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English literature
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The Romantic period
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Leigh Hunt
John Stuart Mill
William Blake
I. "Songs of
Innocence",
II.
"Songs of
Experience",
III. "The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell", IV-V.
"The Book of Job"
William Wordsworth
"The Prelude"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner"
PART I,
PART
II-IV,
PART
V-VI,
PART
VII
Illustrations by Gustave
Dore
Dorothy Wordsworth
William Lisle Bowles
Thomas Campbell
Samuel Rogers
Thomas Moore
Helen Maria Williams
Mary Robinson
Robert Southey
George Crabbe
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The nature of Romanticism
As a term to cover the most
distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the
18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic”
is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no
self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great
writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not
until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of
1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the
“organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the
“mechanical” character of Classicism.
Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something
new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless.
William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is
begun” was matched a generation later by
Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these
will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,”
wrote
John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt and
William
Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular,
the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being
extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal
swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the
age of tyrants might soon end.
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the
new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where
the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise
the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society
addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having
as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found
the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience.
Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses
expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To
Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone
Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual
distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his
perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings
of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own
truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be
judged.
The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the
poems of
Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the
earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering
that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no
language but the language of the heart. But feeling had
begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of
the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833
John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself,
employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It
followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest
intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new
importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of
Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or
imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new
stress on imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the
imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine
creative force that made the poet a godlike being.
Samuel
Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention,
imagination and judgement,” but
Blake wrote: “One Power
alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The
poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on
the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and
reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or
primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as
valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been
overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.”
Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was
often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the
phrase is
Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the
“poor Indian” of
Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of
the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic
attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere,
intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the
dictates of the creative imagination.
Wordsworth advised a
young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and
your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does
from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic
view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of
“genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led
to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except
in short passages.
Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the
insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new
ways of writing.
Wordsworth and his followers, particularly
Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th
century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally
unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could
not be, for them, the language of feeling, and
Wordsworth
accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to
that of common speech.
Wordsworth’s own diction, however,
often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he
published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time
was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier
18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional
language.
Leigh Hunt
born Oct. 19, 1784, Southgate, Middlesex,
Eng.
died Aug. 28, 1859, Putney, London
English essayist, critic, journalist, and
poet, who was an editor of influential journals
in an age when the periodical was at the height
of its power. He was also a friend and supporter
of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John
Keats. Hunt’s poems, of which “Abou Ben Adhem”
and his rondeau “Jenny Kissed Me” (both first
published in 1838) are probably the best known,
reflect his knowledge of French and Italian
versification. His defense of Keats’s work in
the Examiner (June 1817) as “poetry for its own
sake” was an important anticipation of the views
of the Aesthetic movement.
Hunt, at his best, in some essays and his
Autobiography (1850; in part a rewriting of Lord
Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 1828), has
a distinctive charm. He excels in perceptive
judgments of his contemporaries, from Keats to
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As a Radical journalist,
though not much interested in the details of
politics, he attacked oppression with
indignation.
The poems in Juvenilia (1801), his first
volume, show his love for Italian literature. He
looked to Italy for a “freer spirit of
versification” and translated a great deal of
Italian poetry, and in The Story of Rimini
(1816), published in the year of his meeting
with Keats, he reintroduced a freedom of
movement in English couplet verse lost in the
18th century. From him Keats derived his delight
in colour and imaginative sensual experience and
a first acquaintance with Italian poetry. Much
of Hunt’s best verse was published in Foliage
(1818) and Hero and Leander, and Bacchus and
Ariadne (1819).
In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother John had
launched the weekly Examiner, which advocated
abolition of the slave trade, Catholic
emancipation, and reform of Parliament and the
criminal law. For their attacks on the unpopular
prince regent, the brothers were imprisoned in
1813. Leigh Hunt, who continued to write The
Examiner in prison, was regarded as a martyr in
the cause of liberty. After his release (1815)
he moved to Hampstead, home of Keats, whom he
introduced in 1817 to Shelley, a friend since
1811. The Examiner supported the new Romantic
poets against attacks by Blackwood’s Magazine on
what it called “the Cockney school of poetry,”
supposedly led by Hunt.
In Hunt’s writings for the quarterly
Reflector (1810–11), politics was combined with
criticism of the theatre and of the fine arts,
of which he had considerable knowledge.
Imagination and Fancy (1844), his most sustained
critical work, draws interesting parallels
between painting and poetry. It was in the
weekly Indicator (1819–21) and The Companion
(1828), however, that Hunt published some of his
best essays. He continued to write for
periodicals until his death.
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John Stuart Mill
British philosopher and economist
born May 20, 1806, London, Eng.
died May 8, 1873, Avignon, France
Main
English philosopher, economist, and exponent of Utilitarianism. He was
prominent as a publicist in the reforming age of the 19th century, and
remains of lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist.
Early life and career
The eldest son of the British historian, economist, and philosopher
James Mill, he was born in his father’s house in Pentonville, London. He
was educated exclusively by his father, who was a strict disciplinarian.
By his eighth year he had read in the original Greek Aesop’s Fables,
Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the whole of the historian Herodotus. He was
acquainted with the satirist Lucian, the historian of philosophy
Diogenes Laërtius, the Athenian writer and educational theorist
Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of
history in English. At the age of eight he started Latin, the geometry
of Euclid, and algebra and began to teach the younger children of the
family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the
Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schools and universities
and, by the age of 10 could read Plato and the Athenian statesman
Demosthenes with ease. About the age of 12, he began a thorough study of
Scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle’s logical treatises
in the original. In the following year he was introduced to political
economy and studied the work of the Scottish political economist and
philosopher Adam Smith and that of the English economist David Ricardo.
While the training the younger Mill received has aroused amazement
and criticism, its most important aspect was the close association it
fostered with the strenuous character and vigorous intellect of his
father. From his earliest days he spent much time in his father’s study
and habitually accompanied him on his walks. He thus inevitably acquired
many of his father’s speculative opinions and his father’s way of
defending them. But he did not receive the impress passively and
mechanically. The duty of collecting and weighing evidence for himself
was at every turn impressed upon the boy. His childhood was not unhappy,
but it was a strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of
natural, unforced development.
From May 1820 until July 1821, Mill was in France with the family of
Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham, the English Utilitarian
philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist. Copious extracts from a
diary kept at this time show how methodically he read and wrote, studied
chemistry and botany, tackled advanced mathematical problems, and made
notes on the scenery and the people and customs of the country. He also
gained a thorough acquaintance with the French language. On his return
in 1821 he added to his work the study of psychology and of Roman law,
which he read with John Austin, his father having half decided on the
bar as the best profession open to him. This intention, however, was
abandoned, and in 1823, when he had just completed his 17th year, he
entered the examiner’s office of the India House. After a short
probation he was promoted in 1828 to assistant examiner. For 20 years,
from 1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill had charge of the British
East India Company’s relations with the Indian states, and in 1856 he
became chief of the examiner’s office.
In 1822 Mill had read P.-E.-L. Dumont’s exposition of Bentham’s
doctrines in the Traités de Législation, which made a lasting impression
upon him. The impression was confirmed by the study of the English
psychologists and also of two 18th-century French philosophers—Étienne
Bonnot de Condillac, who was also a psychologist, and Claude-Adrien
Helvétius, who was noted for his emphasis on physical sensations. Soon
after, in 1822–23, Mill established among a few friends the Utilitarian
Society, taking the word, as he tells us, from Annals of the Parish, a
novel of Scottish country life by John Galt.
Two newspapers welcomed his contributions—The Traveller, edited by a
friend of Bentham’s, and The Morning Chronicle, edited by his father’s
friend John Black. One of his first efforts was a solid argument for
freedom of discussion in a series of letters to the Chronicle on the
prosecution of Richard Carlile, a 19th-century English radical and
freethinker. Mill seized every chance for exposing departures from sound
principle in Parliament and courts of justice. Another outlet was opened
up for him (April 1824) with the founding of the Westminster Review,
which was the organ of the philosophical radicals. In 1825 he began work
on an edition of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (5 vol.,
1827). He took part eagerly in discussions with the many men of
distinction who came to his father’s house and engaged in set
discussions at a reading society formed at the home of English historian
George Grote in 1825 and in debates at the London Debating Society,
formed in the same year.
Public life and writing
The Autobiography tells how in 1826 Mill’s enthusiasm was checked by a
misgiving as to the value of the ends that he had set before him. At the
London Debating Society, where he first measured his strength in public
conflict, he found himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious
phenomenon, a “made man,” an intellectual machine set to grind certain
tunes. The elder Mill, like Plato, would have put poets under ban as
enemies of truth; he subordinated private to public affections; and
Landor’s maxims of “few acquaintances, fewer friends, no familiarities”
had his cordial approval. The younger Mill now felt himself forced to
abandon these doctrines. Too much in awe of his father to make him a
confidant, he wrestled with his doubts in gloomy solitude. He emerged
from the struggle with a more catholic view of human happiness, a
delight in poetry for its own sake, a more placable attitude in
controversy, a hatred of sectarianism, and an ambition no less noble and
disinterested but moderated to practical possibilities. Gradually, the
debates in the Debating Society attracted men with whom contact was
invigorating and inspiring. Mill ceased to attend the society in 1829,
but he carried away from it the conviction that a true system of
political philosophy was something much more complex and many-sided than he had previously had
any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model
institutions but principles from which the institutions suitable to any
given circumstances might be deduced.
Mill’s letters in The Examiner in the autumn of 1830, after a visit
to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of the younger liberals, may be
taken as marking his return to hopeful activity; and a series of
articles on “The Spirit of the Age” appeared in the same paper in 1831.
During the years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays to Tait’s
Magazine, The Jurist, and The Monthly Repository. In 1835 Sir William
Molesworth founded The London Review, with Mill as editor. It was
amalgamated with The Westminster (as The London and Westminster Review)
in 1836, and Mill continued as editor (latterly as proprietor, also)
until 1840. In and after 1840 he published several important articles in
The Edinburgh Review. Some of the essays written for these journals were
reprinted in the first two volumes (1859) of Mill’s Dissertations and
Discussions and give evidence of the increasing width of his interests.
Among the more important are “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties”
(1833), “Writings of Alfred de Vigny” (1838), “Bentham” (1838),
“Coleridge” (1840), “M. De Tocqueville on Democracy in America” (1840),
“Michelet’s History of France” (1844), and “Guizot’s Essays and Lectures
on History” (1845). The twin essays on Bentham and Coleridge show Mill’s
powers at their splendid best and indicate very clearly the new spirit
that he tried to breathe into English radicalism.
During these years Mill also wrote his great systematic works on
logic and on political economy. His reawakened enthusiasm for humanity
had taken shape as an aspiration to supply an unimpeachable method of
proof for conclusions in moral and social science; the French positivist
philosopher Auguste Comte had some influence here, but the main
inspiration undoubtedly came from the English scientist and
mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, whose physics had already been accepted
as a model of scientific exposition by such earlier British philosophers
as John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill. But he was
determined that the new logic should not simply oppose the old logic. In
his Westminster review (of 1828) of Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic,
he was already defending the syllogism against the Scottish philosophers
who had talked of superseding it by a supposed system of inductive
logic. He required his inductive logic to “supplement and not
supersede.” For several years he searched in vain for the means of
concatenation. Finally, in 1837, on reading William Whewell’s Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences and rereading John F.W. Herschel’s Preliminary
Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mill at last saw his way
clear both to formulating the methods of scientific investigation and to
joining the new logic onto the old as a supplement. A System of Logic,
in two volumes, was published in 1843 (3rd–8th editions, introducing
many changes, 1851–72). Book VI is his valiant attempt to formulate a
logic of the human sciences—including history, psychology, and
sociology—based on causal explanation conceived in Humean terms, a
formulation that has lately come in for radical criticism.
Mill distinguished three stages in his development as a political
economist. In 1844 he published the Essays on Some Unsettled Questions
of Political Economy, which he had written several years earlier, and
four out of five of these essays are solutions of perplexing technical
problems—the distribution of the gains of international commerce, the
influence of consumption on production, the definition of productive and
unproductive labour, and the precise relations between profits and
wages. Here for the most part Mill appears as the disciple of David
Ricardo, striving after more precise statements and reaching forward to
further consequences. In his second stage, originality and independence
become more conspicuous as he struggles toward the standpoint from which
he wrote his Principles of Political Economy. This was published in 1848
(2 vol.; 2nd and 3rd eds., with significant differences, 1849, 1852),
and, at about the same time, Mill was advocating the creation of peasant
proprietorships as a remedy for the distresses and disorder in Ireland.
