Tortured genius, the importance of the imagination, the power of nature – we owe them all to the Romantics. Their legacy is the subject of a new BBC series
THE IMAGE OF THE POET, and the writer, and the artist, is firmly fixed in the public imagination. They represent all the values to which we most loyally adhere; they are deemed to embody the imperatives of sincerity and spontaneity, of integrity and dedication. Above all, they must be original. We hope and expect that the writers of our time will have something original to impart. We do not want them to repeat the maxims and precepts of the past. We do not want them to rehearse or follow the writings of their predecessors. There is a terrible fate in store for any writer accused of plagiarism. It is the cardinal sin of all contemporary writing.
The great triumph, however, lies in the spontaneous expression of feeling. They must be somehow apart, an observer rather than a participant. They may be in society — but not necessarily of it. Of course a writer is allowed, indeed encouraged, to have social and political opinions. He or she is permitted to speak out against the abuses of the day, and to write novels or poems that are relevant to the needs of the age. But a premium is placed upon personal observation and knowledge; if possible, the writer ought to write out of personal experience. Above all he or she must “express” that experience in eloquent and memorable ways. As a result there is an endless temptation to write ethnic novels, or gay novels, in implicit honour of the personality of the author.
Writers have been, and can still become, popular — almost celebrities — in a culture hag-ridden by the notion of celebrity. That is why they are allowed their foibles — drugs or drink (in modest enough quantities) are permissible. They do not necessarily need to support conventions. Their lives may be deemed wretched, or lonely, but that is part of the price of their genius. Suffering is beneficial. Genius is a word often employed. A genius is above the normal laws of society. He has a unique imaginative message that he may or may not care to impart. A writer is, in any case, a person of note. He or she has a duty to take himself or herself very seriously indeed.
There is another modern assumption. If the pieties of orthodox religion are in decline, the new spirituality or the precepts of a new faith may be found in books. In the universities of the 20th century there was established (largely by the efforts of F. R. Leavis and his disciples) a “great tradition” of canonical texts, most of them works of fiction. The writer can be a seer or visionary, whose narratives demand close reading and complex explication in the academies of the land.
These are all commonplaces, implicit in most discussions of what is now termed “creative writing”. They are not necessarily misguided but they are provisional and temporary. They have been learnt by several generations of readers and teachers, to the extent that they now pass as received wisdom. But they spring from a very particular phase of our cultural history. They are emanations of what we now call “the Romantic age”.
There are other ramifications of this Romantic sensibility, which we may, with a certain necessary inaccuracy, identify from the middle of the 18th century. Those of us who travel to the sea for refreshment, or climb mountains, or wander among hills, are heirs of the Romantic movement. The programmes of David Attenborough testify to the almost spiritual awe with which nature is now invested. The creatures of the earth and sea are often invested with human characteristics too, so that there is an element of pantheism in the depiction of the natural world.
These beliefs and principles flourish in a prevailing atmosphere of individual liberty; a world of rights rather than of duties. We like to believe that we live in a world of individuals rather than of systems. This, too, is part of the Romantic legacy. There is a profound belief in the self as the source of all values. There is the prevailing idea of individual striving. There is a general acceptance of the importance of the imagination and of the unconscious. These, too, are ideals that the Romantics were the first to adumbrate.
The origins of Romanticism are a matter of some debate. The same impulse can be found in Rousseau and in Goethe, in Blake and in Diderot, in Fuseli and in Chatterton. For the sake of the argument, we have established the scene of operations with an account of Rousseau and Diderot before embarking upon a presentation of the great Romantic poets — Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Clare and Byron. Mary Shelley has been included but it might be asked why no room was made for Sir Walter Scott or the Brontës. The great prose writers can only be left for separate treatment.
There is much room for contemplation of the lives and writings of the poets themselves. Blake was perhaps the last of the great visionary poets whose stage was the universe itself. But he was the first English poet to assault the principles of science and commercialism. It has become customary for writers to inveigh against the evils of capitalism and industrialism, but his was the first serious voice raised against the blackening of the earth. He attacked the principles of Newtonian science, of uniformity and of system, at the same time as he began a direct assault upon what is now called mass production.
He was so percipient a genius that his radical attitudes were properly understood only at the beginning of the 20th century. He has set the seal upon “radical poetry” ever since, and is the direct ancestor of poets as diverse as Walt Whitman and Allan Ginsberg. He wrote lyrics. He wrote vast verse epics. He wrote verse dramas. All were filled with a yearning for spiritual reality, and for a redefinition of the human imagination beyond the classical precepts of order and control.
The name of Wordsworth is intimately associated with the new perception of nature in the late 18th century, and with a new appreciation of the natural sublime. He was the first poet in English to suggest the redemptive possibilities of the natural world, and thus he inaugurated the myriad schools of “nature worship” that exist to this day. Nobody enjoys a sunrise, or a sunset, without being tangentially influenced by the notions of Wordsworth.
He also achieved something else. He revolutionised the tone — the language — of poetry. In his youth he had been associated with the principles of the French Revolution, and travelled to that country during its most dangerous phase. He quickly became disenchanted with its bloody direction, but acquired one important belief. He came to realise that the language of the people — the direct unmediated expression of the labourer or the vagrant — was as significant, poetically, as the more refined diction of the scholar or the clergyman. So in one of those periodic renovations of English verse, from the accretions of tradition, habit and orthodoxy, he introduced the language “that men do use” as the proper medium for poetry. In his verse tales he introduced the outcast, the mad boy, the vagrant, the fallen woman as types of simple humanity. He inaugurated a change in English poetry with consequences more beneficial, if less sensational, than the Revolution from which he had learnt.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
