Romanticism: Feeling, Nature and Revolt

In 1798 two young English poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a slim book without their names on it: Lyrical Ballads. Its poems were about shepherds, a mad mother, an old huntsman and a sailor cursed for shooting a bird, written in the plain words of ordinary speech. Many reviewers were puzzled. Two years later Wordsworth added a Preface that explained the experiment, and English literature turned a corner.

This unit follows four turns of that kind. Each European literary movement grew out of the history around it, and each was partly a quarrel with the movement before it. Romanticism rebelled against the cool reason of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; Realism rebelled against Romantic dreaming; Modernism broke the Realist novel apart; Postmodernism played with the pieces. You met the earlier traditions, from the classical writers to the Enlightenment, in Senior 5. Here you take the story from about 1790 to today.

1The text: a poem that tells you to close your book

Read this poem from Lyrical Ballads aloud. The speaker is calling a friend away from his studies. Notice how many sentences are commands or exclamations.

The Tables Turned
An Evening Scene on the Same Subject
William Wordsworth (1798)

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

2Close reading

Who speaks, to whom? The speaker addresses a "Friend" buried in books. The poem is a gentle argument, and its title tells us the speaker is turning the tables: the student who thinks he is learning is told he is wasting his time.

How does it persuade? Through imperatives ("Up!", "quit", "Come forth", "Close up"), exclamations ("How sweet his music!") and a steady contrast between two worlds:

The key line. "We murder to dissect" compresses the whole argument into four words. To study a living thing scientifically, the anatomist must first kill it; the speaker suggests that cold analysis kills the beauty and life of what it studies. The verb "murder" is shockingly strong for a gentle poem, and that shock is the point.

Form and language. The poem uses simple four-line stanzas rhyming ABAB, the plain rhythm of a song or ballad, and everyday words. That is itself a Romantic statement: in the 1800 Preface Wordsworth said he wanted "a selection of language really used by men", and he described good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".

A fair reader's doubt. The poem attacks books, yet it is a book, written by a highly educated man. Is the speaker serious, or half-joking with a friend? Strong answers notice this tension rather than taking the poem's claims at face value.

3The other face of Romanticism: protest

Romanticism was not only daffodils and birdsong. The movement was born in the shadow of the French Revolution of 1789, with its cry of liberty, and of the Industrial Revolution, which was filling British cities with factories, smoke and poor workers. William Blake's "London" (1794) walks through those streets:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

William Blake, "London", Songs of Experience (1794), first two stanzas

"Charter'd" means owned and controlled by legal charters: even the river has been bought. "Mind-forg'd manacles" are chains people make in their own minds, through fear and habit. The repeated "every" makes the misery universal. The individual imagination, here, is a tool for seeing what is wrong with society.

4Features of Romanticism

5An African comparison: Négritude

About a century later, in Paris in the 1930s, three Black students and writers, Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana, began the movement called Négritude. Like the Romantics, its poets rejected the cold rationalism of the culture that ruled them (here, French colonialism), celebrated feeling, rhythm and the body, praised a rural homeland and an idealised past, and treated the poet as the voice of a whole people. Senghor later became the first President of independent Senegal.

The likeness is real but not complete. The English Romantics rebelled against their own society's values; Négritude writers were reclaiming a culture that colonial rule had despised. Critics such as the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka later argued that Négritude had accepted the colonial idea that reason belonged to Europe and emotion to Africa. A good comparison names both the likeness and the difference.