Page 127 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 16: The Triumph of Romanticism (Renascence

of Wonder and Influence of French
Revolution on Poets of The Age)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
16.1 Wonder and Intellectual Curiosity
16.2 The Role of Imagination
16.3 Coleridge and the Supernatural
16.4 Medievalism and Hellenism
16.5 Nature-Wordsworth and Others
16.6 Influence of French Revolution on the Poets of the Age
16.7 Poetry and Politics
16.8 Three Phases of the French Revolution
16.8.1 The Influence of the Doctrinaire Phase
16.8.2 The Influence of the Political Phase and the Military Phase
16.9 Coleridge and Southey
16.10 Summary
16.11 Keywords
16.12 Review Questions
16.13 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Define the role of imagination.
Describe medievalism and hellenism.
Explain influence of french revolution on the poets of the age.
Describe coleridge and southey.

Introduction
Various definitions of romanticism and various interpretations of the Romantic Movement in
England and the Continent have been given. F. L. Lucas in The Decline and fall of the Romantic
Ideal (1948) lists as many as 11,396 such definitions! Bewildered by the enormous number of such
attempts to define romanticism, some critics have counselled that such terms as “romanticism” and
“classicism” should be given up altogether F.L. Lucas calf “romanticism” a “wholly woolly term fit
only for slaughter.”
But we should not accept this counsel of despair as, in spite of their vagueness, most modem critics
have accepted these terms on the strength of their utility to criticism.
The Romantic Movement in England was directed against the traditions of the neoclassical poetry
of the school of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. There was politics, too, which was involved, but
essentially, this Movement was not political but poetic. Neoclassical poetry was intellectual,
correct, reasonable, and traditional in its selection of themes and metre-which was invariably the
heroic couplet. At the end of the eighteenth century (more specifically, with the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the coup de grace was given to the already decadent poetry which had
followed from the footsteps of Pope. In the later part of the eighteenth century could already be
felt a kind of reaction against the Popean school of poetry. Poets like Thomson, Gray, Cowper,
Collins, Burns, and Blake had already broken away at various points from the time-honoured
120 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY