Symons - The romantic movement in English poetry

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

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THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON BARO LILENGO SIKIMASKERO GUDLO ROMANO GIAMANGERO

PREFACE

IN calling my book the 'Romantic Movement in English Poetry' I do not wish that title to be taken in too exclusive a sense. The word 'romantic,' I think, defines more clearly than any other what we find most characteristic in the renewal of poetry after its long banishment. The great poets of every age but the eighteenth have been romantic: what are Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Coleridge if not romantic? But in using the convenient word ' movement ' I wish it to be understood that it is not meant in the usual historical sense, or with the defi-niteness with which we say, for example, the Tractarian or the Agrarian Movement. There a definite aim sets many minds working together, not in mere comradeship. No such thing ever happened in the creation of literature. It is each one of these poets whom I want to study, finding out, if I can, what he was in himself, what he made of himself in his work, and by what means, impulses, and instincts, The poet, the poem, it is with these only that I am concerned.

And, again for convenience, I have set limits to my plan. The year 1800 is taken as a sort of centre; or shall I say a barrier, which shuts out every writer of verse who was born after that year, and lets through every one who survived from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. My plan allows me no choice between good or bad writers inverse: I give each his due consideration, his due space, of a few lines or of many pages. And I have given each in chronological order, with the dates of his birth and death and of the first edition of his published volumes of verse. I have consulted no histories of literature, nor essays about it, except for the bare facts of a man's life or work; but I have tried to get at one thing only: the poet in his poetry, his poetry in the poet; it is the same thing.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832) 108

JAMES MONTGOMERY (1771-1854) 119

MRS. TIGHE (1772-1810) 121

HENRY FRANCIS GARY (1772-1844) 122

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) ..... 123

ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774r-1843) 148

ROBERT TANNAHILL (1774-1810) 161

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) 161

CHARLES LLOYD (1775-1839) 167

JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE (1775-1840) 169

THOMAS DERMODY (1775-1802) 170

DR. JOHN LEYDEN (1775-1811) 171

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864) 172

JAMES AND HORATIO SMITH (1775-1839 ; 1779-1849) .. 189

THOMAS CAMPBELL (1775-1844) 191

THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852) 200

ROBERT EYRES LANDOR (1781-1869) 207

EDWARD, BARON THURLOW (1781-1829) 209

EBENEZER ELLIOTT (1781-1849) 209

WILLIAM NICHOLSON (1782-1849) 213

ANN AND JANE TAYLOR (1782-1866; 1783-1824)...213

REGINALD HEBER (1783-1826) 215

JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES (1784-1862) 216

BERNARD BARTON (1784-1849) 217

WILLIAM TENNANT (1784-1848) 217

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859) .... 218 ALLAN CUNNINGHAM (1784-1842)......227

REV. CHARLES STRONG (1785-1864) 228

HENRY KIRKE WHITE (1785-1806) 228

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK (1785-1866) 230

JOHN WILSON (1785-1841) .231

SIR AUBREY DE VERB (1786-1846) 232

CAROLINE ANNE BOWLES SOUTHEY (1786-1854)... 233

GEORGE BEATTIE (1786-1823) 234

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1787-1855) 234

BRYAN WALLER PROCTER : BARRY CORNWALL (1787-1874) . 236 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)....239

RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (1788-1845) 263

REV. HENRY HART MILMAN (1791-1868) 265

REV. CHARLES WOLFE (1791-1823) 266

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)......268

REV. JOHN KEBLE (1792-1866) 286

DR. WILLIAM MAGINN (1793-1842)......286

JOHN CLARE (1793-1864) 288

FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS (1793-1835) 293

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART (1794-1854) 295

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) 297

KEATS (1795-1821) 298

GEORGE DARLEY (1795-1846).......315

JEREMIAH JOSEPH CALLANAN (1795-1829) .... 318

SIR THOMAS NOON TALFOURD (1795-1854) .... 319

JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS (1796-1852) 320

DAVID HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1796-1849) 321

WILLIAM MOTHERWELL (1797-1835) ..... 323

SAMUEL LOVER (1797-1868) 324

ROBERT POLLOK (1798-1827) 325

DAVID MACBETH MOIR (1798-1851) 325

WILLIAM THOM (1798-1848) 326

THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845) 328

THE MINORS 333

NOTE 340

INDEX 341

'Ages are all equal; but genius is always above the age.' BLAKE.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY

INTRODUCTION

COLERIDGE defined prose as 'words in good order/ poetry as 'the best words in the best order/ But there is no reason why prose should not be the best words in the best order. Rhythm alone, and rhythm of a regular and recurrent kind only, distinguishes poetry from prose. It was contended by an Oxford professor of poetry, Mr. W. J. Courthope, that the lines of Marlowe,

' Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium?'

are of a different substance from the substance of prose, and that it is certain that Marlowe ' could only have ventured on the sublime audacity that a face launched ships and burned towers by escaping from the limits of ordinary language, and conveying his metaphor through the harmonious and ecstatic movement of rhythm and metre.' To this it may be answered that any writer of elevated prose, Milton or Ruskin, could have said in prose precisely what Marlowe said in verse, and could have made fine prose of it: the imagination, the idea, a fine kind of form, would have been there; only one thing would have been lacking, the very finest kind of form, the form of verse. It would have been poetical substance, not poetry; the rhythm transforms it into poetry, and nothing but the rhythm.

When Wordsworth declares, in the Preface to the ( Lyrical Ballads/ that' there neither is nor can be any essential differ

4 ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY

ence between the language of prose and metrical composition/ he is perfectly right, and Coleridge is certainly wrong in saying, ' I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.' Both forget that what must be assumed is poetical substance, and that, given poetical substance, the actual language of the prose and of the verse may very well be identical. When Coleridge says that he would have preferred ' Alice Fell! in prose, he is, very justly, criticising the substance of that 'metrical composition/ which is wholly unpoetical: there, and not in the language, is the distinction between its essential prose and poetry.

There is in prose, whenever it is good prose, but not necessarily inherent in it, a certain rhythm, much laxer than that of verse, not, indeed, bound by formal laws at all; but, in its essence, like the intonation which distinguishes one voice from another in the repetition of a single phrase. Prose, in its rudimentary stage, is merely recorded speech; but, as one may talk in prose all one's life without knowing it, so it may be that the conscious form of verse (speech, that is, reduced to rules, and regarded as partly of the nature of music) was of earlier origin. A certain stage of civilisation must have been reached before it could have occurred to any one that ordinary speech was worth being preserved. Verse is more easily remembered than prose, because of its recurrent beat, and whatever men thought worth remembering, either for its beauty (as a song or hymn) or for its utility (as a law), would naturally be put into verse. Verse may well have anticipated the existence of writing, but hardly prose. The writing-down of verse, to this day, is almost a materialization of it; but prose exists only as a written document.