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The period of Romanticism in English literature was in many senses a reaction to the Enlightenment which preceded it. The objectivity and sheer rationality of the Enlightenment was held in disdain by the Romantics, who saw it as a period "which did not allow feeling and imagination to outweigh reason". The essence of Romantic thought springs from a soul which "protests against whatever exists, aspiring to something else without knowing what it is" (Thorlby ). This unrest within the Romantic movement induced writers to explore aspects of the individual further, notably the consciousness and the self. Notions of dreams and man's spiritual side were of particular interest to the likes of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, as Day points out; "a number of Romantic writers suggest that the mind possesses a faculty which enables it to see through the forms of the material world to a greater, spiritual reality behind it" (58).
In this way, the Romantics turned towards the importance of feeling and turned "away from society towards the sublimities of nature"(Day 65). Nature and emotion overtook any rationality that was a hallmark of the past;
Peckham exemplifies this breakaway from tradition "from the values of static mechanism - reason, order, permanence, and the like - are replaced by their counterparts in an organic universe - instinct or intuition, freedom, and change. Romantic thought is relativistic and pluralistic; it rejects absolute values, formal classifications, and exclusive judgements; it welcomes novelty, originality, and variety. It is less interested in distinctions than in relationships, particularly in the organic relationship which it posits between man and nature, or the universe, and (less often) between the individual and society".
The turn from reasoning brought about terrific individualism in the Romantic personality and led to a huge concentration on the psychological and on human centrality. Such focus inevitably led to such writers believing they were of the optimum importance, and demonstrating such "pride that was taken in this selfhood" (Thorlby 6). William Blake was particularly guilty of such egomania, and his reference to "hold infinity in the palm of your hand" portrays the fact that "he is always conscious of the bonds that link him with the dark realm inside himself"(45).
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The egocentric attitude of the Romantics had to be inevitable, owing to the introspection that they demonstrated for dreams, the unconscious, and the mind of the individual; with such focus on aspects of their own psyche, to "cultivate and contemplate nothing but their own 'moi'"(6) was perhaps understandable.
Lucas suggests that "the fundamental quality of Romanticism is not mere anti-Classicism, nor mediaevaelism, nor 'aspiration', nor 'wonder', nor any of the other things its various formulas suggest; but rather a liberation of the conscious levels of the mind" (Thorlby 6). This attention paid to the mind's visionary release and power tended to oppose old Enlightenment ideals against those of the Romantics; for example, rationality was now held against passion, natural impulse against artificial restraint, and most importantly the conflict of internal against external.
The battle of internal and external is looked upon by Northrop Frye. He refers to Rousseau's assumption that "civilisation was a purely human artifact, something that man had made, could unmake…and was at all times entirely responsible for". He alludes to the power of creativity within man, "located in the mind's internal heaven, the external world being seen as a mirror reflecting and making visible what is within" (10).
Wordsworth's poetry is highly concerned with aspects of the psyche, and in many of his poems, he explores the subconscious; in revolt to socio-political goings on, he searches for an inner revolution within himself. He makes reference to water and streams within his poetry which represents the unconscious; in Tintern Abbey, the use of nature and natural landscape, such as "lofty cliffs", and "these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a sweet inland murmur", demonstrate Wordsworth's metaphorical exploration of the depths of the mind.
Oh Sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit returned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again.
Lucas refers to this passage of Tintern Abbey, showing his somewhat sceptical opinion of the Romantic subversion into the consciousness, explaining, "and so the Romantic, I suggest, wandering into the woods of dream, has often wandered too far"(Thorlby 64). An "increasing preoccupation with the 'mental' patterns that underlie the flux of human events"(Beer 7) is somewhat frowned upon by Lucas, who compares the Romantic "who surrenders too much to the unconscious, who becomes too completely a child once more" to one who "has fallen a victim to the neurotic maladies that beset the childish adult who cannot cope with life but falls between two ages" (6). It seems that Lucas is uncomfortable with the total escapism that the Romantic writers employed, and his description of the Romantic as he "who got lost like the neurotic who takes refuge from reality among the phantoms that haunt the mouldered lodges of his childish years"(64) implicates the sheer irrationality he perceives from such writings.
