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

Scott’s treatment of the supernatural is somewhat crude, but Keats gives a good account of himself Notes
in his ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci which is delicately tinctured with the supernatural.

16.4 Medievalism and Hellenism

Many romantic poets, while they did not feed their curiosity on the world of the supernatural, yet
transported themselves to the remote in time and space to create a similar effect of wonder.
Almost all of them looked at the middle Ages as the period of chivalry, adventure, action, and art.
In doing so, however, they conveniently forgot the seamy facets of that period-squalor, pestilence,
superstition, and fanaticism. Keats viewed ancient Greece as the abode of art and unexampled
beauty, so much so that Shelley said that Keats was “a Greek.” With the exception of Wordsworth
and Shelley, who were always lost in the world of his own vision and dreams of the golden age to
come-all the romantic poets, loved the middle Ages. The middle Ages, according to Walter Pater,
“are unworked sources of romantic: after, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out
of things unlikely or remote.”

Notes The enthusiasm for the middle Ages satisfied the emotional sense of wonder as the
intellectual sense of curiosity.

16.5 Nature-Wordsworth and Others

Wordsworth, who is generally recognised to be the greatest of all the romantic poets, has not
much to do with supernaturalism, medievalism, or Hellenism. Nor is he ensconced in the world of
his own imagination. Nevertheless, he shows a strong tendency towards wonder and curiosity
even while keeping his gaze fixed on the ordinary world. He was the greatest poet of Nature, as
also her greatest priest. He brings a fresh curiosity and wonder to bear upon his study of Nature.
His creed is strongly pantheistic, as Nature for him becomes something like a ubiquitous goddess.
In the writing of the Lyrical Ballads it was mutually agreed upon by Coleridge and him that the
endeavours of the former would be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least
“romantic,” whereas he himself was to propose to himself as his subjects familiar, everyday
things, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention
from the “lethargy” of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonder of the world before us-
an inexhaustible treasure which because of its film of familiarity we have eyes but see not, ears but
hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
So when Wordsworth is dealing with familiar objects his intention is not to present them
photographically-as, for as instance, Crabbe does. Crabbe, an uncompromising realist and a kind
of “Pope in worsted stockings”, had nothing of the romantic in him. He looked at the miseries of
rural life without batting his eyelids. His claim was:
I paint the Cot
As Truth would paint it, and as Bards will not.
We read his descriptions of people, natural phenomena, and the sights and sounds of Nature with
the boredom of recognition rather than the wonder of strangeness. When we read about the grave
of a child:
I have measured it from side to side;
It is three feet long and two feet wide
It does not excite wonder or curiosity. There is indeed no romance in giving the exact measurement
of a meadow or the exact height of an oak. Wordsworth, it must be admitted, does also sometimes
succumb to such prosaic realism; however, it is his definite aim to sketch objects not as they are, but
after removing from their surfaces the dull Film of familiarity and then projecting over them a
certain colouring of-the imagination. Coleridge, by virtue of his subtle imagination, gives realistic

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