He Romantic Artist in Society

The Romantic poet was considered to be a supremely individual creator. The growth of literacy and emergence of book market made writers less dependant on noble patrons. For the first time in the history of English literature, a writer could find his audience in a free cultural context and truly be, as Wordsworth said, ‘a man speaking to men’.

Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth (in his Prelude) and later on Shelley, present themselves as what Wordsworth calls ‘a chosen son’, or ‘Bard’. The poet assumes the persona and voice of a poet-prophet, like the prophets in the Bible, and puts himself forward as a spokesman for Western civilization at a time of profound crisis. But often the Romantic writer saw himself as a prophet preaching in the wilderness, a gifted visionary who lived outside the respectable society. An important theme in Romanticism was the contrast between artist and middle-class “Philistine”. In their private lives they liked to emphasize their individuality and difference. The gulf between the ‘chosen’ artists and their uncomprehending public began to widen.

The Romantic poets are usually grouped in two generations. The poets of the first generation, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were greatly influenced by the French Revolution and considered it to be almost a physical realization of the ideals of Romanticism, representing as it did, a breaking free from the restrictive patterns of the past.

The initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution, however, soon dissipated, and within a decade disillusionment set in.

The beginning of the new era was marked by the book Lyrical Ballads (1798) written by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The two poets revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. No other book in English history announced so plainly a new literary departure. William Hazlitt described the effect: “the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me … the first welcome breath of spring”. The poems deal with low subjects – rural life, rustic characters – and are written in ‘simple and unelaborated expressions’.

The second edition of Lyrical Ballads included Wordsworth’s Preface, which became a sort of manifesto for the Romantic movement. In it Wordsworth theorizes about poetry, concluding that:

· the language of poetry should be simple language ‘really used by men’;

· the subject of poetry should consist of ‘incidents and situations from common life’;

· the poet’s imagination can reveal the inner truth of things to which the mind is habitually blind;

· the poet is ‘a man speaking to men’. He uses his special gift to show other men the essence of things.

Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory, and made them the rationale for his own massive achievements as a poet.

Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth created a new kind of poetry which was innovative in subject matter, language and form. Their work has had a lasting effect on all subsequent English poetry.