S. P. Dutta, M.A.

(English), ACIB (London),

395 Ramakrishna Palli, [Mission Palli] Kolkata 700 150
Voice : (91) 9883494021
Email: sibaprasaddutta44@yahoo.com
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Features of Romantic Poetry

A.O.Lovejoy, an American critic, once observed that the word ‘romantic’ had come to mean so
many things that, by itself, it meant nothing at all. In The Decline and Fall of the Romantic
Ideal (1948) F. L. Lucas counted 11396 definitions of ‘romanticism.’ In Classic, Romantic and
Modern (1961), Barzun cites synonyms of ‘romantic’ like: attractive, bombastic, emotional,
exuberant, fanciful, formless, futile, heroic, irrational, passionate, wild and many more words. In
England, the romantic period starts from 1798, the year in which Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth
and Coleridge was published. Romanticism brought in a new note in the field of English literature
different from neo-classicism. The Romantic period in English literature covers the time from
1798 to 1832, the year in which the Reforms Bill was passed and Sir Walter Scott and Goethe
died. It is often dated from 1789, the year of the French Revolution which enthused the poets of
the time with its call for liberty, equality and fraternity.

01.The romantic attitude favoured innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and
styles of literature. Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads published in
1800 was considered a poetic manifesto in favour of a revolutionary attitude to literature. The
elevated style of the preceding age with uncommon diction and upper-class subjects was rejected,
and ordinary subjects sifted from ordinary life and language from the ordinary tongue replaced it.
To Wordsworth, ‘a poet was a man speaking to men’. This feature is amply found in Wordsworth,
and in no less measure in Keats, Byron, Blake and Shelley. The poems on Lucy are the brightest
examples of this mode of poetic expression.

02. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth described poetry as the “spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.” According to this view, poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in
action, but on the contrary, its essential ingredient is the poet’s own feelings in the process of
composition. The spontaneity has been beautifully clarified by Keats . “If poetry”, says Keats,
comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” This feature is the
distinctive mark of romantic poetry, which remains far off from intellectual exercise or erudition.

03. To a remarkable degree, external nature – the landscape, together with its flora and fauna –
became a subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance
unprecedented in earlier writers. Hence, the age is termed as ‘Return to Nature’ by Albert. But we
must be cautious that it would be a mistake to call the poets as “nature poets”, for while nature
was profusely dealt with by the poets of the age, man was also the subject of the poets – not the
aristocratic man but the man living as a part of nature. Nature was not attractive to the poets for
its external beauty, but worked as a stimulus to human thinking, and often reflected the glory of
God. To consider nature as the manifestation of God constituted mysticism, which forms an
essential element of romanticism. In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth says:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
 Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The poet recognizes “in nature and the language of the sense/ The anchor of my purest thoughts,
the nurse / The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul/ Of all my moral being.”

04. Neoclassical poetry was about other people, but much of romantic poetry deals with the poets
themselves. The poems may not be autobiographical, but they represent the actual thoughts,
feelings and emotions of the poet. Man not as a part of an organised society, but man as an
individual is the concern of the romantic poets.

05. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of French Revolution
in the early 1790s, prompted the writers of the early Romantic period to feel that there was before
the mankind the possibility of a new social order based on equality. They felt spurred and their
writings were surcharged with the thought that French revolution had signalled the birth of a new
era.

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