English Literature

A

The Romantic Poets

The first important expression of romanticism was in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, young men who were aroused to creative activity by the French Revolution; later they became disillusioned with what followed it. The poems of Wordsworth in this volume treat ordinary subjects with a new freshness that imparts a certain radiance to them. On the other hand, Coleridge's main contribution, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” masterfully creates an illusion of reality in relating strange, exotic, or obviously unreal events. These two directions characterize most of the later works of the two poets.

For Wordsworth the great theme remained the world of simple, natural things, in the countryside or among people. He reproduced this world with so close and understanding an eye as to add a hitherto unperceived glory to it. His representation of human nature is similarly simple but revealing. It is at its best, as in “Tintern Abbey” or “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” when he speaks of the mystical kinship between quiet nature and the human soul and of the spiritual refreshment yielded by humanity's sympathetic contact with the rest of God's creation. Not only is the immediacy of experience in the poetry of Wordsworth opposed to neoclassical notions, but also his poetic style constitutes a rejection of the immediate poetic past. Wordsworth condemned the idea of a specifically poetic language, such as that of neoclassical poetry, and he strove instead for what he considered the more powerful effects of ordinary, everyday language.

Coleridge's natural bent, on the other hand, was toward the strange, the exotic, and the mysterious. Unlike Wordsworth, he wrote few poems, and these during a very brief period. In such poems as “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” the beauties and horrors of the far distant in time or place are evoked in a style that is neither neoclassical nor simple in Wordsworth's fashion, but that, instead, recalls the splendor and extravagance of the Elizabethans. At the same time Coleridge achieved an immediacy of sensation that suggests the natural although hidden affinity between him and Wordsworth, and their common rejection of the 18th-century spirit in poetry.

Another poet who found delight in the far distant in time was Sir Walter Scott, who, after evincing an early interest in the ancient ballads of his native Scotland, wrote a series of narrative poems glorifying the active virtues of the simple, vigorous life and culture of his land in the Middle Ages, before it had been affected by modern civilization. In such of these poems as The Lady of the Lake (1810) he employed a style of little originality. His work, however, was the more popular among his immediate contemporaries for that very reason, long before the full stature of Wordsworth's more impressive poetry was recognized. Some of Scott's Waverley novels, a series of historical works, have given him a more permanent reputation as a writer of prose.

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A second generation of romantic poets remained revolutionary in some sense throughout their poetic careers, unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Scott. George Gordon, Lord Byron, is one of the exemplars of a personality in tragic revolt against society. As in his stormy personal life, so also in such poems as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) and Don Juan (1819-1824), this generous but egotistical aristocrat revealed with uneven pathos or with striking irony and cynicism the vagrant feelings and actions of great souls caught in a petty world. Byron's satirical spirit and strong sense of social realism kept him apart from other English romantics; unlike the rest, he proclaimed, for example, a high regard for Pope, whom he sometimes imitated.

The other great poet-revolutionary of the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, seems much closer to the grandly serious spirit of the other romantics. His most thoughtful poetry expresses his two main ideas, that the external tyranny of rulers, customs, or superstitions is the main enemy, and that inherent human goodness will, sooner or later, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal reign of transcendent love. It is, perhaps, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) that these ideas are most completely expressed, although Shelley's more obvious poetic qualities—the natural correspondence of metrical structure to mood, the power of shaping effective abstractions, and his ethereal idealism—can be studied in a whole range of poems, from “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark” to the elegy “Adonais,” written for John Keats, the youngest of the great romantics.

More than that of any of the other romantics, Keats's poetry is a response to sensuous impressions. He found neither the time nor the inclination to elaborate a complete moral or social philosophy in his poetry. In such poems as “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” all written about 1819, he showed an unrivaled awareness of immediate sensation and an unequaled ability to reproduce it. Between 1818 and 1821, during the last few years of his short life, this spiritually robust, active, and wonderfully receptive writer produced all his poetry. His work had a more profound influence than that of any other romantic in widening the sensuous realm of poetry for the Victorians later in the century.

B

Romantic Prose

Certain romantic prose parallels the poetry of the period in a number of ways. The evolution of fundamentally new critical principles in literature is the main achievement of Coleridge's Biographia literaria (1817), but like Charles Lamb (Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808) and William Hazlitt (Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817), Coleridge also wrote a large amount of practical criticism, much of which helped to elevate the reputations of Renaissance dramatists and poets neglected in the 18th century. Lamb is famous also for his occasional essays, the Essays of Elia (1823, 1833). An influential romantic experiment in the achievement of a rich poetic quality in prose is the phantasmagoric, impassioned autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

VII

The Victorian Era

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments that forced writers more than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems of faith and truth.

A

Nonfiction

The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing political power. The clarity and balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was to draw people away from the materialism and skepticism of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life, 1864), describes with psychological subtlety and charm the basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.

Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of the period, Thomas Carlyle, another of the great Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).

Other answers to social problems were presented by two fine Victorian prose writers of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty and vitality in the national life. The escape from social problems into aesthetic hedonism was the contribution of the Oxford scholar Walter Pater.

B

Poetry

The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls of the King (1859-1885). All the characteristic moods of his poetry, from brooding splendor to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with smooth technical mastery. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker; his literary criticism (Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times (for example, “Dover Beach,” 1867), a pessimism countered, however, by a strong sense of duty. Among a number of lesser poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne showed an escapist aestheticism, somewhat similar to Pater's, in sensuous verse rich in verbal music but somewhat diffuse and pallid in its expression of emotion. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, artist, and socialist reformer William Morris were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the adherents of which hoped to inaugurate a new period of honest craft and spiritual truth in property and painting. Despite the otherworldly or archaic character of their romantic poetry, Morris, at least, found a social purpose in his designs for household objects, which profoundly influenced contemporary taste.

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