2. Romanticism

a. The French Revolution

Rather than a clearly defined literary movement, Romanticism was a melting pot of various historical influences. One of the biggest of those influences was, without any doubt, the French Revolution, and the ideals of Enlightenment that went with it. People believed they were witnessing the dawn of a new age, an age of freedom and social reform. Intellectuals and poets embraced the promising ideology of 'egalité, fraternité et liberté'. Wordsworth, in his early years, exclaimed enthusiastically:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times ...
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights. (Abrams 263)

The light of reason was destined to sweep away the darkness of the ancien régime. In this climate of euphoria, poets - like Blake - even used the imagery of biblical Armageddon. He speaks with "the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future, sees." (Abrams 33)

But these early dreams of paradise were shattered by the actual historical developments. By 1793, the glory of the French Revolution had mutated into Robespierre's reign of terror. The once so high-spirited Wordsworth was utterly disgusted and disillusioned with the reality unfolding before him:

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,
Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
Before unjust tribunals, with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense
Of treachery and desertion in the place
The holiest that I knew of - my own soul. (Abrams 262)

It were these kinds of sentiments that would shape Romanticism in its most typical form. They were responsible for a shift from external to internal orientation. If the human mind couldn't change history as such, it would now have to change its own subject. Revelation became a spiritual rather than a realistic goal. Actually, the same kind of conversion had also been used by the Church in its early days. Christ supposedly died on the cross for mankind's sins, but the fact that the world was not at all redeemed created rather a big problem. So the Church introduced the idea of the Second Coming, when the world would be delivered from evil once and for all. Until then, salvation would have to be conceived spiritually and not historically.
The purpose, of course, of this sort of process of the mind - and towards the mind, for that matter - is to keep people's hope alive. Similarly, Wordsworth wanted to keep the grand ideas of the French Revolution alive after they had proved to be intangible in actual reality. Mankind had been unable to live up to the celestial visions it had created for itself. Through poetry, the egalitarian principle managed to survive, but it had become an egalitarianism of the spirit.
A direct consequence of this was that the establishment was no longer the enemy. The individual mind now had to be liberated from its ignorance, no longer a whole people from its oppressor. Wordsworth, for example, had gone from the revolutionary figure of the 1890's to the conservative poet 'of hall and bower' who would receive, and accept, the poet laureate ship. Of this first, revolutionary period Wordsworth's letter to the bishop of Llandaff is a very good example of his sentiments at the time:

Reflecting on the corruption of the public manners, does your lordship shudder at the prostitution which miserably deluges our streets? You may find the cause in our aristocratical prejudices... Do you lament that such large portions of mankind should stoop to occupations unworthy the dignity of their nature? You may find in the pride and luxury thought necessary to nobility how such servile arts are encouraged... If the long equestrian train of equipage should make your lordship sigh for the poor who are pining in hunger, you will find that little is thought of snatching the bread from their mouths to eke out the 'necessary splendor' of nobility.
I have not time to pursue this subject farther, but am so strongly impressed with the baleful influence of aristocracy and nobility upon human happiness and virtue that if, as I am persuaded, monarchy cannot exist without such supporters, I think that reason sufficient for the preference I have given to the republican system. (Day 1998, 34)

None of this was to be found in Wordsworth's later works anymore. Even if he had wanted to revisit these earlier feelings, he would still have had to be very careful not to arouse any suspicion. The English nobility was fearful of ending in the same vein as Louis XVI, so any public display of sympathy for revolutionary France would surely have been awarded with the charge of high-treason. Wordsworth's change of heart thus effectively kept him from losing his head... What he did lose, though, was his credibility. Former disciples, like Keats and Shelley, were very bitter about this 'selling out'.

Keats, Byron and Shelley - the second generation Romantics - were born into an age that had lost much of its Revolutionary ideals. Although they all shared a deep sympathy for those lost ideals, they were also very aware of the limits of the human mind. While Wordsworth and Coleridge had been pursuing visions larger than life, their predecessors had lost all faith in this kind of idolisation of the individual spirit. Shelley comments on the subject in his Preface to 'Alastor':

The Poet's self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin.... Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. (Abrams 650)

So for all Shelley's seeming spiritually and Keats' quest for the Divine, their ambitious projects inevitably are the sad representations of their own impossibility. This sense of failure resulted in a sometimes melancholy undertone, hence Byron and Shelley's infatuation with gothic and German-styled Dark Romanticism. After these early excursions in the realm of the spirit, though, they tended towards a more realistic mode of writing. Even Keats, "in his particularly short career as a poet, shows something of a move from an early concern with an interior, spiritual world towards an increasing awareness of the drawbacks of such interiority and towards an engagement with external realities." (Day 1998, 171) So, over two generations of Romantics, we see the focus shift from external to internal affairs and then, after this internal approach had been pushed to and over its limit, back to external realities again.

