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Unit 16: The Triumph of Romanticism (Renascence of Wonder and Influence of French Revolution.....

traditions of the Augustan or neoclassical school. But it was Wordsworth and Coleridge who in their Notes
joint work, the Lyrical Ballads, produced, as were, the Magna Carta of English poetry.

Notes According to a critic, reatterton and Gray had been the early birds, Cowper was
the dawn, and Wordsworth the broad day-light of Romanticism.

16.1 Wonder and Intellectual Curiosity
All poetic works of all the romantic poets do not follow the s-e pattern. Romanticism emphasized
the liberty of the individual genius from the deadening weight of tradition and rules, thereby
encouraging a kind of chaotic tendency. The only bond of union among the romantic poets was
their impatience of tradition and their craving for novelty. They looked at everything anew and
were struck by the spirit of wonder while exploring the new Americas of feeling, emotion, and
spirit, and many of them built their spiritual homes in the imaginary worlds of their own making.
According to Pater, classicism signifies “order in beauty”, whereas romanticism stands for the
addition of “strangeness to beauty.” Pater was the reluctant leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He
stressed beauty as the end of all art. Classicism and romanticism, to him, differed in that whereas
the former stood for tradition, sameness, and well-defined patterns, the latter put a special premium
on intellectual curiosity and departure from the ordinary and the normal. Theodore Watts-Dunton,
likewise, interpreted the Romantic Movement as the “Renascence of Wonder.” He meant that in
their perception of life and people the neoclassicists, being devotees of set patterns and traditions,
had been covered by the dulling film of familiarity which they never tried to see through. The
romantics scraped this film and draped the world in the light of their own imagination; and
therefore, everything struck them with iridescent, prismatic effects. They were struck with the
newness of things, which bred the sense of wonder. The neoclassicists projected only the cold light
of reason on every object, but the romantics looked at everything with the eyes of the imagination.
Consequently the classicists were more realistic than the romantics, in the ordinary sense.

Did u know? The romantic poets lived in the world of Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

16.2 The Role of Imagination

According to Herford, Romanticism was primarily “an extraordinary development of imaginative
sensibility.” This imaginative sensibility opened up new vistas which were to be the wonder of
both the poet and the reader alike. Samuel C. Chew observes: “The romanticist is ‘amorous of the
far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the limitation of ‘that shadow-show
called reality’ which is presented to him by his intelligence. He delights in the marvelous and
abnormal. To be sure, loving realistic detail and associating the remote with the familiar, he is
often ‘true to the kindred points of heaven and home.’ But he is urged on by an instinct to escape
from actuality: and in this escape he may range from the most trivial literary fantasy to the most
exalted mysticism. His effort is to live constantly in the world of the imagination above and
beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world. For him the creations of the imaginations are ‘forms
more real than living man.’ He practises willingly, that ‘suspension of disbelief which ‘constitutes
poetic faith.’ In its most uncompromising form this dominance of the intuitive and the irrational
over sense experience becomes mysticism- ‘the life which professes direct intuition of the pure truth
of being, wholly independent of the faculties by which it takes hold of the illusory contaminations of
this present world.’ Wordsworth described this experience as, ‘that serene and blessed mood in
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