleridge in 1809-1810, spanning 28 issues. It included diverse
themes from rhetorical orations about politics, history and war, to poems and metaphysical observations.
• In 1810, Coleridge was estranged from Wordsworth, for the latter disapproved of his irresponsible ways.
Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism
• Between 1810 and 1820, despite his ill health and dependence on opium, Coleridge lectured on Shakespeare in London and
Bristol
• Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Poets
• These lectures have placed him in history as one of the first of the modern Shakespearean critics.
• His lectures were characterized by delays, irregularities and digressions, which reflected his erratic personality.
• The best of his lectures was on Hamlet, delivered in 1812, that rescued the play from the denigrating remarks of earlier
critics such as Voltaire and Dr. Johnson.
• In his lecture on Othello, characterized Iago as “motiveless malignity”
Coleridge’s Concern with Evil
• In as early as 1797, Coleridge had written a verse tragedy called Osorio on the human potential for evil.
• Set in Granada during the Spanish Inquisition, Osorio is a re-working of the Cain and Abel myth.
• Coleridge’s play Remorse: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1813), is a reworking of Osorio. It was a failure.
• Evil is the predominant theme in his poems also.
• In 1814, inspired by the works of the 17th century Anglican divine, Robert Leighton, he abandoned the Unitarianism he had
practised and embraced the Church of England
• Regarded as the greatest living writer on evil, Coleridge was commissioned by publisher John Murray to translate Goethe’s
Faust. However, he abandoned the project
Two Volumes of Verse
• James Gillman
• Still addicted to opium, he moved in with the physician James Gillman in 1816
• Gillman even built an extension to his house to accommodate the poet
• Their house was frequented by writers including Carlyle and Emerson.
• Reputation
• From 1815, Coleridge’s major endeavour was to restore his reputation as a significant poet of the age
• Published two successive volumes of verse
• Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (1816)
• Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (1817)

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“Christabel” (1816)
• Incomplete Gothic ballad (in two parts, three more planned, but not written)
• Medieval supernatural romance
• Writing began in 1797
• A witch disguises as lovely lady Geraldine to win Christabel’s confidence
• Themes of sexuality and corruption of innocence
• Christabel metre (couplets with four accents per line: accentual metre)
Biographia Literaria (1817)
• The biographical preface originally intended for Sibylline Leaves grew into a lengthy, two-volume work in 23 chapters, called
Biographia Literaria
• This work, Coleridge’s greatest contribution to prose, was published at the same time as Sybilline Leaves
• A combination of literary criticism, autobiography, and philosophical speculation
• Traces Coleridge’s life through
• Childhood
• His fascination and later disillusionment with the associationist philosophy of David Hartley
• The theory of imagination developed under the influence of the German romantics
• His collaboration with and criticism of Wordsworth
Coleridge’s view of poetry
• Every work is an organic, developing whole, subject to its own laws
• Revolt against Augustan conception that poetry should instruct.
• Maintained that poetry should provide pleasure through the medium of beauty
Last Years
• Prose works of this period
• Aids to Reflection (1825)
• Subtitle: in the formation of a manly character, on the several grounds of prudence, morality, and religion:
illustrated by select passages from our elder divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton
• Church and State (1830)
• Full title: On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each: with aids toward a
right judgement on the late Catholic Bill
• Coleridge died of heart and lung illnesses (probably due to his opium addiction) in London on July 25, 1834
Features of Poetry and Prose
• Imaginative power
• Weird, supernatural, obscure tone and themes
• Willing suspension of disbelief
• Excellence in the use of language
• Simplicity of diction
• Prose
• Journalistic in origin
• In theme philosophic, literary
You Tube
• Listen to Coleridge’s poems uploaded by “SpokenVerse”
• There is a lecture “COLERIDGE & ROMANTICISM BY DOUGLAS HADLEY” uploaded by “StJohnsNottingham”
Coleridge as a Critic
• Two major critical works
• Biographia Literaria
• Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Poets
• Formative influences
• From Wordsworth, got his interest in imagination
• Hartley & Associationist psychology: human mind is reduced to a passive & inactive recipient of external
impressions & sensations (Hartley also influenced Wordsworth)

