Differences Between the First and Second Generation of Romantic Poets, Essay Example

Introduction

The first generation of the great romantic poets, most notably represented by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)  and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), created and established a poetic form deeply indebted to classical Greek tradition. The two were in fact lifelong friends and sometime collaborators, a relationship which would be echoed by the friendships existing between the generation of romantic poets to follow. Both men, despite occasional disfavor with public and press, enjoyed admiration and acclaim in their time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats were the heroes of the succeeding era. Like their predecessors, Shelley and Byron were the objects of a great deal of public scrutiny; Keats’ death at the age of twenty-five in 1820 spared his personal reputation. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, much of the attention Shelley and Byron drew was focused more on their notorious personal lives than on the work they produced. As that work was largely of a more personal and volatile nature than that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the poetry itself served to fuel the controversies and disapproval attached to them.

The First Wave

No true sense of what Wordsworth and Shelley accomplished, nor for that matter what the next generation achieved, can be had without an awareness of how these men lived, and under what circumstances. Each was, despite sometimes pressing financial difficulties, a gentleman, and that element is crucial when examining their work as produced in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

English life then was unabashedly caste in nature, and entitlement was the due of all gentlemen. This translated to poetry. The profession was by no means considered amateurish or unworthy of a gentleman, particularly as the work itself mirrored education and breeding. Wordsworth – who would in fact take the Poet Laureate crown from Robert Southey in 1843 – and Coleridge wrote poetry for a world that expected great things from them but was not shy in expressing dislike: “Much early criticism of Wordsworth is very hostile, a fact which explains Wordsworth’s general reluctance…to publish his major work” (Gravil 79). Coleridge did not fare better. He “….criticized contemporary critics and their ‘petulant sneers’” (Murray 93).

However, the poetry of each has endured and that is what demands attention, particularly in the styles the poets employed. These leaders of the first romantic wave owed much of their inspiration to classical motifs of the ancients. Form was paramount, even blank verse was meticulously laid out, and the works represents traditional poetic structures taken very seriously, in both short pieces and epic poetry. Wordsworth was especially devoted to precise meter and scanning, as in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud: “…Along the lake, beneath the trees/ ten thousand dancing in the breeze…”

That line is as well valuable in highlighting a major attribute of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that each was profoundly, and classically here as well, inspired by the natural world.  Typical of Coleridge are these lines from Frost at Midnight: “Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee/ Whether the summer clothe the general earth/With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing…” Their work reflects the spirituality of place as exemplified in the perfection of nature. Perhaps more than Wordsworth, Coleridge as well sought to connect his earthly imagery in a directly religious, and sometimes romantic, manner. Both nonetheless, however, employ nature as their foundations. As will be explored more fully, this mode of creation and preference of subject marks the single greatest difference between them and the generation of poets to come.

It should be also observed that the friendship between the men clearly had mutually influential consequences. “Wordsworth and Coleridge have…complicated our relationship to them because they helped to shape one another” (Bialostosky 29). That they shared muses is therefore not unexpected.

Shelley, Keats, Byron

The most evident departure noticed with the advent of the second generation of romantic poets is a less idealized and omnipresent view of nature, and more a turning to romanticism of a more strictly personal variety. These men in a sense embody what is commonly regarded as archetypal of a second generation; that is, they are less serious, more sensual, and seemingly more reckless. They are moving away from the expected subjects and styles of presentations of their forebears, both in work and in life.

Of the trio of these greats, Byron enjoys the enduring reputation as the most wild and indulgent, despite his scholarly commitment to the classics. As with the gentleman status of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron’s background is even more relevant to the paths his life and work took. He was of the nobility and this permitted a license of action and thought other men could not achieve. Interestingly, as with the titans of literature, Shakespeare and Dickens, Byron’s being was drastically shaped by a change in fortune when he was a boy, although in his case it was for the better. At the age of ten a lordship came his way and, in the England of the day, a virtual new universe of privilege was opened up to him. “He determined to become different within and acquit himself like a lord” (O’Brien 10).

This is emphasized to explain the excessive sensuality of Byron’s work, which lies in the starkest contrast to that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byron’s reputation is that of a hedonist, and much of this reputation is apocryphal. Nonetheless, he continually reveals an abandonment in his poetry that surpasses the same of Keats and Shelly. Even his weary We’ll Go No More A’Roving admits to sensuality: “Though the night was made for loving/And the day returns too soon…”

Similarly, and more in keeping with his Shelley and Keats, the spirituality in Byron is rebellious in a way Wordsworth and Coleridge would never think of conveying. From his Prometheus: “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind/ To render with thy precepts less/ The sum of human wretchedness…” This is a younger son, privileged and defiant, shaking his fist at the heavens. It is a world apart from the reverence of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coleridge’s classic Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in fact a morality tale on the danger of flying in the face of God’s will, and the killing of the albatross is a blasphemy: “The very deep did rot. O, Christ!/ That ever this should be!” Byron took the myth of Prometheus and his theft of fire from the gods to take the hero’s side; Coleridge more soberly and traditionally warns against the folly of challenging the heavens.