Thereafter, he made a more thorough study of Socialist writers. He was
convinced that the social question was as important as the political
question. He declined to accept property, devised originally to secure
peace in a primitive society, as necessarily sacred in its existing
developments in a quite different stage of society. He separated
questions of production and distribution and could not rest satisfied
with the distribution that condemned the labouring classes to a cramped
and wretched existence, in many cases to starvation. He did not come to
a Socialist solution, but he had the great merit of having considered
afresh the foundations of society. This he called his third stage as a
political economist, and he says that he was helped toward it by Mrs.
Taylor (Harriet Hardy), who became his wife in 1851.
It is generally supposed that Mill writes with a lover’s extravagance
about Harriet’s powers. He expressly says, indeed, that he owed none of
his technical doctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals of
life for the individual and for society, and that the only work directly
inspired by her is the essay on the “Enfranchisement of Women”
(Dissertations, vol. 2). Nevertheless, Mill’s relations with her have
always been something of a puzzle.
During the seven years of his marriage Mill became increasingly
absorbed in the work of the British East India Company and in
consequence published less than at any other period of his life. In 1856
he became head of the examiner’s office in the India House, and for two
years, till the dissolution of the company in 1858, his official work
kept him fully occupied. It fell to him as head of the office to write
the defense of the company’s government of India when the transfer of
its powers was proposed. Mill opposed the transfer, and the documents in
which he defended the company’s administration are models of trenchant
and dignified pleading. On the dissolution of the company, Mill was
offered a seat in the new council but declined it and retired with a
pension of £1,500. His retirement from official life was followed almost
immediately by his wife’s death at Avignon, France. He spent most of the
rest of his life at a villa at Saint-Véran, near Avignon, returning to
his house at Blackheath only for a short period in each year.
The later years
Mill sought relief by publishing a series of books on ethics and
politics that he had meditated upon and partly written in collaboration
with his wife. The essay On Liberty appeared in 1859 with a touching
dedication to her and the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform in the same
year. In his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) he
systematized opinions already put forward in many casual articles and
essays. It has been remarked how Mill combined enthusiasm for democratic
government with pessimism as to what democracy was likely to do;
practically every discussion in these books exemplifies this. His
Utilitarianism (in Fraser’s Magazine, 1861; separate publication, 1863)
was a closely reasoned attempt to answer objections to his ethical
theory and to remove misconceptions about it. He was especially anxious
to make it clear that he included in “utility” the pleasures of the
imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions; and to make a
place in his system for settled rules of conduct.
Mill also began to write again on the wider philosophical questions
that had occupied him in the Logic. In 1865 he published both his
Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and his Auguste Comte
and Positivism, but in both writings his motives were largely political.
It was because he regarded the writings and sayings of Sir William
Hamilton as the great fortress of intuitional philosophy in Great
Britain that Mill undertook to counter his pretensions. In dealing with
Comte, Mill distinguished sharply between Comte’s earlier philosophical
doctrine of Positivism and his later religion of humanity. The doctrine
he commended (as he had frequently done previously) because he regarded
it as a natural development of the outlook of George Berkeley and Hume;
the religion he attacked because he saw in it merely another attempt to
foist a priestly hierarchy upon suffering humanity. It is noticeable
that Mill’s language in these books is much closer to the language of
Bentham and James Mill than it had been since his boyhood, and it was as
an act of piety that in 1869 he republished his father’s Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind with additional illustrations and
explanatory notes.
While engaged in these years mainly with theoretical studies, Mill
did not remit his interest in current politics. He supported the North
in the U.S. Civil War, using all his strength to explain that the real
issue at stake in the struggle was the abolition of slavery. In 1865 he
stood as parliamentary candidate for Westminster, on conditions strictly
in accordance with his principles. He would not canvass or pay agents to
canvass for him, nor would he engage to attend to the local business of
the constituency. He was with difficulty persuaded even to address a
meeting of the electors but was elected. He took an active part in the
debates preceding the passage of the 1867 Reform Bill, and helped to
extort from the government several useful modifications of the bill, for
the prevention of corrupt practices. The reform of land tenure in
Ireland (see his England and Ireland, 1868, and his Chapters and
Speeches on the Irish Land Question, 1870), the representation of women
(see below), the reduction of the national debt, the reform of London
government, and the abrogation of the Declaration of Paris
(1856)—concerning the carriage of property at sea during the Crimean
War—were among the topics on which he spoke. He took occasion more than
once to enforce what he had often advocated, England’s duty to intervene
in foreign politics in support of freedom. As a speaker Mill was
somewhat hesitating, but he showed great readiness in extemporaneous
debate. Elected rector of St. Andrews University, he published his
“Inaugural Address” in 1867.
Mill’s subscription to the election expenses of the freethinker and
radical politician Charles Bradlaugh and his attack on the conduct of
Gov. E.J. Eyre in Jamaica were perhaps the main causes of his defeat in
the general parliamentary election of 1868. But his studied advocacy of
unfamiliar projects of reform had made him unpopular with “moderate
Liberals.” He retired with a sense of relief to Avignon. His villa was
filled with books and newspapers; the country round it furnished him
with a variety of walks; he read, wrote, discussed, walked, botanized.
He was extremely fond of music and was himself a fair pianist. His
stepdaughter, Helen Taylor (died January 1907), was his constant
companion after his wife’s death. Mill was an enthusiastic botanist all
his life and a frequent contributor of notes and short papers to the
Phytologist. During his last journey to Avignon he was looking forward
to seeing the spring flowers and completing a flora of the locality.
Mill did not relax his laborious habits or his ardent outlook on
human affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of his Dissertations
(1875; vol. 3 had appeared in 1867)—on endowments, on land, on labour,
and on metaphysical and psychological questions—were written for the
Fortnightly Review at intervals after his short parliamentary career. In
1867 he had been one of the founders, with Mrs. P.A. Taylor, Emily
Davies, and others, of the first women’s suffrage society, which
developed into the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and in
1869 he published The Subjection of Women (written 1861), the classical
theoretical statement of the case for woman suffrage. His last public
activity was concerned with the starting of the Land Tenure Reform
Association, for which he wrote in The Examiner and made a public speech
a few months before his death; the interception by the state of the
unearned increment on land and the promotion of cooperative agriculture
were the most striking features in his program, which he regarded as a
timely compromise in view of the impending struggle between capital and
labour in Europe. He died in 1873, and his Autobiography and Three
Essays on Religion (1874) were published posthumously.
A bronze statue of Mill stands on the Thames embankment in London,
and G.F. Watts’s copy of his original portrait of Mill hangs in the
National Gallery there.
Influence and significance
Mill was a man of extreme simplicity in his mode of life. The influence
that his works exercised upon contemporary English thought can scarcely
be overestimated, nor can there be any doubt about the value of the
liberal and inquiring spirit with which he handled the great questions
of his time. Beyond that, however, there has been considerable
difference of opinion about the enduring merits of his philosophy. At
first sight he is the most lucid of philosophers. Many people have
spoken of the marvelous intelligibility of his writing. Usually,
however, it is not long before doubts begin to creep in. Although the
lucidity remains, its span is seen to be somewhat limited, and one
sometimes has the uneasy feeling that he is being equally lucid on both
sides of a question.
Oddly enough, however, this judgment has not led to any neglect of
Mill. Little attention is now paid to Hamilton or to Whewell, but Mill’s
name continually crops up in philosophical discussions. This is partly
due to the fact that Mill offers a body of doctrine and a set of
technical terms on many subjects (notably on induction) that have proved
extremely useful in the classroom. But a more important reason is that
he has come to be regarded as a sort of personification of certain
tendencies in philosophy that it is regarded as continually necessary to
expound or expose because they make such a powerful appeal to serious
minds. Thus he is or says he is a Utilitarian; yet nothing, it is
pointed out, could tell more strongly against Utilitarianism than
certain passages in his writings. Then again, he is said to be an
Empiricist (although he says himself that he is not), and his theories
of the syllogism and of mathematics are constantly used to demonstrate
the fatal consequences of this way of thinking.
It is misleading to speak without qualification of Mill’s
Utilitarianism. Nor is it sufficient to add that Mill modified the
Utilitarianism that he inherited from Bentham and from his father in one
way and another in order to meet the criticisms that it encountered in
Victorian times. He does, it is true, sometimes give that impression (as
in his essay Utilitarianism); but elsewhere (as in his essay On Liberty)
he scarcely attempts to conceal the fact that his premises are
completely independent of Bentham’s. Thus, contrary to the common
belief, it appears to be very hazardous to characterize offhand the
precise position of Mill on any major philosophical topic. He sometimes
behaved with a reckless disregard of consequences more suitable to a
Romantic than to a Utilitarian. He is thoroughly romantic, again, and
thoroughly representative of his age in the eagerness with which he
seeks out and endeavours to assimilate every last exotic line of thought
which shows any signs of vitality. He himself claimed to be superior to
most of his contemporaries in “ability and willingness to learn from
everybody,” and indeed, for all his father’s careful schooling, there
was never anybody less buttoned up against alien influences than Mill.
In his writings there can be discerned traces of every wind of doctrine
of the early 19th century.
Richard Paul Anschutz
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Poetry
Blake,
Wordsworth, and
Coleridge
Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic
poetry, there was little conformity among the poets
themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first
Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express
their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the
intellectual climate of the age.
William Blake had been
dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry
and what he considered the irreligious drabness of
contemporary thought. His early development of a protective
shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which
science had become trifling and art inconsequential is
visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c.
1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside
sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789).
His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak
of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such
as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of
Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age
and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of
analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear
that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be
realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his
contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new
mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen,
a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be
the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The
story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of
Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished
manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written
from about 1796 to about 1807.
Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives
of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still
using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the
imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the
possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic)
condition.
William Blake
Dante
and Virgil at the Gates of Hell (Illustration to Dante's
"Inferno")
William Blake
I. "Songs of
Innocence"
II.
"Songs of
Experience"
III. "The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell"
IV-V.
"The Book of Job"
British writer and artist
born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.
died Aug. 12, 1827, London
Main
English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite
lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and
profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of
Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804[–?11]), and
Jerusalem (1804[–?20]). The dating of Blake’s texts is explained in the
Researcher’s Note: Blake publication dates. These works he etched,
printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his
devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are The Lamb,
The Tyger, London, and the Jerusalem lyric from Milton, which has become
a kind of second national anthem in Britain. In the early 21st century,
Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic
poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or (unjustly)
dismissed as mad.
Blake was born over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad
Street, Golden Square, London. His parents were James Blake (1722–84)
and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake (1722–92). His father came from an
obscure family in Rotherhithe, across the River Thames from London, and
his mother was from equally obscure yeoman stock in the straggling
little village of Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire. His mother had first
married (1746) a haberdasher named Thomas Armitage, and in 1748 they
moved to 28 Broad Street. In 1750 the couple joined the newly
established Moravian church in Fetter Lane, London. The Moravian
religious movement, recently imported from Germany, had had a strong
attraction to the powerful emotions associated with nascent Methodism
(see Moravian church). Catherine Armitage bore a son named Thomas, who
died as a baby in 1751, and a few months later Thomas Armitage himself
died.
Catherine left the Moravians, who insisted on marriages within the
faith, and in 1752 married James Blake in the Church of England chapel
of St. George in Hanover Square. James moved in with her at 28 Broad
Street. They had six children: James (1753–1827), who took over the
family haberdashery business on his father’s death in 1784; John (born
1755, died in childhood); William, the poet and artist; another John
Blake (born 1760, died by 1800), whom Blake referred to in a letter of
1802 as “my Brother John the evil one” and who became an unsuccessful
gingerbread baker, enlisted as a soldier, and died; Richard (1762–87),
called Robert, a promising artist and the poet’s favourite, at times his
alter ego; and Catherine Elizabeth (1764–1841), the baby of the family,
who never married and who died in extreme indigence long after the
deaths of all her brothers.
William Blake grew up in modest circumstances. What teaching he
received as a child was at his mother’s knee, as most children did. This
he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent
to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]”
Visions of eternity
Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were
intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson
wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a
window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree
in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer,
Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright
angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in
his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone
in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke
as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but
it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay A Vision of the Last
Judgment, Blake wrote:
I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation…
‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round
Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable
company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God
Almighty!’
Blake wrote to his patron William Hayley in 1802, “I am under the
direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.” These visions were
the source of many of his poems and drawings. As he wrote in his
Auguries of Innocence, his purpose was
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
He was, he wrote in 1804, “really drunk with intellectual vision
whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” Blake’s wife once said
to his young friend Seymour Kirkup, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s
company; he is always in Paradise.”
Some of this stress on visions may have been fostered by his mother,
who, with her first husband, had become a Moravian when the group was in
its most intensely emotional and visionary phase. In her letter of 1750
applying to join the Moravians, she wrote that “last Friday at the love
feast Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds.”
Blake’s religion
Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of
England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In A Vision
of the Last Judgment he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very
Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in
his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan
as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly
declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible
in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated
in his poem The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818):
The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
…
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White.
But some of the orthodox not only tolerated but also encouraged
Blake. Two of his most important patrons, the Rev. A.S. Mathew and the
Rev. Joseph Thomas, were clergymen of the Church of England.
Blake was a religious seeker but not a joiner. He was profoundly
influenced by some of the ideas of Swedish theologian Emanuel
Swedenborg, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the
New Church (which had been recently founded by followers of Swedenborg)
in London. Blake’s poem The Divine Image (from Songs of Innocence) is
implicitly Swedenborgian, and he said that he based his design called
The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on the theologian’s book True Christian
Religion. He soon decided, however, that Swedenborg was a “Spiritual
Predestinarian,” as he wrote in his copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of
Angels Concerning the Divine Providence (1790), and that the New Church
was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England.
Blake loved the world of the spirit and abominated institutionalized
religion, especially when it was allied with government; he wrote in his
annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), “all […]
codes given under pretence [sic] of divine command were what Christ
pronounced them, The Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State
Religion” and later in the same text, “The Beast & the Whore rule
without control.” According to his longtime friend John Thomas Smith,
“He did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine
worship.” For Blake, true worship was private communion with the spirit.
Education as artist and engraver
From childhood Blake wanted to be an artist, at the time an unusual
aspiration for someone from a family of small businessmen and
Nonconformists (dissenting Protestants). His father indulged him by
sending him to Henry Pars’s Drawing School in the Strand, London
(1767–72). The boy hoped to be apprenticed to some artist of the newly
formed and flourishing English school of painting, but the fees proved
to be more than the parental pocket could withstand. Instead he went
with his father in 1772 to interview the successful and fashionable
engraver William Wynne Ryland. Ryland’s fee, perhaps £100, was both
“more attainable” than that of fashionable painters and still, for the
Blakes, very high; furthermore the boy interposed an unexpected
objection: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will
live to be hanged.” Eleven years later, Ryland was indeed hanged—for
forgery—one of the last criminals to suffer on the infamous gallows
known as Tyburn Tree.
The young Blake was ultimately apprenticed for 50 guineas to James
Basire (1730–1802), a highly responsible and conservative line engraver
who specialized in prints depicting architecture. For seven years
(1772–79) Blake lived with Basire’s family on Great Queen Street, near
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. There he learned to polish the
copperplates, to sharpen the gravers, to grind the ink, to reduce the
images to the size of the copper, to prepare the plates for etching with
acid, and eventually to push the sharp graver through the copper, with
the light filtered through gauze so that the glare reflected from the
brilliantly polished copper would not dazzle him. He became so
proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire trusted him to go by
himself to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments
there for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the last
quarter of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough’s Sepulchral
Monuments in Great Britain (vol. 1, 1786).
Career as engraver
On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1779, Blake began to work
vigorously as an independent engraver. His most frequent commissions
were from the great liberal bookseller Joseph Johnson. At first most of
his work was copy engraving after the designs of other artists, such as
the two fashion plates for the Ladies New and Polite Pocket
Memorandum-Book (1782). He also engraved important plates for the Swiss
writer John Caspar (Johann Kasper) Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (vol.
1, 1789), for the English physician Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden
(1791), and for his friend John Gabriel Stedman’s violent and eccentric
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam (1796), which included illustrations titled A Negro Hung Alive
by the Ribs to a Gallows and Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave.
Blake became so well known that he received commissions to engrave
his own designs. These included 6 plates for Original Stories from Real
Life (1791), a collection of narratives for children by Johnson’s friend
Mary Wollstonecraft, and 43 folio plates for part one of Edward Young’s
poem Night Thoughts (1797), with a promise, never fulfilled, for a
hundred more. Blake’s style of designing, however, was so extreme and
unfamiliar, portraying spirits with real bodies, that one review in The
British Critic (1796; of Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora) called them
“distorted, absurd,” and the product of a “depraved fancy.”
Because of the éclat with which they were published, the best-known
engravings after Blake’s own designs were those for Robert Blair’s poem
The Grave (1808). In 1805 the entrepreneur Robert Hartley Cromek paid
Blake £21 for 20 watercolours illustrating Blair’s poem and agreed to
publish folio (large-format) prints after them engraved by Blake. The
number of designs was whittled down, without notifying Blake, from 20 to
15 to 12. Worst of all, the lucrative commission for engraving them,
worth perhaps £300, was taken from Blake, without informing him, and
given to the fashionable Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti. To add
critical insult to commercial injury, when the work was published in
1808, the radical weekly The Examiner mocked the absurdity of
“representing the Spirit to the eye,” and the reactionary Antijacobin
Review not only deplored the designs as “the offspring of a morbid
fancy,” which “totally failed” “ ‘to connect the visible with the
invisible world,’ ” but also mocked Blake’s poetical dedication of the
designs “To the Queen”:
Should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends
would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat.
Whatever licence we may allow him as a painter, to tolerate him as a
poet would be insufferable.
The frontispiece to the work was an engraving after Thomas Phillips’s
portrait of Blake (above), which became the best-known representation of
the artist. It shows him with a pencil in his hand, indicating,
truthfully, that he is an artist, and wearing a waistcoat and an elegant
frilled stock, suggesting, falsely, that he is a gentleman. The most
remarkable feature of the portrait, however, is the prominent eyes.
According to Blake’s acquaintance Allan Cunningham, at the sitting Blake
and Phillips talked of paintings of angels, and Blake said that the
Archangel Gabriel had told him that Michelangelo could paint an angel
better than Raphael could. When Blake demanded evidence that Gabriel was
not an evil spirit, the voice said,
“ ‘Can an evil spirit do this?’ I [Blake] looked whence the voice
came, and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who
diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he
waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven;
he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel
of evil could not have done that—it was the arch-angel Gabriel.” The
painter marvelled much at this wild story; but he caught from Blake’s
looks, as he related it, that rapt poetic expression, which has rendered
his portrait one of the finest of the English school.
Later important commissions included plates for William Hayley’s
biography of the poet William Cowper (1803–04), for sculptor John
Flaxman’s illustrations for the Iliad (1805) and the works of Hesiod
(1817), and for the Wedgwood ware catalogue (1816?), as well as
marvelously modest and poignant little woodcuts after his own
illustrations for a school edition of Virgil published in 1821 by the
physician and botanist Robert John Thornton.
Blake also published his engravings of his own designs, though mostly
in very small numbers. One of the best known is Glad Day, also called
Albion Rose (designed 1780, engraved 1805?), depicting a glorious naked
youth dancing upon the mountaintops. Even more ambitiously, he invented
a method of printing in colour, still not clearly understood, which he
used in 1795 to create his 12 great folio colour prints, including God
Judging Adam and Newton. The latter shows the great mathematician naked
and seated on a rock at the bottom of the sea making geometric designs.
These were printed in only two or three copies apiece, and some were
still in his possession at his death.
More publicly visible were Blake’s engravings of his enormous design
of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1810), his 22 folio designs
for the Book of Job (1826), and his 7 even larger unfinished plates for
Dante (1826–27). Though only the Chaucer sold well enough to repay its
probable expenses during Blake’s lifetime, these are agreed today to be
among the greatest triumphs of line engraving in England, sufficient to
ensure Blake’s reputation as an engraver and artist even had he made no
other watercolours or poems.
Marriage to Catherine Boucher
In 1781 Blake fell in love with Catherine Sophia Boucher (1762–1831),
the pretty, illiterate daughter of an unsuccessful market gardener from
the farm village of Battersea across the River Thames from London. The
family name suggests that they were Huguenots who had fled religious
persecution in France.
According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, at their first meeting
he told her how he had been jilted by Polly Wood, and Catherine said she
pitied him from her heart.
“Do you pity me?” asked Blake.
“Yes, I do, most sincerely.”
“Then,” said he, “I love you for that.”
“Well, and I love you.”
Blake returned to Soho to achieve financial security to support a
wife, and 12 months later, on Aug. 18, 1782, the couple married in her
family’s church, Saint Mary’s, Battersea, the bride signing the marriage
register with an X.
It was an imprudent and highly satisfactory marriage. Blake taught
Catherine to read and write (a little), to draw, to colour his designs
and prints, to help him at the printing press, and to see visions as he
did. She believed implicitly in his genius and his visions and supported
him in everything he did with charming credulity. After his death she
lived chiefly for the moments when he came to sit and talk with her.
Not long after his marriage, Blake acquired a rolling press for
printing engravings and joined his fellow apprentice James Parker in
opening a print shop in 1784. Within a year, however, Blake had left the
business and returned to making rather than selling prints.
Death of Robert Blake
One of the most traumatic events of Blake’s life was the death of his
beloved 24-year-old brother, Robert, from tuberculosis in 1787. At the
end, Blake stayed up with him for a fortnight, and when Robert died
Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward through the
matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy,’” as Alexander
Gilchrist wrote. The occasion entered into Blake’s psyche and his
poetry. In the epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?),
he writes, “Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy,
clapping his hands,” and, in his poem Milton, plates 29 and 33 portray
figures, labeled “William” and “Robert,” falling backward as a star
plunges toward their feet. Blake claimed that in a vision Robert taught
him the secret of painting his designs and poems on copper in a liquid
impervious to acid before the plate was etched and printed. This method,
which Blake called “Illuminated Printing,” made it possible for Blake to
be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all
his published poetry thereafter, from Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem
(1804[–20?]).
Career as an artist
While pursuing his career as an engraver, in 1779 Blake enrolled as a
student in the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts; he exhibited a few
pictures there, in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, and 1808. His greatest
ambition was as an artist; according to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson,
“The spirit said to him, ‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this
there is felicity.’” His materials were watercolours and paper, not the
fashionable oil on canvas, and he painted subjects from the Bible and
British history instead of the portraits and landscapes that were in
vogue. And increasingly his subjects were his own visions.
His friends were artists such as the Neoclassical sculptor John
Flaxman, the book illustrator Thomas Stothard, the sensationalist
painter Henry Fuseli, the amateur polymath George Cumberland, and the
portrait and landscape painter John Linnell. Blake’s patrons were mostly
concerned with his art, and most of his correspondence was about
engravings and paintings. Only Cumberland bought a significant number of
his books.
Blake’s first really important commission, which he received in about
1794, was to illustrate every page of Edward Young’s popular and morbid
long poem Night Thoughts—a total of 537 watercolours. For these he was
paid £21 by the ambitious and inexperienced young bookseller Richard
Edwards, brother of the illustrated-book publisher James Edwards. From
these 537 designs were to be chosen subjects for, as a promotional flyer
touted, 150 engravings by Blake “in a perfectly new style of decoration,
surrounding the text” for a “MAGNIFICENT” and “splendid” new edition.
The first of a proposed four parts was published in 1797 with 43 plates,
but it fell stillborn from the press, and no further engraving for the
edition was made. Its failure resulted at least in part from the fact
that its publisher was already preparing to go out of business and
neglected to advertise the book or almost even to sell it. The work was
largely ignored or deplored, and its commercial failure had profound
consequences for Blake; he wrote to George Cumberland in 1799, “I am
laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist, & Since my Youngs Night
Thoughts have been publish’d Even Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my
Graver.”
Most of his large commissions thereafter were for watercolours rather
than engravings. For John Flaxman, he painted 116 designs illustrating
Thomas Gray’s poems (1797–98); for his faithful patron Thomas Butts, a
functionary in the office of the Commissary General of [Military]
Musters, he created 135 temperas (1799–1800) and watercolours
(1800–1809) illustrating the Bible; and he executed 8 watercolours
(1801?) for Milton’s Comus, 6 for Shakespeare (1806 and 1809), 12 for
Paradise Lost (1807), and 6 for Milton’s ode On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity (1809), all for the Rev. Joseph Thomas of Epsom, not far from
the village of Felpham (where Blake lived for a while). Later Butts
commissioned 12 watercolours for Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso
(1816?) and 12 for Paradise Regained (c. 1816–20); Linnell had Blake
create 6 watercolours for the Book of Enoch (1824–27), plus 102
illustrations for Dante (1824–27) and 11 for what began as an
illuminated Genesis manuscript (1826–27); 29 unfinished watercolours
(1824–27) for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress were still in Blake’s
possession at his death. Blake also drew scores of “Visionary Heads”
(1818–25) of the mighty or notorious dead, which were fostered and often
commissioned by the artist and astrologer John Varley.