b. Nature

A second major element of Romantic poetry was its treatment of nature. The description of natural scenery as such was no innovation of Romanticism, only the way in which it was presented. Earlier poems dealing with nature had done so in an allegorical fashion. Nature had to be a representation of human society and was - just like society - governed by the divine spirit of God. The invention of the Romantic period was the detachment of nature from society and its attachment to the individual mind of the observer. It was actually a flight from "the depredations wrought by humanity" to the unspoiled "integrity of the life of nature". (Day 1998, 39) But above anything else, it was a process of self-awareness. Nature was "the stimulus for the poet to engage in the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking". (Day 1998, 47) The spirit pervading nature was recognized as the same spirit pervading the human mind. And just because they had the same origin, the mind was endowed with the power to see through the physical reality of nature to a greater, spiritual reality behind it.

Imperative in this process was the faculty of the Imagination, a core Romantic concept. As Coleridge puts it in his Biographia Literaria:

The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Abrams 387)

If this sounds philosophic, it's because this is a theory designed to respond to an earlier system of metaphysics by Kant. This 18th century German philosopher had created a worldview in which knowledge could only be obtained through experience. This meant that human knowledge could never confidently rise above the level of sense impressions. It had to be limited to the 'phenomenon', while the 'noumenon' or 'ding an sich' could never be known. In short, this had as a consequence that external objects were never seen for what they really were. For the human mind, they were soulless and lifeless, a whole bunch of dead things. So - in Coleridge's view at least - Kant's system resulted in the death of the world.
In order to rescue the outside world from this grim fate, Romantic philosophy re-interpreted nature as 'the soul of the world'. It was given new life again. But this couldn't be done without first indicating a human faculty that produced this insight. Importantly, Romanticism worked through the Kantian system, not against it. So there had to be a new component added to the earlier model. For this purpose, the faculty of the Imagination was called upon. Actually, Kant himself had already tried to make a similar intervention by introducing into his philosophy the notion of 'Urteilskraft'. The Romantic Imagination would be worked out in greater depth, though.

The Primary Imagination, then, is still closely connected with the mind's divine origins. Rather than rational knowledge - the only kind Kant was willing to acknowledge - it represents some kind of intuitive knowledge. Through this 'living power', the Romantics claimed to somehow be in touch with a higher order behind reality. Of course, this is a big somehow.
If we take the example of Wordsworth once again, we see a conviction of the existence of this power, but at the same time also a conviction of its loss at the moment of birth into this world. All we have left are 'sparks' of the Divine. These are deemed to be still strong in the mind of the child. When it then grows into adulthood, these sparks gradually fade away and become 'embers'. The initial state of bliss and the knowledge that went with are drowned in the Lethean waters of life. The Romantic mission, then, is the recovery of that lost state of bliss. "Though their initial brilliance has faded those early visions of the 'eternal mind' still hold a constitutive authority over the human adult's mind." (Day 1998, 58) They are responsible for Romanticism's tendency to search for the 'one great mind' pervading all things, subject and object, self and world, mind and nature.

As should be obvious by now, Romanticism was by no means a monolithic phenomenon. Different strains were running alongside and over each other. I have already briefly pointed out the democratic tendency, which was fuelled by the ideas of the French Revolution. Equality and freedom for all people was the main consideration here. On the other hand, then, there was also an individualistic strain, which focused on the human subject - as opposed to human society. This explains the escapist nature ascribed to many Romantic works.
I would thus certainly suggest a 'polysystemic' approach to Romanticism, rather than trying to fit every work into a narrow set of rules. I will now carry on in the same vein, and discuss yet another important strain in Romanticism: its treatment of gender.

c. Gender

Over the last couple of decades, gender studies have gained a lot of interest and support. Their importance for the study of Romanticism becomes clear in the following statement by Anne K. Mellor:

By taking on the feminine virtues of compassion, mercy, gentleness and sympathy, the male Romantic poets could claim to speak with ultimate moral as well as intellectual authority... By usurping the mother's womb, life-giving power, and feminine sensibilities, the male poet could claim to be God, the sole ruler of the world.
Foremost among the traditional feminine qualities colonized by this strain of masculine Romanticism is love... Given the central role played by passionate love in masculine Romanticism, where love is the means by which the poet attempts to rise on an almost Platonic ladder to the most transcendent and visionary of human experiences, and the explicit valorisation of the beloved woman contained within this secular myth, we might expect a recognition of the erotic power and spiritual equality of the female to be essential to their poetry. But when we look closely at the gender implications of romantic love, we discover that rather than embracing the female as a valued other, the male lover usually effaces her into a narcissistic projection of his own self. ...
Since the object of romantic or erotic love is not the recognition and appreciation of the beloved woman as an independent other but rather the assimilation of the female into the male (or the annihilation of any Other that threatens the masculine selfhood), the woman must finally be enslaved or destroyed, must disappear or die. (Mellor 23-26)

This masculine operation of the mind could well be responsible for the fact that Western literature seems to be full of dead females. From Ophelia to Porphyria, they all have one thing in common: they don't live to see the end of the play. Another common quality of women in Romantic poetry is that they are breathtakingly beautiful. They all seem to be modelled after Venus, the goddess of love in Roman mythology and traditionally the embodiment of beauty in its purest form. In the logic of Romanticism, this beauty will ultimately be the cause of their downfall.

In order to understand this, it's important to note that Romantic philosophy distinguished between two different forces: Beauty and the sublime. Beauty, then, was to be found in objects in the real world. The sublime - or Divine - was considered to be of a higher order. Therefore it inevitably exceeded human understanding. It was thought of as an overwhelming and infinite source of wisdom, far too great for the finite mind of man to comprehend. A vision of the sublime, therefore, would fill his small mind with awe and terror:

When we contemplate the Deity, his attributes and their operation coming united on the mind, form a sort of sensible image, and as such are capable of affecting the imagination... whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him... If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling. (quoted from Burke in Day 1998, 185)

For the male imagination, this power relationship also exists on a lower level: just as the sublime is superior to man, man is superior to woman.

SUBLIME > MAN > WOMAN (BEAUTY)

The very nature of beauty, or women if you will, is turned against it to validate man's pre-eminence. Since beauty is pleasing to the eye, it can never be sublime, because the sublime has to invoke fear and not pleasure. Furthermore, the very fact that it is pleasing is also enough to make it inferior to the male imagination:

For nothing can act agreeable to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us; and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception. (quoted from Burke in Day 1998, 184)

The Imagination in Romantic poetry, then, doesn't hesitate to make use of its self-proclaimed power. This is why women often end up dead before the final stanza is over. It's a logical result of the power relations at work. At the end of Keats' 'The Eve of St. Agnes', for example, Madeline flees into the storm with her lover Porphyro and they both 'are gone'. This can be seen as an expression of the male lover's yearning to be one with his beloved. This supposed one-ness then, of course, has dangerous implications for the female participant in this union. Figuratively speaking, she would have to be blown to pieces so her particles could be used in the formation of a 'higher mind'. Since Keats was not familiar with present-day nuclear science, a flight into the storm would at the time have done very well as a metaphoric representation of this kind of cataclysmic operation. This is then represented as the ultimate act of love, the desire to be totally united with the beloved woman. In fact - or according to Mellor in any case - it's the ultimate male conquest of the female virtues of love and beauty. For women dwelling in Romantic verse, the expression 'drop-dead gorgeous' was thus not a mere figure of speech.

Later poets ironized this tendency of the male Imagination to kill off women. In Browning's 1834 poem 'Porphyria's Lover', for example, we get a male narrator who, literally, has nothing better to do than murder his beloved Porphyria.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain. (Abrams 1188)

Especially this last line seems to echo Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', in an attempt to debunk the latter's highflying ideals by means of irony.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain (Abrams 792)

With 'Porphyria's Lover' we are actually already breaking new ground in the discussion of gender in poetry. The beating heart behind the poem is a contrast between active (conventionally male) and passive (conventionally female). The Victorian Age saw the emergence of the woman-issue, which was not self-evident by any means. This time, poetry had to come to terms with real women of flesh and blood, not the idealized beauties constructed in Romantic fiction. In that respect, we have to realize that women were never before considered to be active members of society. You could say they were rather seen as something to adorn the house with, a passive object like a longcase clock or a piano. By the mid 19th century, this rationale was starting to come under heavy fire. Also around that same time, the feminist movement had her early beginnings. This is very important because, without this context, it would be hard imagining a 20th century poet like Robert Graves. He stands at the very crossroads where the feminist and the Romantic Movement meet, which will become even clearer when I discuss his The White Goddess in further detail.