The idea of the American Revolution excited European intellectuals. French
Romantics were radical and liberal, but English Romantics divided. Early 18th-
century French thinkers had admired the English for having already curbed the royal
power; mid-18th-century French thinkers identified repression with king, nobles
and clergy. Things were not so clear in England, where the French Revolution had a
mixed and changing reception. Youthful rapture was modified by the Terror, when
thousands were killed. Tom Paine (1737–1809), a hero of the American Revolution
and radical author ofThe Rights of Man (1791), was welcomed in France. Yet his
opposition to the execution of Louis XVI put him in prison and near the guillotine.
In 1793 France declared war on England, whose government as a result became
more repressive – and had much to repress. Napoleon set about his ‘liberating’
conquest of Europe; Britain resisted and at length succeeded. But her own reforms
had to wait until after 1824, when Byron, Shelley and Keats, young radicals at the end
of a long and severe period of national reaction against the Revolution and
Napoleon, were dead. Blake was the only Romantic to stay true to his vision in
middle age. Coleridge and Wordsworth lost faith in utopian solutions, and by 1815
had turned to the Church of England.William Wordsworth
Wordsworth’s early radicalism went quiet, yet a democratic tone is clear in the
Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1798), which advises
that most ofthe poems were ‘to be considered as experiments’ to determine ‘how far
the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to
the purposes of poetic pleasure’. In line with this programme, a few Lyrical Ballads
recount incidents of unsophisticated rural life, using a language close to common
speech.The Preface attacks the artificial ‘poetic diction’ used in conventional 18th-
ce ntury verse (and suggests that 18th-century verse is conventional). The Preface
proclaims that, at this moment of crisis, the poet is the defender of human nature.
For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined
force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and, unfitting it for all voluntary
exertion,to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these
causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing
accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a
craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence
[news] hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners, the literature and theatrical
exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our
elder Writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into
neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and
extravagant stories in verse. When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have
endeavoured to counteract it ....
Wordsworth’s analysis of how the media excited bored urban audiences is repub-
lican and idealist,not populist. It also shows the 18th-century austerity which kept
extravagance out of his work. A sentence in the Preface, however, claims that ‘all good
poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’. Untrue of most previous
kinds of poetry, this described his own poetic process, which involved ‘emotion
recollect ed in tranquillity’. But the overflow model has not helped his reputation.
Despite lyrics such as ‘My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky’, he
rarely gushes, especially in comparison with other Romantics. Matthew Arnold230 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850) Son of
steward of the Lonsdale
estate, Westmorland. 1778
mother dies, Wordsworth
becomes a boarder at
Hawkshead School. 1790
walks 2000 miles through
France and Alps in the
Cambridge Long Vacation.
1791 in France. 1792 a
daughter born to Annette
Vallon. Wordsworth returns
home for funds; war prevents
a reunion. 1793–4 the Terror
(mass executions) cools
Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for
French Revolution; he ‘yielded
up moral questions in
despair’. 1795 a bequest
allows him to live in Dorset;
meets Coleridge, and moves
to live near him, with his
sister Dorothy. 1798 Lyrical
Ballads. 1799 returns to the
Lakes for good. 1802 inherits
money Lord Lonsdale owed
his father. Marries Mary
Hutchinson. 1807 Poems in
Two Volumes. 1810 estranged
from Coleridge. 1813
appointed Stamp Distributor
(tax collector) for
Westmorland. 1843 appointed
Poet Laureate. 1850 The
Prelude published
posthumously.