Of all these commissions, only illustrations for Job (1826) and Dante
(1838) were engraved and published. The rest were visible only on the
private walls of their unostentatious owners. Blake’s art and his
livelihood were thus largely in the hands of a small number of
connoisseurs whose commissions were often inspired as much by love for
the man as by admiration for his art.
Patronage of William Hayley and move to Felpham
Upon the commercial failure of his Night Thoughts engravings, Blake
accepted an invitation from Flaxman’s friend the genteel poet William
Hayley to move to the little seaside farm village of Felpham in Sussex
and work as his protégé. Blake’s work there would include making
engravings for Hayley’s works and painting tempera portraits of literary
notables for Hayley’s library and miniature portraits for his friends.
Blake rented for £20 a year a charming thatched cottage, which he and
Catherine found enchanting, and on arriving he wrote, “Heaven opens here
on all sides her Golden Gates.” He worked industriously on Hayley’s
projects, particularly his Designs to a Series of Ballads—published for
Blake’s benefit (1802)—and Hayley’s biography (1803–04) of his friend
the poet William Cowper, with engravings printed by Catherine. “Mr
Hayley acts like a Prince,” Blake wrote on May 10, 1801; Blake’s host
gave him commissions, found him patrons, and taught him Greek and
Hebrew.
Hayley’s well-meant efforts to foster Blake’s commercial success,
however, strained their relationship. In Blake’s manuscript notebook,
he
expressed his resentment thus: :
When H---- finds out what you cannot do
That is the very thing he[’]ll set you to.
Blake had already determined to return to London when he was beset by
legal troubles.
Charged with sedition
When the peace established in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens broke down in
1803, Napoleon massed his army along the English Channel. British troops
were rushed to the Sussex coast, with a troop of dragoons billeted in
the pub at Felpham. On Aug. 12, 1803, Blake found one of the dragoons,
named John Schofield, lounging in his garden and perhaps tipsy. Blake
asked him to leave and, on his refusal, took him by the elbows and
marched him down the street to the Fox Inn, 50 yards (46 metres) away.
In revenge, Schofield went to his officer with his comrade Private John
Cock, and they swore that Blake had “Damned the King of England.” The
complaint was taken to the magistrate, a charge was laid, and Blake was
forced to find bail and was bound over for trial for sedition and
assault first at the quarter sessions in Petworth (Oct. 4, 1803), where
a True Bill was found against Blake, and then at Chichester (Jan. 11,
1804). (The words “True Bill” are written on a bill of indictment when a
grand jury, after hearing the government witnesses, finds that there is
sufficient cause to put a defendent on trial.) Despite the fact that the
magistrates were all country gentlemen—one of them, the duke of
Richmond, who commanded all troops in the south of England, was, Hayley
wrote, “bitterly prejudiced against Blake”—with the support of Hayley as
a character witness and of the lawyer whom Hayley had hired, Blake was,
according to The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, “by the Jury acquitted, which
so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all
decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.” He later
incorporated his accusers and judges into his poems Milton and
Jerusalem.
Blake’s exhibition (1809–10)
There were few opportunities for a wider public to view Blake’s
watercolours and his temperas. He showed work at the exhibition of the
Associated Painters in Water-Colours (1812) and exhibited some pictures
at the Royal Academy of Arts, but these works were greeted with silence.
Blake’s most determined effort to reach a wider public was his
retrospective exhibition of 16 watercolours and temperas, held above the
Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810.
The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons
and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been
commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. The
painting, now lost, was said to have been 14 feet (4.3 metres) wide by
10 feet (3 metres) tall—the largest picture Blake ever made, with what
an advertisement for the exhibition described as “Figures full as large
as Life.” The young art student Seymour Kirkup said it was Blake’s
“masterpiece,” and Henry Crabb Robinson called it “his greatest and most
perfect work.”
The first three pictures listed in the exhibition catalogue—The
Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (c. 1805–09), The Spiritual
Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805?), and Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the
Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury (1808)—defined
the style of the pictures and the expectations of the viewers. In his
Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809), Blake said that he “appeals to
the Public,” but he scarcely attempted to accommodate his rhetoric to
his audience. The works on display, he wrote, were “copies from some
stupendous originals now lost…[which] The Artist having been taken in
vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of
Asia, has seen.” Blake also inveighed against fashionable styles and
artists, such as the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens—whom he called “a
most outrageous demon” (i.e., villain)—and “that infernal machine called
Chiaro Oscura” (a technique of shading, see chiaroscuro).
Only a few persons saw the exhibition, perhaps no more than a couple
dozen, but they included Robinson, the essayist and critic Charles Lamb
and his sister, Mary, and Robert Hunt, brother of the journalist and
poet Leigh Hunt. Robert Hunt wrote the only printed notice (in the
radical family weekly The Examiner) of the exhibition and its
Descriptive Catalogue, and through his vilification they became much
more widely known than Blake had been able to make them. Hunt described
the pictures as “wretched,” the Descriptive Catalogue as “a farrago of
nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity,” and Blake himself
as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him
from confinement.” Few more destructive reviews have appeared in print,
and Blake was devastated. He riposted by incorporating the Hunt brothers
into his poems Milton and Jerusalem, but the harm was done, and Blake
withdrew more and more into obscurity. From 1809 to 1818 he engraved few
plates, his commissions for designs were mostly private, and he sank
deeper into poverty.
Blake as a poet
Blake’s profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was
painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the
early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the
bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems.
According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by
the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original
and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev.
Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of
these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled
Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading
simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew
that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in
almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a
poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave
the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation
that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons.
Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died
he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.
But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed
that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish
rodomontade, but some, such as To Winter and Mad Song, are exquisite. To
the Muses, lamenting the death of music, concludes,
How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!
Eighty-five years later, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote that in
these lines “The Eighteenth Century died to music.”
Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using
a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew
his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious
to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife,
printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper
wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen
copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more
than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique
copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.
After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There
Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One (1788?), Blake
created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly
remembered: Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems
are written for children—in Infant Joy only three words have as many as
two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from
babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In
The Chimney Sweeper, for example,
[…]the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm.
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.
In one of the best-known lyrics, called The Lamb, a little boy gives
to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in
church:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
…
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb
…
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and
lamb has the same qualities as his creation.
Most of Blake’s poetry embodies myths that he invented. Blake takes
the inquiry about the nature of life a little further in The Book of
Thel (1789), the first of his published myths. The melancholy
shepherdess Thel asks, “Why fade these children of the spring? Born but
to smile & fall.” She is answered by the Lilly of the Valley
(representing water), the Cloud (air), and the Clod of Clay (earth), who
tell her, “we live not for ourselves,” and say that they are nourished
by “he that loves the lowly.” Thel enters the “land unknown” and hears a
“voice of sorrow”:
“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!”
The poem concludes with the frightened Thel seeing her own grave
there, shrieking, and fleeing back to her valley.
Blake’s next work in Illuminated Printing, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (1790?), has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no
familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or
publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg,
echoing the Swedish theologian’s “Memorable Relations” of things seen
and heard in heaven with “Memorable Fancies” of things seen and heard in
hell. The section titled “Proverbs of Hell” eulogizes energy with lines
such as “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “Exuberance is Beauty,” and “The
road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The work ends with “A
Song of Liberty,” which celebrates the values of those who stormed the
Bastille in 1789: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer […]
curse the sons of joy […] For every thing that lives is Holy.”
America, A Prophecy (1793) and Europe, A Prophecy (1794) are even
more daringly political, and they are boldly acknowledged on the title
pages as “Printed by William Blake.” In the first, Albion’s Angel,
representing the reactionary government of England, perceives Orc, the
spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of
Dignities,” but Orc’s vision is of an apocalypse that transforms the
world:
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
…
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease
…
For every thing that lives is holy
The mental revolution seems to be accomplished, but the design for
the triumphant concluding page shows not rejoicing and triumph but
barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents. Blake’s designs
often tell a complementary story, and the two visions must be combined
in the reader’s mind to comprehend the meaning of the work.
The frontispiece to Europe is one of Blake’s best-known images:
sometimes called The Ancient of Days, it represents a naked, bearded old
man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden
compasses. He seems a familiar image of God, but the usual notions about
this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what
the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and
forked tongue. It seems to represent how
Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth:
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face […]
…
Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.
This God is opposed by Orc and by Los, the imagination, and at the
end of the poem Los “call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” The
work’s last illustration, however, is not of the heroic sons of Los
storming the barricades of tyrannical reason but of a naked man carrying
a fainting woman and a terrified girl from the horrors of a burning
city.
In the same year as Europe, Blake published Songs of Experience and
combined it with his previous lyrics to form Songs of Innocence and of
Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The poems
of Songs of Experience centre on threatened, unprotected souls in
despair. In London the speaker, shown in the design as blind, bearded,
and “age-bent,” sees in “every face…marks of woe,” and observes that “In
every voice…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” In The Tyger, which
answers The Lamb of Innocence, the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger
burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
But in the design the “deadly terrors” of the text are depicted as a
small, meek animal often coloured more like a stuffed toy than a jungle
beast.
Blake’s most impressive writings are his enormous prophecies Vala or
The Four Zoas (which Blake composed and revised from roughly 1796 to
1807 but never published), Milton, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the
Giant Albion. In them, his myth expands, adding to Urizen (reason) and
Los (imagination) the Zoas Tharmas and Luvah. (The word zoa is a Greek
plural meaning “living creatures.”) Their primordial harmony is
destroyed when each of them attempts to fix creation in a form
corresponding to his own nature and genius. Blake describes his purpose,
his “great task,” in Jerusalem:
To open the immortal Eyes
Of man inwards into the worlds of thought; into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
Like the Zoa Los, Blake felt that he must “Create a System or be
enslav’d by another Mans.”
Milton concerns Blake’s attempt, at Milton’s request, to correct the
ideas of Paradise Lost. The poem originated in an event in Felpham,
recorded in Blake’s letters, in which the spirit of Milton as a falling
star entered Blake. It includes the lyric commonly called “Jerusalem”
that has become a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
Last years
Blake’s last years, from 1818 to 1827, were made comfortable and
productive as a result of his friendship with the artist John Linnell.
Through Linnell, Blake met the physician and botanist Robert John
Thornton, who commissioned Blake’s woodcuts for a school text of Virgil
(1821). He also met the young painters George Richmond, Samuel Palmer,
and Edward Calvert, who became his disciples, called themselves “the
Ancients,” and reflected Blake’s inspiration in their art. Linnell also
supported Blake with his commissions for the drawings and engravings of
the Book of Job (published 1826) and Dante (1838), Blake’s greatest
achievements as a line engraver. In these last years Blake gained a new
serenity. Once, when he met a fashionably dressed little girl at a
party, he put his hand on her head and said, “May God make this world to
you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me.”
Blake died in his cramped rooms in Fountain Court, the Strand,
London, on Aug. 12, 1827. His disciple Richmond wrote,
Just before he died His Countenance became fair—His eyes brighten’d
and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven. In truth He
Died like a saint[,] as a person who was standing by Him Observed.
He was buried in Bunhill Fields, a burial ground for Nonconformists,
but he was given the beautiful funeral service of the Church of England.
For a list of Blake’s principal works, see Sidebar: William Blake’s
principal writings, series of drawings, and series of engravings.
Reputation and influence
Blake was scarcely noticed in his own lifetime. No contemporary reviewed
any of his works in Illuminated Printing, but his designs for Blair’s
The Grave and his Descriptive Catalogue of his exhibition were reviewed
savagely and at length in The Antijacobin Review (1808) and The Examiner
(1808, 1809)—in the latter publication he was called “an unfortunate
lunatic.” After a flurry of obituaries in 1827 and brief lives of him in
books by John Thomas Smith (1828) and Allan Cunningham (1830), the first
important book on Blake was Alexander Gilchrist’s two-volume Life of
William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863). Volume 1 was the biography,
concentrating on Blake as an unknown artist, and volume 2 printed many
of Blake’s poems and designs, most of them for the first time in
conventional typography. Gilchrist’s work was completed after his death
in 1861 by a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites, chiefly the artist-poet Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and his brother, William Michael Rossetti. The poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne was so carried away by Blake that he
published an exclamatory and influential study William Blake: A Critical
Essay (1868). Gilchrist’s book opened the floodgates of criticism, and
since 1863 Blake has been considered a major figure in English poetry
and art.
In the 1890s Blake was taken up by William Butler Yeats and Edwin
John Ellis. They collaborated on a massive three-volume, extensively
illustrated edition of Blake (1893), which introduced much of Blake’s
prophetic poetry to the public for the first time—in texts that are
often seriously corrupt: words misread, parts omitted, and “facts”
invented. Their work was continued with other editions by Ellis and by
Yeats and with a biography by Ellis called The Real Blake (1907), in
which he claimed, with no shadow of justification, that Blake’s father
was a renegade Irishman named John O’Neil, a fiction with which Yeats
agreed..
