Page 109 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes 13.6 Revolt Against Social Authority

The romantic revolt against social authority took as many shapes as the one against literary
tradition. Most of the romantics were radical in their political views and crusaders for the
emancipation of the individual. The French Revolution affected all the romantic poets, though in
different ways. The young Wordsworth and Coleridge were thrilled with joy at the fall of the
Bastille, which signified for them the cracking of the tyrannic chains which had kept in bondage the
human spirit for so long. Later, however, with the Reign of Terror, the Lake Poets (Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Southey) turned conservative, and Wordsworth earned the censure of Browning as
“the lost leader.” The later romantics-Shelley, Keats, and Byron-were stronger and more consistent
radicals than the earlier ones. All of them devoted themselves to the cause of freedom in all lands.
Byron upheld the cause of Greek freedom in his poetry and his person-not only financially and
morally.

Did u know? The Romantic Movement was much less a political than a poetic movement.
The revolt against social authority did not only mean condemnation of political tyranny and
support for democracy; it also meant, sometimes, an open rebellion against long-standing social
taboos on free love and even incest. Shelley was an arch rebel against all such curbs. Incest
provides the theme of his play The Cenci. The Revolt of Islam is, likewise, a call for rebellion
against tyranny and social authority alike. Shelley revolted against even God and earned his
dismissal from Oxford with his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. His too insistent and serious
belief in free love compelled his first wife to take her own life. On account of their rebellious
notions, most romantics proved misfits in society and some were dubbed insane by it. Samuel C.
Chew observes: “Emphasising the abnormal element, some scholars have singled out the morbidly
erotic and deranged as distinguishing marks of romanticism, interpreting this as evidence of the
part played by the less conscious impulses of the mind and nothing that a large number of English
whters of the period approached the borders of insanity or went beyond, than can be accounted for
on the ground of mere coincidence.” This aspect of romanticism is what exactly prompted T. E.
Hulme to observe that classicism is “healthy” and romanticism “sickly”.

13.7 Summary

It must be pointed out at the very outset that “romanticism” is a thoroughly controversial
term, and to define it is as hopeless a task as ever.
England turned romantic about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and France, the
witness to the famous French Revolution (1789), manifested the influence of romanticism
around 1830, when the Romantic Movement was already starting to decline in England.
“The romantic movement” says William J. Long, “was marked, and is always marked, by
a strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and
theology as well as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit.”
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.
The romantic revolt against social authority took as many shapes as the one against liter-
ary tradition.

13.8 Keywords

Cazamian Observes : The literary transition from the Renascence to the Restoration is
nothing more or less than the progress of a spirit of liberty, at once
fanciful, brilliant, and adventurous, towards a rule and discipline
both in inspiration and in form.
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