ANGLIA POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY

ACADEMIC YEAR 2002/03

SEMESTER TWO

LANGUAGE AND THE ENGLISH ROMANTICS

AEH 1013

ANASTASIA YANNAKOULI

TOPIC: “Romantic poetry is the poetry of individualistic

expression.” Discuss with reference to three poets (Blake, Byron
and Shelley) studied in the module.

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 It was not until the twentieth century that there was analytical discussion of
the abstraction ‘Romanticism’, as a recognised term for theories of art, of the
imagination and of the language (Butler 1981:1). Especially, not until the 1860s did
‘the Romantics’ become an accepted collective name for Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and an agreement begin to emerge about
what an English Romantic Poet was like (Butler 1981:1).

In the Romantic period, (1785-1830) each poet had developed a personal way
of expression through poetry. They were affected by the same political and national
events of their age but each one reacted in a different way and this is depicted in the
poetry of the Romantic period. To understand this better we have to analyse the
beliefs of the poets and the reasons that made them develop a way of poetic
expression that was different from the other poets of the same period.

The first Romantic poet is William Blake (1757-1827) because it is said that
Romanticism have begun with Blake’s Songs of Innocence in 1789, (Butler 1981:1).
During his lifetime, Blake was unknown to the public but now he is consider as a
main figure of the Romantic period. Blake was engaged in the creation of poems and
the illustration of them with paintings, a technique he called “illuminated painting”.
His masterpiece of “illuminated paintings” was the creation of the collection “The
Songs of Innocence and Experience”. This collection is based in a phrase that Blake
said: “without contraries there is no progression". For this reason each Song of
Innocence has its opposite Song of Experience. The first part of the collection (Songs
of Innocence) includes poems that can be easily read by children. It is a collection of
nursery rhymes and songs for children that have a moral and didactic value. The tone
of the poems is pastoral and Blake has used many sources from the bible. Blake was a
very religious person since he was a child and he tries to explore the substance of God
in his poetry through questions and symbols. However, the Songs of Innocence and
Experience except children can also give pleasure to adults. They look simple but in
fact they are complex and include a lot of metaphors and symbolisms. Furthermore,
Blake’s poetry is dialogic, unlike descriptive and reflective, which invites the reader to
identify the viewpoint enounced in the poem as that of the poet (Pirie 1994:131). For
this reason Blake’s poetry can satisfy the adult readers as well as the children.

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 Blake continued writing about God, Christianity and the ideas of good and evil
in his poems The Book of Thel, Aurora and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He
declared that all he knew was in the Bible and that the Old and New Testament are the
Great Code of Art (Norton 2000:37).

However, the idea of God was not his only concern. Blake was interested in
the sexual and female liberation and he wrote about these subjects in his poem
Visions. The poem Visions can be regarded as very modern and pleasant for the
twentieth century readers because it contains scenes of lust and desire (Pirie
1994:134). Moreover as a Romantic poet he used many elements of nature, landscape
and sublime in Visions, in order to make the poem more descriptive.

Furthermore, he was interested in revolution and politics while he was an

ardent supporter of the French Revolution (Norton 2000:37). From this period of his
life he took the inspiration to create three poems, which were The French Revolution,
America, Europe and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He wanted a change in the
political and social life of England and he expressed himself through his poems.

The second Romantic poet is George Gordon (1788-1824), who is formerly

known as Lord Byron. As the French critic Hippolyte Taine said Lord Byron is the
greatest and most English of all the Romantic poets (Norton 2000:551). Lord Byron
was not only known in England but also in Europe and he was admired as a hero
because he took part in many battles. His personal idol was Napoleon, who influenced
him with his plan to create a totally new nation. Lord Byron devoted his entire life to
find Byronic heroes and finally he became a hero himself as he died in Missolonghi
while he was fighting the Turks. A Byronic Hero is a ruling personage; that is, the
model that contemporaries invest with their admiration and sympathy (Norton
2000:552). The Byronic Hero is created in the poem Childe Harold and it is seen in a
more developed form in Manfred and his masterpiece Don Juan. Byron’s poems
improved by details of his travels throughout Europe and usually the protagonist of
each poem was equated with Byron himself. He wrote his poems as he was travelling
and he enriched them with many details of the landscape, the architecture, the wars
and the lives of people in the countries he visited.

