Romantics

The problem with the Enlightenment (as represented by Dryden and Pope) was that it did not account for courage, for passion, or for grief, and poetry without those elements grows quickly stale. The argument for a more fully human voice was needed, and it came from an eccentric young music teacher in France.

If Voltaire was the spokesman for witty reason, his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), was the opposite. The philosopher of Romanticism, his radical ideas about the legitimacy of emotion and the wisdom of the common man were opposed by the educators, scientists, and politicians of his time. But they captured the rebellious mood percolating throughout Europe, and they became the basis for a new kind of poetry.

First Blake appeared in England like a premonition, mystical and visionary. Then Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge followed a decade later, bringing Romanticism to the center of the literary world. Their love of nature, their belief in the imagination, and their willingness to break away from the classical forms defined the movement. Wordsworth called poetry the “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . emotion recollected in tranquility.” But it was the next generation of Romantics who truly lived by those principles. Lord Byron, twenty-two years younger than Wordsworth, embodied his ideas. With his friends Shelley and Keats, he lived the courageous, passionate, loving, and unfortunately brief lives the old Lake Poets could only have imagined.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns