Romanticism, Themes and
Style
Romanticism was an artistic literary and
intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th and early 19th
century in Europe. A reaction against
industrial revelation, a revolt against aristocratic social and political order
of the age of enlightenment, and repugnant repulsion against scientific
rationalization of nature. The romantic literary productions entail all form of
arts such as pottery, basketry, weaving, fishing, hunting and gardening, and of
course literary composition and many others. This art is indeed celebrating the
beauty of nature, the organic unified whole. In all romantic poetry, they
favour natural emotional and aesthetics themes such as love, feeling, thought,
sympathy and perception.
They idealized natural environment where they find
natural and unpolished substances of nature such as hills and mountains, seas
and oceans, birds, greenery etc, as opposed to the happening in urban centers
grappling with wicked intruding and imposing modernity as a result of
industrial revolution and excessive use of machines that pollutes the natural
environment. A student of Wordsworth opines his view “while reading romantic
poetry, I find solace and comfort and feel completely exhilarated; diving in
the ocean of merriment and getting a new wave of admiration writhing within
me.”
To the Romanists, nature is the harmonizing agent
which reconciles the individual souls, and a refuge which a man takes from the
environmental crisis a borne of scientific rationalization and rhapsodization of nature. To them nature is seen as a way of
“perceiving the words God utters through natural things”.
The famous
poets among Romantics include William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy
Bysshy Shelly, William Wordsworth and the ‘me gayya me aiki’, Samuel Tylor Coleridge
whose literary composition is under focus.
The style of their writing is many a times sonnet,
lyric, and conversational, using simple language and personal voice to speak
directly to the readers. The Rainbow, Daffodils, We are Seven, all by
Wordsworth and The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, Dejection: An Ode, The
Eolian Harp, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, are good examples.
Coleridge in Particular
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who,
with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
A recurring motif throughout Coleridge’s poem is the power of dreams and of the
imagination, such as in Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, Dejection: An Ode, and
Christabel. His work is merely a collection of childhood memory. “Sonnet to The
River Otter, and Youth and Age, speak the so.
To the romantic poets, romanticism meant great poems
written on day too day life and objects in simple language understandable to
the common man. Examples “The Nightingale”, “Christabel”, “Blossing Of The
Solitary Date-Tree”.
A speciality
of Coleridge is the idea of the Supernatural in his poems - as in The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner. According to him you have to cultivate a "Willing
Suspension of Disbelief" to enjoy poetry. He coined many familiar words
and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was known by
his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his
careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth
were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is
particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the
very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilizing common,
everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which
Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s
mind.
Examples of Conversation poems
* The Eolian
Harp (1795)
* Reflections
on having left a Place of Retirement (1795)
* This
Lime-Tree Bower my Prison (1797)
* Frost at
Midnight (1798)
* Fears in
Solitude (1798)
* The
Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798)
* Dejection:
An Ode (1802)
Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read
the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English
language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of
"water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always
rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder
and a wiser man" (again, usually rendered as "sadder but wiser
man"). Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its
Gothic tale.
The conversation poems represented a form of blank
verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's. The last ten lines of "Frost
at Midnight" were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the
peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as
prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet."
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