William Blake
His poems include: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Milton, Jerusalem, The Four Zoas
His concern in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience was with the so called The Contrary States (opposites).
Innocence is contrary to experience but there is a relationship between the two. “Innocence demands experience:” both are phases in the spiritual development of man and, at the same time, are perennial ways of looking at the world.
What is innocence?
1) The condition of man before the fall (this is externally and biblically related the traditional definition (pre-lapsarian).
2) On another level (internally and psychologically) it applies to the child who has not yet experienced the inner divisions of human life.
What is experience?
1) an inner state symbolized externally by such images as chains, thorns, spears, graves, briars, blood, roots—representing feelings.
2) experience is the world of normal adult life and adults try to analyze their feelings, and therefore become incapable of spontaneity. Society exerts the outside influences that bring Experience and is a corrupting influence.
3) Blake saw experience as not just bitter but an opportunity to gain wisdom. The harmony of innocence is lost but INSIGHT come in its place.
William Wordsworth
all good poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
his poems include: “Tintern Abbey”(autobiographical), “Strange fits of passion have I known”, Ode: Intimations of Immortality“, "The Daffodils", "The Prelude" (autobiographical)
Like a true Romantic, he was unhappy in the city with its noise and aimless hurry. He felt that nature was the true and best environment for the human soul and that in nature our emotions could find a true outlet and where our thoughts could become calm and clear.
He had supported the French revolution as the “new dawn of humanity.” He believed in many of the democratic ideals of the age—he even lived in France for a while during the Revolution (with a friend). But as he grew older, he became more and more conservative.
In 1798 Wordsworth and his good friend Samuel Coleridge published a small book of their poems, Lyrical Ballads, the book was a popular success, but it was not hailed by many critics. It became the first Romantic Manifesto (or, to be more precise, the manifesto was The Preface to Lyrical Ballads) as it broke with the stiltedness and formalism of the Age of Reason. Some major Romantic ideas he promulgated:
1. discovery of self — looking inward and studying personal passions and volitions (individualism)
2. kinship with nature — human nature and nature are essentially and inextricably linked to each other. For Wordsworth, the mind was “naturally the mirror of the most fair and most interesting properties of nature.” He described himself as “a priest of Nature”.
3. a new ideal of naturalness and simplicity — avoidance of everything artificial or conventional. He felt that our language and our emotions are made simpler and purer by contact with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. He encouraged poets to deal with scenes from the humble and rustic life because in a setting close to nature the essential passions of the heart find a better soil.
4. beauty of the commonplace — while many Romantic writers sought new sensations and feelings in the unusual and exotic, Wordsworth encouraged people to look for true feeling and true beauty closer to home — in the experiences of ordinary people living simple lives close to nature.
His concept of poetry:
poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered “poetic.”
poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory.
the first principle of poetry should be pleasure; the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling — for all human sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native dignity of man.”
many of Wordsworth's poems (including masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations of Immortality” ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular, childhood's lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory.
Wordsworth's images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism, and the relics of the poet's rustic childhood—cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
his poems include: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", “Frost at Midnight”, “The Nightingale”, “Kubla Khan”, “Dejection: An Ode”
Inspired by Wordsworth and enthusiastic about their joint plans for Lyrical Ballads, he wrote most of his greatest poetry including “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan” in one year!
He continued to write literary criticism and philosophy and was a brilliant lecturer and conversationalist during the last years of his life.
Coleridge, like many Romantics, was swept along by revolutionary currents. He helped make the Romantic glorifications of the creative imagination and creative genius part of our modern attitudes toward art and literature. He played a major role in the Romantic rediscovery of Shakespeare (whose plays had gone out of fashion during the Age of Reason), Coleridge asked his readers and followers to think of imaginative literature as a true guide and friend to humanity (unlike Wordsworth, who claimed that Nature was).
He taught that true literature brings the whole soul into activity. It unites vivid awareness, passionate feeling, and deep thought. Coleridge was aware of the two contradictory tendencies in the Romantic movement:
The Romantics rediscovered the power of imagination to transform reality or even leave it behind — exotic, supernatural stuff, NOT a part of nature. Coleridge himself was fascinated by exotic, supernatural subjects. He loved to create scenes of strange exciting events. His best known poems have the magic of enchanted faraway places and the thrill of fear and horror (Rime of Ancient Mariner — doomed sailor on ghost ship)
In this sense his subjects were quite different from Wordsworth—Coleridge's dearest friend.
His concepts:
Coleridge's poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional archaisms of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the hypnotic drone of “Kubla Khan” do not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect.
Coleridge's poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult's reconnection with nature through memories of childhood;
Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the “thousand thousand slimy things” that crawl upon the rotting sea in the “Rime” would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem
emphasis on the imagination, its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those found in the “Rime”;
his depiction of feelings of alienation and numbness helped to define more sharply the Romantics' idealized contrast between the emptiness of the city — where such feelings are experienced — and the joys of nature. The heightened understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for Coleridge in his poetry.