Everything Between the Dirt and the Sky: Defenses of Poetry in the Romantic Age

In this essay I will explore the broad definition of what it means for poetry to be “Romantic.” We will move from broad definitions to brief exploration of the political, economic, and philosophic undercurrents in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and how these apply to contemporaneous evaluations of the form from practitioners.

Periodization as a definitional proposition can be hard to do. The easiest thing to do is look at the calendar and draw some sort of dividing line. There are handy transitions that we can take advantage of. Centuries change to nice round numbers. Monarchs die. Thus, we can call Marlow and Shakespeare, along with Spenser Elizabethans, even though the latter two poets outlived Elizabeth. This has an equally difficult corollary in that sometimes the monarchs won’t die. Victoria lived seemingly forever, as has the current Elizabeth. A more fruitful way of looking at the differences between one set of texts and another and finding commonalities and differences.

What makes a text “Romantic”? There is no one simple definition. Looking for guidance in the Penguin dictionary of Literary terms, the editors cite A. O. Lovejoy, who noted that ‘romantic’ has been so broadly applied that “it means nothing at all” (767).  The entry further brings to light Fredrich Schlegel’s first definition of the ‘romantisch’ as “that which depicts” emotional matter in an imaginative form (768). It is this imaginative turn, the retrospective turn inward that from our perspective is what truly separates the Romantics from their forebears. M. H. Abrams famously called this the divide between the mirror and the lamp, where prior poetry was focused on the mimetic function but the romantic turn is the inward exploration of the self, but as Zaiter notes, it still drew inspiration from Renaissance and earlier Middle Age work (34). But defining a genre is not entirely about influences and the direction they are looking. There are several aspects of the poetic subject that we can think of when we think of the ‘romantics’. As we turn to the dictionary again, we can see highlighted the focus on nature and wild scenery, along with how they are effected with the subjective turn in how these natural scenes are evaluated by the self – the poet as narrator or stand-in for the nominal speaker (Cuddon 769-70).  For me, the ultimate expression of Romanticism can be seen in the Prelude, as Wordsworth elevates what is a long walk in the mountains becomes this sublime, cathartic moment as he experiences Mount Blanc:

. . . That day we first

Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and griev'd

To have a soulless image on the eye

Which had usurp'd upon a living thought

That never more could be: (Vl 452-6)

           The romantic poet is not just walking in the woods but experiencing nature as if they are the first to have ever encountered the snow-capped peaks. And in the subjective way, they are – the art of representation in painting or even in words being limited, there is nothing like being there in the moment and even having crossed the Alps:

Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather'd vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; (Vl 525-9)

“This is nature!” The poet says, and points around him and within him as he collapses in wonderment. That is the move to romanticism, the detailing of that journey both in physical space, but also in terms of the inner journey.

                If we can define stylistic and subjective characteristics that outline what the Romantic move was and what a good representation of the form is, the question next task would be to examine what it is that is driving the turn inwards. We can see Romanticism as a reaction not just to the neoclassical immediate forebears stylistically, but also as a reaction to the larger economic and political framework that defines the ground and atmosphere in which these poets are writing.  For me, there are two main drivers of what created these reactions.

                The first larger issue to look at is the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776, and even by then he as able to observe the growing capitalist classes as they took advantage of displaced peasants claimed that the English genius was in the division of labor. He famously examined a “pin factory” near his hometown to see how the new economic system was able to be much more productive and make more goods for the markets of the world. The ultimate effect of that greater division of labor and the continued enclosure acts meant that there was greater concentration of workers in the cities, pulled both from the English and Scottish countryside as well as the near abroad like Ireland. This concentrate of people created the conditions we see in Friedrich Engels’s examination of the Manchester of 1842, where he notes that the life is hard, where the working-class lives in “enfeebled conditions” that cause people to “age prematurely and die early” (116). In his work, he sees that conditions were such that there is a mortality rate for children of the working classes where 57 percent of their children die before they turn five. This is opposed to the upper classes, where a still frighteningly high 20 percent of children will die (120). Added to the privations of the living conditions, many children are put to work, so that a child of nine is sent to work in the mill for six and a half hours daily, increasing to twelve-hour days when they become what we would call teenagers (160). Children, in their masses, were forced to become adults in terms of entering the workforce because of need in their families for another worker and the lack of formal education options for most lower-class children, while the adults die young and all the workers live close upon each other, in the cold and damp, often in sewage and trash as there was little organized collection of refuse. And though the Manchester of Engels postdates our period some, there is a direct line between the pin factory and humans living in their filth as food for the beast of capital. This romantic turn against the city and into the countryside is best illustrated by Blake’s crossing of the two in his 1810 poem “Jerusalem” where the new Jerusalem is troubled to be built near the “dark Satanic Mills” but instead these should be swept from the earth to build anew “In Englands green & pleasant Land”.

