The impact of the French Revolution had on British culture and society was immense. This revolutionary spirit took various forms:
* political and social revolution in America and France;
* ideological revolution: revolt against all forms of authority, criticism of the social results of the
Industrial Revolution; also radicalism, anarchism, socialism, sexual freedom and
early feminism;
* artistic revolution against neoclassical rules, in favour of the free expression of
personal feeling.
ROMANTIC POETRY
First-generation Romantics.
William Blake was a self-taught poet . His Songs of Innocence (1789) portrays the state of man in childhood and in a second group of poems (Songs of Experience, 1794) he dealt with the presence of evil and injustice in the world. The two states, innocence and experience, are for Blake complementary. He also wrote on social problems, such as the inhuman working conditions of children described in The Chimney Sweeper.
English Romanticism may be said really to begin with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems written together by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the time when they both lived in the Lake District. Wordsworth wrote about the countryside and its simple folk; man’s communion with nature as in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth wrote also Intimations of Immortality (1807), where he writes about childhood and its primitive innocence.
Coleridge wrote poems on Supernatural and magical subjects,such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and his most famous poem Kubla Khan (1816)set in an exotic half~magical land. Wordsworth and Coleridge embody the two souls of English Romanticism: the ordinary world and the supernatural and magical.
Second-generation Romantics
The most representative figure of the second generation was Lord Byron. He was a living legend throughout Europe and died in Greece fighting for the cause of Greek independence. He became famous for his long narrative poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage(1812-18) and Don Juan (1819-24) which are tales of adventure in exotic lands, his heroes are rebels against social codes and hypocrisy.
Percy Bysshe Shelley had a typically Romantic life of scandal and exile: he left England due to his unconventional lifestyle and ideals. He wrote his lyrics and odes which link Nature with Man’s ideals of freedom and happiness (as in his celebrated Ode to the West Wind, 1819) and longer works such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), a verse tale to depict man’s eternal struggle against the
higher powers that threaten his aspirations to infinity.
John Keats also died abroad, in Rome at an early age. His sufferings — due to very poor health and an unhappy love-life - and a sense of impending death are reflected in his great Odes. He wrote about life’s brevity and the belief in the ethical value of beauty, which is eternal. The supreme symbol of this is his Grecian urn, where the classically beautiful scenes of life, death and love painted on the vase are seen as forever suspended in time (Ode on a Grecian Urn; 1819). In a ballad such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1819) Keats showed his loveof Romantic subjects: a young man caught in the spell of a beautiful but evil lady.