He everyday and the exotic

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of ‘local colour’ or through popular literary forms.

Wordsworth stated that his aim in Lyrical Ballads was “to choose incidents and situations from common life” and to use “a selection of language really spoken by men”, for which the source and the model was “humble and rustic life”. This was more a social that distinctively literary definition of the proper materials and language for poetry. Strictly speaking, his aim was not to represent the actual world, but “to throw over situations from common life … a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”. His aim is to shake us out of the lethargy of custom, to refresh our sense of wonder – of divinity – in the everyday, the trivial, the lowly.

Coleridge wrote: “To combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and the privilege of a genius.

However, social realism in the Romantics was always subordinate to imaginative suggestion and ideals. Romantic art was, in part, an escape from modern realities.[1] Romantic imagination found little sustenance in the stale and mercantile world around and turned to other times and places. The Romantics were fascinated by various forms of the exotic as opposed to everyday subject. Walter Scott finds his ideal in the patriarchal past; John Keats – in classical antiquity; Byron travels to the exotic East, Southey writes Hindu tales, etc. The medieval and Renaissance worlds were particularly favored.

In such settings life seemed more dangerous, individuality more sharply defined, existence had a zest, an edge, lacking in conformist Britain. A central conflict in Romanticism is the conflict between dream (the ideal) and reality. The Romantics simultaneously long for the ideal, and realize that it is unattainable.

The Romantics even tried to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events. They opened up to poetry the realm of mystery and magic. Materials from ancient folklore, superstition and demonology, occult powers or unknown modes of being came to be used.

They were also interested in exploring the depth of human consciousness, the mysteries of the soul. Interest in psychology had been growing steadily in literature. But never before had the inner world been seen as self-sufficient, as an alternative to outward existence.

A new side to it was an interest in unusual modes of experience. Romantics explored ways of penetrating down to the levels of the subconscious: dreams, drugs, madness. The eighteenth century would have found this interest unhealthy

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