Romantic poetry
Romantic poetry arrived with a declaration. In the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth defined the new kind of writing he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were attempting: poetry is, he wrote, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that "takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility." That sentence was a challenge to everything English poetry had been for a century. It said that the proper subject of a poem was not a king, a battle, or a classical hero. It was the inner life of an ordinary person standing before a river or a ruined abbey. What drove the Romantics to that conclusion? And why did the same turn happen at almost the same moment across England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States? The answers reach back to a movement that lasted roughly from 1800 to 1850 and produced some of the most quoted lines in Western literature. The poets who shaped it disagreed with one another on almost every point except one: that feeling mattered more than rule.
For most of the eighteenth century, European poetry ran on rules. Epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles, and songs each had their conventions, and those conventions demanded intellect, restraint, and formal decorum. As scholar William J. Long described it, the Romantic movement was "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 Romantics wanted to write in what Wordsworth called "the real language of men," fitting ordinary speech to verse rather than elevating subject matter to a classical register. Neoclassical poets had kept their personal emotions out of poems; the Romantics put them at the centre. Coleridge put the ambition philosophically. In his essay On Poesy or Art, he described art as "the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man." That phrase captures the territory the Romantics staked out: the space between the external world and the human mind, where raw feeling is transformed into meaning. The difficulty of that transformation troubled them too. Despite the talk of spontaneity, the Romantics were intensely aware of how hard it was to translate emotion into finished poetic form.
John Keats stated his position with unusual directness: "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth." For Keats, Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, imagination was not decoration but the central faculty of the mind. William Blake and Wordsworth took it further still. For them, imagination was a spiritual force bound up with morality, and both believed that poetry could improve the world. Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence" became his working definition of that power. Nature fed the imagination, and love of the natural world became one of the movement's most visible features. Wordsworth treated nature as a living teacher. His epic poem The Prelude is the fullest expression of that relationship. In "The Tables Turned" he set out the same conviction in compressed form. Shelley shared the belief in a union between nature and humanity, though his emphasis was more intellectual than Wordsworth's philosophical approach. Coleridge stood slightly apart. He held that joy does not come from external nature at all, but from within the human heart, and that people's reactions to the natural world depend on their own mood and disposition. Overarching all of this was the concept of the Sublime, linked to Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise and later taken up by Immanuel Kant. In literature, the Sublime referred to language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary experience. It could mean grandeur, but it could equally mean the grotesque or anything extraordinary enough to take a person beyond themselves.
Keats's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci draws on a world remote from industrial England: knights, enchantresses, and a landscape drained of warmth. That pull toward the medieval was deliberate. Romantic poets were drawn to exotic, obscure, and remote places, and the Middle Ages offered a world as distant as any. Medieval English writer Richard Rolle, whose poems include The Fire of Love, was later read as an early Romantic by those who saw the same emotional intensity in his work. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" works through a different kind of distance. The poem is built on supernatural elements, and Coleridge was considered the leading Romantic poet in that vein. Alongside these flights from the ordinary world, melancholy occupied a prominent place in the poetry itself. In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats wrote about it directly, exploring the longing for a state beyond pain and transience. The classical world provided a third source of removed beauty. Keats filled his work with allusions to Greek art and culture. His "Ode on a Grecian Urn" meditates on figures frozen in time on a piece of pottery, and the poem became one of the most analysed texts in the English tradition. Each of these orientations outward, backward, toward myth, toward melancholy, shared a single motive: the desire to exceed the limits of the present moment.
German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, and in its early years ran alongside Weimar Classicism, which lasted from 1772 to 1805. Where English Romanticism tended toward seriousness, the German variety notably valued wit, humour, and beauty. Its proto-Romantic predecessor, Sturm und Drang, meaning Storm and Stress, ran from the late 1760s to the early 1780s. The period is named after Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play, first performed in 1777. Johann Georg Hamann was considered the movement's ideologue; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was among its notable proponents before moving on to initiate Weimar Classicism with Friedrich Schiller. Jena Romanticism, the first phase of German literary Romanticism proper, centred on a group active from around 1798 to 1804, including Friedrich Schlegel, his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Their philosophical preoccupation was Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, specifically the problem of bridging pure and practical reason. The Heidelberg circle that followed included Joseph von Eichendorff and Clemens Brentano; the Philosophers' Walk in Heidelberg, a scenic path on the Heiligenberg overlooking the city, survives as a physical relic of that era. In France, the movement produced Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, and others whose influence reached into theatre, poetry, and prose fiction. A 1983 study of the sixteenth-century poet Jean de La Ceppède noted that the Protestant epic poet Agrippa d'Aubigné, active during the French Wars of Religion, had been forgotten until the Romantics rediscovered him. In Poland, Romanticism began around 1820 with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances in 1822 and ended with the suppression of the January 1863 Uprising against the Russian Empire in 1864, after which Polish culture entered the era known as Positivism.
