Romantic Poetry Essay Research Paper Romantic Poetry

Romantic Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Romantic Poetry Essay

Romantic poetry gets written during a period of wars and of revolutions, a period of immense changes where human society reorganizes itself at every level.

The Romantic period usually refers to the half century from about 1780-1830. It was a time when Britain underwent the first industrial revolution and so emerged with an economy more radically constructed than in Britain s history. Therefore it brought about different work habits, different leisure patterns, different prospects and even different sex lives for most people. At the same time the French Revolution and the American War of Independence changed the way those countries were govern and made old certainties questionable and new possibilities feasible for everyone else.

The cultural, political and economic structures were being laid down by three revolutions The American, French and Industrial. The American revolution had started in 1776 when the thirteen colonies had declared their independence from Britain, and ended after seven years of war with

British recognition of that independence in 1783.

The fall of the Bastille in July 1789 is the moment when the French Revolution struck British consciousness. Coleridge was only 16 at the time and celebrated the event soon afterwards in Destruction of the Bastille . Soon followed in successive events was Britain s war with France beginning in 1793, The Reign of Terror in 1793-4 and Napoleon s coup in 1799.

The impact for the first generation after the Industrial revolution was depressing, terrifying and intoxicating to a scarcely bearable degree. Eg: Manchester changing from an overgrown village of 27000 people with no cotton mills in 1773 to a town of 95000 people with more than 50 mills in 1802. This monstrous change, quite unprecedented in human history included responses such as those of the Luddites who fought to defend a traditional livelihood and culture by smashing the machines that were used to impoverish them during 1811-1816.

The Industrial Revolution meant for the very first time a great mass of people no longer suffered through a life of brute labour just to avoid starving, to a life of consistent natural disasters and diseases. The huge increase in the productivity of labour that was opened up by the Industrial revolution opened up the chance of leisure and recreation, of education and self-development for everyone rather than just for High-class people.

The Industrial revolution brought about the enclosures and a galloping technology drove country people to the towns, and the discoveries of Arkwright and Hargreaves brought mechanization and mass production to the cotton industry, and a profound change to English Life. The canal system began energetically with the Manchester Canal in 1761 together with the new roads mobilized society. The changes splintered ancient and venerable ways of life. Even as typhoid departed from London and streetlights arrived, the large industrial cities became more and more crammed with people, filth, poverty and suffering. At the same time, however, a new movement in the history of social thought was beginning to disturb the vast inertia of English political administration. More people began to be concerned with the welfare of the poor, more demands were made for individual freedom. 5

Romantic poetry does not turn it back on all these shattering changes and wander off up an Alp to sniff flowers and contemplate eternal verities. 2

But Romantic poets do sometimes speak directly about those events such as Blake s poem The French Revolution.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution it seemed, as Wordsworth s lines have it:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven….

A tempestuous wind was felt blowing through the old bonehead of Europe. The intellectuals of the day were ardent supporters of the revolution, fired with new, noble visions. Despotism seemed to have floundered, the slave trade was abolished, and yet at home no social change seemed to be forthcoming, and abroad the war with France, after a lapse, took up again. The new air seemed to be turning rancid and stale. 3

The long wrestle with Napoleon in Spain (1808-12) exhausted the country. At home she was on the verge of bankruptcy, starvation, and revolution. From 1815 to the grudging, tardy reforms of 1832, the history of the country is a long repetitions of rebellion, unrest, public protest and blind, draconic repression by an ignorant government. The poor marched and re-marched across, up and down England, exhorted by the demagogues to pillage and destroy. 4 The shame of Peterloo is only the most notorious of succession of such fights.

The idea of tension, hopes and fears are all important to Romantic poetry because most of the best Romantic poetry gets written from these ideas.

Tension begins as an understandable response to a turbulent, distressing and exhilaration history which formed and cut across the poets lives from various directions and in complicated ways

We see the poets taking hold of their experience, exploring and negotiating it, using their own lives and own history to add to the poem.

Romanticism places individual man in opposition to a world now only conceived and experienced as the world o

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