Among the most influential works on Blake have been an essay by poet
T.S. Eliot (1920) and the books of Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry: A
Study of William Blake, 1947), David V. Erdman (Blake: Prophet Against
Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, 1954),
and Joseph Viscomi (Blake and the Idea of the Book, 1993). Blake’s
appeal is now worldwide, and it is not just his poetry that has
attracted international attention. There have been major exhibitions of
Blake’s art in London (1927); Philadelphia (1939); London, Paris,
Antwerp (Belg.), and Zürich (1947); Hamburg (1975); London (1978); New
Haven (Conn., U.S.) and Toronto (1982–83); Tokyo (1990); Barcelona and
Madrid (1996); and London and New York City (2000–01). Blake has come to
be regarded as a major poet, as one of the most fascinating British
artists, as an original thinker, and as a conundrum of endless
fascination.
Blake’s influence has been traced in the works of authors as diverse
as Yeats, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Welsh
poet Dylan Thomas, and American writer and monk Thomas Merton. His ideas
have been included in detective stories and in formidable novels such as
The Horse’s Mouth (1944) by English author Joyce Cary and Rouse Up O
Young Men of the New Age! (2002; originally published in Japanese, 1983)
by the Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe. Blake, who set his own
poems to music and died singing them, has had an impact on the world of
music as well. His works have been set as operas, and he has served as
inspiration for an enormous number of musical composers, including
Hubert Parry and pop musicians.
Each copy of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing differs in
important ways from all others, and a clear idea of the power and
delicacy of his books and drawings can be obtained only by seeing the
originals. The most extensive collection of Blake’s drawings and
temperas is in the Tate Britain (London); important collections of his
books are held by the British Museum Print Room (London), the
Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, Eng.), Harvard University libraries
(Cambridge, Mass., U.S.), the Huntington Library (San Marino, Calif.,
U.S.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Morgan Library
and Museum (New York City), the Yale University Library (New Haven), and
the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven).
G.E. Bentley
|
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the
French Revolution.
Wordsworth, who lived in France in
1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was
distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war
on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of
his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to
develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his
twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the
unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first
factor emerges in his early manuscript poems The Ruined
Cottage and The Pedlar (both to form part of the later
Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and
his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, with whom he was living in the west of
England, were in close contact with
Coleridge. Stirred
simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested
everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published
1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative
genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads
(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, continued with poems displaying delight in
the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary
people, and concluded with the meditative Lines Written a
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth’s attempt to set
out his mature faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and
the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem
addressed to
Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99
in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised
continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he
traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered
alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime
surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant
English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as
a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of
the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood. In poems such as Michael and The Brothers, by
contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads
(1800),
Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of
ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic development during these years
paralleled
Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together
images of nature and the mind in The Eolian Harp (1796), he
devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of
political and social prophecy, such as Religious Musings and
The Destiny of Nations. Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with
his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth,
he turned back to the relationship between nature and the
human mind. Poems such as This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,
The Nightingale, and Frost at Midnight (now sometimes called
the “conversation poems” but collected by
Coleridge himself
as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive
descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological
comment. Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem
that
Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,”
represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also
exploited in the supernaturalism of The Ancient Mariner and
the unfinished Christabel. After his visit to Germany in
1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the
subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this
attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary
criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his
poetic output became sporadic. Dejection: An Ode (1802),
another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse
letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law,
memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of
Imagination.”
The work of both poets was directed back to national
affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802
Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic
cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a
captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that,
while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had
been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the
theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His
political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain,
Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra
(1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend
(1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among
statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of
Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as
the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse,
“a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and
Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The
Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of
moral and religious consolation for those who had been
disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both
Wordsworth and
Coleridge benefited from the advent
in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in
the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on
Shakespeare became
fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his
volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains
of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817),
an account of his own development, combined philosophy and
literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and
important contribution to literary theory.
Coleridge settled
at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most
impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist
William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a
considerable impact on Victorian readers.
William Wordsworth
"The Prelude"
English author
born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, Eng.
died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland
Main
English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the
second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. He lost
his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13, upon which the
orphan boys were sent off by guardian uncles to a grammar school at
Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the Lake District. At Hawkshead
Wordsworth received an excellent education in classics, literature, and
mathematics, but the chief advantage to him there was the chance to
indulge in the boyhood pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors.
The natural scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as
nurture, as Wordsworth would later testify in the line “I grew up
fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” but its generally benign aspect
gave the growing boy the confidence he articulated in one of his first
important poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey . . .
,” namely, “that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John’s College, Cambridge.
Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way
through the university, persuaded that he “was not for that hour, nor
for that place.” The most important thing he did in his college years
was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through
revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the passionate
enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille, and became an ardent
republican sympathizer. Upon taking his Cambridge degree—an
undistinguished “pass”—he returned in 1791 to France, where he formed a
passionate attachment to a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon. But before their
child was born in December 1792, Wordsworth had to return to England and
was cut off there by the outbreak of war between England and France. He
was not to see his daughter Caroline until she was nine.
The three or four years that followed his return to England were the
darkest of Wordsworth’s life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless,
virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own country’s opposition to
the French, he lived in London in the company of radicals like William
Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned
mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England’s wars who
began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time.
This dark period ended in 1795, when a friend’s legacy made possible
Wordsworth’s reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy—the two were never
again to live apart—and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near
Bristol. There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and they formed a partnership that would change both
poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.
Their partnership, rooted in one marvelous year (1797–98) in which
they “together wantoned in wild Poesy,” had two consequences for
Wordsworth. First it turned him away from the long poems on which he had
laboured since his Cambridge days. These included poems of social
protest like Salisbury Plain, loco-descriptive poems such as An Evening
Walk and Descriptive Sketches (published in 1793), and The Borderers, a
blank-verse tragedy exploring the psychology of guilt (and not published
until 1842). Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of
nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797–98 to compose the short
lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by many
readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were
tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of “Nature’s holy
plan,” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to
illustrate basic truths of human nature.
Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original program
formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and aimed at breaking
the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems appeared in 1798 in a
slim, anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, which opened
with Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed
with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” All but three of the intervening
poems were Wordsworth’s, and, as he declared in a preface to a second
edition two years later, their object was “to choose incidents and
situations from common life and to relate or describe them . . . in a
selection of language really used by men, . . . tracing in them . . .
the primary laws of our nature.” Most of the poems were dramatic in
form, designed to reveal the character of the speaker. The manifesto and
the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style, a new vocabulary, and
new subjects for poetry, all of them foreshadowing 20th-century
developments.
The second consequence of Wordsworth’s partnership with Coleridge was
the framing of a vastly ambitious poetic design that teased and haunted
him for the rest of his life. Coleridge had projected an enormous poem
to be called “The Brook,” in which he proposed to treat all science,
philosophy, and religion, but he soon laid the burden of writing this
poem upon Wordsworth himself. As early as 1798 Wordsworth began to talk
in grand terms of this poem, to be entitled The Recluse. To nerve
himself up to this enterprise and to test his powers, Wordsworth began
writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently
for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under
the title The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind. The Prelude extends
the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that Wordsworth had
begun in “Tintern Abbey” and traces the poet’s life from his school days
through his university life and his visits to France, up to the year
(1799) in which he settled at Grasmere. It thus describes a circular
journey—what has been called a long journey home. But the main events in
the autobiography are internal: the poem exultantly describes the ways
in which the imagination emerges as the dominant faculty, exerting its
control over the reason and the world of the senses alike.
The Recluse itself was never completed, and only one of its three
projected parts was actually written; this was published in 1814 as The
Excursion and consisted of nine long philosophical monologues spoken by
pastoral characters. The first monologue (Book I) contained a version of
one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, “The Ruined Cottage,” composed in
superb blank verse in 1797. This bleak narrative records the slow,
pitiful decline of a woman whose husband had gone off to the army and
never returned. For later versions of this poem Wordsworth added a
reconciling conclusion, but the earliest and most powerful version was
starkly tragic.
In the company of Dorothy, Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798–99 in
Germany, where, in the remote town of Goslar, in Saxony, he experienced
the most intense isolation he had ever known. As a consequence, however,
he wrote some of his most moving poetry, including the “Lucy” and
“Matthew” elegies and early drafts toward The Prelude. Upon his return
to England, Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second
edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), notably two tragic pastorals of
country life, “The Brothers” and “Michael.” These poems, together with
the brilliant lyrics that were assembled in Wordsworth’s second verse
collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), help to make up what is now
recognized as his great decade, stretching from his meeting with
Coleridge in 1797 until 1808.
One portion of a second part of The Recluse was finished in 1806,
but, like The Prelude, was left in manuscript at the poet’s death. This
portion, Home at Grasmere, joyously celebrated Wordsworth’s taking
possession (in December 1799) of Dove Cottage, at Grasmere, Westmorland,
where he was to reside for eight of his most productive years. In 1802,
during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, Wordsworth returned briefly to
France, where at Calais he met his daughter and made his peace with
Annette. He then returned to England to marry Mary Hutchinson, a
childhood friend, and start an English family, which had grown to three
sons and two daughters by 1810.
In 1805 the drowning of Wordsworth’s favorite brother, John, the
captain of a sailing vessel, gave Wordsworth the strongest shock he had
ever experienced. “A deep distress hath humanized my Soul,” he lamented
in his “Elegiac Stanzas” on Peele Castle. Henceforth he would produce a
different kind of poetry, defined by a new sobriety, a new restraint,
and a lofty, almost Miltonic elevation of tone and diction. Wordsworth
appeared to anticipate this turn in “Tintern Abbey,” where he had
learned to hear “the still, sad music of humanity,” and again in the
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (written in 1802–04; published in
Poems, in Two Volumes). The theme of this ode is the loss of his power
to see the things he had once seen, the radiance, the “celestial light”
that seemed to lie over the landscapes of his youth like “the glory and
freshness of a dream.” Now, in the Peele Castle stanzas, he sorrowfully
looked back on the light as illusory, as a “Poet’s dream,” as “the light
that never was, on sea or land.”
These metaphors point up the differences between the early and the
late Wordsworth. It is generally accepted that the quality of his verse
fell off as he grew more distant from the sources of his inspiration and
as his Anglican and Tory sentiments hardened into orthodoxy. Today many
readers discern two Wordsworths, the young Romantic revolutionary and
the aging Tory humanist, risen into what John Keats called the
“Egotistical Sublime.” Little of Wordsworth’s later verse matches the
best of his earlier years.
In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative
energy in odes, the best known of which is “On the Power of Sound.” He
also produced a large number of sonnets, most of them strung together in
sequences. The most admired are the Duddon sonnets (1820), which trace
the progress of a stream through Lake District landscapes and blend
nature poetry with philosophic reflection in a manner now recognized as
the best of the later Wordsworth. Other sonnet sequences record his
tours through the European continent, and the three series of
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) develop meditations, many sharply
satirical, on church history. But the most memorable poems of
Wordsworth’s middle and late years were often cast in elegiac mode. They
range from the poet’s heartfelt laments for two of his children who died
in 1812—laments incorporated in The Excursion—to brilliant lyrical
effusions on the deaths of his fellow poets James Hogg, George Crabbe,
Coleridge, and Charles Lamb.
In 1808 Wordsworth and his family moved from Dove Cottage to larger
quarters in Grasmere, and five years later they settled at Rydal Mount,
near Ambleside, where Wordsworth spent the remainder of his life. In
1813 he accepted the post of distributor of stamps for the county of
Westmorland, an appointment that carried the salary of £400 a year.
Wordsworth continued to hold back from publication The Prelude, Home at
Grasmere, The Borderers, and Salisbury Plain. He did publish Poems, in
Two Volumes in 1807; The Excursion in 1814, containing the only finished
portions of The Recluse; and the collected Poems of 1815, which
contained most of his shorter poems and two important critical essays as
well. Wordsworth’s other works published during middle age include The
White Doe of Rylstone (1815), a poem about the pathetic shattering of a
Roman Catholic family during an unsuccessful rebellion against Elizabeth
I in 1569; a Thanksgiving Ode (1816); and Peter Bell (1819), a poem
written in 1798 and then modulated in successive rewritings into an
experiment in Romantic irony and the mock-heroic and coloured by the
poet’s feelings of affinity with his hero, a “wild and woodland rover.”
The Waggoner (1819) is another extended ballad about a North Country
itinerant.
Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and
tireless critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers; no great poet has
ever had to endure worse. But finally, with the publication of The River
Duddon in 1820, the tide began to turn, and by the mid-1830s his
reputation had been established with both critics and the reading
public.
Wordsworth’s last years were given over partly to “tinkering” his
poems, as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of
revising his earlier poems through edition after edition. The Prelude,
for instance, went through four distinct manuscript versions (1798–99,
1805–06, 1818–20, and 1832–39) and was published only after the poet’s
death in 1850. Most readers find the earliest versions of The Prelude
and other heavily revised poems to be the best, but flashes of
brilliance can appear in revisions added when the poet was in his
seventies.
Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britain’s poet
laureate in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850.
Thereafter his influence was felt throughout the rest of the 19th
century, though he was honoured more for his smaller poems, as singled
out by the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold, than for his masterpiece,
The Prelude. In the 20th century his reputation was strengthened both by
recognition of his importance in the Romantic movement and by an
appreciation of the darker elements in his personality and verse.
William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English Romantic
revolution in poetry. His contribution to it was threefold. First, he
formulated in his poems and his essays a new attitude toward nature.
This was more than a matter of introducing nature imagery into his
verse; it amounted to a fresh view of the organic relation between man
and the natural world, and it culminated in metaphors of a wedding
between nature and the human mind, and beyond that, in the sweeping
metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God, a mind that “feeds
upon infinity” and “broods over the dark abyss.” Second, Wordsworth
probed deeply into his own sensibility as he traced, in his finest poem,
The Prelude, the “growth of a poet’s mind.” The Prelude was in fact the
first long autobiographical poem. Writing it in a drawn-out process of
self-exploration, Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern
psychological understanding of his own nature, and thus more broadly of
human nature. Third, Wordsworth placed poetry at the centre of human
experience; in impassioned rhetoric he pronounced poetry to be nothing
less than “the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the
heart of man,” and he then went on to create some of the greatest
English poetry of his century. It is probably safe to say that by the
late 20th century he stood in critical estimation where Coleridge and
Arnold had originally placed him, next to John Milton—who stands, of
course, next to William Shakespeare.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner"
PART I,
PART
II-IV,
PART
V-VI,
PART
VII
Illustrations by Gustave
Dore
born Oct. 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary,
Devonshire, Eng.
died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London
English lyrical poet, critic, and
philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with
William Wordsworth, heralded the English
Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria
(1817) is the most significant work of general
literary criticism produced in the English
Romantic period.
Early life and works
Coleridge’s father was vicar of Ottery and
headmaster of the local grammar school. As a
child Coleridge was already a prodigious reader,
and he immersed himself to the point of morbid
fascination in romances and Eastern tales such
as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. In 1781
his father died suddenly, and in the following
year Coleridge entered Christ’s Hospital in
London, where he completed his secondary
education. In 1791 he entered Jesus College,
Cambridge. At both school and university he
continued to read voraciously, particularly in
works of imagination and visionary philosophy,
and he was remembered by his schoolmates for his
eloquence and prodigious memory. In his third
year at Cambridge, oppressed by financial
difficulties, he went to London and enlisted as
a dragoon under the assumed name of Silas Tomkyn
Comberbache. Despite his unfitness for the life,
he remained until discovered by his friends; he
was then bought out by his brothers and restored
to Cambridge.
On his return, he was restless. The
intellectual and political turmoil surrounding
the French Revolution had set in motion intense
and urgent discussion concerning the nature of
society. Coleridge now conceived the design of
circumventing the disastrous violence that had
destroyed the idealism of the French Revolution
by establishing a small society that should
organize itself and educate its children
according to better principles than those
obtaining in the society around them. A chance
meeting with the poet Robert Southey led the two
men to plan such a “pantisocracy” and to set up
a community by the Susquehanna River in
Pennsylvania. To this end Coleridge left
Cambridge for good and set up with Southey as a
public lecturer in Bristol. In October 1795 he
married Sara Fricker, daughter of a local
schoolmistress, swayed partly by Southey’s
suggestion that he was under an obligation to
her since she had been refusing the advances of
other men.
Shortly afterward, Southey defected from the
pantisocratic scheme, leaving Coleridge married
to a woman whom he did not really love. In a
sense his career never fully recovered from this
blow: if there is a makeshift quality about many
of its later events, one explanation can be
found in his constant need to reconcile his
intellectual aspirations with the financial
needs of his family. During this period,
however, Coleridge’s intellect flowered in an
extraordinary manner, as he embarked on an
investigation of the nature of the human mind,
joined by William Wordsworth, with whom he had
become acquainted in 1795. Together they entered
upon one of the most influential creative
periods of English literature. Coleridge’s
intellectual ebullience and his belief in the
existence of a powerful “life consciousness” in
all individuals rescued Wordsworth from the
depression into which recent events had cast him
and made possible the new approach to nature
that characterized his contributions to Lyrical
Ballads (which was to be published in 1798).
Coleridge, meanwhile, was developing a new,
informal mode of poetry in which he could use a
conversational tone and rhythm to give unity to
a poem. Of these poems, the most successful is
“Frost at Midnight,” which begins with the
description of a silent frosty night in Somerset
and proceeds through a meditation on the
relationship between the quiet work of frost and
the quiet breathing of the sleeping baby at the
poet’s side, to conclude in a resolve that his
child shall be brought up as a “child of
nature,” so that the sympathies that the poet
has come to detect may be reinforced throughout
the child’s education.
At the climax of the poem, he touches another
theme, which lies at the root of his
philosophical attitude:
. . . so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Coleridge’s attempts to learn this “language”
and trace it through the ancient traditions of
mankind also led him during this period to
return to the visionary interests of his
schooldays: as he ransacked works of comparative
religion and mythology, he was exploring the
possibility that all religions and mythical
traditions, with their general agreement on the
unity of God and the immortality of the soul,
sprang from a universal life consciousness,
which was expressed particularly through the
phenomena of human genius.
While these speculations were at their most
intense, he retired to a lonely farmhouse near
Culbone, Somersetshire, and, according to his
own account, composed under the influence of
laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as
“Kubla Khan.” The exotic imagery and rhythmic
chant of this poem have led many critics to
conclude that it should be read as a
“meaningless reverie” and enjoyed merely for its
vivid and sensuous qualities. An examination of
the poem in the light of Coleridge’s
psychological and mythological interests,
however, suggests that it has, after all, a
complex structure of meaning and is basically a
poem about the nature of human genius. The first
two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge
elsewhere calls “commanding genius”: its
creative aspirations in time of peace as
symbolized in the projected pleasure dome and
gardens of the first stanza; and its destructive
power in time of turbulence as symbolized in the
wailing woman, the destructive fountain, and the
voices prophesying war of the second stanza. In
the final stanza the poet writes of a state of
“absolute genius” in which, if inspired by a
visionary “Abyssinian maid,” he would become
endowed with the creative, divine power of a sun
god—an Apollo or Osiris subduing all around him
to harmony by the fascination of his spell.
Coleridge was enabled to explore the same
range of themes less egotistically in “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner,” composed during the
autumn and winter of 1797–98. For this, his most
famous poem, he drew upon the ballad form. The
main narrative tells how a sailor who has
committed a crime against the life principle by
slaying an albatross suffers from torments,
physical and mental, in which the nature of his
crime is made known to him. The underlying life
power against which he has transgressed is
envisaged as a power corresponding to the influx
of the sun’s energy into all living creatures,
thereby binding them together in a joyful
communion. By killing the bird that hovered near
the ship, the mariner has destroyed one of the
links in this process. His own consciousness is
consequently affected: the sun, previously
glorious, is seen as a bloody sun, and the
energies of the deep are seen as corrupt.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
The very deep did rot; O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Only at night do these energies display a
sinister beauty.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
After the death of his shipmates, alone and
becalmed, devoid of a sense of movement or even
of time passing, the mariner is in a hell
created by the absence of any link with life.
Eventually, however, a chance sight of water
snakes flashing like golden fire in the
darkness, answered by an outpouring of love from
his heart, reinitiates the creative process: he
is given a brief vision of the inner unity of
the universe, in which all living things hymn
their source in an interchange of harmonies.
Restored to his native land, he remains haunted
by what he has experienced but is at least
delivered from nightmare, able to see the
ordinary processes of human life with a new
sense of their wonder and mercifulness. These
last qualities are reflected in the poem’s
attractive combination of vividness and
sensitivity. The placing of it at the beginning
of Lyrical Ballads was evidently intended to
provide a context for the sense of wonder in
common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s
contributions. While this volume was going
through the press, Coleridge began a
complementary poem, a Gothic ballad entitled “Christabel,”
in which he aimed to show how naked energy might
be redeemed through contact with a spirit of
innocent love.
Troubled years
Early in 1798 Coleridge had again found
himself preoccupied with political issues. The
French Revolutionary government had suppressed
the states of the Swiss Confederation, and
Coleridge expressed his bitterness at this
betrayal of the principles of the Revolution in
a poem entitled “France: An Ode.”
At this time the brothers Josiah and Thomas
Wedgwood, who were impressed by Coleridge’s
intelligence and promise, offered him in 1798 an
annuity of £150 as a means of subsistence while
he pursued his intellectual concerns. He used
his new independence to visit Germany with
Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy.
While there Coleridge attended lectures on
physiology and biblical criticism at Göttingen.
He thus became aware of developments in German
scholarship that were little-known in England
until many years later.
On his return to England, the tensions of his
marriage were exacerbated when he fell in love
with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s
future wife, at the end of 1799. His devotion to
the Wordsworths in general did little to help
matters, and for some years afterward Coleridge
was troubled by domestic strife, accompanied by
the worsening of his health and by his
increasing dependence on opium. His main
literary achievements during the period included
another section of “Christabel.” In 1802
Coleridge’s domestic unhappiness gave rise to
“Dejection: An Ode,” originally a longer verse
letter sent to Sara Hutchinson in which he
lamented the corrosive effect of his
intellectual activities when undertaken as a
refuge from the lovelessness of his family life.
The poem employs the technique of his
conversational poems; the sensitive rhythms and
phrasing that he had learned to use in them are
here masterfully deployed to represent his own
depressed state of mind.
Although Coleridge hoped to combine a
platonic love for Sara with fidelity to his wife
and children and to draw sustenance from the
Wordsworth household, his hopes were not
realized, and his health deteriorated further.
He therefore resolved to spend some time in a
warmer climate and, late in 1804, accepted a
post in Malta as secretary to the acting
governor. Later he spent a long time journeying
across Italy, but, despite his hopes, his health
did not improve during his time abroad. The time
spent in Malta had been a time of personal
reappraisal, however. Brought into direct
contact with men accustomed to handling affairs
of state, he had found himself lacking an equal
forcefulness and felt that in consequence he
often forfeited the respect of others. On his
return to England he resolved to become more
manly and decisive. Within a few months he had
finally decided to separate from his wife and to
live for the time being with the Wordsworths.
Southey atoned for his disastrous youthful
advice by exercising a general oversight of
Coleridge’s family for the rest of his days.
Coleridge published a periodical, The Friend,
from June 1809 to March 1810 and ceased only
when Sara Hutchinson, who had been acting as
amanuensis, found the strain of the relationship
too much for her and retired to her brother’s
farm in Wales. Coleridge, resentful that
Wordsworth should apparently have encouraged his
sister-in-law’s withdrawal, resolved shortly
afterward to terminate his working relationship
with William and Dorothy Wordsworth and to
settle in London again.
The period immediately following was the
darkest of his life. His disappointment with
Wordsworth was followed by anguish when a
wounding remark of Wordsworth’s was carelessly
reported to him. For some time he remained in
London, nursing his grievances and producing
little. Opium retained its powerful hold on him,
and the writings that survive from this period
are redolent of unhappiness, with
self-dramatization veering toward self-pity.
In spite of this, however, there also appear
signs of a slow revival, principally because for
the first time Coleridge knew what it was to be
a fashionable figure. A course of lectures he
delivered during the winter of 1811–12 attracted
a large audience; for many years Coleridge had
been fascinated by William Shakespeare’s
achievement, and his psychological
interpretations of the chief characters were new
and exciting to his contemporaries. During this
period, Coleridge’s play Osorio, written many
years before, was produced at Drury Lane with
the title Remorse in January 1813.
