Heaven and Hell (1793) - in Other Poems, He Expressed Powerfully A Vision of The New Urban World As Plagued by

In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the
economic, political, and cultural transformations. The system of absolute government crumbled even earlier in
Britain than elsewhere; nationalistic sentiment sharpened, imperialistic endeavors widened, and the century saw an
increasing growth of periodical literature which catered to the middle classes.
The ideals of neoclassicism, such as decorum, order, normality of experience, and moderation, were increasingly
displaced by an emphasis on individual experience. The moral function of literature was increasingly
counterbalanced by an emphasis on aesthetic pleasure and the psychology of the reader’s response to beauty and
sublimity. An emphasis on originality and genius supplanted the primacy of imitation of classical authors or nature.
Thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Burke had been instrumental in these shifts of taste and philosophical
orientation. Critics such as Edward Young, William Duff, and Joseph Warton produced influential treatises:
Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) and Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767) stressed the
claims of originality, genius, and the creative imagination. Poets and critics of this period, such as Richard Hurd,
idealized the Middle Ages and expressed an admiration for primitive societies and a native literary tradition, in
which the figures of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare were accorded prominence. The artist Sir Joshua
Reynolds praised the genius and sublimity of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo.
The early British practitioners of Romanticism included Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns. The
English movement reached its most mature expression in the work of William Wordsworth, who saw nature as
embodying a universal spirit, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, drawing on the work of Kant, Fichte, and
Schelling, gave archetypal formulation to the powers of the poetic imagination. Like their European counterparts,
the English Romantics reacted at first favorably to the French Revolution and saw their own cultural and literary
program as revolutionary. As many critics, ranging from Lukács to Abrams and Raymond Williams, have noted,
the Romantics saw themselves as inheriting a world disfigured by the squalor of bourgeois economic and political
practice, a world fragmented by dualisms such as individual and society, past and present, sensation and intellect,
reason and emotion; their task was to seek once again a unifying vision, usually through the aesthetic and cultural
realms.
The first major figure of English Romanticism, William Blake (1757–1827), had recourse to mysticism and a
mythical vision of history; he saw the world as inherently harboring opposites and contradictions, which it was the
poet’s task to harmonize. His own idiosyncratic religious views were presented in poems such as The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1793). In other poems, he expressed powerfully a vision of the new urban world as plagued by
social injustice, and he railed against what he saw as the oppressive rationality embodied by figures such as
Voltaire and Rousseau. In his Pursuits of Literature (1794–1798) the writer Thomas James Mathias accorded to
literature an explicitly ideological function. Other writers such as the liberal William Hazlitt attempted to separate
the political and aesthetic realms, though he saw the literature of the new era as no longer subservient to the forces
of absolutism. The literary-critical insights of Wordsworth and Coleridge, concerning the nature of poetry,
language, and the imagination, in the context of their ideological orientations, will be discussed below. The other
English Romantics included Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), who authored letters, poems, and a series of
journals, and who had a considerable influence on her brother and Coleridge; John Keats (1795–1821), Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of Frankenstein (1818), and George Gordon Lord
Byron (1788–1824).
Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry is a powerful and beautifully expressed manifesto of fundamental Romantic
principles, detailing the supremacy of imagination over reason, and the exalted status of poetry . Keats’ brief
literary-critical insights are centered around the notion of “negative capability.” In a letter to Benjamin Bailey,
Keats suggests that, in poetic creation, the poet acts as a catalyst for the reaction of other elements , stating that
“Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect . . . they have not
any individuality, any determined Character.”1 Writing to Richard Woodhouse, Keats distances himself from “the
wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”: “the poetical Character . . . has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It
has no character . . . A Poet . . . has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body” (Letters,
386–387). The idea behind this “annihilation” of character is that the poet’s mentality infuses, and is infused by,
everything. Deploying what Keats calls the “negative capability” of abstaining from particular positions or dogmas,
it loses itself wholly among the objects and events of the external world which are its poetic material (Letters, 184,
386–387). The ego, then, should not interpose itself between the poet and his “direct” sensations. Keats’ apparent
identification of beauty with truth in his Ode on a Grecian Urn has received much critical attention. Though the
Romantics are often viewed as writing confessional poetry and expressing personality, it is significant that both
Keats and Shelley rejected this notion. Like Shelley, Byron rebelled against conventional beliefs, and in his poems
such as Don Juan engaged in pungent satire of the hypocrisy and corruption of those in power. His stormy and
eccentric life ended in the struggle for Greek independence.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is an essay, composed by William Wordsworth, for the second edition
(published in January 1801, and often referred to as the "1800 Edition") of the poetry collection Lyrical
Ballads, and then greatly expanded in the third edition of 1802. It has come to be seen as a de
facto manifesto of the Romantic Movement.
The four guidelines of the manifesto include:
1. Ordinary life is the best subject for poetry. (Wordsworth uses common man's language.)
2. Everyday language is best suited for poetry
3. Expression of feeling is more important than action or plot
4. "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion" that "takes its origin from emotion, recollected in
tranquility." - William Wordsworth
https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/preface-to-lyrical-ballads/

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In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

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