By the mid-1800's, much of the world was hopeless and reeling, still suffering the aftermath of the French Revolution and the scientific mindset of the Enlightenment. Artists and poets found themselves discouraged in the face of such logical, linear thought, and began to develop a style of their own, which they dubbed “romanticism.” This movement of thought and style was heavily inspired by the works of medieval artisans, and was rooted in the belief of imagination as the greatest faculty a person possessed. The poets of this movement varied from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was greatly concerned with the place of the common man in the vastness of the universe, to Oscar Wilde, who emphasized the importance of art in every aspect of life. Each of these writers, however, believed in the same ideals-that innocence, nature, and the struggle of the individual against society were the most important topics at hand. Moreover, each utilized emotion in conjunction with the human mind to create their art.
The romantic poets wrote a revolution, believing their work to be like theology. They believed their work created a new covenant between the mind and the body and brought them closer to God. One prominent romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, claimed poets to be interpreters of the spirit of the age, and poetry to be human racial antennae that sensed what was going to happen. Through an examination of the works of several poets, the state of society during the romantic period can be observed.
John Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale” is a study in the significance of nature in romantic poetry, as well as the painful condition of mortality. Keats writes to the nightingale perched outside of his window, considering the sensual stimulus of the world around him-the song of the nightingale, the nearby forests and rivers, the beauty of night. He envies the bird, writing, “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” Keats wishes to escape the constraints of human consciousness and time, to fly away with the nightingale into nature. He finds, however, that his only possibility of flying away is in poetry. By the end of the poem, he is deflated, and falls back to being human in the line, “Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well.” This poem emphasizes the wistful, idealized state of mind in which many people during the 18th and 19th centuries dwelt. They wished to return to a state of belief, rather than reason. The science of the Enlightenment weighed on society, and those of a more aesthetic manner felt oppressed.
William Blake, a poet and illustrator, was a more naïve romantic than most. He believed that the natural state of man was that of happiness, not sin, and that the happiness a man possesses naturally is destroyed by society. Blake's poetry centers on the idea that, after innocence is lost, poetic meditation provides compensation, as well as containing the central theme of childhood divinity. He theorized that grown men can reclaim this divinity through poetical metaphysics, and centered his belief structure on that of 18th century German idealism, the basis of which stated that reality is in ideas rather than things, that imagination intuits a higher reality, and that a man's body is the physical aspect of his soul. In his poem, “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” Blake tells rationalists that they are wasting their time in lives dictated by logic and knowledge. He uses multiple religious symbols, including the collection of sand on a beach, which represent the collection of people for God's judgment, as well as being a loose reference to the Jewish flight from the Egyptians. Blake's use of religion in poetry traces back to his belief in childhood divinity, in this case stating that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake is unnecessary and vain-an unholy characteristic. This poem holds values of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction led by poets and romantics against the Age of Enlightenment. Thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized deductive reason, whereas romanticism was grounded in intuition.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ascribed to the same German idealism as Blake, and believed that the imagination is an instrument of God. In his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge tells the story of a sailor who violates the sanctity of nature. The man kills an albatross and is punished for this action against holy nature. The descriptions of nature within the poem are vivid: “The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide : Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.” This tale of the vengeance of nature is a warning to the scientists of the Enlightenment and the inventors of the Industrial Revolution-nature is the beginning and the end, and actions against it will result in your own downfall.
Charles Baudelaire was a different sort of romantic. Baudelaire was angry about his cause and those who opposed it. He was viewed as the original bohemian, the slum-dwelling romantic, who pitted himself against an insensitive, hypocritical society. Later on, he became the model for French symbolist poets and the poet-god of the Beat Generation. His poem, “Anywhere Out of the World” is a discussion between the poet and his soul. He offers up possible locales which should please his soul entirely, but his soul remains silent, suggesting that there is no location in which it would be comfortable. Finally, his soul responds, crying, “'No matter where! No matter where! As long as it's out of the world!'” In this, Baudelaire is stating that there is nowhere at which a man's soul can find peace-all of the world is a prison, and the soul will be oppressed by any and every environment. This applies to the power struggles that took place during the romantic period. The reconstruction of the French government, post-revolution, was shaky, and the works of romantics helped to inspire the January Uprising of 1863. Lithuanian and Polish men refused to submit to the Russian oppression they faced, and rebelled. Thousands died, and 128 men were personally hanged by Mikhail Muravyov, a Russian imperial statesman. After the Uprising, about 70,000 persons were imprisoned and removed from Poland. These and many other conflicts caused the romantics to believe that a poetic revolution was necessary immediately, and so they wrote some of the most influential poetry produced to date.
The effects of romanticism exist to this day. A movement called “post-romanticism” began in 2005, with painters and poets producing work that echoes their romantic predecessors. Even mainstream, contemporary poetry throws back to the natural themes embraced by the romantics. The influence is heavy; the genealogy of romantic poetry roots back to the first poem, and, so it seems, will stretch so far as the last.
