Tension, Conflict and Anguish of the age in the Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry, like other branches of Victorian literature is found to have been dominated by social thoughts of the age. The age of Victorian poetry is an age of ideological conflict. The tensions of the conflicting demands are seen both in the form and content of poetry. The Victorian are is an era of the ideological conflict. It is an era in which the conflict between science and faith, rationality and mysticism, and the technical progress and religious orthodoxy is found kun and clear. The poems of Tennyson, and  Browning specially reflect the conflicts in many of its phases and facets.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) is, in fact, the representative poet of Victorian Age. He entered fully into the moods of his age. He molded and then satisfied the tastes of his contemporaries. He is triumphant to show us the restless spirit of his nation. His poetry demonstrates national spirit more than personal spirit and also, like mirror, reflects the social, political moral, and religious trends of the time.

Tennyson’s poetry reflects the general feelings of his age on the great things of the world- religion, morals and social life. “Ulysses”, for instance, represents the spirit of inquiry, intellectual ferment, quest for knowledge, and urgency of going ahead, carrying on, and the life full of earnestness.

With the publication of In Memoriam Tennyson’s status as the poet of the Victorian age was assured. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is his magnum opus that represents the conflicts of doubt and faith. In some sections of In Memoriam Tennyson sought to reconcile traditional faith with the new ideas of evolutionary science but in others faith and reason are opposed. Like Wordsworth and Shelly, Tennyson, too may be called a poet of nature. But there is a difference. He did not spiritualize nature; neither did he conceive it as alive. Living in an age of conflict between science and religion, he believed in the operation of a spirit, in nature culminating in

“One God, one law, one element / And

one far-off divine event,/ To which the

whole creation moves”.

Thus, In Memoriam sympathized with the conclusions of contemporary science. Unlike the modern poets, the Victorian poets does not use free – verse in the poems, the Victorian poets, like the Romantic poets, were more adventurous in stanza forms. Tennyson likes to use fairly elaborate stanzas in which he could swing his lines with the mood, for example in the concluding stanza of In Memoriam.

He is not here; but far away

The noise of life beings again,

And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bald streets breaks the blank day.

Thus Tennyson’s famous poem In Memoriam reflects the Victorian “Struggle” between the

conflicting aspects of science and religion, faith and doubt, hope and a sense of annihilation.

Another preeminent figure of Victorian poetry was Robert Browning, who was also Tennyson’s contemporary. Never have two products of the same age been so widely diverse as Browning and Tennyson. Browning remains uninfluenced by the element of doubt that had entered the Victorian era as a result of the scientific and industrial advantage of the age. The element of doubt and skepticism find no place in the poetry of Browning. He speaks of outright faith.

Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi is a delightful poem. The conclusion of Fra Llippo Lippi is that the world is good because God made it. This shows Browning’s clear optimism, which goes against Victorian pessimism: ‘This world’s no blot for us.’

Fra Lippo Lippi expresses Browning’s strongest word of pure faith to an age of doubt. Like

Fra Lippo Lippi, the opening line of A Grammarian’s Funeral also presents a dramatic Situation in the poem:

Let us begin and carry up this corpse

Singing together.

The poem describes that the grammarian has the optimistic belief in a benevolent God and

immortality of the soul. Thus A Grammarian’s Funerals reflects Browning’s robust optimism, which was a strong opposing element of Victorians, for example: “Straight get by heart that book to its learned; we found him”(line, 51- 52). In the poem the mountain peak on which the Grammarian is to be buried achieves a symbolic value. The plains, which suffice for the common masses, symbolize low aims. The poem admits allegorical interpretation throughout. Thus poem finds a modern element, which was absent in Victorian poems. Like the modern poets Browning does not follow the established rules of poetry.

A Grammarian‘s Funeral is also written in blank verse like Fra Lippo Lippi and other poems of Browning. The poem is indeed, a “psalm of life, the mighty optimistic song of a life lived in the life of eternity, rather than within the limits of time.”

Thomas Hardy is another leading Victorian poet who also introduced the typical Victorian moral or ethical complications which are very uncharacteristic of Victorian attitudes. He intensified Tennyson's uncertainties about the religious doubts attendant on Victorian science and positivism. Hardy is often Victorian in his emphasis on the failures of human love and the hypocrisies in the social system of his time. He has important, if complicated, links with minor voices like Meredith, Swinburne, and the Decadent poets of the 1890s.

To conclude this, it can be said that the tensions of the conflicting demand rise because of the scene of the Victorian world is not the same in the Modern world. The age is one of the interrogations, and there is a total break down of old faith, idealism and conviction. In fact the modern age appears quite skeptical of the old certainties and values, governing Victorian life. The modern age is labeled, and rightly perhaps, as the age of interrogation. Old prejudices and old moralities are challenged sharply. There is a clear revolt against the conventionalism, Victorianism,- against its sense of stability, its strife for order and its spiritual complacency.

Thus, the tension, anguish and the conflicting demands of the Victorian age are  reflected clearly and aptly in the Victorian poetry, especially in the poetry of  Tennyson, Browning and Hardy.

Development of English Sonnet During the Elizabethan Age

Development of English sonnet was one of the remarkable features of Elizabethan literature. The sonnet, a short lyric poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter and first practiced by Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, was brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Surrey. In 1557 they jointly published their anthology of sonnets Tottel’s Miscellany. Soon the sonnet writing became favorite among the Elizabethan poets. The Elizabethan sonneteers followed the structure and theme of the patriarchal sonnets. A Petrarchan sonnet was divided into two parts: octave and sestet. The first eight lines were grouped as octave and the rest six lines as sestet. The function of an octave is to introduce a subject and the function of the sestet is to develop draw it to a satisfactory end.

The theme of a Petrarchan sonnet was usually courtly love. The Elizabethan poets, at first, also used the sonnets for the courtly love poems. In courtly love poems the lover is dutiful, anxious, adoring, full of wanhope and of praises of his mistress couched in a series of conventionalized images. The mistress is proud, unreceptive, but, if the lover is to be believed, very desirable. Throughout the Elizabethan age poets imitated these Petrarchan moods of love, and used sonnets to express them. Sir Philip Sidney, another remarkable sonneteer of the age, jested at the fashion in his ‘Astrophel and Stella and yet half succumbed to it. Some of his sonnets however plead for realism.

The notable changes in sonnet writing mainly come through Shakespeare. Both in style and theme he was different from the previous sonnet writers. His sonnet, which was also of 14 lines, was however, divided into four parts: Three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean soneet is abab, cdcd, efef, gg which is different form the previous sonnet rhyme. This rhyme was very suitable for English sonneteers as it allowed seven different rhymes.

The themes of Shakespearean sonnet are very different. Some of his sonnets are addressed not to a woman but to a young man, and they are in the terms of warmest affection. Others are written not with adoration but with an air of disillusioned passion to a dark lady. Shakespeare’s sonnets have led to a greater volume of controversy than any volume of verse in English literature. But they can be enjoyed without the tantalizing attempt to identify the personages, or to explain the dedication and circumstances of the actual publication.

The sonnet outlived the Elizabethan period. Milton, the greatest seventeenth century poet, used the sonnet, not however for amorous purposes, but to define moments of autobiography, and for brief, powerful comments on public events. To the sonnet Wordsworth returned to awaken England from lethargy, to condemn Nepoleon, and to record many of his own moods. Keats, who had studied Shakespeare and Milton to such purpose, discovered himself as a poet in his sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ In the nineteenth century Meredith in Modern love showed how a sixteen line variant could be made a vehicle of analysis, and D. G. Rossetti in ‘ The House of life came back, though with many changes, to the older way of Dante and Petrarch, employing this most perfect of all miniature verse forms for the expression of love.

Development of English Sonnet During the Elizabethan Age

Development of English sonnet was one of the remarkable features of Elizabethan literature. The sonnet, a short lyric poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter and first practiced by Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, was brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Surrey. In 1557 they jointly published their anthology of sonnets Tottel’s Miscellany. Soon the sonnet writing became favorite among the Elizabethan poets. The Elizabethan sonneteers followed the structure and theme of the patriarchal sonnets. A Petrarchan sonnet was divided into two parts: octave and sestet. The first eight lines were grouped as octave and the rest six lines as sestet. The function of an octave is to introduce a subject and the function of the sestet is to develop draw it to a satisfactory end.

The theme of a Petrarchan sonnet was usually courtly love. The Elizabethan poets, at first, also used the sonnets for the courtly love poems. In courtly love poems the lover is dutiful, anxious, adoring, full of wanhope and of praises of his mistress couched in a series of conventionalized images. The mistress is proud, unreceptive, but, if the lover is to be believed, very desirable. Throughout the Elizabethan age poets imitated these Petrarchan moods of love, and used sonnets to express them. Sir Philip Sidney, another remarkable sonneteer of the age, jested at the fashion in his ‘Astrophel and Stella and yet half succumbed to it. Some of his sonnets however plead for realism.

The notable changes in sonnet writing mainly come through Shakespeare. Both in style and theme he was different from the previous sonnet writers. His sonnet, which was also of 14 lines, was however, divided into four parts: Three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean soneet is abab, cdcd, efef, gg which is different form the previous sonnet rhyme. This rhyme was very suitable for English sonneteers as it allowed seven different rhymes.

The themes of Shakespearean sonnet are very different. Some of his sonnets are addressed not to a woman but to a young man, and they are in the terms of warmest affection. Others are written not with adoration but with an air of disillusioned passion to a dark lady. Shakespeare’s sonnets have led to a greater volume of controversy than any volume of verse in English literature. But they can be enjoyed without the tantalizing attempt to identify the personages, or to explain the dedication and circumstances of the actual publication.

The sonnet outlived the Elizabethan period. Milton, the greatest seventeenth century poet, used the sonnet, not however for amorous purposes, but to define moments of autobiography, and for brief, powerful comments on public events. To the sonnet Wordsworth returned to awaken England from lethargy, to condemn Nepoleon, and to record many of his own moods. Keats, who had studied Shakespeare and Milton to such purpose, discovered himself as a poet in his sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ In the nineteenth century Meredith in Modern love showed how a sixteen line variant could be made a vehicle of analysis, and D. G. Rossetti in ‘ The House of life came back, though with many changes, to the older way of Dante and Petrarch, employing this most perfect of all miniature verse forms for the expression of love.

Evaluate Charles Dickens as a novelist

Charles Dickens was the representative novelist of the Victorian age. He is the greatest novelist that England has yet produced. He is the writer of some great novels such as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Bleak House in which his comic view of life, social criticism, power of story telling and use of humour have been vividly exemplified.

His first novel was Pickwick Papers, the supreme comic novel in English language. His comedy is never superimposed because it is an effortless expression of a comic view of life. Dickens seems to see things differently in an amusing and exagggerated way, and in his early work with much exuberance he plunges from one adventure to another, without any thought of plot or design.

As a novelist, Dickens is a social Chronicler. He is found to have introduced social novels in a much broader sense. In his such novels as David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, he gave the contemporary social picture and attacked the various vices of the victorian age. Dickens enjoyed life, but hated the social system into which he had been born. There are many indications that he was half-way towards being a revolutionary, and in many of the later novels he was to attack the corruptions of his time. In Oliver Twist, (which followed in 1837-8), pathos is beginning to intrude on humour, and Dickens, appalled by the cruelty of his time,feels that he must convey a message through fiction to his hardhearted generation. Yet some modern social historians assert that he disguised the depths to which the lower classes had been brutalized. His invention is still abundant, as he tells the story of the virtuous pauper boy who has to submit to perils and temptations. Burnaby Rudge, with its picture of the Gordon Riots, is Dickens’s first attempt in the historical novel, and here plot, which had counted for nothing in Pickwick Papers, becomes increasingly important.

In David Copperfield he brought the first phase of his novel-writing to an end in a work with a strong autobiographical element, and with such firm characterization as Micawber and Uriah Heep. Bleak House is the most conscious and deeply planned novel in Dickens’s whole work, and clearly his art has moved far from the spontaneous gaiety of Pickwick Papers. It was followed by Herd Times, a novel dedicated to Carlyle. While in all his work Dickens is attacking the social conditions of his time, here he gives this theme a special emphasis with A Tale of Two Cities he returned to the historical novel and, inspired by Carlyle, laid his theme in the French Revolution. None his works shows more clearly how wide and unexpected were the resources of his genius. He completed two other novels Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend before his death, and he left unfinished the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Like all great artists he viewed the world as if it was an entirely fresh experience seen for the first time, and he had an extraordinary range of language, from comic invention to great eloquence. He invented character and situation with a range that had been unequalled since Shakespeare. So deeply did he affect his audiences that the view of life behind his novels has entered into the English tradition. Reason and theory he distrusted, but compassion and cheerfulness of heart he elevated into the supreme virtues.

How did W. B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominate the first half of the 20th century?

W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominated the first half of the 20th century. In W.B. Yeats two generations of poetry met. He wrote his earlier poems under the influence of the romanticists, like Spenser, Shelley, Rossetti and particularly of the late Victorian romantic escapists. The second stage of Yeats’s poetry comprises his symbolic and mystical poems, like The Wandering of Oisin and The Wind among the Reeds.

Yeats realized that poetry had to be adjusted to the changes of his time, and this he achieved in and individual way. Through Blake and Siedenborg he found a metaphysical approach. Some of the sources he employed magic and the like seemed unworthy, but the poetic results were of profound beauty. Apart from this philosophical change much else was happening. He was profoundly moved by the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which resulted in the Easter rebellion, as is seen in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’.

He stands out as the greatest poetical figure of the first half of the twentieth century, of a stature beyond controversy. Out of fables and strange beliefs he made images to hold beauty together in a world where so much conspired for its destruction. In his verses he showed a dominant, even arrogant control of his medium, using simple phrases with a mastery that equaled that of Wordsworth. His later verse is seen at its best in The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robertes and the Dancer; The Tower; and The Winding Stair.

T.S. Eliot was an American born British poet. He is essentially a modern poet who stands on a footing different from the Romantic and Victorian poets of the nineteenth century. T.S. Eliot both by verse and prose essays, made a revolution in the taste of his generation. His early poems in Prufrock were satiric, sometimes comic, always dramatic and impersonal, with an underlying disparagement of the so-called benefits of civilization. His first remarkable poem The love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock represents, indeed, a complete departure from the conventional poetry of the 19th century and even the poetry of the pre-war years of the twentieth and marks entirely a new beginning. The major influences in it were to be Donne, the later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and Laforgue, with Dante also frequently present.

Eliot’s another celebrated work is The waste Land which is one of the significant poetic creations of modern times. It is a vivid expression of the poet’s nightmare vision of the hollow life of modern men and women. The poem represents symbolically the failure of modern civilization through the scenes of desolation and social emptiness. The influence of The Waste Land has been immense:no poet, in his own life-time, has seen erected such a verbal monument of criticism over his work. The meaning has complex references often half-concealed, which lead to commentary, yet the poem is best read without the notes for the effect made on the imagination. To sum up Eliot has a major influence on his generation and created a poetic revolution.

Discuss the contribution of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to the development of the 18th century English novel

In the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson is an influential figure. He stands out almost unrivalled in his age in his sphere of literature. He is probably called the mighty pioneer of modern novel. Richardson was not a professional novelist. He became a novelist accidentally. In cause of composing and competing love-letters he suddenly discovered his craft and emerged as a fiction writer.

Richardson wrote his novels in the form of letters or epistolary. This method is not merely a natural one for his but also inevitable to his objective to reveal the working of the inner soul. It is definitely the most appropriate means for his attempt to record the fluctuation of emotions and inner conflict in a character. His method was immensely popular just after him, and followed by a good many novelists.

As a novelist, his reputation rests on his three great novels; they are Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. In Pamela his subject matter is to show the virtue of a maidservant who resists the attempt of her master to seduce her. Her steadiness and consistency ultimately pay and enable her to win her master as her husband. As a novel,it is sentimental, grandiloquent, and wearisome. Its success at the time was enormous and Richardson began another novel, Clarissa. This was another, somewhat better, sentimental novel. The novel shows the suffering of good women, as a victim of a false man’s seduction. Clarissa illustrates Richardson’s sympathy for women and his heroine, Clarissa, is shown as a dignified lady who dies, but does not make compromise with that which is immoral. In Sir Charles Grandisons,Richardson’s third novel, the story of a man’s love with two women is presented with a moral effect.It shows also the triumph of womanly virtues over man’s loose morals.

Richardson’s novels have moral purposes. These are didactic and serious and imply the contrast between virtue and villainy, between innocence and incest, between love and last. He manipulates the moral ideals through these contrasting features in human nature and behaviour. His novels are also sentimental. Their excessive ethical views and tragic bearing have rather sentimental effects, But this sort of sentimentality was the fashion of the time.

As a novelist, Richardson has influenced subsequent ages through his penetrative study of human nature. In the history of English literature, his relevance is really notable. He has laid the foundation of that which has turned out to be a majestic edifice in the literary realm of England

In the rise of the English novel in the eighteen-century, the name of Henry Fielding shines as prominently as that of Samuel Richardson. Richardson and Fielding, though recognized as classic masters in English novels, are however widely different as novelists. Like Richardson, Fielding did not write many novels. His notable novels include Joseph Andrews, The History of Jonathan Wilds, The History of Tom Jones, and Amelia. His novels are not epistolary like Richardson’s. His method is epical, direct, and the story is developed through narration as well as conversation.

Fielding’s first notable novel Joseph Andrew, published in 1742, was supposed to ridicule Richardson’s Pamela. The situation, he contrived here is quite original and reverse to what is found in Pamela. Instead of the virtuous maidservant, Fielding presents Joseph, an honest servant, who resists reduction from his mistress Lady Bobby and her woman Mrs. Slipslop. He is ultimately thrown out of employment for resisting them. At this moment in the story, Fielding became so engrossed in his own narrative, and the exercise of his own comic gift that Richardson is almost forgotten. There follows a series of adventures on the road, where Joseph is accompanied by Parson Adams, who becomes the source of endless fun and comedy. Fielding is direct, vigorous, hilarious, ad coarse to the point of vulgarity. He is full of animal spirits, and he tells the story of a vagabond life, not for the sake of moralizing, like Richardson, but simply because it interests him, and his only concern is “to laugh men out of their follies”. So his story, though it abounds in unpleasant incidents, generally leaves the reader with the strong impression of reality.

Fielding’s most illustrious work is Tom Jones. Nothing in his work compares with this great novel. It is so carefully planned and executed that though the main theme follows Tom Jone’s life from childhood onwards, the reader is kept in suspense until the close as to the final resolution of the action. The story itself is elaborate, with most diverse social elements. In Tom Jones he had draw one of the great human characters of English literature.
Fielding’s last novel Amelia,published in 1751, marks his resourcefulness as a story-teller. He idealizes the main woman character and this leads to an excess of pathos. He had established in it one of the most notable forms, middle class realism.

S.T. Coleridge as a romantic poet

S.T. Coleridge is one of the remarkable poets of Romantic period. He was a most intimate friend of Wordsworth and their influence on one another was most productive. In Coleridge we find the rare combination of the dreamer and the profound scholar.

Coleridge is remembered not only as a poet but also as a critic and a philosopher. He lived a period where science, religion and politics were at variance. As a scholar, he aimed at bringing them into unity.Biographia Literaria is a remarkable work of Coleridge’s literary criticism. In this work he has anticipated the modern philosophical and psychological criticism of the arts. He also defined the nature of Wordsworth’s poetry.

The Aids of Reflection is Coleridge’s most profound philosophical work. It had a wide popularity in the nineteenth century. In this work he attempted to distinguish between understanding which gives us a known of the ordinary world and reason which guide us towards the ultimate spiritual truths.

Besides these considerable contributions to criticism and philosophy, his contributions in poetry are most memorable . His notable poetic works are The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel. Coleridge would have liked to have been himself such a poet, gathering the meaning of life as he saw it. Within Coleridge there was a strange territory of memory and dream, of strange birds, Phantom ships, Arctic seas, caverns, the sounds of unearthy instruments and haunted figures. He imagined a world beyond the control of reason in where magic reigned.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Coleridge’s chief contribution to the Lyrical Ballads. It was published in 1798. It is possibly one of the world’s masterpieces. When we go through the poem, it introduces us to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a crew of dead men, the overhanging curse of the albatross, the polar spirit, and the magic breeze. Though it presents a supernatural world before us, it nevertheless manages to create a sense of absolute reality concerning these manifest absurdities. All the mechanisms of the poem such as its meter, rhyme, and melody are perfect. Some of its description of the lonely sea have never been equaled to any others. In this poem Coleridge attached a lesson at the end of the narrative where all moves in weird and unexpected sequence.

Kula Khan is a dream picture of the populous Orient. It, though sometimes considered as a fragment, is best considered as complete poem and almost as a definition of the magical elements in Coleridge’s poetry. The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen asleep and upon awakening he began to write hastily. He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and never finished the poem.

Christabel is also a fragment work. It was planned as the story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcerer, in the shape of the woman Geraldine. It is full of a strange melody, and contains many passages of exquisite poetry.

Coleridge’s poems are far removed from the gravity and high seriousness of Spenser, Milton or Wordsworth. Much modern poetry has followed Coleridge in this manner, removing verse from its older and more normal purposes.

William Wordsworth as a Romantic Poet

William Wordsworth was at once the oldest, the greatest, and the most long-lived among the romantic poets. He made himself the leader of the Romantic movement, first, because he issued in his Pre-face to the Lyrical Ballads what may be called the manifesto of the movement, in which he demanded a change both in the subject and the form of poetry that was truly revolutionary ; and secondly because the theme of his great poem The Prelude is the apotheosis of the Self which lies at the root of Romanticism. The basic traits of romanticism such as the love of nature, the belief in humanity, mysticism, revolutionary spirit etc were early developed in his poetry. As a young man he had high hopes for humanity and he had been nurtured in the Lake District which helped him to think well on man. He also read Rousseau’s view on the innocence of man. Thus, the teaching of Rousseau and his own experience convinced him that man was naturally good. He greatly supported the dawn of a new era for the humanity. But later he changed his mind when the French Revolutionists started to commit all kinds of atrocities.

The whole of his early life had been a dedication to poetry, and from his childhood he had stored his mind with the experience in nature which later he was recall in is verse. His best-known works are The Prelude, The Lyrical Ballads, Tintern Abbey and a number of sonnets.
The work which made him popular was the Lyrical Ballads. He wrote it in collaboration with his intimate friend S.T. Coleridge. In Lyrical Ballads he attempted to make verse out of the incidents of simple rustic life. He took incidents and situations from common life and threw over them a coloring of the imagination by which ordinary things would be made to assume an unusual aspect. In it, he used a language that was a selection from the ordinary speech. Thus, the poems of the Lyrical Ballads showed originality both in subject matter and in language and were a departure from all previous practice. S.T. Coleridge contributed in Lyrical Ballads only The Ancient Mariner and four other poems in blank verse.In his poems, Coleridge endeavoured to employ to give credibility to the miraculous

The Prelude, an autobiographical poem is the spiritual record of his mind, honestly recording its own intimate experiences, and endowed with a rare capacity for making the record intelligible. It is an idealized version of his spiritual growth in which he escapes into the higher reality of his imagination. It emphasized particularly his surrender of the charm of logic to the claims of the emotion which became a cardinal principle of all the later Romantic poets. No poems in English offers a parallel. It was composed in bland verse and had an epical scale.

