The Concept of English Romanticism - Research Paper Example

? Keats as a Romantic Poet: A study based on Ode to a Nightingale The nineteenth century is marked in the history of literature with numerous changesand reforms. It is the Romantic Age in Literature. English Romanticism found its consummate expression in the poetry of the period. The poets of that period wrote a new kind of poetry which marked a revolutionary departure from the neo-classical tradition of the century of Johnson. The distinctive quality of this new poetry, as against the neo-classical poetry, lay in its new interest in the world of new nature, its intense human sympathy or humanitarianism, its emphasis on the self or individual genius, its enthusiasm for medievalism and the projection of a golden age , its repudiation of classical rules and customs, its sense of wonder and mystery, its deliberate choice of new prosody etc. The Romantic Movement thus became a revolutionary phase in the history of English poetry. Keats once said “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death”. Mathew Arnold commenting upon this statement said” He is with Shakespeare “.T. S Eliot in spite of his reservations and qualifications about romantic poetry, in general, conceded that the kind of poetry which Keats wrote seems “much more the kind of Shakespeare”. He also said that Keats had, like Shakespeare, a philosophic mind”. It is indeed a credit to Keats that he has been compared to Shakespeare by some of the most eminent critics of our time. The essential quality of Keats as a poet is his sensitiveness to beauty. With singleness of aim he seeks for “the principle of beauty in all things. Poets like Milton, Wordsworth and Shelly also worshipped, but they had secondary moral intentions. He worships beauty with the unreasoning rapture of a child or a lover. Keats poetry has a sensuous richness. All that appeals to the senses is vividly described in his poems. In early poems, the sensuous richness is too great. This is merely the eager lavishness of youth rejoicing in its abundance, and not yet disciplined by good taste. Once Keats expressed his love of sensuousness and delights by preferring sensation to thought, “O for a life of sensation rather than of thought”. None of Keats predecessors had the same keen eagerness as had Keats to taste all earthly delights to burst joy’s grape against his palate fine” and to convey in verse the wealth of his sensations. By describing life as it impinged upon the sensuous, Keats greatly widened the sensuous realm of poetry. The finest of the four odes written in the spring of 1819the ‘Ode to A Nightingale’ is the passionately human and personal. He did not think about the particular bird of Hampstead but of its song which had been beautiful and delightful for centuries. The poem as we know was composed in the morning and but in the ode, the Queen moon is on her throne and the Nightingale is a type of the race imagined as singing in a far-off scene of woodland mystery, of verdurous gloom and winding mossy way. The poet would like to escape from the woes of the world,”Where youth grows pale and specter-thin, to the fairy land, to the …melodious plot, Of beeches green and shadows numberless”. Ode to the nightingale, though not so classic in its perfection, is richer in emotion and is truly romantic in haunting suggestiveness and melody. It might even be said that the ‘ode to autumn is to the Nightingale, what the poetry of Pope is to Keats. The Nightingale has true romantic spirit, attempts the impossible and like all romantic poetry pleases us by its very glorious failure. This ode is deeply charged with human feeling and the mood here is very intense. Crushed down by a personal loss, the poet is tortured by the thought of instability of man’s estate on earth and his continual suffering and decay in the world. The enjoyed sensuous experience is shown in the poem ‘The Ode To Nightingale’. Sidney Colvin regards it as “one among the glories of English poetry”. The song of the nightingale is the first experience that gives him a keen sensuous delight. On hearing the song of the bird, his sense is pained by a ‘drowsy numbness’ (ln 1)and his heart begins to ache. He feels as though he has tasted some opiate. Thus the sensuous experience of listening to the bird-song is compared to another sensuous experience, namely tasting opiate. He wishes for a draught of vintage which would carry him out of the world into the abode of the nightingale. He would thus leave behind him the sorrows of the world. He thinks of the universal sorrows of man, and his own particular and personal grief. The youth that dies , is his own, dearly loved brother Tom who had died a few months before and beauty ’lustrous eyes are, according to Middleton Murry , the eyes of Fanny Browne whom Keats loved. This stanza is tense with the emotion of personal suffering controlled by poetic genius. The poetic genius transports him. Not with the help of wine but on the wings of poetic imagination,’he flies to the realm of forgetfulness”- the romantic world of the nightingale. This world is a ‘heaven of joy ‘where the poet listens to the sing of the nightingale. Now more than ever it seems to him rich to die and cease upon the mid night with no pain .But if he were to die; he would not hear the song .Thus mortality has its poor advantage; in that he, while living; can hear the enchanting song of the bird. Mortality is reasserted against immortality of which bird’s song is at once the symbol and the ‘elixir’. Then with a magnificent sweep of the imagination he sees the bird and the songs as one; The bird becomes pure song and inherits the eternity of beauty. “Thou were not born for death, immortal bird. No hungry generations tread three down”(Ln 61,62). The poet here passes from the world of time into the world of eternity. The song of the bird is the voice of eternity heard by emperors and clowns of all ages. “The same that off times hath Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous sea; in fairy lands forlorn.”