ROMANTIC POETRY

Between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19 th century, there was the development of
the romantic poetry, used as a mean to express individual feelings and emotional experience. The poet was
seen as a teacher or a prophet, whose job was to mediate between man and nature, to underlie the ideals
of freedom, beauty and truth as well as the evils of society.

THE FIGURE OF THE CHILD

Differently from Augustan poets, for whom childhood was a temporary state before becoming a civilized
adult. For Romantic poets, a child was an unspoiled being, closer to God because of his purity. So,
childhood was precious and needed to be admired and cultivated.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The Augustan saw the man as a social animal, in relationship with his fellows. The romantic poets instead,
focused on the individual’s mind and solitary state. They exalted the atypical, the outcast, the rebel.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, representative of the current of thought, stated that the convention of civilization
brought restriction on individual’s personality and produced evil and corruption. So, only the impulsive
behavior was good because it wasn’t governed by reason. The most used romantic concept was of the
“Romantic savage” , this because the savage wasn’t seen as a primitive, but as a subject who had instinctive
knowledge of himself and of the world, often better than the civilized man.

THE CULT OF EXOTIC

Rousseau’s thought brought a taste for what was far in time and space. Indeed, Romantic poets had a taste
for the picturesque in scenery, the remote and the unfamiliar both in custom and social outlook.

THE VIEW OF NATURE

Romantic poets gave lot of importance to nature, indeed was seen as expression of God in the universe. It
became their source of inspiration, joy and comfort as well as a stimulus to thought.

POETIC TECHNIQUE

Romantic poets tried to find a new style for their poetry. Indeed, they started to use more vivid and familiar
words and avoided the use of symbols and images to describe inner visionary perceptions.

TWO GENERATIONS OF POETS

The great English Romantic poets are usually grouped into two generations.

The first generation tried to theorize about poetry :

- William Wordsworth : he talked about the beauty of nature and made ordinary things interesting
for the reader
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge : he wrote about visionary topics, the supernatural and the mystery.

The second generation experienced the political disillusionment :

- Gordon Byron
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Keats

Their poetic was focused on the escapism and individualism, but also on the alienation of the artist from
the society. We could find this characteristics in :
 - The anti-conformist and rebellious “Byronic hero”
- The revolutionary and stubborn hope of Shelley’s Prometheus
- Keats’s escape into the world of classical beauty.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Blake was born in London in 1757, by humble family. He was trained as engraver, when he was a boy and
later studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. As an engraver , he developed his own engraving technique
called “Illuminated printing”, which combined picture and poetic text. As a painter, he made illustrations
for the work of John Milton and for the Bible, and also made a series of drawings inspired by Dante’s Divine
Comedy.

Blake was a freethinker, supported the French Revolution and was a radical during his whole life. He was
also a religious person, indeed his greatest literary influence was the Bible.

Blake is seen as an early Romantic, this because he rejected neoclassical literary style and put imagination
over reason. His most important works are :

- Songs of Innocence
- Songs of Experience

He also wrote some prophetic books with a personal mythology, one of these is “The marriage of Heaven
and Hell” in which Hell and Satan represent liberty and Heaven instead is a place for lawgiving. Other
prophetic books are “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, “America: a Prophecy” , “Europe: A Prophecy”

SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

Songs of Innocence was produced before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The narrator is a shepherd
who receives inspiration from a child in a cloud, indeed the poems deal with childhood as symbol of
innocence, freedom and imagination. The language is simple and musical. Symbols found in the poem are
lamb, flowers, and children playing on the village green.

Songs of Experience was written during the period of terror in France, and is like a counterpart of songs of
Innocence. Indeed, in this poems, the narrator is a bard, tones are pessimistic and it’s a sort of protest for
social injustices. “Experience” is linked to adulthood, it coexist with and completes “Innocence”, providing
another point of view in reality.

IMAGINATION AND THE POET

Blake tought at imagination as a way to get to know the world. It’s also the “Divine Vision” so the ability to
look over the reality. This “power” is owned only by God, children and the poet. So, the poet becomes a
sort of prophet who can see deeply into reality.

BLAKE’S INTEREST IN SOCIAL PROBLEMS

He was interested in social and political problems. He believed in revolution as a mean for the redemption
of men. After the French Revolution, he became disillusioned and underlined the bad consequences of the
Industrial Revolution. In his poems he sympathized with victims of these causes, such as children,
prostitutes, orphans, and soldiers.

STYLE

Blake’s poems are characterized by simple structure and original use of symbols. His verse are linear and
rhythmical, there’s also a frequent use of repetition. Between the symbols, we can remember child, father
and God, representing innocence, experience and higher innocence.
COMPLEMENTARY OPPOSITES

Blake believed in a spiritual world but considered Church as responsible for the fragmentation of
consciousness and the dualism present in men’s life.

He looked at the dualism as complementary opposites such as good and evil, male and female, cruelty and
kindness. Normally a person’s life would proceed from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to
experience. For Blake instead there’s a coexistence of these two not only in human beings but also in God.

THE LAMB

The poem opens with a question, the narrator wants to know who created the lamb. The answer to the
question is given in the second stanza similar to a riddle, the person who created the Lamb, calls himself a
Lamb that then became a child. Since the poem is taken from Songs of innocence, and is focused on
childhood, the rhythm of the poem Is similar to lullaby.

Clearly the lamb was created by God, but he is never named in the poem.

THE TIGER

The poem is very different from the Lamb. It is made of 6 stanzas , there are a lot of question but,
differently from the “Lamb” there’s no answer. The tones of the poem are pessimistic, the creation is not
positive, but is something violent, physical. There’re different references in this poem, for example in line 8,
there’s a reference to Prometheus, and in the third stanza there’s a reference to Hephaestus.

The Christian God of The Lamb is the good and positive God of the new Testament, differently here we
have the revengeful and violent God of the Old Testament.