The reflection of the Revolution on the Romantics was particularly inspirational and founds the case that "Romanticism on the philosophical side is a protest against the disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist" (Day 61). This rationality was to be opposed and questioned by a "greater creative power"; "the sense of identity with a larger power of creative energy meets us everywhere in Romantic culture" (Frye 14). This creative prowess is born from the writers ability to look inside himself. Frye demonstrates how "the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within". Blake's poem Jerusalem illustrates the inner yearning for centrality "where inward and outward manifestations of a common motion or spirit are unified" (16).
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Blake's "mental fight" he describes here is his battle within himself. Jerusalem is his own psychological and spiritual utopia. His own personal progress lay in his spiritual and mental discovery; this is evident through his journey into the subconscious in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where he uncovers such proverbs as "the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man".
Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan was by his own admission "composed in a sort of reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysentery"; elements of the unconscious are particularly prominent here, and the lines "and mid this tumult Cubla heard from far / ancestral voices prophesying war" denote a type of subconscious premonition of war within. Coleridge's poem depicts "a savage place" and a "chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething"; this allusion could be said to represent the underworld, which the poet looks into through his unconscious state of being. Adair's translation of Kubla Khan points to "the poet, when divinely inspired, remembers the inscrutable secrets of the world below, singing of a mystery and terror which seems to men like the gift of prophecy" (116). This delving into the imagination demonstrates "the mysterious unconscious sources of creative inspiration and the poet's brief singing of this memory on his return to the sunlit conscious world"(117). This poem replicates a contrast between man's conscious and unconscious being; in a sense the "sacred river" and the "caverns measureless to man" are juxtaposed to represent alternate states of the psyche.
Although this poem provides evidence for Coleridge's undoubted ventures into his imagination, as does his collaboration with Wordsworth, his agenda is a slightly different one to that of Wordsworth, or for that matter any of the other Romantic poets; Beer demonstrates this in talking of "the theme of man's lonely struggle, physically and intellectually with the universe" which is inherent in Wordsworth's work, yet for Coleridge "is not one which attracted him or elicited his best work" (5). The difference between Coleridge and the other romantics is observed by Coleridge's daughter, in that "he could not bear to complete incompletely, which everybody else does" (Beer 6).
Elements of religion are looked upon in Coleridge's poetry, essentially those of the battle between God and nature; Adair points to the "continuous conflict" which his work sets up, not only between these facets, but also between "faith and reason…the mechanical and transcendental explanations of the universe" (44). These elements are confronted within Coleridge's most famous work, The Ancient Mariner;
At length did cross an albatross;
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
In this verse the appearance of the bird of good luck is regarded as "a Christian soul", which would keep safe those on the ship. In this way Coleridge makes God "an immanent part of the material world" in order "to make God himself material and to deprive the universe of the ultimate mystery of the Godhead" (Adair 45). The figure of God is now put in opposition to the evil which obsessed the ancient mariner to shoot down the albatross;
'God save thee, ancient mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look'st thou so?' With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.
The shooting of the albatross comes to represent a multitude of opinions. Beer examines the attention paid to this defining moment within Coleridge's poetry, notably that it depicts the fall of man, or the death of Christ yet that "they all conflict with one another and try to give the poem the definiteness of allegory which the poet himself would have deplored" (57). The death of the bird in the Ancient Mariner is fundamentally poignant, but as to what it represents is debatable. It is definite however, that it comes to portray the contrasting ideals of Coleridge's poetry, and its meaning in this way is not so important. The notion of resolve in Coleridge's poems is very rare, and he hardly ever comes to solution. Beer talks of Coleridge's "all-embracing vision which should encompass all things in heaven and earth" (1); this approach makes the potential for complete understanding and harmony within his poetry highly improbable, and his conflicting ideals show "an awareness of the infinite" which "had thus always dominated Coleridge's imagination" (47).
