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Subject: ENGLISH
Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-1, Group B
Topic: Precursors of Romantic Poetry
Lecture No: 59

By: Prof. Sunita Sinha

Head, Department of English
Women’s College Samastipur
L.N.M.U., Darbhanga
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.sunitasinha.com
Mob No: 9934917117

“PRECURSORS OF ROMANTIC POETRY / PRE-

ROMANTIC POETS”

INTRODUCTION

• “Throughout the eighteenth century, all over Europe, signs appeared

of new interests and new feelings about neglected elements in life and
art. This is sometimes called eighteenth-century romanticism or pre-
romanticism,” remarked Jacques Barzun.

• The eighteenth century is usually known Classical Age, and the ‘Age
of Prose and Reason’. However, in the later part of 18th century, we
can see numerous cracks in the classical edifice through which seems
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to be peeping the multicolored light of romanticism. In the later years

of this century a large number of new influences were at work on
English sensibility and temper.

• The change signalized a change in the ethos of poetry and, in fact,

literature as a whole. The younger poets started breaking away from
the "school" of Dryden and Pope, even though some poets, like
Churchill and Dr. Johnson, still elected to remain in the old groove.

• There were very few poets, indeed, who set

themselves completely free from the old traditional influences. Most
of them are, as it were, like Mr. Facing both ways, looking
simultaneously at the neoclassical past and the romantic future. They
seem to be ‘Plac 'd on this isthmus of a middle state.’

Those eighteenth-century poets who show some elements associated with

romanticism, while not altogether ignoring the old conventions, are called
transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PRE-ROMANTIC POETRY

• Their poetry is not altogether intellectual in content and treatment.

Passion, emotion, and the imagination are valued by them above
the cold light of intellectuality. They naturally return to the lyric.

• They show a new appreciation of the world of Nature which the

neoclassical poetry had mostly neglected. Their poetry is no longer
"drawing-room poetry." They do not limit their attention to urban life
and manners only, as Pope almost always did.
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• They place more importance on the individual than on society. In them,

therefore, is to be seen at work a stronger democratic spirit, a greater
concern for the oppressed and the poor, and a greater emphasis on
individualism in poetry, in society, everywhere. Their poetry becomes
much more subjective.

• They show a much greater interest in the Middle Ages which Dryden
and Pope had neglected on account on their alleged barbarousness.

• Lastly, there is a strong reaction against the heroic couplet as the only
eligible verse unit. They make experiments with new measures and
stanzaic forms.

PRE-ROMANTIC POETS

• James Thomson (1700-48):

He is a typical transitional poet, though he chronologically belongs to the first

half of the eighteenth century. Though he was contemporaneous with Pope
yet he broke away from the traditions of his school to explore "fresh woods
and pastures new. His Seasons (1726-30) is important for accurate and
sympathetic descriptions of natural scenes. It is entirely different from such
poems as Pope's Windsor Forest on account of the poet's firsthand knowledge
of what he is describing and his intimate rapport with it.

• Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74):

Goldsmith was as essentially a conservative in literary theory as Dr. Johnson

of whose "Club" he was an eminent member. Both of his important
poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770) are in heroic
couplets. The first poem is, didactic (after Johnson's visual practice) and is
concerned with the description and criticism of the places and people in
Europe which Goldsmith had visited as a tramp. The second poem is rich in
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natural descriptions and is vibrant with a peculiar note of sentiment and

melancholy which foreshadows nineteenth-century romantics. As in the first
poem, Goldsmith exhibits the tenderness of his feelings for poor villagers.

• Thomas Gray (1716-71):

Gray was one of the most learned men of the Europe of his day. He was also
a genuine poet but his poetic production is lamentably small-just a few odes,
some miscellaneous poems, and the Elegy. Though he was a classical scholar,
his popular “Elegy written in The Country Churchyard is romantic because of
its note of sadness and delicate imaginative spirit. Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard is Gray's finest poem which earned him the praise of even
Johnson who condemned most of Gray's poetry. Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard is a wonderful example of natural settings
in transitional poetry. It "reflects on the lives of common, unknown, rustic
men and women, in terms of both what their lives were and what they might
have been". ("English" 268) Gray is unafraid to see the poor, and emotionally
illustrates how death affects their life:
"For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, / Or busy housewife ply
her evening care: / No children run to lisp their sire’s return…."
Gray's next poems, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, present a new
conception of the poet not as a clever versifier but a genuinely inspired and
prophetic genius. His last poems like The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of
Odin are romantic fragments with which we step out of the eighteenth century
and find ourselves in the full stream of romanticism.

