Romantic Poetry: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, & Keats
The Romantic Movement (ca. 1780 to 1830) was based upon the doctrine that an artist, whether in painting, sculpture or the written word, must constantly search out self-identity and seek for a reality deeper than convention and tradition, usually found hidden beneath the conscious mind. The freedom of inquiry and expression, hash criticism toward established forms and values, the use of symbols and metaphors to arouse pleasant emotions in the viewer or reader, and the power of the human imagination-all of these traits made up the Romantic Movement. And out of this came romantic poetry, drawn to a great degree from the above principles yet highlighted by an artistic reaction against all movements that sought to divide the mind from the soul. In essence, the romantic poet wished to return to the simplicities of nature and put aside the use of reason in his search for the absolute truth, being beauty itself. William Blake stood as England's greatest poet during the early years of the Romantic Movement, and his poem "The Tyger" symbolizes many aspects of Romanticism, especially through Blake's metaphorical arguments against the Industrial Revolution which many romantic poets considered as a quest to move away from man's status in
William Wordsworth was another great English romantic poet, yet unlike Blake, his focus seems to have been on a desire to express his own emotional reactions to the world around him, thus bringing about pure symbolic representations of beauty in all its varied forms. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (July 13, 1798)" clearly expresses the poet's love and admiration for beauty in the natural world, a place which Wordsworth, like Blake, greatly desired to explore in all its intricacies. This long poem contain many symbolic motifs, such as "These waters, rolling from their mountain springs/With a soft inland murmur" (lines 3-4) and "Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs/That on a wild secluded scene impress/Thoughts of more deep seclusion" (Lawall, lines 4-7, 792), both of which suggest that Wordsworth the poet is seeking the true aspects of nature and that when viewing such beauty from the hills above the abbey, he becomes melancholy and wishes to go into "deep seclusion" within his own artistic mind. the natural world. Blake compares the industrialized cities of England to a tiger "burning bright/In the forests of the night" (lines 1-2), a place filled with violence, poverty and loss amid the chaos of industrialization. Blake also refers to this "tyger" has having "fearful symmetry" (Lawall, line 4, 786), a reference to the architectural nature of the city with ancient buildings set against factories that belch out bla
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Approximate Word count = 990
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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