(ln 68-70) The spells is broken as the bird flies away. The heaven of joy and beauty vanishes and the poet finds himself back in the realities of life. The world of eternity into which the poet was transported by the wings of poetry is replaced by the world of time. In this poem Keats shows what a master he is. There is a logical unity of design that gives unity and compactness to the whole poem. Contemplation of his personals despondency leads him to see forgetfulness of his woes. But in the very effort to forget he remembers only too bitterly; the ills that assail life from all quarters sparing neither age nor sex beauty. And it is only by supreme imaginative effort that he can escape from all these into the region of magic wonder. There he balances himself on the wings of imagination and surrenders himself entirely to the sensation of the moment. In such a mood depth and annihilation are more than ever welcome. But the idea of death reminds him strikingly of the immortality of nature as contrasted with human morality. And then his imagination sinks exhausted from the region of dream and beauty and fancy, he reverts to the light of common day and feels seems of satiety. Thus we see how wonderfully the variety of moods and fancies are knit together and united into a whole. Another quality in which this ode excels is that of sheer music. The stanzas have been carefully and artistically designed. Cleanth Brook points out the world of mankind and the world of the nightingale are contrasted with each other. The listener in the human world of the nightingale is contrasted with each other. The listener in the human world responds to the song of the nightingale and feels an intense desire to find his way into the world in which the bird sings of summer in full-throat of richness and vitality of deep sensuousness of natural beauty and fertility; this world appeals to the imagination. The poem has got a memorable touch of medievalism. The song of the nightingale seems to have magical properties. It opens the window of an inaccessible tower in which a high born lady is imprisoned. The description “…magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn”(ln 68-70) opens a window on the medieval times when damsels in distress were rescued by knights. Some critics have pointed out the fallacy of Keats’s argument that man is mortal and the nightingale is immortal. W H Rossetti says: But this antithesis (between man and nightingale) cannot stand the test of a moment’s reflection man, as a race, is as deathless as superior to the tread of hungry generation, as is the nightingale as a race, while the nightingale as an individual bird has a life not less fleeting, but still more fleeting than a man as an individual. Keats ‘has all the romantic fondness for the unfamiliar and strange and for the remote, in place and time. One of the most obvious manifestations of this is his medievalism. Keats was fond of Greek legends and myths .There is a few touches of Hellenism in the Ode to a nightingale. The Greek poets personified natural phenomena and Keats resorts to this device in this ode. Dryad, in Greek mythology, is a wood nymph. The Nightingale lives in the opening stanza of the poem. Baccus is the Greek god of wine and his chariot is drawn by leopards. Keats describes getting drunk and forgetting the painful problems of life as being transported in the leopard-drawn chariot of Baccus. In the middle ages , magic and sorcery were rampant. High born damsels were abducted and shut up in inaccessible towers and young knights undertook to rescue these damsels in distress. Keats refers to some such story in the lines: “Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn” The tower is surrounded on all sides by dangerous seas. The lady is helpless. The windows of her tower can be opened only by some magical forces. The song of Keats nightingale has got this magical power. So when the song is heard, the casements are thrown open. The lady peeps through the windows and is comforted by the nightingale’s song. All these details are suggested by Keats. Besides this medieval touch, there is also a reference to the Old Testament story of Ruth. She left her parents and went to live in her husband’s land. She had to live there, even after the death of her husband. So she often felt home-sick, standing in her husband’s corn field in the foreign land. Keats says that the nightingale now singing might have sung to Ruth also and cheered her up. Keats’s historical importance as a poet lies in his being the most romantic of romantic poets in spite of many unromantic features in his poetry. Attitude towards art was also in several important respects a thoroughly romantic one. He wrote poetry out of an assured Romantic belief in the transcendent value of poetry. He believed in the supreme value of poetry and dedicated himself to it absolutely. He sounds a Romantic egoist when he confess, “I never wrote one single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought”. Thus Keats is a romantic. Work cited Colvin , Sydney; Keats, Harper&Brothers ,1887 John Middleton Murry; Keats and Shakespeare,1925 Eliot,T S; The Use of poetry and The Use of Criticism, Harvard University Press 1986 Read More