An Introduction to Romantic Poetry

 An Introduction to Romantic Poetry

This month I was completely out of ideas but then I remembered Elizabeth Kay's excellent piece about poetry on AuthorsElectric last month. I looked back on the subject in my files and there I found An Introduction to Romantic Poetry, relating to a course I taught in Northampton not so very long ago. I was also reminded of a fantastic group of poetry students, some of whom I still meet up with on Zoom. We read through this introduction together at the beginning of the course, breaking off to discuss various points, such as my visit to Christchurch Priory below in 1970, so here goes...

Christchurch Priory 

‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’, so wrote Wordsworth in his 13 book poem, The Prelude, which was subtitled, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, and which wasn’t published in its entirety until after his death in 1850. The lines are about the French Revolution and in 1791 Wordsworth had travelled to France while it was taking place, having just graduated from Cambridge. But The Prelude is also about other things, about childhood and nature, ideas that were beginning to replace the cultural dominance of the neo-classical era of poetry favoured by Dryden, Swift, Pope and other ‘Augustan’ writers. These were ideas too that were to be rendered in ‘the real language of men’ a poetic theory that Wordsworth had set out in his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, a book which he had published with Coleridge in 1798, and to which he had added the Preface in 1801.

 

Ballads we may recall are a simple form of rhyming poetry. William Blake, who preceded those who are generally known as The Romantic Poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron - had published Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Experience in 1794, works whose simplicity of style were complemented by the woodcuttings on which the poems were engraved. These two works, often written in the ballad style, were interspersed with other poems and writings such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1790-3, a prose work in which he developed his attitude of revolt against authority. It was because of ideas like this that Blake became very popular again in the 1960s when exhibitions of his work were shown, and new editions of his illustrated poems were published. 

 

Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, had lived near Coleridge in the West Country during 1897-8, where during a period of intense creativity The Lyrical Ballads were produced, containing poems such as The Ancient Mariner, The Female Vagrant, The Idiot Boy, and Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth’s contribution to the collection is much greater than Coleridge’s and the last-mentioned poem can hardly be considered a ballad at all, having no verses or rhyming pattern. Wordsworth eventually moved with Dorothy to The Lake District and in 1891 published a new edition of The Lyrical Ballads with its preface. He and Coleridge gradually grew estranged and Wordsworth married and settled down abandoning the radical politics of his youth.

                                                                           Deathbed Portrait of Keats

 

The second generation of Romantics – Byron, Shelley and Keats – ‘wrote swiftly, travelled widely and died prematurely: their life stories and letters became almost as important for Romanticism as their poetry’ (Drabble, 1987). Keats, for example, began life as an apothecary in 1816 at Guys Hospital then, abandoning the profession, moved to Hampstead in 1817 where he met Fanny Brawne and in a single year composed most of his great poems. You can visit his house today and see how thin were the walls that divided their neighbouring cottages. Keats was later beset by financial problems and illness, and when Shelley invited him to Italy he travelled there with Joseph Severn only to die in Rome in 1821 from consumption. You can see the room where he died half way up The Spanish Steps which is a kind of shrine to his brief life. His letters published after his death were described by T. S. Eliot as ‘among the most important written by any English poet’.

 

Shelley, who had rebelled against a conventional upbringing in Sussex and an education at University College, Oxford, had arrived in Italy in 1818, suffering ill health and pursued by his many creditors. He had married Mary Godwin, after eloping abroad with her and her step sister Jane in 1814. (He had already married Harriet Westbrook in 1811 and had two children by her. Sadly, Harriet took her own life in 1816, drowning herself in The Serpentine at the age of 21.) After many travails such as the death of both his daughter Clara and his son, William, and Mary’s nervous breakdown, Shelley and his family settled in Tuscany where he wrote many of his best-known works such as The Mask of Anarchy, Ode to the West Wind and Prometheus Unbound. When he heard of the death of Keats in Rome he wrote Adonais. 

 

However, at the height of his creative powers Shelley drowned during a storm at sea while returning from a trip to see Byron and Leigh Hunt at Livorno. Memorials to his death are many and the story of what happened to his heart is not for the squeamish, but you can see a monument designed in 1854 by Henry Weekes at Christchurch Priory in Dorset. Beneath the carved figure of a woman supporting the body of a drowned man is a verse from Adonais: ‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night;’ (XL). The line is as much a comment on the death of Shelley as on that of Keats.

 

The third of the trio from this second generation, Byron, is little talked about nowadays but other writers, of that time particularly female, have come to the fore.  Shelley’s wife, the former Mary Godwin, is now well-known as the author of Frankenstein (1818).  There has been a film of the life of Mary Shelley, starring Elle Fanning (2017), and a recent biography by Fiona Sampson, both of which have coincided with the 200^th anniversary of the book’s publication. Besides Mary, there are many other women who added their voices to the Romantic movement.  Greater attention has been given recently to female poets such as Anna Seward, Letitia Landon, Harriet Martineux, Sara Coleridge, Lady Caroline Lamb, who wrote an additional canto to Byron’s Don Juan, and Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William. Recent scholarship has included some of Dorothy’s best poems in anthologies of the Romantic era.

                                           Top: Mary Robinson, Lettitia Elizabeth Landon,  Harriet Martineux

                                           Bottom: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, Anna Seward 

Finally, I should mention John Clare, who is from Northamptonshire and who has been rediscovered as a romantic poet. Adam White, also from the Open University, has published a book John Clare’s Romanticism(2017) which argues that he is an important figure in the era of Romantic Poetry. Clare who was originally a farm labourer published his first successful book of poems in 1820. Although further books were published, Clare suffered from severe bouts of depression, his mental health declined, and in 1841 he was admitted to an asylum in Northampton, now St Andrew’s Hospital. Margaret Drabble says that his best poems like Remembrance, The Flittings and Decay ‘have been variously read as laments for lost love and talent, for the death of rural England, or for lost innocence’ (Drabble, 1987). Other poems from his book, The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) are much admired today.

As with the Short Story, subject of my June blog, the art of poetry is often neglected. I have noticed, however, a new trend linked to reading aloud and often called 'spoken word' poetry: American Poet, Amanda Gorman read "The Hill We Climb", a call for unity, at the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021, Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest has held vast audiences spellbound with her powerful delivery of poems like "Peoples Faces" at The Albert Hall. Roger McGough, who I first saw reading almost 60 years ago at O'Connor's Tavern in Liverpool and who is now 86, is still delivering witty and mesmerising performance poetry to his listeners. As a line from one of my own live poems says:

                                                 Get off that bar stool

                                                 Listen to me

                                                Tell all your friends 

                                                About live poetry

References:

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Ed. M.Drabble and J.Stringer (1987)

Photographs by Getty/Alamy accompanying an article by Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian, Sunday 11 Mar 2018

"An Introduction to Romantic Poetry" by Peter Leyland (2018)

"Live Poetry" by Peter Leyland, delivered at The Horse and Groom, Bedford, (1981)