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 • German philosophy: after German tour became anti-Associationist; shared Kantian view of imagination as an
“esemplastic power”: art is re-creation; soul of the artist fuses with external reality; transforms & recreates it
Post-Enlightenment in Germany
• The early 18th century in France and Germany was the period of Enlightenment, which stressed the importance of reason
and scientific progress.
• At this time of feudality and absolutism, writers and philosophers like Schiller and Goethe expressed a new penchant for
strong emotion and nature, influenced by the writings of J.J. Rousseau.
• This movement is called Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang)
Storm and Stress
• Rejected reason for the emotional and mystical side of human nature
• Rejected rigid adherence to formal Aristotelian conventions
• Strove to replace the objective representation of nature with subjective representation of feeling
• Strove to replace the simplicity of ancient art with the complexity and turmoil of the inner world of feelings, intuitions and
the unconscious
German Romanticism
• German Romanticism attacked the leaders of the Storm and Stress—Hamann, Herder and Goethe—for rejecting reason.
• The Romantics argued that their goal of attaining the knowledge of the infinite was a rational striving.
• As Kant had taught them, it was a postulate of reason itself to seek the eternal and the infinite.
• In short, German Romanticism sought to integrate the two opposing forces of Neoclassicism and Storm and Stress
You Tube
• The video “German Romanticism (Die Deutsche Romantik)” uploaded by “Geisterkerker”
German Romantics
• Schlegel (1772-1829)
• Schleiermacher (1768- 1834)
• Schelling (1775-1854)
• Rooted in Kantian theory
• Sought to overthrow the extremism of Storm and Stress
• Insisted on the necessity to synthesize feeling and reason
• Learned from Kant that reason could be an ally of the sublime
• Believed that feelings could be related to thought so as to become knowledge
Coleridge’s View of Imagination
• Coleridge separated between fancy and imagination as “two distinct and widely different faculties”
• Imagination is of two types: Primary and Secondary
• Secondary imagination is poetic
Imagination and German Romanticism
• Since the medieval period
• Fancy (free play of thought)
had been considered superior to
• Imagination (restricted faculty of recalling images)
• Several German thinkers of the 18th century overturned this hierarchy, defining imagination as a creative and unifying force
Influence of German Romantics
• Coleridge’s theory is indebted to Kant
• Primary imagination
• Roughly equivalent to Kant’s idea of reproductive imagination
• Operates in our normal perception
• Helps us to understand the world in a fragmentary fashion
• Secondary imagination
• Like Kant’s productive or spontaneous imagination
• Creates and synthesizes new complex unities out of raw sense impressions
• Also indebted to Schelling who identified 3 levels of imagination

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Lectures on Shakespeare
• Collection of lectures, published posthumously
• Essays employ practical criticism
• Impressionistic approach to Shakespeare
• Impressionism is judging a work on the basis of the impressions in the critic’s mind
• Against Coleridge’s and Walter Pater’s impressionism, the New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley advocated the
concept of “Affective fallacy”
• Affective fallacy means that it is wrong to judge a poem on the basis of the impressions of the reader
• Revolts against the Augustan conception of poetry—said poetry provides pleasure
• Considered as an ancestor to modern Shakespearean critics
Coleridge’s Friend
• In 1794 he became friendly with Coleridge
• They collaborated on a play, The Fall of Robespierre
• They planned to set up a ‘Pantisocratic’ community in the United States
• This was aimed at putting into practice Godwin’s ideas of human perfectibility
• Southey’s enthusiasm soon waned, causing a break with Coleridge
• Secret marriage to Edith Fricker
• Also played a significant role as matchmaker in Coleridge’s marriage to her sister, Sara
• Travelled to Portugal at the end of 1795
Early Poems
• In the final years of the 18th century
• Wrote many of the lyrics and ballads by which he is now chiefly remembered,
• These poems contributed to the dismantling of the formal constrictions of late 18th century verse
• “My days among the dead are past” "The Inchcape Rock", "The Battle of Blenheim", as well as "The Holly Tree",
perhaps his best-known poem
• Changed from radical to Tory (conservative) after a further visit to Portugal and Spain in 1800-01
• This led many of his contemporaries to attack him.
A Lake Poet
• Back in England, he settled at Keswick, in Lake District
• Called a "Lake Poet", though his work has little in common with that of Wordsworth and Coleridge
• Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)
• Oriental verse epic
• Indifferently received by critics
• Shelley later borrowed its irregular verse form for Queen Mab (1813)
• Madoc (1805)
• Another exotic narrative
• South American adventures of the son of the medieval Welsh king, Owen Gwyneth
Prolific Output
• From then on, had to write virtually without pause: numerous poems, history, biography, translations and editions of earlier
writers
• The long epic poem, The Curse of Kehama, another Oriental tale (which was the current fashion), appeared in 1810
Poet Laureate
• In 1813 Southey succeeded Henry James Pye as poet laureate, a post which he did not particularly enjoy, but which gave
him the reputation as a radical who had prostituted himself to the establishment
• His short and interesting Life of Nelson appeared in the same year, and was followed in 1814 by his Christian romance
Roderich the Last of the Goths
• During the next three years he completed his three – volume History of Brazil (1810-19), and his Life of Wesley (1820)
• In his official capacity as Laureate, he wrote poems for various public events

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Controversies
• In 1817 he tried in vain to secure an injunction from chancery to stop the publication, by his liberal enemies, of Wat Tyler,
the play of his radical youth
• He was repeatedly attacked and lampooned during these politically tense years, notably by Thomas Love Peacock, who
caricatures him as Mr Feathernest in the novel Melincourt (1817)
• Southey’s A Vision of Judgement (1820)
• When King George III died, Southey, the Poet Laureate and a Tory, commemorated his elevation into heaven. In the
poem Southey also made a dig at Byron and his "Satanic school."
• Byron’s satirical poem The Vision of Judgment was a response which depicts the fate of the king’s soul from a very different
political perspective
Last Years
• Southey’s prolific output continued in the 1820s
• His wife died in 1837, following a period of insanity, and in 1839 he married Caroline Bowles
• His own mind was to become clouded during his last years

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