Lecture 7
Introduction to Romanticism and 19th century Britain
I. Social and historical background
1. British Empire
expansion of colonies –
overseas empire including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (already established in North America, India)
2. Industrial revolution: birth of industrial-capitalist democracy
Agricultural revolution → increase in agricultural productivity →population growth AND rural poverty
Industrial revolution: steampower, powered machinery, → dramatic increases in production capacity*
canals, improved roads, first public railways (steamship, steamcoach) → trade expansion
Effects:
increase of urban population (over-crowding, insanitary squalor)
increase in labour force
Rise of the middle classes
growing number of industrial working classes
woman and child labour
Trade unions demanding social legislation
social changes: alienation
Wordsworth in 1817:
I see clearly that the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other have, within these thirty years, either been greatly impaired or wholly dissolved. Everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price it would buy. (From Letters)
EXAMPLE: William Blake: “London”, “The Chimney-Sweeper”
rejection of the city, condemnation of institutionalized religion, oppression, militarism and poverty
3. Cultural changes
Religion: historical criticism of the Bible
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species (1854)
Belief in unlimited human progress
Opening of new worlds: Australia
Dissemination of ideas facilitated: pamphlet, speedier traffic
Education: free public libraries; elementary education compulsory from 7 to 10 from 1880)
4. Political changes
* revolutions – eradication of feudal privileges
* extension of voting rights - Reform bills
Women’s rights: significant improvements
e. g. married women recover the right to inherit or bequeath property, to enter into contracts etc.
* 1869: first women’s college in Cambridge
II. Romanticism
1) Changed attitude to nature
city = a place of alienation, nature = a place to escape to
natural = innocent and good; civilization = corrupt (Rousseau)
spontaneity, naturalness, simplicity VERSUS art, artificiality, civilization
interest in simple people in a “natural” state
“Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated.” (Wordsworth: Preface to the Lyrical Ballads)
source of artistic inspiration: nature
Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.” (Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare)
“if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”
(letters of Keats – 28 Febr 1818)
2) subjectivism
personal quality, authorial presence valued
“poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind” (Wordsworth: Preface to the Lyrical Ballads)
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why (Shelley: The Defence of Poetry)
Artist = lonely genius, alienated from society
3) Imagination (=mind)
imagination = renewed perception
“the Hallelujah chorus perception of the sun”:
"What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I would Question a window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it. (Blake: A Vision of the Last Judgment
poetry renews the ways we see the world
sense experience is a chaos which must be organized actively by the imagination.
imagination = divine faculty
The imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will; yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate...it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are essentially fixed and dead. (Coleridge: Biographia Literaria)
primary imagination: a universal human quality with a divine aspect
secondary imagination: poetic – it disrupts, dissolves in order to unify; UNITY
Platonic version: poet/creative artist is in touch with eternal divine ideas
4. Interest in repressed or/and neglected areas of human experience
a) childhood(the word:’childlike’ first used in 1738 by Wesley)
* child’s sense of wonder!
* the child: an aspect of possibility of every human personality
* change in the books published for children (earlier: moral-laden, puritanical)
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
(From William Wordsworth: “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)
b) the Non-Rational
imaginative, supernatural, fantastic, emotional
c)The foreign and the savage and remote history
d) The poor and the unlettered
vs. the sophisticated urban civilization of the prosperous
5. figurative expression
In neoclassicism: „thought clothed in words”!
Romantics: Language: not a tool for the poet’s purposes (convey a message) but it is a material or medium which produces its own effects
William Blake: “The Sick Rose”
O Rose thou art sick. Has found out thy bed
The invisible worm, Of crimson joy:
That flies in the night And his dark secret love
In the howling storm: Does thy life destroy.