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Romantic
poetry |
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To literary scholars, romantic poetry is poetry written
in the Romantic
period (1790-1830). Indeed Blake,
Coleridge,
Byron,
Shelley,
Wordsworth,
Scott,
and Keats
displayed what the common reader still expects of poetry:
soaring imagination, emotional intensity, freshness of individual
experience, plus a deep sense of myth and mystery in natural
events. There also arose the notion of Fine
Art, which was created out of nothing (or at least out its
own matter, and certainly for its own sake) and therefore
superior to an Applied Art adulterated with practical or commercial
considerations. From
movements leading to Romanticism arose aesthetics
(the philosophy art), with all its current problems,
and our contemporary art that illustrates or challenges these
conceptions. |
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Contemporary attacks |
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Contemporary
theory
and literary criticism
has begun to question the greatness of Romantic poetry,
pointing out that we can't characterize a period by a handful
of works without examining the 5,000 other contemporary
verse publications. It was indeed the Victorians
who elevated the chosen few to superstar status –
half
of the popular Palgrave's
Golden Treasury consists of Romantic poetry –
by isolating
a "purity" of art, which could then be merchandised
for trade and empire.
Very largely, however, current theory
also derives from Romantic sources. Too often it is created
out of suspect material –
Freudian
psychiatry (a trivialising myth), continental
philosophy (misunderstood) and left
wing political theory (historically unsupported). We
still live in the shadow of the Romantics.
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Romantic poetry now |
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The arts have always been part of civilized living,
and the continuing need for a popular romantic poetry is shown
by the hundreds of thousands monthly who visit sites like
Net Poets
and Love
Poetry: some 10-100 times the numbers visiting the "quality"
ezines. There
have been returns to Romanticism – Dylan
Thomas, Vernon
Watkins, Thomas
Blackburn – and their American contemporaries –
Robert
Bly, James
Wright, Robert
Duncan, W.S.
Merwin and Charles
Olson – which may argue for a poetry that vividly
reveals, evokes and convinces us of the
significance and wonder of our lives. The stock in trade of
theorists is still words, but the real need
is for experiment and survey, analysis of artistic experience,
and more authentic conceptions of art.
Biology,
memetics,
metaphor
theory, anthropoetics
and cognition
studies are beginning these tasks, and may provide a fuller
and therefore more inspiring understanding of the models that
consciousness creates of experience. |
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Books on Romantic poetry |
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Useful
starting points for Romantic poetry are: Romanticism
in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
textbooks on English literature, and D. Perkin's A History
of Modern Poetry. Specialist surveys like S. Curran's
British Romanticism (1993) carry fuller bibliographies.
Poetry of the earlier Romantics, plus helpful critical studies,
can be found in most libraries and bookshops. For the later
Romantics you may need to use inter-library loans. Caedmon
issue readings of Romantic poets on CD and cassette. The
Library of Congress keeps some 2,000 recordings of poets
reading their work.
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