(without mention of Coleridge). The quality and impact of the best poems were
such that lyric poetry and imaginative literature were permanently altered, especially
by the new emphasis on subjective experience. This subjectivity is exemplified in a
famous Wordsworth lyric:
She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
5 A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the eye! –
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
10 When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh!
The difference to me.The ending illustrates a principle of the Preface that in these poems ‘the feeling
therein developed gives importance to the ... situation, and not the ... situation to
the feeling.’ This inverts the Augustan idea that literature’s object is ‘just representa-
tions of general nature’, or general truth. The comic impulse of the 18th century also
recedes. Had Pope written lines 3–4 or 7–8 above, irony might have been suspected;
but social irony has no place in Wordsworth’s graveside manner. Lines from Gray’s
Elegy approach Wordsworth’s position: ‘Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen
/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ Gray’s churchyard lies betweeen London
and the Lakes,whence the half-hidden violet and the first star (the planet Venus) can
be seen.Yet it takes a poet’s eye to see a Lucy, and a poetic reader to respond. The
poet is becoming a special interpreter of special truths to a special reader, not of
ge neral tru ths to common readers. This relationship is more personal, and can be
deeper and more intense than what it replaced, but – as the rhyme on ‘oh!’ illustrates
- it can also be more risky.
As poetry became more subjective, literature began to be defined as imaginative.
Thus the post-Romantic prose of Carlyle, and of Ruskin, Newman and Pater, is more
‘literary’ than the rational prose of J. S. Mill, which relies less on rhythm and
imagery. In fiction, too, the keynote is often set by imaginative natural description,
as in the novels of the Brontës.
Romanticism and Revolution
There had been a European Romanticism or pre-Romanticism since the ‘Ossian’
craze of the 1760s. Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) added passionate love to the ingredients of sensi-
bility sketched in the last chapter. Thus it was that Robert Southey(1774–1843),
expelled from Westminster School, could say that he went up to Oxford with ‘a heart
full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious
principles shaken by Gibbon’. He makes out here that he was a typical student of the
ge neration that shared Wordsworth’s reaction to the French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it
in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ Southey became very
popular, and eventually a strong Tory.
THE ROMANTIC POETS 229