                Aside from the economic context of the growing, the other trigger for this interior move was the American and French Revolutions and the political and philosophical environment that helped lead to the revolution as well as the intellectual reaction to the overturning of the prior order. It was not as if the English did not have their own experience in overthrowing kings, but Charles lost his head but after a Cromwellian interlude, the monarchy was re-established, so the world order did not change. The French revolution, on the other hand, was one where as Marx notes “abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeoise property” (Manifesto 25), where you can point to the same sort of motivation in the American Revolution as many of the key figures revered as founding fathers were wealthy landowners. During the eighteenth century, there was a noted move from an acceptance of the Hobbesian state where any government is good as it is the intervention in the overwhelming war of all against all. The move to a more Lockean acceptance of the natural rights of man and his “Life, Liberty, and Property” being paralleled in the US declaration of independence as “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. (“Rousseau”). These natural rights stem from a centering of the self that begins with Descartes’s famous “cogito ergo sum” and run through to Kant and Rousseau. In his essay “The Mirror, the Lamp, and the Lens,” reframing Abrams’s dichotomy, Garrett Green centers Kant as the philosopher of choice in describing the Romantic’s move against the neoclassicals and their forebears: “ Kant breaks with the long tradition going back to Plato, according to which the imagination is mimetic, in the unoriginal business of re-presenting something `original.' Accordingly, for Kant the imagination takes on an active, as opposed to a merely passive, role; it is no longer simply dependent on a prior original but assumes an ‘originating' role of its own” (77).  What we see is that the Romantic subject and poet did not spring forth out of nothing. There were important political, economic, and philosophic precursors that helped give rise to the Romantic poets, their form, and structure. Without all the various revolutions going on around these writers, their crafts and subject matters were an extension of the self that was created and nurtured at a social level, especially for well-off men and women who had seen the current order shift under their feet and massive change that people in our time are used to, but which was only beginning to accelerate as the centuries turned from the eighteenth to the nineteenth.

Of course, it can feel like a big hand-wave to say that what Romanticism is was just a reaction to the enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the French and American political revolutions. It suggests the Carl Sagan aphorism that to first make a pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. Those events would have happened and there would have been some artistic response, there is no Teleology that leads directly to Romanticism. There was even a worry that the freedom represented in the ideals of the French Revolutions’ “Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité” were in danger of regressing in the English Monarchy, as Cook notes in his introduction to Hazlitt’s work, “The subsequent reversal of a historical process which seemed to guarantee liberty was accompanied by the collapse of a more patriotic confidence that Britain was tending toward a state which guaranteed the freedom and equality of its subjects (“Introduction” xiv).  Thankfully for our analysis we do not have to take these top-down approaches and try to sus out meaning from style and focus, with the Romantic’s inward subjectivity drawing our attention. The poets and critics were discussing these issues asking what is poetry and why is it important and how do we differentiate from poetry and prose? This was more an ongoing conversation, and less about the creation of a school, as “Romantics did not know that was what they were.” It was the business of the critics of our age, who have categorized the romantics into lake  School’  (Wordsworth,  Coleridge  and  Southey),  the  ‘Demonic School’ (most notoriously, Byron), the ‘Cockney School’  (Leigh  Hunt  and  Keats)” (Perry qtd in Zaiter 34). In the last section of this essay, we will explore these conversations through published work focusing on Wordsworth and Shelley.