• William Collins (1721-59):

Collin's work is as thin in bulk as Gray's-it does not extend to much more than
1500 lines. He combines in himself the neoclassic and romantic elements,
though he is not without a specific manner which is all his own. On the one
hand, he provides numerous examples of poetic diction at its worst, and, on
the other, he delights in the highly romantic world of shadows and the
supernatural. His Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the
Highlands foreshadows the world in which Coleridge delighted. He is chiefly
known for his odes. To Liberty and the one mentioned above are the lengthiest
of Collins' odes, but he is at his best in shorter flights. He is exquisite when
he eschews poetic diction without losing his delightful singing quality.
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Referring to Collins, Swinburne maintains that in "purity of music" and

"clarity of style" there is "no parallel in English verse from the death of
Marvell to the birth of William Blake."

• William Cowper (1731-1800):

"He", says Compton-Rickett, "is a blend of the old and the new, with much of
the form of the old and something of the spirit of the new. In his satires he
imitated the manner of Pope, but his greatest poem The Task is all his own. It
is written in blank verse and contains the famous line:
God made the country and man made the town
which indicates his love of Nature and simplicity. However, the classical
element in him is more predominant than the romantic. Compton-Rickett
maintains: "We shall find in his work neither the passion nor the strangeness
of the Romantic school. Much in his nature disposed to shape him as a poet
of Classicism, and with occasional reserves he is far more of a classical poet
than a romantic.

• George Crabbe (1754-1832):

He mostly continued the neoclassic tradition and was derisively dubbed as "a
Pope in worsted stockings." In his poetry, which is mostly descriptive of the
miseries of poor villagers, he was an uncompromising unromantic realist. He
asserted:
I paint the Cot
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not.
He showed much concern for villagers, but he left for Wordsworth to glorify
their simplicity and, even, penury. Crabbe's excessive, boldness as a realist
alienates him from the polish of the neoclassic school. However, he
tenaciously adhered to the heroic couplet, even when he was a contemporary
of Blake and the romantic poets.

• Robert Burns (1759-95):

He was a Scottish peasant who took to poetry and became the truly national
poet of Scotland. His work Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) sky-
rocketed him to fame. All these poems are imbued with the spirit of romantic
lyricism in its untutored spontaneity, humour, pathos and sympathy wjth
nature and her lowly creatures including the sons of the soil. A critic observes
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: "Burns was a real peasant who drove the plough as he hummed his songs,
and who knew all the wretchedness and joys and sorrows of the countryman's
life. Sincerity and passion are the chief keys of his verse. Burns can utter a
piercing lyric cry as in A Fond Kiss and then we Sever, can be gracefully
sentimental as in My love is like a Red, Red Rose, can be coarsely witty as
in The Jolly Beggars, but he is always sincere and passionate, and that is why
his words go straight into the heart."

• William Blake (1757-1827):

Blake was an out and out rebel against all the social, political, and literary
conventions of the eighteenth century. The most undisciplined and the most
lonely of all poets, he lived in his own world peopled by phantoms and
spectres whom he treated as more real than the humdrum realities of the
physical world. His glorification of childhood and feeling for nature make him
akin to the romantic poets. He is best known for his three thin volumes-
Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of
Experience (1794), which contain some of the most orient gems of English
lyricism. A critic observes: "His passion for freedom was, also, akin to that
which moved Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in their earlier years,
though in its later form, it came nearer to Shelley's revolt against convention.

***
By: Prof. Sunita Sinha
Head, Department of English
Women’s College Samastipur
L.N.M.U., Darbhanga
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.sunitasinha.com
Mob No:9934917117