What is Romanticism? We shall open that huge question by looking at the first two great English Romantic poets, William Blake and William Wordsworth. Their writing shares certain fundamental themes and attitudes, but the poems are also very different in style and in effect; it is not surprising that Blake both revered and condemned different aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry. For Wordsworth seeks to embed his vision in his actual environment, the world of natural feeling and familiar situations, while Blake aspires to a more symbolic, condensed, ‘prophetic’ or mythical mode. To move between these two great poets is to discover the range and richness of English Romantic writing at the moment of its birth.
We shall concentrate on Wordsworth’s shorter poems, looking at his contributions to the ground-breaking volume of Lyrical Ballads (as well as a few poems from later volumes). This writing seeks to return English poetry to a lost tradition of simplicity, directness and emotional immediacy. In Blake we shall look principally at his two early masterpieces, the Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which radically challenge the assumptions and pieties of his time.
These classes will put us in a position to compare Wordsworth with Blake under a number of headings. The feelings of childhood and their relation to adult consciousness are central to their work. They both write as passionate opponents of a narrow rationalism, and develop poetic modes that foster a more holistic intelligence. They reject moralising and conventional morality, even while each offer a wisdom, a moral vision, that the world has need of. Both of them have the highest sense of the poetic calling, but this is expressed in strikingly popular forms – the song, the ballad, the proverb – which ignore the expectations of a sophisticated literary readership. Their work responds, in different ways, to the turbulent political times of the 1790s, dealing with comparable themes of fallenness, loss, and alienation. And they both aspire to a great honesty and directness in their writing – telling it how it is – even while being committed to the power of the imagination to transfigure the ordinariness of the world.
In the classes we shall, through group discussion, look closely at specific poems, at how they achieve their effects and at the larger issues they raise.