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 Byron experimented with different tones and styles in his poems. Manfred for
instance is a dramatic poem whereas Don Juan is a satirical comedy. In particular,
Byron insisted that Don Juan is a satire on abuses of the present state of society and
the most moral of the poems (Norton 2000:622). In Don Juan he speaks for politics,
fame and love but the poem in total is dominated by antiromantic feelings. In his
poetry there are many contraries and as Blake said without contraries there s no
progression (Bottrall 1970:27). Byron in his poetry often mixes romance and
burlesque, weeping and laughing which comprise his two philosophies (Pirie
1994:298).

He is concerned about politics and revolution and he speaks with passion

about them in the poems Marino Faliero, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. In
these poems he makes a lot of references in the American and French Revolution and
the fall of personal idol, Napoleon.

Furthermore he wrote little about the idea of heaven and hell in The Vision of
Judgement, were the Archangel Michael and Satan fight with words when they try to
take George III in the heaven or hell.

Finally, women have important roles in Byron’s poetry. Byron wrote many
poems to extol the female gender and most of them were poems for his lovers. He was
a feminist and he didn’t like the slavery of women by men. Poems like The Corsair,
Manfred and Beppo represent women as liberated figures but in Don Juan, some of
the women are represented as hypocrites who like to seduce men. Byron took pleasure
by playing with the two genders and shocking the readers with his poems.

The third Romantic poet is Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) who has
always attracted controversy from his English contemporaries (Pirie 1994:311).
Shelley was a great literary talent but his ideas and beliefs made him the focal point
for many negative judgements. He was totally different from his contemporaries in
matters like religion, politics and social life. He was atheist, radical and he believed in
free love in the marriage. Shelley used his entire ideology in his poems and he created
masterpieces but unfortunately they were not good for the Romantic period.

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 In his first years as a poet he was known as a lyric poet because he wrote
poems with short lines that had a specific metre. However, as he grew old he
developed more complex poems. As a radical he wrote many poems about politics and
society. He wrote a sonnet called England in 1819, after the Peterloo massacre, in
which he cauterise the English society and all those who are responsible for the bad
political conditions in England. Moreover in The Mask of Anarchy Shelley speaks
about the bad society, in Alastor how the society can lead people to death as a final
solution and in his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound how the people can bring down
tyranny. Shelley was influenced by the theories of Plato and for this reason he tried to
change something through his poetry. In Queen Mab, another masterpiece of Shelley,
he said that institutional religion and codified morality are the roots of social evil
(Norton 2000:699).

As all Romantic poems, Shelley composed poems about nature and the
sublime. For instance, he wrote Ode to West Wind a poem about the forces of the wind
and the nature. He liked Gothic writing and therefore he regularly uses melancholy
landscapes and night-scenes, graves, ghosts, supernatural beings and events and
situations of extremity and duress (Pirie 1994:331). Adonais is another poem where
Shelley uses Gothic descriptions.

Finally Shelley expressed his feminism in his poem Laon and Cythna. Shelley
supported with the same passion radicalism and feminism and he confronted with
honesty and sustained effort the extremely difficult challenge of a feminist politics
(Pirie 1994:322).

To conclude we can see that Blake, Byron and Shelley were influenced by the
same national conditions, wrote about the same subjects but they expressed
themselves in a very personal way. They developed their own theories about God and
society and gave to their nation a great treasure: their poems. The Romantic poetry
contains personal poems by the viewpoint of each poet and that is why “Romantic
poetry is the poetry of individualistic expression.”

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 REFERENCES

Bottrall, M. (1970) William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience,

London, The Macmillan Press Ltd

Butler, M. (1981) Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford, OUP

Pirie, B. D. (1994) The Romantic Period, London, Penguin Books

The Norton Anthology, 7th ed., 2000, United States of America

FURTHER READING

Ball, M. P. (1968) The Central Self: A Study in Romantic and Victorian

Imagination, London, The Athlone Press

Christiansen, R (1988) Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age 1780-1830,

London, The Bodley Head Ltd

Ford, B. (1990) 5. From Blake to Byron, London, Penguin Books