English Romantic Poets

A New Anthology Edited by Jonathan Bate

English Romantic Poets

Edited by Jonathan Bate

288 pages. Everyman's Library. $18.00.

beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror

-Rilke

A sad fact about the five major English Romantic poets is that the ones who were born later also died earlier: Wordsworth was born, then Coleridge was born, then Byron was born, then Shelley was born, then Keats was born, then Keats died, then Shelley died, then Byron died, then Coleridge died, then Wordsworth died.

What makes this fact more than just a grim curiosity is the significance that has been attached to each poet’s death. Keats' last days in Rome, withering away from consumption, made him the exemplar of the passionate young poet who burned bright and died early. Shelley drowned in a shipwreck, and when his body was washed ashore, a volume of Keats’ poetry was found in his pocket. Byron’s death in revolutionary Greece was fitting for a man who was just as adventurous in his life as in his verse. Coleridge’s death in 1834 marked the date at which, for many years, Oxford and Cambridge stopped teaching English literature - everything written afterwards being considered too contemporary to be worthy of serious academic scrutiny. Wordsworth’s death in 1850 left an opening in the role of poet laureate - and many in the press thought there was no poet remaining in the United Kingdom worthy of the position.

These last two deaths, though not thrilling stories, are good indications of the reputation the Romantics left on English poetry. After the Romantics, what was there left for poetry to say?

That Romanticism was seen as the end of poetry is strange, as in many ways the Romantics positioned themselves as a beginning, as discoverers of a new language and new themes for poets to explore. Yes, in some respects their poetry hit a peak, but it was only as "upon a peak in Darien" that brings forth the sight of a "new planet," as Keats wrote in his first major poem, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer."

Jonathan Bate, the Oxford critic of English literature, has edited the new Everyman's Library anthology of English Romantic poetry, and he organizes the poems by theme, including “Childhood,” “Love,” “and “Society and Politics.” The last section is “Intimations of Mortality and Immortality,” but really the title of every section could have been preceded with “Intimations of” – whatever their subject, the Romantics were wont to suggest at some force that was connected to neither formal religion nor the material world - typically, they use  words like “soul” or “spirit."

Wordsworth leads the way. For him, “Tintern Abbey'' is not just a pretty landscape; it is a “gift” of memory that can bring to him a “blessed mood” where “the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world/Is lighten’d.” “O sylvan Wye!” he exclaims, “How often has my spirit turned to thee!” Meanwhile, Shelley begins his poem “Mont Blanc” with the assertion that “The everlasting universe of things/Flows through the mind” - and the rest of the poem elaborates upon that assertion. Actual physical descriptions of either Tintern Abbey or Mont Blanc are largely absent from these poems - it is all about the unseen parts of life.

Perhaps I am making Romanticism sound too much like new-age fluff. To the Romantics, soul  and spirit are not mystical forces that alight onto busy minds; they are connected intimately, are perhaps even one and the same, with psyche - the sensations, turmoil, and workings of consciousness. 

In textbooks of intellectual history, Romanticism is associated with pure, burning passion, of unmixed emotions. But to portray the English Romantics this way would be an oversimplification. The power of their verse has underneath it uncertainty and competing ideals. Just observe how the word “half” appears in the two of the most memorable lines by Romantic poets. There is, first of all, the most famous passage from Wordsworths’ “Tintern Abbey”: 

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive

A lesser poet would have flipped those final two clauses - “what perceive” being deflated by “what they half create.” But for Wordsworth the creation of the mind comes first, the external world second. Does he believe the creations of the mind take precedence over physical reality? Or is his recognition of the limitations of his mind and his senses also a statement of his confidence in being able to balance the ambiguities "of all the mighty world"?

The other passage is from “Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats: "many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death." This is not so bitter, so melancholy of a statement as it may at first seem. The rhythm is more easeful than deadly. Does the thought of death provide Keats with the spirit of poetic inspiration?

Many Romantic poems end in exclamation points, but many others end in a question mark. Blake, who created a whole mythological cosmos inspired by visionary experiences, nevertheless includes thirteen question marks in “The Tyger,” a poem of twenty four lines. “What immortal hand or eye,/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” is the last question, and it is as full of spiritual ambiguity as anything in Donne. Is the power of the “immortal” a “hand” that creates or an “eye” that simply perceives forms from the fabric of the universe? And then there is that seemingly incomplete phrase “fearful symmetry” that hides as much as it reveals - hides, presumably, because only an immortal would “dare” to create it, and mortals can only suggest at its form.

In this Everyman’s Library edition, Bate does not limit himself to only poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, along with Blake (the outsider even among the Romantics). He also includes many of the less well-known poets of the time, including several female poets of the era who have not gotten the recognition they deserve. Among these poets is Letitia Landon, who wrote “Juliet After the Masquerade." Landon has Juliet, in a revery after seeing Romeo, imagine that the two marble statues in her family’s garden are of “PSYCHE and her boy-god," a description that seems to satirize both Shakespeare's play and Wordsworth's distinction between what is perceived and what is half-created.

Bate has also selected for this anthology a large number of poems from John Clare, a poet new to me. Clare does not exactly achieve the same things as the other great Romantics, but his poems are so full of original language, of the close observance of nature and country life, that I am glad he was included.

I am not sure if I would recommend Bate’s anthology to a newcomer to the Romantic poets. A few careful footnotes, some biographical details, would certainly help a reader coming to these poets for the first time. And “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” and “Adonais” should not be excerpted (and “Don Juan” and “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” deserve longer excerpts). But for someone (that is, me) familiar with most of these poems, revisiting them after an extended absence, it was a delightful experience to read. 

Throughout this review, I have focused on individual lines of poems, rather than full poems. The Romantics were of course masters of the perfect lyric poem, but it is through snatches of phrases that I (and I suspect many others) most cherish the Romantics. I have, for instance, an unsettled opinion of Byron's poem "Darkness," but I will always admire its first line: “I had a dream, which was not at all a dream." This line begins and ends with two perfect iambs, but contains at its center three syllables that cannot be scanned. It is a line which lulls us and at the same time disturbs us. What makes us remember a passage from the Romantics is rarely its meter and even more rarely its rhyme; it is simply the perfect arrangement of words.

In "Adonis," Shelly describes Keats's literary immortality thusly:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again

But it is by describing these very human emotions and states of being which have made sure that the Romantics will live and live again throughout the ages. To the contours of our literary language, we owe almost as much to the Romantics as to Shakespeare. The fate of Ozymandias does not await them; they will provide myths for a desacralized age, their verse will be a secular scripture.