Late life and works
In the end, consolation came from an
unexpected source. In dejection, unable to
produce extended work or break the opium habit,
he spent a long period with friends in
Wiltshire, where he was introduced to Archbishop
Robert Leighton’s commentary on the First Letter
of Peter. In the writings of this 17th-century
divine, he found a combination of tenderness and
sanctity that appealed deeply to him and seemed
to offer an attitude to life that he himself
could fall back on. The discovery marks an
important shift of balance in his intellectual
attitudes. Christianity, hitherto one point of
reference for him, now became his “official”
creed. By aligning himself with the Anglican
church of the 17th century at its best, he hoped
to find a firm point of reference that would
both keep him in communication with orthodox
Christians of his time (thus giving him the
social approval he always needed, even if only
from a small group of friends) and enable him to
pursue his former intellectual explorations in
the hope of reaching a Christian synthesis that
might help to revitalize the English church both
intellectually and emotionally.
One effect of the adoption of this basis for
his intellectual and emotional life was a sense
of liberation and an ability to produce large
works again. He drew together a collection of
his poems (published in 1817 as Sibylline
Leaves) and wrote Biographia Literaria (1817), a
rambling and discursive but highly stimulating
and influential work in which he outlined the
evolution of his thought and developed an
extended critique of Wordsworth’s poems.
For the general reader Biographia Literaria
is a misleading volume, since it moves
bewilderingly between autobiography, abstruse
philosophical discussion, and literary
criticism. It has, however, an internal
coherence of its own. The book’s individual
components—first an entertaining account of
Coleridge’s early life, then an account of the
ways in which he became dissatisfied with the
associationist theories of David Hartley and
other 18th-century philosophers, then a reasoned
critique of Wordsworth’s poems—are fascinating.
Over the whole work hovers Coleridge’s
veneration for the power of imagination: once
this key is grasped, the unity of the work
becomes evident.
A new dramatic piece, Zapolya, was also
published in 1817. In the same year, Coleridge
became associated for a time with the new
Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, for which he
planned a novel system of organization, outlined
in his Prospectus. These were more settled years
for Coleridge. Since 1816 he had lived in the
house of James Gillman, a surgeon at Highgate,
north of London. His election as a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 1824 brought him
an annuity of £105 and a sense of recognition.
In 1830 he joined the controversy that had
arisen around the issue of Catholic Emancipation
by writing his last prose work, On the
Constitution of the Church and State. The third
edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works appeared
in time for him to see it before his final
illness and death in 1834.
Evaluation
Coleridge’s achievement has been given more
widely varying assessments than that of any
other English literary artist, though there is
broad agreement that his enormous potential was
never fully realized in his works. His stature
as a poet has never been in doubt; in “Kubla
Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” he
wrote two of the greatest poems in English
literature and perfected a mode of sensuous
lyricism that is often echoed by later poets.
But he also has a reputation as one of the most
important of all English literary critics,
largely on the basis of his Biographia Literaria.
In Coleridge’s view, the essential element of
literature was a union of emotion and thought
that he described as imagination. He especially
stressed poetry’s capacity for integrating the
universal and the particular, the objective and
the subjective, the generic and the individual.
The function of criticism for Coleridge was to
discern these elements and to lift them into
conscious awareness, rather than merely to
prescribe or to describe rules or forms.
In all his roles, as poet, social critic,
literary critic, theologian, and psychologist,
Coleridge expressed a profound concern with
elucidating an underlying creative principle
that is fundamental to both human beings and the
universe as a whole. To Coleridge, imagination
is the archetype of this unifying force because
it represents the means by which the twin human
capacities for intuitive, non-rational
understanding and for organizing and
discriminating thought concerning the material
world are reconciled. It was by means of this
sort of reconciliation of opposites that
Coleridge attempted, with considerable success,
to combine a sense of the universal and ideal
with an acute observation of the particular and
sensory in his own poetry and in his criticism.
Thomas De Quincey’s biography on Samuel
Taylor Coleridge appeared in the eighth edition
of the Encyclopædia Britannica (see the
Britannica Classic: Samuel Taylor Coleridge).
John Bernard Beer
Ed.
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Dorothy Wordsworth
born Dec. 25, 1771, Cockermouth, Cumberland,
Eng.
died Jan. 25, 1855, Rydal Mount, Westmorland
English prose writer whose Alfoxden Journal
1798 and Grasmere Journals 1800–03 are read
today for the imaginative power of their
description of nature and for the light they
throw on her brother, the Romantic poet William
Wordsworth.
Their mother’s death in 1778 separated Dorothy
from her brothers, and from 1783 they were
without a family home. The sympathy between
William and Dorothy was strong; she understood
him as no one else could and provided the
“quickening influence” he needed. When in 1795
he was lent a house in Dorset, she made a home
for him there. At Alfoxden, Somerset, in
1796–98, she enjoyed with Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge a companionship of “three
persons with one soul.” She went with them to
Germany (1798–99), and in December 1799 she and
William settled for the first time in a home of
their own, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in the Lake
District, remaining there after his marriage
(1802) and moving with the family to Rydal Mount
in 1813. In 1829 she was dangerously ill and
thenceforth was obliged to lead the life of an
invalid. Her ill health affected her intellect,
and during the last 20 years of her life her
mind was clouded.
The Alfoxden Journal (of which only the
period from January to April 1798 survives) is a
record of William’s friendship with Coleridge
that resulted in their Lyrical Ballads (1798),
with which the Romantic movement began. The
Grasmere Journals contains material on which
William drew for his poetry (notably her
description of daffodils in April 1802, which
inspired his I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud). Her
other surviving journals include accounts of her
trip to Germany in 1798–99 as well as visits to
Scotland (1803) and Switzerland (1820). None of
her writings was published in her lifetime.
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Other poets of the early Romantic period
In his own lifetime,
Blake’s poetry was scarcely known.
Sir
Walter Scott, by contrast, was thought of as a major poet
for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of
the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse
writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets
(1784) of
Charlotte Smith and the
Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by
Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his
patriotic lyrics such as Ye Mariners of England and The
Battle of Hohenlinden (1807) and for the critical preface to
his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was
known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after
his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel
Rogers), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry.
Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore, whose
Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly coloured
narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his
satirical poetry were also immensely popular.
Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this
period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795),
Mary Robinson’s Sappho
and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain
notable work.
Robert Southey was closely associated with
Wordsworth and
Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with
them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His originality is
best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,”
three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of
his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse
sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any
poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810)
were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on
his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the
Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the
children’s tale The Three Bears.
George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his
sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic
couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs
from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter,
concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the
life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows
considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse
tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques)
and great powers of description. His antipastoral The
Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned
to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough
(1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819),
which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.
William Lisle Bowles
born , September 24, 1762, Kings
Sutton, Northamptonshire, England
died April 7, 1850, Salisbury, Wiltshire
English poet, critic, and clergyman, noted
principally for his Fourteen Sonnets (1789),
which expresses with simple sincerity the
thoughts and feelings inspired in a mind of
delicate sensibility by the contemplation of
natural scenes.
Bowles was educated at Trinity College, Oxford,
where he was a pupil of Thomas Warton, and
became an Anglican priest in 1792. His Fourteen
Sonnets was enthusiastically received by the
early Romantic poets, whose theory and practice
it foreshadowed, and the work particularly
influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By 1794 the
collection had been enlarged to 27 sonnets and
13 other poems. Bowles also published verse on
political and religious topics: The Missionary
(1813) is an attack on Spanish rule in South
America. Days Departed; or, Banwell Hill (1828)
is an eloquently reflective prospect poem (a
subgenre of topographical poetry that considers
a particular landscape as viewed from an
elevated perspective).
As a critic, Bowles is remembered for his
assertion that natural objects and basic
passions are intrinsically more poetic than are
artificial products or mannered feelings. This
attitude may have influenced Bowles’s annotated
1806 edition of the works of Alexander Pope, in
which, under a mask of judicial impartiality,
Bowles attacked the great poet’s moral character
and poetic principles. So began the pamphlet war
known as the “Pope-Bowles controversy,” in which
Pope’s chief defenders were Thomas Campbell and
Lord Byron; Byron’s characterization of Bowles
as “the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers”
is perhaps the only memorable remnant of this
seven-year-long (1819–26) public argument.
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Thomas Campbell
born July 27, 1777, Glasgow, Scot.
died June 15, 1844, Boulogne, France
Scottish poet, remembered chiefly for his
sentimental and martial lyrics; he was also one
of the initiators of a plan to found what became
the University of London.
Campbell went to Mull, an island of the Inner
Hebrides, as a tutor in 1795 and two years later
settled in Edinburgh to study law. In 1799 he
wrote The Pleasures of Hope, a traditional
18th-century survey in heroic couplets of human
affairs. It went through four editions within a
year.
He also produced several stirring patriotic
war songs—“Ye Mariners of England,” “The
Soldier’s Dream,” “Hohenlinden,” and, in 1801,
“The Battle of the Baltic.” With others he
launched a movement in 1825 to found the
University of London, for students excluded from
Oxford or Cambridge by religious tests or lack
of funds.
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Samuel Rogers
born July 30, 1763, Stoke Newington,
near London
died Dec. 18, 1855, London
English poet, best remembered as a witty
conversationalist and as a friend of greater
poets.
Rogers attained eminence with the publication of
his popular discursive poem The Pleasures of
Memory (1792). On his father’s death (1793) he
inherited a banking firm, and for the next half
century he maintained an influential position as
a leading figure in London society and as a
generous host to brilliant company. His
acquisition of paintings and objets d’art made
his home a centre for anyone ambitious to be
thought a man of taste. The amusing, though
often unkind, conversations held at his
breakfast and dinner parties were recorded by
Alexander Dyce and published as Recollections of
the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856; edited by
Morchard Bishop, 1952). In spite of his sharp
tongue, he performed many kind offices for his
friends. He aided Richard Sheridan in his dying
days and helped to secure a pension for Henry
Cary, translator of Dante. He secured a position
for William Wordsworth as distributor of stamps
for Westmorland. He also continued to write
poetry, including an epic, The Voyage of
Columbus (1810); a collection of verse tales,
Italy (1822–28); and a miscellaneous collection
titled Poems (1834). In his own lifetime, his
poetry was widely admired. On Wordsworth’s
death, in 1850, Rogers was offered the
laureateship, which he refused.
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Thomas Moore
born May 28, 1779, Dublin, Ire.
died Feb. 25, 1852, Wiltshire, Eng.
Irish poet, satirist, composer, and political
propagandist. He was a close friend of Lord
Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The son of a Roman Catholic wine merchant,
Moore graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in
1799 and then studied law in London. His major
poetic work, Irish Melodies (1807–34), earned
him an income of £500 annually for a quarter of
a century. It contained such titles as The Last
Rose of Summer and Oft in the Stilly Night. The
Melodies, a group of 130 poems set to the music
of Moore and of Sir John Stevenson and performed
for London’s aristocracy, aroused sympathy and
support for the Irish nationalists, among whom
Moore was a popular hero.
Lalla Rookh (1817), a narrative poem set (on
Byron’s advice) in an atmosphere of Oriental
splendour, gave Moore a reputation among his
contemporaries rivaling that of Byron and Sir
Walter Scott. It was perhaps the most translated
poem of its time, and it earned what was till
then the highest price paid by an English
publisher for a poem (£3,000). Moore’s many
satirical works, such as The Fudge Family in
Paris (1818), portray the politics and manners
of the Regency period.
In 1824 Moore became a participant in one of
the most celebrated episodes of the Romantic
period. He was the recipient of Byron’s memoirs,
but he and the publisher John Murray burned
them, presumably to protect Byron. Moore later
brought out the Letters and Journals of Lord
Byron (1830), in which he included a life of the
poet. Moore’s lifelong espousal of the Catholic
cause led him to produce such brilliant works as
his parody of agrarian insurgency, The Memoirs
of Captain Rock (1824), and his courageous
biography of the revolutionary leader of the
1798 rebellion, The Life and Death of Lord
Edward Fitzgerald (1831).
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Helen Maria Williams
born 1762, London
died Dec. 15, 1827, Paris
English poet, novelist, and social critic best
known for her support of such radical causes as
abolitionism and the French Revolution.
The daughter of an army officer, she was
privately educated at Berwick-on-Tweed. After
she went to London in 1781 to publish her poem
Edwin and Eltruda, she made a wide literary
acquaintance, which included Dr. Samuel Johnson
and Robert Burns as well as such prominent
radicals as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin.
In the 1780s she achieved some success with her
poetry; her collected poems (1786) had a
subscription of some 1,500 names.
The first important expression of Williams’s
interests in social reform came with her Poem on
the Slave Bill (1788), and her opposition to
slavery was clear in her novel Julia (1790),
which also indicated her support for the French
Revolution. She spent the summer of 1790 in
Revolutionary France, returned again in late
1791, and settled there in late 1792. Her
sympathy for the Revolution is recorded in
volumes of Letters published from 1790 to 1796.
