Page 107 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes directed against fancy and un-reason. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver Travels, to consider an
example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse and devoid of reason or common sense.
On the other hand, Houyhnhnms are glorified for being endowed with “right reason.” The
romantics starting with Blake rebelled against the curbing influence of reason which could variously
manifest itself as good sense, intellect, or just dry logic-chopping. Most of the romantic poets
believed in a kind of transcendentalism, intuition, or mysticism and none believed in the dictum
that poetry is an intellectual exercise whose worth is entirely dependent on effective expression.
Pope said:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought but ne ‘er so well express ‘d.
The romantics discredited wit as against real poetic inspiration. Poetry to them did not mean just
a set of smart gnomes but something inner and spiritually enlightening. “Poetry”, wrote
Wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, “is the breath and finer spirit
of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.” He
advised the student of Chemistry to lay aside his books and turn to poetry for true learning. The
romantic conception of a poet and poetry was thus entirely different from the classical one.
Dryden and Pope had believed that a poet was a “civilised” man of the world but much wittier and
more talented than other civilised men. To the romantics a poet became a seer, a clairvoyant, a
philosopher, and, in the words of Shelley, an unacknowledged legislator of mankind. Neoclassic
poetry was mainly a product of intellect, and it was to intellect that it chiefly appealed. The attitude
of most romantics was, however, keenly anti-intellectual. Thus, Wordsworth strongly denounced
“that false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions”. Blake represented reason as
clipping the wings of love, and Keats declared that “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Thus
anti-intellectualism”, avers Samuel C. Chew, “was no sudden manifestation of a spirit of revolt; it
had been swelling in volume for many years”.

Notes In the thought of the predecessors of the great romantic poets there had been a
tendency to view learning with suspicion as allied to vice and to commend ignorance
as concomitant with virtue.

13.4 Imagination, Feeling and Emotion

The romantics revolted against the neoclassical exaltation of wit. They gave the place of wit to
imagination and that of intellect to feeling and emotion. Wordsworth emphasised the role of
feeling and emotion in all poetry. These are his famous words: “I have said that poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species, ofreaction, the tranquillity gradually
disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” Cazamian observes: “Intense
emotion coupled with an intense display of imagery, such is the frame of mind which supports and
feeds the new literature.” Feeling and imagination came to have a supreme importance with the
romantics. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote: “...each of these poems has a
purpose: the feeling therein developed gives importance to action and situation, and not the action
and situation to the feeling.” The neoclassicists had held imagination suspect. They had admitted
fancy now and then but the true imagination of Coleridge’s conception was almost non-existing.
They had neglected love as a theme of poetry; their poetry was mostly didactic, and this didacticism
quite often took the shape of satire. Even when some romantics now and then become didactic,
they are not just being intellectual or rhetorical; they rather appeal primarily to our emotions and
take a generous help from imagination. Consider, in this context, Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias or
Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty.

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