The Romantic Lyric Poem

Romanticism: A European artistic movement, commonly thought of as to have taken place between
1780 – 1830. Romantic poets and writers exist after this period, such as Yeats and apparently
Nietzsche.
Wordsworth and Coleridge others popularised the autobiographical form. Before this period,
autobiography was considered self centred or ridiculous.
The lyric poem is the most well known part, but not the only part, of romanticism.

The American Revolution and French Revolutions create a sort of hope in western culture, that
history is starting again and the old and unnecessary is being overturned.
Romanticism emphasised subjectivity, inspiration, and the primacy of the individual.
Nature was hugely important in the romantic movement as a source of inspiration and the sublime.

Romanticism believes in the spontaneity of art, the strong impulses of creativity and emotion that
nature can impose on us.

A core idea of romanticism is that art is a spontaneous creative impulse, generally created by nature,
that must be captured.

Wordsworth was very ambivalent toward cities, and considered nature important for an individual’s
spiritual development. An almost animistic set of beliefs? The Lake District became a kind of home
for Wordsworth, as it’s basically the only patch of nature in England. Blake had similar ideas.
Pantheism, that’s what it’s called. The romantic conception of death is a return to nature, the
physical body broken down into its constituent parts and redistributed through the world, becoming
one with the cosmos. “Gods are difficult, but the Earth is holy.”
There is a quasi religious joy in the world and nature taken by the romantics.
There is a degree of conservatism to romanticism, but not really in the sense we’d think of them in
the modern day?

Coleridge and Wordsworth became friends and wrote ballads together.

The romantics disrupted the social order of the time. Wordsworth wrote poems from the
perspective of disabled people (having actually spoken to them!) and of children, breaking down the
norms of poetry at the time by writing about people who it wasn’t “for.”
Wordsworth’s Old Man Travelling, before he revised it, is an excellent example of this, where the
poetic form runs counter to the reality of the subject’s situation.

(I believed you) William Blake

 What is this man’s deal what is up with him. As above so below?

 Blake was a weird little Hermetic scrunkly man
 He had weird bizarre gods and ideas that were weirdly Jungian?
 He believed that human nature was bound up in established and corrupted religions.
 A Poison Tree is something of a riposte to Milton, to having Gods that know the rules will be
broken and have disdain for natural behaviours. The apple is Christianity?
 To Blake Jesus was an earthly manifestation of holiness so he was cool, while those aspects
of God that don’t do that are Not.
 Blake believed there was something holy about innocence. See The Garden of Love and
Infant Joy.
 He was very adamant about how important it is for children to be able to play.
 Blake makes frequent use of the symbols of binding.