The Characteristics of the Romantic Poetry

---by He Zhi

English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.

The romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and nature provided romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over “artifice” and “convention,” the human need for emotional outlets, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings are often set in rural or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive concern with “innocent” children, young lovers, and animals. The major romantic poets included William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Gordon Byron. This essay describes two major characteristics of the romantic poetry, namely, nature and emotion.

Nature
The romanticism poet's poetry mostly originates from the nature. The romanticism poets almost all advocate the nature. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth conceives of nature as “the nurse, the guide and guardian of my heart and soul.” Nature to the romanticists is a source of cleanliness and spiritual understanding; it is a teacher; it is the stepping-stone between man and god, so romantic poets mostly take describing the nature to eulogize the nature as the subject.

Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of golden daffodils tossing, reeling and dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here: When all at once I saw a crowd，A host，of golden daffodils，/ Beside the lake， beneath the trees，/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze./　Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way，/ They stretch'd in never-ending line　/Along the margin of a bay：/Ten thousand saw I at a glance　/Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

"To a Skylark" is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A skylark soars into the sky singing happily. As it flies upward, the clouds of evening make it invisible, but its song enables the poet to follow its flight. All the earth and air is filled with its song. A skylark is addressed by the poet, who calls it a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird, because its song emanates from Heaven. Out of its full heart pours "profuse strains of unpremeditated art". The skylark ascends higher and higher in the blue sky,” Higher still and higher / From the earth thou springest / Like a cloud of fire / The blue deep thou wingest / And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.”, "like a cloud of fire", singing as it ascends. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy". As the skylark flies higher and higher, the poet loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its "shrill delight", which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the "white dawn", which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark's voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind "a lonely cloud".

Emotion

Romantic poets describe poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful felling” which expresses the poets mind. They pay great attention to spiritual and emotional life of man placing the individual rather than the society at the centre of their vision believing in human progress and improvement and advocating the freedom to express personal feelings rejecting convention and tyranny and emphasizing the rights and dignity of the individual

Ode to a Nightingale, Keats’s masterpiece, expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy and sorrow, song and music. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth and despair, rapture and grief. The complex emotion is vividly shown in the poetry such as What thou among the leaves hast never known,/The weariness, the fever, and the fret /Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.

In Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes the west wind. The poet expressed his deep love toward the west wind and yearned for the nature through the westerly wind. Here Shelley's rhapsodic and declamatory tendencies find a subject perfectly suited to them. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive potential, its universality. "I fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!" calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has logical feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful and convincing conclusion: "If winter comes, can Spring before behind?" The poem is written in the terza rima form Shelley derived from his reading of Dante. The nervous thrill of Shelley's response to nature however is here transformed through the power of art and imagination into a longing to be united with a force at once physical and prophetic.

In conclusion, nature is one of the major characteristics of the romantic poetry, for most of the romanticism poet's poetry originates from the nature. And the emotion which is expressed in the poetry is also one of the major characteristics of the romantic poetry through the above analyze.

浪漫主义诗歌的特点