The first thing in looking at works such as Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” or Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” is that they act as a sort of ars poetica of the self, and as a larger defense of the form in general. What we have to avoid as critics is the intentional fallacy, knowing that the poetic texts these authors write may be reflective of the intentions, but the work themselves are not fully explained by the essays. How much their intentions are reflected in an Ozymandias or the quivering at Mount Blanc in the prelude are outside the scope of this essay, instead the desire is to look at what they were trying to do – to understand romanticism through the eyes of the poets themselves as they understood their project.

In his Preface, Wordsworth notes the same difficulty in a formal introduction and defense as we looked at earlier, knowing all of the social forces behind his poetry:

For, to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. (645-6)

But he does make an effort at showing that his main purpose in writing the poems in the Lyrical ballads as an attempt to show what is the common life, with language as “really used by men” (646). What Wordsworth claims to do is to use the rustic life as the subject matter, because of the rustic life’s greater simplicity, with a language that is at it most pure as the people living in rustic life are less influenced by “social vanity” and have less pretentions (647). By writing with this language and this subject, then the poetry can gain the high explosion of what makes good poetry to Wordsworth, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”(648). He juxtaposes the rustic with the city life, which dumbs people down, as we saw in many ways with the industrial revolution, “the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident” (649). For Wordsworth this lowered diction is important in his task, as he wants to keep it “near the language of men” (650) and is hammered home at several points in the essay. The author then turns from looking at the poetic subject and the poetic language to looking at the role of the poet. For Wordsworth, the poet is one who speaking to man, but with greater sensitivity: “he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.” (652). From this rustic language, telling man the story of man the Poet synthesizes all, “He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature” (654).The poet and the poet’s work weaves together all of human society so that everything is contained in poetry and “Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge” (655). It becomes a large claim. From looking at the language and events of the rustic man, to the overflowing feelings to encircling the whole of human knowledge, if true, it is a heavy burden to carry.

                As it is with Woodsworth, so it is with Shelley.  Shelley was writing in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry,” where Peacock argue that the Poetic genre more or less begins in golden ages and then declines down to the age of brass, a retrograde slide to barbarism, a return to nature, and a “second childhood of poetry” (689). Shelley famously ends his essay “A Defence of Poetry” with the line “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (717) which ties nicely into the strong claim that Wordsworth makes for the poets. Shelley’s essay is more wide ranging, making a strong case for a broader definition of poetry than even Wordsworth allows, to the point of perhaps being overly broad, as John Ross Baker notes, “What does poetry not include? Toward the end of the Defence appears the culmination of what has been implicit all along: there are hardly any limits to "poetry," for "It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge" (438). Once you start to dig, the reader does find other parallels with Wordsworth, as “Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man,” as Shelly tracks man through the mimetic function of poetry, and there are those can experience the beautiful “in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds.” This function turns though, through poetry. Where for Woodsworth, Man was the mirror, for Shelley “poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted,” it is the revealer of hidden truth and beauty, that which “makes familiar objects be ass if they were not familiar.” Further, it “communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving.” Shelly follows Wordsworth down the path where the poet and poetry are not just the distorted reflection of the world, but the creators of new knowledge. The port “creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.” Also the poets are in parallel in that the poetic act is spontaneous and cannot be willed, as Shelly says, “A man cannot say, ‘I will create poetry,’” the overflowing of emotion is not under control of the active mind but when the poet does “he is the author of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory”.          

What we see with Woodsworth as well as with Shelly is that an examination of the poetic form takes the poet from the savage and rustic until the poet is the one who is inscribing all of the world’s knowledge. Circling back around as we look at the texts, and try to think of the relationships that is formed between the political and social milieu and the texts laying out their supposed program, what we find is an optimism in Shelley and Wordsworth that is not there in the work of Peacock (depending on how tongue-in-cheek you evaluate his work). By approaching man at the individual level there remit of the poet grows to encompassing all knowledge. In another turn the growth of capitalism created a different form of man as the individual, one who exists as a commoditized worker, so we can see the tension in the different forms of selves created. The critic can ask again, “What is Romanticism” and through looking at the texts of Shelley and Wordsworth, we can answer – it is everything possible between the dirt and the sky but you must start in the dirt. The problem with that answer is that it does not fit nicely in the dictionary of literary terms under the proper heading.

               

Bibliography

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