Realism in Romantic poetry Essay

Reality is abstract, as it depends on e re whollyy individuals own perspective. When Wordsworth says, world is too a good deal with us, it depends on us how we assure at the world, as every world has a world of his own. We acknowledge the hithertots round us with whom we can relate, but abridge musical compositiony other changes con mankind facerable for others. near of the times, Ro gaytics are considered escapist, and are alleged that their belles-lettres reflect an Imaginary world utmost from the reality surrounding us. But vent through various poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I dominate it vice versa.All bright and appear in the potentiometerless pushover. Never did solarize much beautifully steep In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill Neer saw I, never mat, a calm so deep The river glideth at his own sweet allow dear(p) God The very houses seem drowsy And all that mighty heart is fraud still Westminster Bridge Wordsworth Sept 3,1802 The allege han dst that Wordsworth moved from the harsh realities of the cities brought intimately by the industrial revolution initiated in 1765. This allegation was made relatively stronger by placing Wordsworth counterpart Victorian realism.In my view much(prenominal) an allegation is a product of petty readings of his poems. The poem composed upon Westminster Bridge il impulserates crafty sense of socio-economy of the then London. It describes the urban beautify departing from his stock theme based on rural landscape painting. It talks about the landscape of the city which has been divested to its negative qualities. Like the smoke of the industries, the busy crowd, insensitive to its fellow man and the incessant desire in man to control nature.The term smokeless air is for him a matter to rejoice a evince of the city distilled of the harmful stipulate up of industrialization. The line, the river glideth at his own sweet will encapsulates the entire project of Wordsworth vis-a-vis t he stark naked call given by the plaza class to conquer and exploit nature. In this sense his realism is much more(prenominal) pronounced and subtle than it is taken into grievance of. Citing from historical context, one can chance upon the involvement of the ilks of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb during French revolution.In 1798, the year Lyrical Ballads, a common effort by Wordsworth and Coleridge, came out, was a tumultuous period in Englands history. Hostilities had unkept out among Her and France in 1793 (and was to make it with unremarkable intermission for over 20 years), and by 1798, she was faring badly in the war. Wordsworth had, of course, visited France in 1791-92, and had been in Paris at by chance the most critical of all the slap-up(p) moments of the French Revolution that began with the destruction of the nonorious prison of the Bastille in July 1789.(Coleridges poem, An Ode on the Destruction of the Bastille). The political tussle between the Girondin s and the Jacobins were at a height, and Wordsworth saw clear the slow rise of the Jacobins under Robespierre. He felt a deep fearfulness for the Girondin leaders whom he felt were the genuine revolutionaries. He believed in the reasonableness of gentlemans gentleman nature and also believed passionately that men were worthy of liberty.Wordsworths archaean republicanism, his c at a timern for France and the Revolution is described memorably in his long and autobiographical advance Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven O times, In which the meager, stale, black ways Of custom, law and statute, took at once The attraction of a rural area in romance The prelude testifies to the shock that Wordsworth felt in his moral nature when he saw the Revolution that was to redeem mankind, play to dust.For many, Tom Paine, William Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth, the French Revolution was not simply as struggle of a people to be free- it was mankinds stru ggle to achieve something better- a bracing-sprung(prenominal) age for the entire tender race- when grandeur and class privilege would give to republic and Reason would destroy the fetters of superstition and tyranny. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, had been swayed by the ideals of the Revolution, but the savagery and unhinged mob frenzy under the holy terror disillusioned him as did the rise of short sleep and Frances aggressive conquests of other European nations.In France, An Ode and Fears in Solitude, Coleridge describe his feelings with blondness O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils Are these thy boasts, Champion of human? To mix with kings in low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt, and share the homicidal prey To insult the Shrine of indecorousness with spoils From freemen torn to tempt and to betray? France, An Ode British sympathizers of the French Revolution like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were lampooned in the con servative press.Coleridge was so much influenced by William Godwins idea (Political Justice, 1793) of rejection of authority, abolition of sequestered property, creation of a hardly state that along with Robert Southey, he was ready to set sail for America to establish a perfect state along the lines charted by Godwin. The political ideas of Wordsworth and Coleridge was also strengthened by pursuing the ideological goals of Unitarianism (which verged on root word deism) and drew heavily on the ideas of face Commonwealthman of the seventeenth century.Side by side to these intellectual debates between the conservatives and the liberals, the economic and the human cost of the war proving to be enormous. In the country, rural poverty was becoming acute and the number of beggars, starving children, gypsies, wounded s overagediers roaming the country lanes could be seen from early poetry. Wordsworths poetic capability to recreate the sorrows and hardships of these homeless, starving canaille is one of his lasting achievement as a poet.The Old Cumberland Beggar in poem of the same name, the traveler of criminality and Sorrow, the blind London beggar in The Prelude are all powerful figures of forsaken humanity who become permanent symbols of the human condition. The effect of industrialization was viewed by twain Wordsworth and Coleridge with a mixture of excitement and distrust. The new industrial cities- Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, by 1815, contained a considerable population that had come from the country to appearance for work, and both Wordsworth and Coleridge were increasingly worried about the rising number of poor.Against the expanding complexities of men quick in an industrial wasteland, the destruction of old livelihoods and an increasing impossibility to believe in a benign Providence, harmony with constitution offered the Romantic poets another way of life. The disruptive force of the French Revolution added the trend to romanticism. There are individual differences among the great romantic poets concerning the conception of nature. But all of them share a common remonstration to the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth century- even though Wordsworth admires Newton and accepts him, at to the lowest degree in the orthodox interpretation.All romantic poets conceived of nature as an organic integral, on the analogue of man rather than a concourse of atoms- a nature that is not divorced from aesthetic values, which are just as real (or rather more real) than the abstractions of science. My conclusion concerning the romantic poets may be unorthodox and even unconventional. On the whole political criteria seem grossly overrated as a basis for judging a man. References Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge Edited by Debjan Sengupta and Shernaz Cama Worldview Critical Editions The Prelude by William Wordsworth An Ode on the Destruction of the Bastille by Samuel Taylor Coleridge