Abrams alludes to the fact that although one would never mistake Blake's work for Coleridge's or vice versa, "a reading of Coleridge's poem with Blake's in mind reveals how remarkably parallel were the effects of the same historical and literary situation, operating simultaneously on the imagination of the two poets" (4). Abrams describes the Romantic poet as the "inspired prophet-priest" yet notes that what obscures a concern for the social and political commentary of the Romantics is the lack of "direct political and moral commentary" (44).
The ambiguous nature of Romantic poetry with its allusions to nature and certain images such as "the earthquake and the volcano, the purging fire, the emerging sun" recurring endlessly, refer to what Abrams calls "one of the principal leitmotifs of Romantic literature"; he points out that "To Europe at the end of the Eighteenth-Century the French Revolution brought what St. Augustine said Christianity had brought to the ancient world hope" (54). This hope roused "human and social possibility" and "its reflex, the nadir of feeling caused by its seeming failure".
Abrams discusses this hope of man which "can never be matched by the world as it is and man as he is"(56), and alludes to Wordsworth's "Romantic doctrine; one which reverses the cardinal neoclassic ideal of setting only accessible goals, by converting what had been man's tragic error- that persists in setting infinite aims for finite man"(57).
Wordsworth, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, shows his interest in the imagination and the unconscious by his delight in contemplating "similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe". The sense of the universal which he and his contemporaries address denotes an element of searching far and wide to let loose "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which "arise in him without immediate external excitement". The exploration of feeling which he attempts to communicate is apparent through "the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions".
Wordsworth exemplifies the foundation of Romantic thought in his preface, describing the "essential passions of the heart" which "find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity". Within these lines he speaks on behalf of the powerful Romantic imagination which is liberated through the means of poetry.
Shelley's Defence of Poetry stands out as one of the defining aspects of contemporary Romantic literature, examining the realms of poetry and all of its "pleasurable impressions". It can be seen as an ambassador for Romanticism itself. Percy Shelley addresses the attraction of the imagination, and deplores the monotonous nature of reason; "reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole". He remarks that "although all men observe a similar; they observe not the same order in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects"; this point is specifically poignant, for it outlines the essence of Romantic literature. It alludes to the diversity of meaning through poetry and demonstrates that one man's perception and understanding of something is not necessarily the same as another's. This represents the universality of language, a notion which was at the heart of the Romantic poet. Shelley claims that "a poem is the very image of life expressed in eternal truth", and that "a poet is a nightingale who sits in the darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician"; this demonstrates man's unconscious appreciation of poetry, without perhaps knowing why, portraying a type of unknowing gratification from it.
The attraction of a universal picture to the Romantic poet was brought about by an age of reason which proceeded it. Notions of the unanswerable and complex levels of consciousness hence attracted him to explore further. Beer discusses the resemblance of Romanticism to the Renaissance period in which "both eras shared an optimism for humanity" and in which "both were aware that the traditional interpretation of the universe was being undermined", yet he points out that the Renaissance "thinker tended to occupy himself chiefly with the glories of mankind", whilst the "Romantic thinker is aware of a universe which seems to be alien even from human glories" (15).
This quote underlines just how contemplative a period it was, and exhibits the profound imagination of the Romantic writer.
Bibliography
Adair, P. The Waking Dream. A study of Coleridge's Poetry. London Edward Arnold 167
Beer, J.B. Coleridge the Visionary. London Chatto & Windus 15
Day, A. Romanticism. London Routledge 16
King-Hele, D. Shelley. London Macmillan 160
Thorlby, A.K. The Romantic Movement. London Longman 166
Wu, D. Romanticism An Anthology. Oxford Blackwell 14
Essays in Romanticism Reconsidered. Ed. Frye, N. New York Columbia University Press 16
Abrams, M.H. English Romanticism The Spirit of the Age.
Frye, N. The Drunken Boat The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism
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