THE LAST GROUP OF ROMANTIC POETS

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott had mostly ceased to produce poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the last out-and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly from about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly with them. Byron and Shelley were far more radically revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry, was devoted wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no concern either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous external adventure. It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived; they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.

LORD BYRON (1788-1824) Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and standards.

The first literary work was the result of his European tour through Spain, Greece, and Turkey – the first two cantos of «Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage» (1812). This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author himself; but Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which the first two cantos consist. The public received the poem with the greatest enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his well-known comment: «I awoke one morning and found myself famous». In fact, «Childe Harold» is the best of all Byron’s works, though the third and fourth cantos, published some years later, and dealing with Belgium, the battle of Waterloo, and central Europe, are superior to the first two. Its excellence consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely vivid in themselves, are permeated with intense emotion and often serve only as introductions to passionate rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely lyrical.

Though Byron always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical romances, most of them Eastern in setting.

In his half dozen or more poetic dramas he entered a new field. In the most important of them, «Manfred», a treatment of the theme which Marlowe and Goethe had used in «Faust», his real power is largely thwarted by the customary Byronic mystery and swagger. «Cain» and «Heaven and Earth», though wretchedly written, have also a vaguely vast imaginative impressiveness. Their defiant handling of Old Testament material and therefore of Christian theology was shocking to most respectable Englishmen and led to characterization of Byron as the founder of the «Satanic School» of English poetry. More significant is the longest and chief of his satires – «Don Juan», on which he wrote intermittently for years as the mood took him. It is ostensibly the narrative of the adventures of a young Spaniard, but as a story it rambles on formlessly without approaching an end, and its real purpose is to serve as an utterly cynical indictment of mankind, the institutions of society, and accepted moral principles.

As a poet he continues to occupy a conspicuous place through the power of his volcanic emotion. It was this quality of emotion, perhaps the first essential in poetry. He stands as the extreme but significant exponent of violent Romantic individualism in a period when Romantic aspiration was largely disappointed and disillusioned, but was indignantly gathering its strength for new efforts.

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