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THE ROMANTIC POETS

THE first quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary flowering of English poetry. The men here considered differ widely from one another but they are alike in their effort to extend the domain of poetry and to increase the range of poetical expression. Childhood, humble life, nature in its homely, its exotic, even its mystical aspects, the glamour of the Middle Ages, social and moral problems, all the wonder of the world, at once terrifying and consoling, become parts of the poet's consciousness; on them he ponders, and as he feels, in suffering or in exaltation, he sings. Such a conception of poetry may be contrasted with the objective descriptive manner which characterizes the effort in our own day still further to increase the poetical domain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was possessed of one of the finest minds that have appeared on earth, but one partially frustrated by its own fecundity and by opium. If he impresses us as something less than the poet he might have been, he is still a great poet, and he is besides a figure of the first importance in literary criticism and in liberal theology. He is renowned as a copious talker.

Leaving Cambridge without a degree, he joined his friend Robert Southey, who charmed him with his plan to found a community on the banks of the Susquehanna, a "pantisocracy" of virtue and brotherly love. The idea was abandoned through lack of funds. The two friends married sisters. Coleridge then tried lecturing and journalism. About 1796 he associated himself with the Wordsworths, William and his only less gifted sister Dorothy. One result of this association was the little volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798), to which Coleridge's principal contribution was The Ancient Mariner. At this time Coleridge wrote also Kubla Khan and the first part of Christabel. These were not published until 1816. The Ode to France appeared in the Morning Post, April 16, 1798. In that year he made a memorable visit to Germany. Returning, he translated Schiller's Wallenstein (1800), and removing to the Lake region, he wrote the second part of Christabel.

Coleridge's poetical work was now nearly complete. In spite of his addiction to opium, he continued to experiment in drama, contributed frequently to the press, lectured, and above all, talked. Lay Sermons (1816), Sibylline Leaves (1817), Biographia Literaria (1817), Aids to Reflection (1824), Church and State (1830), together with Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, a volume of Table Talk, and four volumes of Literary Remains, all of which were published after his death, embody only a part of the outgivings of this extraordinary mind.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in his youth went to France and became a flaming revolutionary and, after the manner of that robust day, was something of a scatterer of wild oats. He lived to grow serenely old in "a wise passiveness"; to the young Browning his later Toryism seemed a base desertion. (See Browning's The Lost Leader.) Also Wordsworth in his youth was a poet he never intended to be and never to himself seemed anything other. If to others he grew voluminous and prosy, he regarded it all as a necessary part of the development of his poet's mind, which was his perpetual theme. The forces which he regarded as formative of his poetic mind were not the polished societies of cities, but the intercourse with simple and homely country people and a surrender of himself to the influences of hill, stream, bird, and flower which were the outer garment of that "nature" which was all in all to him. Walking reflectively amid the natural beauties of his English lakes he wrought throughout his life at his poetry

until it developed a mass and contour which, quite as much as its occasional perfections, have made of it an enlargement and a consolation to the spirit of men since. Wordsworth regarded his peasants and his "nature" with all the enthusiasm of a discoverer. He would write only in the simple diction of peasants. He would be the first consistently to describe natural scenery, as he says, "with his eye on the object." He would do away with the artificial "poetic diction" which had beset English poetry since the days of Pope. Of course Wordsworth's practice was often something quite different from his theory. He did study poetry. He did not write in the language of peasants, though he sometimes wrote lines and whole poems that were flat and very nearly silly. He adhered closely to poetical conventions in many respects. But he did write about simple things-people, trees, birds, places, some aspects of everyday human conduct - which he had known, reflected upon, felt deeply about. Upon these he looked back in the tranquillity that succeeded his emotion, and, by recreating his emotion, he invested with dignity and splendor what would otherwise have passed for commonplace.

All the faults and excellences of this method appear in the famous volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798); the faults may be exemplified by the Idiot Boy, the excellences by Tintern Abbey.

