Blog Series on Romanticism #3: England

The previous post in the current blog series on Romanticism focused on Romanticism within the nation of Germany. The present blog post will now turn attention to Romanticism within the nation of England. In particular, Romanticism in England particularly took root within the art of poetry. The present essay will discuss several key figures of Romanticism in England, including Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Then, the essay will consider William Blake in light of the Romantic tradition but will conclude that he falls somewhat outside of the bounds of this specific cultural movement per se, except insofar as the Romantic tradition is interpreted in a much broader way than it ordinarily is. Finally, the essay will consider the significance of the English Romantic poets' adventures with political revolution, and what this says about the Romantic temperament in general. 

Lord Byron

The poetry and general temperament of Lord Byron perhaps exemplifies the basic antithesis that exists between the Romantic ethos on the one hand and the values of bourgeois society on the other. As Stauffer has put the matter: "Byron characteristically combines satiric impulses with a dramatic sense of himself as a figure of vengeance. As a result, he expresses anger most frequently and exuberantly as a curse: a ritualized declamation of ill will that performs his wrath" (paragraph 13). From a Romantic perspective, it would hardly be necessary to ask what Byron is so upset about. When one's cardinal values consist of things as the intensification of passion and of subjectivity, all of bourgeois society can only come to seem like an endless provocation of one's moral outrage. 

In his own life, Byron had a reputation for being a rake, and it is probably not a coincidence that one of his most famous works is Don Juan—a rendition, of course, of the classic seducer archetype. Byron, for both temperamental and aesthetic reasons, lived in conscious defiance of the values of dominant society, and this antagonism can be felt across most of his works. This is perhaps also part of what gives Byron's poetry a kind of prophetic character: one gets the sense of an outsider raging against the normative picture of reality, in the name of a deeper truth that only he understands. As Heschel has pointed out, this was also the characteristic perspective of the biblical prophets of old: "To a person endowed with prophetic sight, everyone else appears blind; to a person who's ear perceives God's voice, everyone else appears deaf" (19). It can be suggested that the Romantic artist in general attempts to fulfill this kind of prophetic function within the context of his day and age, and that Byron exemplifies this aspect of Romanticism. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

In Percy Bysshe Shelley, the sense of antagonism toward society found in Byron manifests itself as a full-fledged call for political revolution. One of his more famous poems, for example, is called the "Masque of Anarchy," and it closes with these incendiary lines: "Rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number! / Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you: / Ye are many—they are few!" (411). From a present-day perspective, these lines almost inevitably call to mind the kind of ethos and exhortation that have undergirded recent political protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. And Shelley would have felt very much at home supporting such movements. His poetry his consistently animated by concerns over social justice and the ways in which the very structures of dominant society prevent the Romantic ethos from coming to full fruition. 

In his own life, Shelley actually died young at the age of 30 when he went on a sea voyage; it would seem that the vessel just outright sank due to the poor seamanship of the men aboard the boat. One can pick up on a certain bitter irony here, between the wild calls for revolution found within Shelley's works on the one hand, and his apparent incapacity to have kept a boat from sinking on the other. The irony, in any event, has not been lost on the novelist Kundera, who has reflected that although Shelley—like all revolutionaries—dreamed of death by fire, he actually ended up drowning in water instead (408). This tension is salient for a thorough analysis of Romanticism, insofar as one of the characteristic perils of Romanticism is the temptation to confuse the imagination with the real world, or aesthetic/spiritual ideals with pragmatic and political ends. Given the radical nature of Shelley's poetry, it would be difficult for a sensitive reader to not think of the dramatic contrast between Shelley's works and Shelley's death as containing the beginnings of a parable. 

John Keats

John Keats was perhaps the most brilliant of the English Romantics; and one of the remarkable features of his poetry is perhaps its realistic grasp of the world, even when refracted through the prism of his Romanticism. As James has written: "much of his realism was veiled in romance, but underneath the romance he saw things as they were, and wrote them down as if to record the texture of life were his deepest compulsion" (352). It is perhaps also for this reason that Keats is generally considered to be significantly more modern than his Romantic contemporaries: it is difficult to confine the value of his work to the cultural movement and historical moment of Romanticism per se; rather, many poets find it necessary to consider him almost as a contemporary with whom dialogue is necessary, if poetry as a whole is to meaningfully move forward. 

