Lakhasly

A major change in thinking occurred in the late eighteenth century. A new feeling came into existence, a sense that man had become separated from nature. This is most evident in the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, which provides the effective starting point for romantic poetry. The romantic poets had been lost sight of by rational man (romanticism in many ways was a reaction against the prevailing rational mentality of the eighteenth century). Romantic poets also attribute a tremendous importance to childhood, feeling that the child possesses an innocent wisdom which disappears as maturity approaches. The emphasis on what is natural and uncorrupted leads to a new emphasis on the importance of the emotions and feelings. Such thinking finds expression in an extraordinary flood of great poetry from Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley. Their work is very popular, but it is a common failing to underestimate the poetic sophistication of these writers. It is often assumed that a romantic poet has a positive philosophy centring on simple, natural values, but, for, the most part, the major poets are very hesitant romantic.
fully aware that there can be no simple scheme of values.
We can begin with Blake, whose most celebrated poems were in fact published before the Lyrical Ballads. His Song of Innocence (1789) Songs of experience (1794) are short poems presenting an innocent and contrasting view of a topic. Most readers encountering Blake for the first time begin to extract a philosophy from his work: that he is for innocence and freedom and against authority, discipline and restraint. The poems, however, are more complex than this, an innocent view is often too naive. In addition, we only appreciate innocence because we are experienced. If the innocent and experienced poems are seen as complementary, we can see how they deal with the conflict there will always be between these two states. Rather than providing a philosophy or message, the poems are questions about the relationship between innocence and experience, between the (perhaps too simple) ideal and the real.
The danger of assuming that the poet's works offer a philosophy is most damaging in the case of Wordsworth. "Tintern Abbey' (1798) opens with a description of a rural landscape. Here we have the poet turning to nature, and Wordsworth continues by writing about the effect of the scene: it enables him to see a pattern in the world ("We see into the life of things”). Here we do have a romantic expression of the perception of truth and order in the natural world, just as in the other poems in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth finds truth and value in the close-to-nature lives of the characters he describes.
Wordsworth's poetry is often appreciated for his perception of this natural order. The problem, however, is that in 'Tintern Abbey' Wordsworth is sufficiently sceptical to realize that this order might not exist, that it might be simply an invention of his imagination. In fact, this is the point that the poem eventually arrives at: Wordsworth realizes that it is nature and his mind working together that create his deeper harmony. This concept of the imagination is central in romantic thought, for it is the creative insight of the poet that allows him both to perceive and create an order in the natural world. At this point some readers start talking about Wordsowrth's great gift, as if he has an imaginative capacity that most people lack, and which can never be fully explained. If one looks closely at "Tintern Abbey', however, it becomes clear that Wordsworth is less concerned to present his imaginative perception than to talk about, examine and even question his imagination. Thus, instead of being a relative, straightforward poem in which Wordsworth is concerned to present his almost religious insight into the life of things', 'Tintern Abbey' is in fact a much more complex and hesitant work which begins by setting up the idea that an order can be found in nature, but then questions the imaginative process that creates that idea.
Many of Wordsworth's finest poems follow a similar pattern. He presents us with a picture of something natural (either landscape or a character) on which he imposes an imaginative interpretation, but then questions whether the order he creates can be trusted. In an encounter with a leech-gatherer in 'Resolution and Independence' (1807) we have a typical Wordsworth character: Pathetic but also courageous. He inspires the poet. What we might feel in reading the poem as a whole, though, is that there is a gap between the reality of the leech-gatherer's lot and the rather too confident uplifting sentiments Wordsworth draws from the encounter. Again we are confronted with a hesitant, romantic, distrusting and questioning his own imaginative interpretation of

experience. The poem does not have a message: on the contrary, it makes us feel that any interpretation the poet impose on life can not be totally trusted.
The point being made here is that romantic poets do not have a simple philosophy to offer. In the end, their good poems, like all good poems, show us that reality is more complex and confusing than any order that the poet might create. Wordsworth's poems only work so well, however, because he does give such serious consideration to his own imaginative search for order: the self-doubts and hesitations of his poems are so effective only because they are played off against his ability to create a sense of an almost mystical insight into the life of things.
Coleridge is another poet who often turns to nature, and writes of how the imagination can perceive a harmony and order in the natural world. In his “conversation poems', however, such as "Frost at Midnight (1802), his theme is most commonly the failure of his imagination to detect this pattern. He has an ideal, and the poems hit at this ideal, so we are offered a concept of order. Indeed, there are numerous lines in Coleridge where a vision of harmony is offered to us, but the main stress of the poems is on how he would like

things to be. If Wordsworth's most repeated theme could be said to be his distrust of his own imagination, Coleridge's is the failure of his imagination.
Coleridge is also relevant to another aspect of romantic poetry: the emphasis on the imagination suggests how the mind is central in romanticism, and the awareness of how the poet creates ideas in his imagination puts.a.new importance on the fantasies that can be created in the mind. The imagination need not relate to the everyday world but can create its own makebelieve world. This is important in Coleridge, especially in ‘Kubla Khan' (1816), where he creates a sort of fairytale kingdom. Coleridge does not, however, just drift off into fantasy: the poem worked so well partly because there is always an implicit tension between the dream and the reality. The other important aspect of the poem, however, is the vividness of its imaginative picture: as with Wordsworth, Coleridge can create can intense imaginative vision, even if the poem as a whole undercuts and questions it. Keats is another poet who uses his imagination to create make-believe worlds, the world of the nightingale or the Grecian Urn in his odes - and again the vividness of the imaginative picture is important. The make-believe world he creates in his mind is, however, always put in conflict with the real world. We see again
poetry's familiar tension between dreams of order and the world's lack of order. In the case of Shelley, though, the pattern varies. Shelley has never been as highly regarded as the other romantic poets mainly because he did tend to believe in his own imagination, so that his ideas and ideals are not sufficiently measured against things as they really are.
The romantic period runs from the end of the eighteenth century to about 1830, yet to a large extent we are still living in the wake of romantic thinking. One effect, seem in the poetry of Yeats, Wallace Stevens and others, is the frequency with which poets write about art itself, setting life against the orders that can be created in the artistic imagination. There is also, in this century, a great emphasis on the mind: writers are fond of exploring the unconscious and contrasting what is found there within what we might perceive in the everyday world.
When studying a romantic poem, initially you should try to see how the poem as a whole might be offering more than this: that it might well be alert to the disorder and problems that are always present in experience, for the great poet is always ready to acknowledge that reality is more complex than any order he can create.