Page 108 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 13: The Eighteenth Century-Approach/Transition Towards Romanticism (Progress of Education, Philosophical ...........

This special stress on imagination sometimes led the romantics away from the humdrum world of Notes
actuality and its pressing problems to make them citizens of their own respective worlds of
imagination and to gloat in imaginary
Casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The exaltation of imagination sometimes almost took the form of a revolt against realism, amounting
to escapism. All neo-classical poets were hard-boiled realists, men of the world, and sometimes men
of affairs. Blake is the most notorious example of a romantic moving in the world of visions. He
went so far as to assert that the “vegetable world of phenomena” is only a shadow of “the real world
which is the Imagination.” Swift, from what we gather from Section IX of The Tale of a Tub, would
have certainly put such a man as Blake behind the bars of a bedlam! “The romanticist”, according to
Samuel C. Chew, “is amorous of the far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the
limitations of ‘that shadow-show called reality’ which is presented to him by his intelligence. He
delights in the marvellous and abnormal”. This escape from actuality assumes many forms. In
Coleridge it takes the form of love of the supernatural; in Shelley, of that of the dream of a golden
age to come; in Keats, a striving after ideal beauty and the effort to recall the ancient Hellenic glory;
in Scott it is manifested by his escape to the hoary Middle Ages; in Byron it takes the form of a
haughty disdain of all humanity and absorption in his own self, amounting almost to a kind of
egotheism, and, lastly, in Wordsworth it appears in his insistence on giving up the mechanical and
spirit-throttling civilization and escaping into the untainted company of nature.
This condemnation of civilization is incidentally a basic tenet of European romanticism. Walter
Jackson Bate observes: “It also encouraged the common romantic emphasis on the virtues of
simple and rural life and in its extremer form...found outlet in continuing the cult of the ‘noble
savage’ who is unspoiled by contact with civilization. It lent a kind of sanction to the vogue of the
untutored and ‘original genius, and the frequent dilating on the natural innocence and goodness of
childhood is an equally common expression of it.” The neoclassicists had expected a child to be a
little gentleman, but most romantics, like Blake and Wordsworth, gave him a spiritual importance
for being full of the “intimations of immortality.” Rousseau, the French thinker, was chiefly
responsible for this vital change of conception.

13.5 Diction and Metre
The Romantic Movement was a revolt not only against the concept of poetry held by the
neoclassicists, it was also a revolt against traditional poetic measures and diction. About this
part of the romantic revolt, Legouis observes: “To express their fervent passions they sought a
more supple and more lyrical form than that of Pope, a language less dulled by convention,
metres unlike the prevailing couplet. They renounced the poetical associations of words, and
drew upon unusual images and varied verse forms for which they found models in the Renaissance
and the old English poetry.” Some of these verse forms were personal inventions of the new
poets. They sounded the death-knell of the heroic couplet which had reigned supreme upwards
of a century.

Self Assessment
Fill in the blanks:
1. F.L. Lucas in the Decline and Fall of the .................... (1948) counted as many as 11,396
definitions of romanticism.
2. The Romantic Movement was a .................... , not only an English, phenomenon.
3. The romantics revolted against the neoclassical exaltation of .................... .
4. .................... and imagination came to have a supreme importance with the romantics.
5. .................... is the most notorious example of a romantic moving in the world of visions.
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