Romanticism was a literary and cultural movement that flourished in England between the late 18th and the early 19th century, and Wordsworth and Coleridge are considered its founding voices in poetry.
The Romantic Age in English literature is traditionally dated from 1798, the year in which William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, to around 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne. It emerged as a profound reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the mechanical world produced by the Industrial Revolution. Romantic poets celebrated imagination, individual emotion, the beauty of nature, and the inner life of ordinary people, including children, peasants, and outcasts. They believed that truth could not be reached only through reason, but also through feeling, intuition, and a sensitive response to the natural world. Historical events such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars deeply influenced their hopes for human liberty and, later, their disillusionment.
Wordsworth: nature, memory and ordinary life
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in the Lake District, a mountainous region of north-western England, and his attachment to that landscape shaped his entire poetic vision. In the famous Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), he defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity, meaning that genuine poems are born when past emotions are calmly re-examined by memory. He chose to write about humble subjects and to use the real language of common men, rejecting the artificial diction of 18th-century poets. For Wordsworth, nature is a living moral teacher: contemplating a lake, a flower or a mountain heals the soul and reconnects the individual to something eternal. A typical example is Daffodils, where the speaker, wandering lonely as a cloud, sees a host of golden flowers and later, when lying on his couch in a pensive mood, relives that joy through what he calls the inward eye. This dynamic of perception, memory and emotional recollection is the heart of his poetics.
Coleridge: imagination and the supernatural
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) shared Wordsworth's revolutionary aims but explored a different territory: the supernatural, the mysterious and the visionary. In the Biographia Literaria he famously distinguished between primary imagination, the basic power by which every human being perceives reality, and secondary imagination, the conscious creative faculty of the poet, which dissolves and recreates the world. He also introduced the idea of the willing suspension of disbelief, the pact by which readers accept improbable events in order to grasp a deeper poetic truth. While Wordsworth dealt with everyday situations made strange by feeling, Coleridge gave a human and emotional reality to extraordinary or ghostly events. His Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and is condemned to a journey of guilt, penance and partial redemption, in which nature reacts to human moral choices. The poem combines vivid imagery, archaic language and a strong didactic message about respect for all living creatures.
Ricorda
- Romanticism in England begins conventionally with the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and exalts imagination, nature, emotion and the value of ordinary people against the cold rationalism of the previous age.
- Wordsworth focuses on humble life, simple language and nature seen through memory, defining poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.
- Coleridge focuses on the supernatural and the creative power of imagination, theorising the willing suspension of disbelief and giving emotional truth to mysterious events.
- Active check on your notebook: write two short paragraphs of four or five lines each, the first explaining in your own English words why Wordsworth chose ordinary people as poetic subjects, the second explaining how Coleridge's idea of imagination differs from simple fantasy; then underline the key terms you used.