She was particularly attracted to the moderate
Girondins and allowed her Paris salon to serve
as a meeting place for them as well as for
British radicals; among the attendees were the
English-American political pamphleteer Thomas
Paine and the English feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft. Arrested with other British
citizens in October 1793, Williams was soon
released but had to leave Paris the following
year, eventually going to Switzerland in June to
escape Jacobin persecution.
On her travels Williams was accompanied by
another English expatriate, John Hurford Stone.
She wrote about her time in Switzerland in Tour
in Switzerland (1798), which also includes some
of her verse. Her hatred for Robespierre did not
destroy her faith in the original principles of
the Revolution, and after his fall (July 1794)
she returned to Paris.
Williams’s enthusiasm for political change in
France lost her most of her literary friends in
England. Because of her disenchantment with the
Directory, she initially admired Napoleon
Bonaparte, but she later condemned him as a
tyrant and finally welcomed his fall in her
Narrative of the Events (1815). In the meantime
she satirized rank and privilege in Perourou
(1801) and reiterated her republican principles
in an edition of the forged correspondence of
Louis XVI (1803). In 1817 she took out letters
of naturalization in France but spent most of
the remaining decade of her life in Amsterdam.
Her Poems on Various Subjects appeared in 1823.
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Mary Robinson
Portrait of Mary Robinson by Thomas
Gainsborough, 1781
Mary Robinson (née Darby) (27 November 1757 – 26
December 1800) was an English poet and novelist.
During her lifetime she is known as 'the English
Sappho'. She was also known for her role as
Perdita (heroine of Shakespeare's The Winter's
Tale) in 1779 and as the first public mistress
of George IV.
Private life: childhood, marriage, and the
theater
Mary Darby was born in Bristol, England to
John Darby, a sea captain, and Hester Seys.
According to her memoirs, Mary gives her birth
in 1758 but the year 1757 seems more likely
according to recently published research (see
appendix to Byrne, 2005). Her father deserted
her mother when Mary was still a child, and Mrs
Darby supported herself and the five children
born of the marriage by starting a school for
young girls (where Mary taught by her 14th
birthday). However, during one of his brief
returns to the family, Captain Darby had the
school closed (which he was entitled to do by
English law). Mary, who at one point attended a
school run by the social reformer Hannah More,
came to the attention of actor David Garrick.
Mary's mother encouraged her to accept the
proposal of an articled clerk, Thomas Robinson,
who claimed to have an inheritance. After the
early marriage, Mary discovered that Thomas
Robinson did not have an inheritance.
Subsequently, she supported their family. After
her husband squandered their money, the couple
fled to Wales (where Mary's only living daughter
was born in November). The family lived under
house-arrest after Thomas Robinson was
imprisoned for debt. During this time, Mary
Robinson found a patron in Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire who sponsored the publication of
Robinson's first volume of poems, Captivity.
After her husband obtained his release from
prison, Robinson decided to return to the
theater. She launched her acting career and took
to the stage, playing Juliet, at Drury Lane
Theatre in December 1776. Robinson was best
known for her facility with the 'breeches
parts', her performances as Viola in Twelfth
Night and Rosalind in As You Like It won her
extensive praise. But she gained popularity with
playing in Florizel and Perdita, an adaptation
of Shakespeare, with the role of Perdita
(heroine of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale) in
1779. It was during this performance that she
attracted the notice of the young Prince of
Wales, later King George IV of Great Britain and
Ireland, who offered her twenty thousand pounds
to become his mistress. With her new social
prominence, Robinson became a trend-setter in
London, introducing a loose, flowing muslin
style of gown based upon Grecian statuary that
became known as the Perdita. He ended the affair
in 1781, refusing to pay the promised sum. "Perdita"
Robinson was left to support herself through an
annuity promised by the Crown (but rarely paid),
in return for some letters written by the
Prince, and through her writings.
Subsequent career
After seeing her as Perdita, and declaring
himself enraptured with her, the Prince of Wales
offered Mary Robinson twenty thousand pounds to
become his mistress. However, he soon tired of
her and abandoned her after a year, refusing to
pay the money. Her reputation was destroyed by
the affair, and she could no longer find work as
an actress. Eventually, the Crown agreed to pay
Robinson five thousand pounds, in return for the
Prince's love letters to her. Some time later
she was able to negotiate a small annuity (five
hundred pounds) from the Crown, but this was
rarely paid.
Mary Robinson, who now lived separately from
her philandering husband, went on to have
several love affairs, most notably with Banastre
Tarleton, a soldier who had recently
distinguished himself fighting in the American
War of Independence. Their relationship survived
for the next 15 years, through Tarleton's rise
in military rank and his concomitant political
successes, through Mary's own various illnesses,
through financial vicissitudes and the efforts
of Tarleton's own family to end the
relationship. However, in the end, Tarleton
married Susan Bertie, an heiress and an
illegitimate daughter of the young 4th Duke of
Ancaster, and niece of his sisters Lady
Willoughby de Eresby and Lady Cholmondeley.
In 1783, at the age of 26, Robinson suffered
a mysterious illness that left her partially
paralyzed. Biographer Paula Byrne speculates
that a streptococcal infection resulting from a
miscarriage led to a severe rheumatic fever that
left her disabled for the rest of her life. From
the late 1780s, Mary Robinson became
distinguished for her poetry and was called "the
English Sappho." In addition to poems, she wrote
six novels, two plays, a feminist treatise, and
an autobiographical manuscript that was
incomplete at the time of her death. Like her
contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, she championed
the rights of women and was an ardent supporter
of the French Revolution. She died in late 1800
in poverty at the age of 42, having survived
several years of ill health, and was survived by
her daughter, who was also a published novelist.
Literature
After years of scholarly neglect, Robinson's
literary afterlife continues apace. In addition
to regaining cultural notability because of
scholars who study her writing, she again
attained a degree of celebrity in recent years
when several biographies of her appeared,
including one by Paula Byrne that became a
top-ten bestseller after being selected for the
Richard and Judy Book Club.
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Robert Southey
born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol, Gloucestershire,
Eng.
died March 21, 1843, Keswick, Cumberland
English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose
who is chiefly remembered for his association
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the
early Romantic movement.
The son of a linen draper, Southey spent much of
his childhood at Bath in the care of his aunt,
Elizabeth Tyler. Educated at Westminster School
and Balliol College, Oxford, Southey expressed
his ardent sympathy for the French Revolution in
the long poem Joan of Arc (published 1796). He
first met Coleridge, who shared his views, in
1794, and together they wrote a verse drama, The
Fall of Robespierre (1794). After leaving Oxford
without a degree, Southey planned to carry out
Coleridge’s project for a pantisocracy, or
utopian agricultural community, to be located on
the banks of the Susquehanna River, in the
United States. But his interest in pantisocracy
faded, causing a temporary breach with
Coleridge.
In 1795 he secretly married Edith Fricker,
whose sister, Sara, Coleridge was soon to marry.
That same year he went to Portugal with his
uncle, who was the British chaplain in Lisbon.
While in Portugal he wrote the letters published
as Letters Written During a Short Residence in
Spain and Portugal (1797), studied the
literature of those two countries, and learned
to “thank God [he was] an Englishman.” So began
the change from revolutionary to Tory.
In 1797 he began to receive an annuity of
£160 that was paid to him for nine years by an
old Westminster school friend, Charles Wynn, and
in 1797–99 he published a second volume of his
Poems. In these years he composed many of his
best short poems and ballads and became a
regular contributor to newspapers and reviews.
Southey also did translations, edited the works
of Thomas Chatterton, completed the epic Thalaba
the Destroyer (1801), and worked on the epic
poem Madoc (1805).
In 1803 the Southeys visited the Coleridges,
then living at Greta Hall, Keswick. The Southeys
remained at Greta Hall for life, partly so that
Sara and Edith could be together. Southey’s
friendship with Wordsworth, then at nearby
Grasmere, dates from this time. The Southeys had
seven children of their own, and, after
Coleridge left his family for Malta, the whole
household was economically dependent on Southey.
He was forced to produce unremittingly—poetry,
criticism, history, biography, journalism,
translations, and editions of earlier writers.
During 1809–38 he wrote, for the Tory Quarterly
Review, 95 political articles, for each of which
he received £100. Of most interest today are
those articles urging the state provision of
“social services.” He also worked on a projected
history of Portugal that he was destined never
to finish; only his History of Brazil, 3 vol.
(1810–19), was published. His edition (1817) of
Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte
Darthur played an important part in generating
renewed interest in the Middle Ages during the
19th century.
In 1813 Southey was appointed poet laureate
through the influence of Sir Walter Scott. But
the unauthorized publication (1817) of Wat
Tyler, an early verse drama reflecting his
youthful political opinions, enabled his enemies
to remind the public of his youthful
republicanism. About this time he became
involved in a literary imbroglio with Lord
Byron. Byron had already attacked Southey in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and
had dedicated to him (1819) the first cantos of
Don Juan, a satire on hypocrisy. In his
introduction to A Vision of Judgement (1821),
Southey continued the quarrel by denouncing
Byron as belonging to a “Satanic school” of
poetry, and Byron replied by producing a
masterful parody of Southey’s own poem under the
title The Vision of Judgment (1822). The
historian Thomas Macaulay unleashed a similarly
devastating riposte to Southey’s Sir Thomas
More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and
Prospects of Society (1829), a major statement
of 19th-century political medievalism. Southey’s
last years were clouded by his wife’s insanity,
by family quarrels resulting from his second
marriage after her death (1837), and by his own
failing mental and physical health.
Except for a few lyrics, ballads, and
comic-grotesque poems—such as “My days among the
Dead are past,” “After Blenheim,” and “The
Inchcape Rock”—Southey’s poetry is little read
today, though his “English Eclogues” (1799)
anticipate Alfred Tennyson’s “English Idyls” as
lucid, relaxed, and observant verse accounts of
contemporary life. His prose style, however, has
been long regarded as masterly in its ease and
clarity. These qualities are best seen in his
Life of Nelson (1813), still a classic; in the
Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of
Methodism (1820); in the lively Letters from
England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, the
observations of a fictitious Spaniard (1807);
and in the anonymously published The Doctor, 7
vol. (1834–47), a rambling miscellany packed
with comment, quotations, and anecdotes
(including the well-known children’s classic
“The Story of the Three Bears”). His less
successful epic poems are verse romances having
a mythological or legendary subject matter set
in the past and in distant places. In his prose
works and in his voluminous correspondence,
which gives a detailed picture of his literary
surroundings and friends, Southey’s effortless
mastery of prose is clearly evident, a fact
attested to by such eminent contemporaries as
William Hazlitt and Scott and even by such an
enemy as Byron.
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George Crabbe
born Dec. 24, 1754, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Eng.
died Feb. 3, 1832, Trowbridge, Wiltshire
English writer of poems and verse tales
memorable for their realistic details of
everyday life.
Crabbe grew up in the then-impoverished seacoast
village of Aldeburgh, where his father was
collector of salt duties, and he was apprenticed
to a surgeon at 14. Hating his mean surroundings
and unsuccessful occupation, he abandoned both
in 1780 and went to London. In 1781 he wrote a
desperate letter of appeal to Edmund Burke, who
read Crabbe’s writings and persuaded James
Dodsley to publish one of his didactic,
descriptive poems, The Library (1781). Burke
also used his influence to have Crabbe accepted
for ordination, and in 1782 he became chaplain
to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle.
In 1783 Crabbe demonstrated his full powers
as a poet with The Village. Written in part as a
protest against Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted
Village (1770), which Crabbe thought too
sentimental and idyllic, the poem was his
attempt to portray realistically the misery and
degradation of rural poverty. Crabbe made good
use in The Village of his detailed observation
of life in the bleak countryside from which he
himself came. The Village was popular but was
followed by an unworthy successor, The Newspaper
(1785), and after that Crabbe published nothing
for the next 22 years. Apparently happily
married (1783) and the father of a family, he no
longer felt impelled to write poetry.
In 1807, however, spurred by the increasing
expenses associated with his sons’ education,
Crabbe began to publish again. He reprinted his
poems, together with a new work, “The Parish
Register,” in which he made use of the register
of births, deaths, and marriages to create a
compassionate depiction of the life of a rural
community. Other verse tales followed, including
The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and
Tales of the Hall (1819).
Crabbe is often called the last of the
Augustan poets because he followed John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson in using the
heroic couplet, which he came to handle with
great skill. Like the Romantics, who esteemed
his work, he was a rebel against the realms of
genteel fancy that poets of his day were forced
to inhabit, and he pleaded for the poet’s right
to describe the commonplace realities and
miseries of human life. Another Aldeburgh
resident, Benjamin Britten, based his opera
Peter Grimes (1945) on one of Crabbe’s grim
verse tales in The Borough.
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