Relative to Byron and Shelley, Keats could be understood as having a profound philosophical and metaphysical bent to his cast of mind. Keats is known for his heavy of natural imagery, which contributes to his reputation for realism. The imagery however, is dramatically intensified through his Romanticism. For example, one of his most famous poems centers on the figure of a nightingale; but from this concrete image, the poet's mind ventures into far-ranging questions regarding the nature of knowledge and reality. Likewise, it is clear that Keats had a complex philosophical system with innovative concepts underlying his perceptions of reality, although this system was perhaps never made explicit in his published works themselves. If Byron was primarily a rebel at the social level and Shelley was primarily a rebel at the political one, then Keats could be understood as having been primarily a rebel at the metaphysical level. He was a poet, but he also did a great deal to delve into the intellectual foundations that characterize the general Romantic ethos. 

William Blake 

William Blake lived before the advent of English Romanticism proper, but he is sometimes considered as a predecessor to the movement. An overview of his works make it clear why this may be the case. Blake was iconoclastic in the extreme, suggesting that his Christian vision had nothing to do with the dominant Christian church of his time—even going so far as to suggest that the deity worshipped by that church was none other than Satan himself. Likewise, Blake's vision was characterized by the extreme valorization of subjectivity: he insisted that the entire world existed within the mind of the perceiver, and that the very notion of an objective world separate from a subjective perceiver was a reflection of the current fallenness of the common human mind. These radical, non-rational notions fit extremely well with the ethos that animated the cultural movement of Romanticism. 

As Frye has suggested, however, it may be misguided to actually call Blake a Romantic, unless one wanted to substantially expand one's definition of what it means to actually be a Romantic: "Blake's identification of religion with art is utterly different from the Romantic identification of the religious and aesthetic experiences. There is no place in his thought for aesthetics or general theories of abstract beauty" (51). More generally, Blake consciously identified himself as a prophet, in the biblical sense of the word; and in order to call Blake a Romantic, it would be necessary to also call much of the Bible itself Romantic. That is, the tradition of valuing subjectivity over objectivity and focusing attention on the concrete human existential situation was not an innovation of the Romantics per se, but rather an essentially religious attitude toward the world that has existed since time immemorial. One could call that attitude itself Romantic in nature; but this would just confuse matters if one wanted to analyze the specific cultural movement known as Romanticism.  

Adventures in Revolution 

Both Byron and Shelley engaged in actual revolutionary activities, and these activities would seem to have been inspired by their poetic visions. Byron, though, had no military experience, and he died from illness before he could actually see service; and as has been pointed out above, Shelley drowned in the ocean as a result of bad seamanship. This calls attention to the question of whether the poets' political activities were in fact natural consequences of their poetic convictions, or whether there was a basic and tragic confusion in play here. In particular, it is worth pointing out that the psychology of a Romantic poet must be radically different from the psychology of a guerrilla fighter, just as the Romantic idea of revolution is a considerably different thing from the actual politics of revolution. As Kundera has sardonically shown, the Romantics have historically had a difficult time telling the line between the one domain and the other. 

In short, the political (mis)adventures of these English Romantics would seem to point toward one of the basic dangers inherent within the Romantic mind in general: this is the danger of getting carried away by one's own imagination, to the point that one forgets to grasp salient aspects of objective reality. One may, for example, attempt to make a sea voyage without knowing how to sail a boat, or attempt to join a militia without knowing how to operate a gun. Iyer has identified this kind of thinking with the term muddled romance, which refers to the risk of solipsism that is more or less built into the Romantic temperament. In Shelley's poetry, for example, it is unclear to what extent revolution refers to actual political turmoil, and to what extent it functions as a symbol of psychological liberation. Moreover, it would seem that this line was also unclear to the poet himself. This is a train of thought that will be picked up in a later blog post in this series regarding the relationship between madness and Romanticism. 

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of a discussion of Romanticism within England, in particular as it manifested within the works of several key English poets. A main idea that has emerged here is that the English Romantics exemplified the relationship that exists between Romanticism and revolt, whether at the social, the political, or the metaphysical levels. An implication that has also emerged, however, is that the English Romantics also tended to have a fuzzy boundary between aesthetic pursuits and political pursuits, or work within the imagination and work within the empirical world. This confusion led to actual tragedies in their own actual lives. The meaning of this will be picked up later. The next blog post in this series, though, will turn to Romanticism within America.

Works Cited

Byron, Lord. Don Juan. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print. 

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1947. Print.

Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets. New York: HarperPerennial, 2001. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print.

Kundera, Milan. Life Is Elsewhere. Trans. Aaron Asher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. Print. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Major Works. New York: Oxford U P, 2009. Print. 

Stauffer Andrew M. "Romantic Anger and Byron's Curse." Romantic Circles. n.d. Web. 20 Jun 2016. <https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/passions/stauffer/stauf.html>.