Alexander Pushkin holds a peculiar place in the history of Romanticism. The nineteenth century is traditionally called the Golden Era of Russian literature, and Pushkin is credited with both crystallising the literary Russian language and introducing a new level of artistry. His best-known work is Eugene Onegin, a novel written as a sonnet sequence. Russian critics have long argued that across his thirty-six years of life, Pushkin moved from neo-Classicism through Romanticism and finally to Realism. Lord Byron influenced nearly every poet of the Golden Era, including Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, and especially Mikhail Lermontov. The British poet who generated the strangest afterlife in Russia, however, was the Scotsman Robert Burns. Because the Russian aristocracy was so removed from the peasantry, Burns translated into Russian became a symbol for ordinary people. In Soviet Russia he was elevated as the archetypical poet of the people, a status that suited the state's propaganda needs. A new translation begun by Samuil Marshak in 1924 sold over 600,000 copies. In 1956, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative postage stamp. Burns's poetry is taught in Russian schools alongside Russian national poets. His reputation survived the post-communist years of capitalism intact. The case of Burns in Russia illustrates how far a poem can travel from its original context and acquire meanings its author never imagined.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 and died in 1892. His major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855. He was shaped by transcendentalism, the philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States, drawing on English and German Romanticism, the biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It was also influenced by Indian religions, especially the Upanishads. Whitman's poems praise nature and the individual human's role in it, but like Ralph Waldo Emerson, he elevates rather than diminishes the mind and spirit. Edgar Allan Poe, who lived from 1809 to 1849, is widely regarded as a central figure of American Romanticism, though he strongly disliked transcendentalism. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who lived from 1807 to 1882, was the most popular American poet of his day and one of the first American celebrities; it was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day. His reputation collapsed after his death as academics shifted their attention to Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost. Twentieth-century poet Lewis Putnam Turco concluded that Longfellow was "minor and derivative in every way throughout his career." More recently, an essay by Dana Gioia sparked a revival of scholarly interest in his work. The Romantic strain continued long after 1850. Whitman's influence is visible in Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings; echoes of transcendentalism appear in poems about nature by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Gary Snyder; and strains of Romantic individualism run through Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Frank O'Hara, and the Beat Generation.
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Common questions
What is Romantic poetry and when did it emerge?
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850 and was defined by a reaction against the formal conventions and rationalism of Neoclassical poetry.
How did William Wordsworth define Romantic poetry?
In the 1800 preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that "takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility." He and Coleridge advocated writing in "the real language of men" rather than elevated classical diction.
What role did the Sublime play in Romantic poetry?
The Sublime was one of the most important concepts in Romantic poetry. It referred to language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary experience, linked to Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise and later taken up by Immanuel Kant and Romantic poets including Wordsworth.
Who were the key figures of German Romantic poetry?
Jena Romanticism, active from around 1798 to 1804, centred on Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. The earlier Sturm und Drang movement, named after Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's 1777 play, included Goethe as a notable proponent.
How did Robert Burns become famous in Russia?
Because the Russian aristocracy was so removed from ordinary people, Burns translated into Russian became a symbol of the peasantry. A translation begun by Samuil Marshak in 1924 sold over 600,000 copies, and in 1956 the Soviet Union became the first country to honour Burns with a commemorative postage stamp.
What was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's place in American Romantic poetry?
Longfellow, who lived from 1807 to 1882, was the most popular American poet of his day; it was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day. His reputation declined sharply after his death, though an essay by Dana Gioia later spearheaded a revival of scholarly interest.
All sources
18 references cited across the entry
- 5bookOn Poesy or ArtSamuel Taylor Coleridge — Harvard Classics — 1914
- 6webThe Sublime: From A Poet's Glossarymphillips — 2014-10-29
- 7bookThe Fire of LoveR. Rolle et al. — Penguin — 1981
- 8bookThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth EditionPrinceton University Press — 2012-08-26
- 18webAmerican TranscendentalismIan Finseth — Excerpted from "Liquid Fire Within Me": Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early Evangelicalism, 1820-1860, - M.A. Thesis, 1995.