Wordsworth planned to devote his life to a long philosophical poem on "man, nature, and society," to be called the Recluse. Of this plan he completed, in 1805, the Prelude, in fourteen books (published 1850) and the Excursion (1814), which was intended to serve as the second of three parts. It was of the Excursion that the critic Jeffrey said, "This will never do." In a sense, it never has done; and yet there is in him a world of healing wisdom and beauty: the lofty reflection of his Ode to Duty, the splendors of his Ode on Intimations of Immortality, the homely and touching truth of his Michael, and the chastened imagination of his sonnets; and the shorter poems of nature and of humble folk, both in his view, presenting but different aspects of the same creative principle working through all things in dignity and beauty.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) came of a race of moss-trooping Borderers. As a little boy at his grandfather's hill-top farm of Sandy-Knowe nothing pleased him so much as the ballads and songs of the Border. Toward the end of his school days he read with delight Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. While studying and later practising law, as well as serving as Sheriff of Selkirkshire, his enormous energy and unquenchable enthusiasm found time to collect ballads, pore over manuscripts, and make friends with every sort of person in Scotland. In 1802 he published two volumes of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and a third volume the next year. He had already tried his hand at original ballad-writing for "Monk" Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and in attempting something more ambitious he again began with a tale of the supernatural, around which he wove incidents from his wide knowledge of the early border forays, giving unity to the whole by putting it into the mouth of the aged minstrel. The metrical form was suggested by what he had heard of Coleridge's yet unpublished Christabel; in this respect both poets are influenced by the English verse of the Middle Ages and of later popular poetry. The Lay of the Last Minstrel appeared in 1805 and met with immediate and great popularity. The public was already prepared to receive a poem which should recreate the glamour of the Middle Ages. It was the first poem in the new romantic style to win for itself a wide popular hearing.

The anticipation which had been aroused by the news that Scott had received a thousand guineas for a poem, not a line of which had been written, was fully met by Marmion (1808). The critic Jeffrey, with personal apologies to the author, dealt firmly with it in the Edinburgh Review, and Byron, also with apologies later, taunts Scott, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, with writing for money. The truth is that Scott, with his open-handed generosity, his lordly way of life as he expanded to the full glories of

Abbotsford, and his harassing involvement in the tangled affairs of the publishing business of John Ballantyne and Co., which eventually wrought his financial ruin, stood often in need of advances on the large sums which his writings came to realize. Few men, and certainly no man of letters, however, have led so wholesome a life as he, and none has met adversity, when it came, more indomitably.

Marmion, a longer and more stately romance than the Minstrel, is a tale of a faithless English knight and the great Scottish disaster at Flodden Field (1513).

When the Lady of the Lake (1810) appeared "the post-horse duty in Scotland rose in an extraordinary degree," and the stream of visitors to the Highlands, whose scenery Scott was the first to make known to the world, has never slackened. "The Lay,' wrote Lockhart, his adoring son-in-law and biographer, "if I may venture to state the creed now established, is, I should say, generally considered the most natural and original, Marmion is the most powerful and splendid, The Lady of the Lake is the most interesting, romantic, picturesque, and graceful of his great poems." The Lady of the Lake placed Scott at the height of his poetic fame. He wrote other poems, notably Rokeby (1813) and the Lord of the Isles (1814), but Byron's eastern tales were catching the popular ear, and the success of Waverly, published anonymously in 1814, discovered to Scott an ampler means of setting forth his stores of antiquarian lore, his descriptive pov rs, and his observation of Scottish character.

George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Byron's father was a rake; his mother as uncontrolled in her expression of affection as of anger and despair, and her ruling passion was somehow to educate her son on her small income. Byron himself had every grace of person, but his right leg and foot were shrivelled and his left hardly normal: from bitterness that such a curse should be laid upon him his heart was never free. His misfortune, although it did not deny him a certain prowess in swimming, particularly qualified him to share in the mood of titanic despair and revolt which had been fashionable throughout Europe since the days of Rousseau and of Goethe's Werther. On the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, in 1812, Byron awoke one morning, as he says, to find himself famous.

Plunged forthwith into a whirl of social gayety, Byron found time to pour forth a series of Eastern tales bringing to Englishmen authentic news of regions from which they had long been cut off, which placed the "Byronic hero" before the world, desolately and heroically at war with it and with himself. When in 1816, his wife, whom he had married the year before, left him, and the dissolute society of London under the Regency had, in a spasm of moral indignation, cast him out, Byron in the eyes of all Europe became more than ever, himself the personification of the "Byronic hero." Nothing that he ever did or wrote thereafter but was of interest to a large public. Even during the years of Byron's furiously discursive reading at Cambridge, he had tried his hand at poetry. Hours of Idleness (1807) contains nothing memorable. The Edinburgh Review ridiculed it, and Byron, stung to fury, published English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). This satire, parts of which Byron afterwards repented, is in the tradition of Pope, which must be thought of as still dominating the taste of this period. It was a tradition which Byron would allow no one to attack and with which, as a great prose man himself, he had many affinities. The Hebrew Melodies (1815) were written at the request of a friend, to be set to music.

Byron left England in 1816 for Switzerland. Here he met Shelley, who stimulated him to a more thoughtful kind of poetry and interested him in the work of Wordsworth. Under these influences the third canto of Childe Harold was composed, its descriptions of natural scenery both heightened and deepened by a growing sense of man's share in nature. Here, too, he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon (1816); it is a monologue, the form which Browning later developed. Byron then went to Italy, spending a three years' carnival at Venice, but writing the fourth canto of Childe Harold (1818), and in the tales