The brief career of Keats is perhaps in less startling contrast to that of the first generation of romantic poets. Keats is different from Byron and Shelley in that he was first and foremost a true classicist: “Therefore, ’tis with full happiness that I/ Will trace the story of Endymion/ The very music of the name has gone/ Into my being…” These lines from  A Thing of Beauty are quintessential Keats: lovingly reverent, classically oriented, and unmarked by the turbulence of his peers.

That said, by no means was Keats the natural heir to the legacies of Wordsworth and Coleridge as such. For one thing, he died long before his extraordinary promise had occasion to develop. Then, even in this relatively naïve work he exhibits a real pleasure in nature not entirely in keeping with that of the earlier giants. There is sensuality of a mortal kind in Keats and, as with Shelley and Byron, it has no echoes in the first generation’s work save in the over-all idolatry of nature. Yet what we know of Keats points to a duality in his nature; it is as though he wanted to be a “:bad boy” but felt too guilty to truly indulge. From the telling Fill for Me a Brimming Bowl: “Fill for me a brimming bowl/ And in it let me drown my soul/ But put therein some drug designed/ To banish women from my mind…” It is hard to conceive of a Wordsworth or Coleridge writing such lines.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, unlike his beloved friend Lord Byron, was a child of privilege from the start, the son of a Member of Parliament and no less than a direct descendent of the 10^th Earl of Arundel. He was also perhaps more divergent from the first generation of romantic poets than even Byron, both in life and in his poetry. Always seeking new experience, drawn to the sensual beauties of Italy as was Byron, Shelley was something of an 19^th century explosion of a poet, combing profoundly felt convictions on liberal politics, art, and interpersonal relations. If any of the three second generation was the true hedonist, it was Shelley.

It was, however, a tempered hedonism, for Shelley was also something Wordsworth and Coleridge would disdain: a reformer. “Though Shelley harmonizes Romantic ideas about merging with eighteenth-century hedonism and utilitarianism, neither he nor Keats…identifies love with a search for pleasure alone” (Singer 291). Shelley embraced political dissent and took an active role in the affairs of his day normally never associated with a working poet.

In viewing Byron, Shelley, and Keats as pleasure-seeking poets, it must be emphasized that this trait becomes pronounced mainly through contrast with the first generation, and is a quality far removed from how hedonism is defined in today’s world. For these men, and consequently for their work, it was more a case of experimentation. They were never mindlessly seeking release through easy and/or unacceptable channels of behavior; they were seeking to expand their vision and thus get nearer to their conceptions of poetry as real art.

Conclusion

In a very real sense, what ultimately separates the generations of the romantic poets is a gulf which can be seen in other generational differences. The mere fact of the one coming upon the heels of the other seems to impart almost obligatory changes in approach and subject matter.

Wordsworth and Coleridge largely carried on the Southey tradition. Their work is stirring, often patriotic in terms of venerating English landscape and life, reverent to God and conforming to established ideas of virtues. The breed that followed them veered from their pursuits in more than one way. Keats desired a purer return to Greek classical form, while Byron and Shelley, somewhat reckless and entitled in life, sought to express more the pleasures and tragic consequences of human affairs and human love. They invoke gods, to be sure, but they present them as flawed as their mortals, and as subject to passions.

Perhaps the major difference between the two schools, or generations, can be summed up with the Byronic hero. In the poet’s verses, this hero was typically gifted, passionate, riddled with flaws, larger-than-life, and removed from societal restraints, as his creator so often was. He was, moreover, a type Wordsworth and Coleridge would never create, nor be able to view as heroic. The second generation of romantic poets chose to enter realms of relative realism, and interpret experience on a more earthbound and sensual level.

Works Cited

Bialostosky, D.H. Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

Gravil, R. William Wordsworth: ‘Lyrical Ballads’. Penrith, CA: Humanities eBooks, 2008. Print.

Murray, C. J. Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, Volume 1. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis Books, Inc., 2004. Print.

O’Brien, E. Byron in Love: A Short, Daring Life. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Print.

Singer, I. The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.