Tuesday 19 February 2013

The Romantic Manifesto: Spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling...?

Those of us who've studied English in school or college would be familiar with the works of the Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley, John Keats and a few others. The lyrical beauty of their poems have so entered our consciousness that we can't imagine literature without them and, yet, it took an act of courage by two men to herald the Romantic era as a revolutionary departure from the Enlightenment period that had celebrated logic and reason and highly stylized forms of poetry. Then suddenly came The Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (published anonymously) with poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abbey, The Female Vagrant and so on. Wordsworth was acutely aware of the furore these works might cause for he says in an introduction to that edition: readers "will perhaps have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness". But once the Ballads became popular, a second edition came out with Wordsworth's famous preface in which he put forth the basic principles of Romanticism, basically an emphasis on feelings and emotions and the beauty of nature. All good poetry, he says, is
"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling".
It originates, he says, from
"emotion recollected in tranquility."
Hence, we see at the end of The Solitary Reaper:
"The music in my heart I bore,
            Long after it was heard no more."

And The Daffodils concludes thus:
"For oft, when on my couch I lie 
 In vacant or in pensive mood,
           They flash upon that inward eye
           
           Which is the bliss of solitude;

           And then my heart with pleasure fills,

            And dances with the daffodils."

We're so familiar with poems of heightened passion such as Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind that we forget it took a revolutionary Lake poet like Wordsworth to perform that first act of brazenness and produce something new and utterly different from the prevailing poetic diction.
I suppose good writing always requires loads of courage.
Oui ou non?


 
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Good job Rapunzel !Thanks ! You are taking us back to the wonderful world of romantics.Daffodils remains one of my favourites.tis a pleasure to read the poems of the Romantic poets.anita

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