Wordsworth also wrote some of the finest sonnets in which he wanted to awaken England from lathargy, to condemn Napoleon and to record many of his own moods Wordsworth also wrote some famous sonnets. He wrote the sonnets to arouse England to a sense of her responsibility in international affairs, and to express memorable moment in his own experience. His other works included Immortality ode, Ode to Duty and ‘Laodamia’. In the Immortality Ode, he recorded a mystical intuition of a life before birth which can be recovered in a few fortunate moments in the presence of nature.

Thus, Wordsworth stands apart as the the pioneer of Romantic movement by his great contribution in English literature.

what is Romantic Movement? Write a short essay on the contribution of Romantic poets to English literature.

In the publication of Lyrical Ballads ,a joint work by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, is marked the beginning of a new phase of poetry in the history of English literature namely Romanticism. The new poetry has some special characteristics such as emphasis on imagination, spontaneity of feeling, love for nature, dealing with supernatural elements, and love for beauty.

The first characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century is the emphasis which they attach to imagination. In the 18th century imagination was not a cardinal point in poetical theory. But for the Romantics imagination is fundamental, because they think that without it poetry is also the powerful and artistic expression of the spontaneous feeling in man. Interest in humanity –man in his native impulse is the very basis of romantic poetry. The love of nature is another aspect of Romantic Movement. Nature is drawn nearer to shown to be in a very close affinity with the working of man’s mind and moral. Again, love for beauty rings all through romantic poetry.

William Wordsworth

Among the romantic poets, the chief name is William Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads, a joint product with Coleridge, started the Romantic Movement. Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads, a joint is his love for nature. He is deemed as a complete innovator with a new look for every visible object. He is basically a poet of nature. Inspired with the humanism of the French Revolution and thoroughly disillusioned with its excesses, he is found drawn to Nature as the only repose for the woes and worries of human life. To him Nature is a mighty, majestic living force__ a teacher ___, and exercises a highly conducive effect on the mind of man “Nature did never betray the heart that truly loved her”.

Coleridge

Coleridge is the next name in romantic poetry. His chief importance lies as a poet of the supernatural. Along with Wordsworth in its mystical note, Coleridge’s poetry remains the fine example of romantic imagination as well as mysticism. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan bear out this sufficiently. Coleridge’s earlier poetical works mark his love for liberty. He has also to his credit some other poems on love and human relationship. These poems have delicate and subtle psychological touches.

Byron and Shelley

Byron and Shelley are the democratic poets of Europe. They are the poets of men, whose poetry may be termed as the poetry of revolution. In vigour and passion, Byron stands prominent, with a gift of satire. Shelley is essentially a Lyricist with a prominent zeal for the lofty idealism of life. Both of them died young, with immense possibilities.

Keats

The youngest of the romantic poets is Keats, who stands on a level different from other romantic poets, He is a poet of beauty, whose fundamental creed is expressed in his dictum __ ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. Sensuousness, imaginative splendour and verbal felicity are the other gifts of Keats’s poetry. Keats’s Odes are the specific contribution to romantic poetry.

Robert Southey

Robert Southey is included among the Lake poets. His nature poems are hardly interesting. His epical poetry on orientalism is found quite interesting, though this is not sufficiently alive with imaginative wholeness.
There are several other poets, belonging to the age, though they are deemed as minor poets. These poets include W.S. Landor, Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell, John Clare, Robert Bloomfield, and so on.
The greatness of the great romantic poets remains undisputed even today. Many years have passed since their death. But their poetry is not lost in the heaps of the past. People still turn to them and find in their ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Skylarks’ and ‘Nightingales’ joy and consolation infinite.