ROMANTIC POETS.pptx

Romantic poets

1. POET OF ROMANTIC AGE The poets of Romantic Age can be classified into Three Different Groups:- 1.LAKE POET Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey 2.SCOTT GROUP Campbell, Walter Scott, Thomas Camphell 3.YOUNGER GROUP Byron, PB Shelley, John Keats

2. Lake Poet lake Poets formed a ‘school’ in the sense that they worked in close cooperation, and their lives were spent partly in the Lake district. Only Wordsworth was born there, but all the three lived there for a shorter or longer period. Linked together by friendship. They held many of the poetic beliefs in common. Wordsworth and Coleridge lived together for a long time and produced the Lyrical Ballads by joint effort in 1798. They had original genius and what they achieved in the realm of poetry was supported by Southey who himself did not possess much creative imagination. The literary revolution which is associated with their name was accomplished in 1800, when in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge explained further their critical doctrines.

3. Wordsworth thus registered a protest against the artificial ‘poetic diction’ of the classical school, which was separated from common speech. He declared emphatically: “There is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.

4. William WORDSWORTH William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the greatest poet of the Romantic period. The credit of originating the Romantic movement goes to him. He refused to abide by any poetic convention and rules, and forged his own way in the realm of poetry. He stood against many generations of great poets and critics, like Dryden, Pope and Johnson, and made way for a new type of poetry. He declared: “A poet is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” The truth of this statement struck down the ideal of literary conventions based on reason and rationality, which had been blindly worshipped for so long. By defining poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” he revolted against the dry intellectuality of his predecessors. By giving his ideas about the poetic language as simple and natural, he opposed the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of the affected classical style.

5. Wordsworth wrote a large number and variety of lyrics, in which he can stir the deepest emotions by the simplest means Besides lyrics Wordsworth wrote a number of sonnets of rare merit like To Milton, Westminster Bridge, The World is too much with us, in which there is a fine combination of the dignity of thought and language. In his odes, as Ode to Duty and Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he gives expression to his high ideals and philosophy of life.

6. S.T.Colridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The genius of Coleridge was complementary to that of Wordsworth. While Wordsworth dealt with naturalism which was an important aspect of the Romantic movement, Coleridge made the supernatural his special domain, which was an equally important aspect. In his youth Coleridge came under the spell of French Revolution and the high hope which it held out for the emancipation of the oppressed section of mankind. He gave poetic expression to his political aspiration in Religious Musings, Destiny of Nations and Ode to the Departing Year (1796). But like Wordsworth, he also began to think differently after the excesses of the Revolution. This change of thought is shown in his beautiful poem France: an Ode (1798) which he himself called his ‘recantation’. After that he, like Wordsworth, began to support the conservative cause.

7. Coleridge was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will power and addiction to opium prevented him from occomplishing much in the realm of poetry. Whatever he has written, though of high quality, is fragmentary. It was, however, in the fields of theology, philosophy and literary criticism that he exercised a tremendous and lasting influence. His two best-known poems are The Ancient Mariner and Christabel , which represent the high watermark of supernaturalism as some of the best poems of Wordsworth represent the triumph of naturalism, in English poetry. In these two poems Coleridge saved supernaturalism from the coarse sensationalism then in vogue

8. Christabel , which is a fragment, seems to have been planned as the story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcer in the shape of the woman Gerldine . Though it has strange melody and many passages of exquisite poetry, and in sheer artistic power it is scarcely inferior to The Ancient Mariner, it has supernatural terrors of the popular hysterical novels. The whole poem is suffused in medieval atmosphere and everything is vague and indefinite. Like The Ancient Mariner it is written in a homely and simple diction and in a style which is spontaneous and effortless. Kubla Khan is another fragment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental dream picture. The whole poem came to Coleridge in a dream one morning when he had fallen asleep, and upon awakening he began to write hastily, but he was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and it was never finished. Though Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love, The Dark Ladie , Youth and Age, Dejection: an Ode, which have grace, tenderness and touches of personal emotion, and a number of poems full of very minute description of natural scenes, yet his strength lay in his marvellous dream faculty, and his reputation as a poet rest on The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan where he touched the heights of romantic poetry

9. Robert southey Robert Southey (1774-1843) was the third poet of the group of Lake Poets. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge he lacked higher qualities of poetry, and his achievement as a poet is not much. He was a voracious reader and voluminous writer. His most ambitious poems Thalaba, The Curse of Kehama, Madoc and Roderick are based on mythology of different nations. He also wrote a number of ballads and short poems, of which the best known is about his love for books (My days among the Dead are past.) But he wrote far better prose than poetry, and his admirable Life of Nelson remains a classic. He was made the Poet Laureate in 1813, and after his death in 1843 Wordsworth held this title.