BURNS 1759-1796, 1752-1770 Ancient Songs (collected) (1783-95) Poems that in subject belong to the See List following next period, but in style to the old. See Book IV p. 342 *See explanation, page 360. BOOK IV MODERN LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) were the conscious and deliberate leaders of the new movement. Lyrical Baland Coleridge: lads, the little volume issued by these two Lyrical Ballads young poets (Wordsworth, 28, and Coleridge, Wordsworth 26) in 1798, marks a poetic revolution. Romantic" is a term hard to define. The "romantic" attitude is a thing of the spirit. It is a delight in the spontaneous, the unusual, in the thrill that clothes a new sight or a new experience. It is an openness to the wonder of life. Whether one seeks this in the simple joys and sorrows of the poor, in the inspiration of nature, in the Greek delight in beauty, or in imagined marvels of a world of spirits, the underlying impulse is the same. this new impulse lies the secret of the new age. In In one sense the work of the new men was one of denial. They denied all that the followers of Pope had held sacred. To quote Saintsbury's summary of the "Augustan” age: "Men praised 'correctness' without having any more real standard of it than a misunderstanding by Pope of Denial of Old Boileau's misunderstanding of Horace, who had himself misunderstood the Greeks. They turned, instinctively, rather than in theory, away from Ideas wild nature to civilized manners. They laughed at the Middle Ages, and filled their poems with personifications as unreal as those of the Romance of the Rose, and infinitely less attractive. They generalized and abstracted; they refused to count the streaks of the tulip' till their written imagery had the life and the outline and the color of a mathematical diagram. Feeling, and feeling rightly, that prose ought not to be like poetry, they consecrated one particular limited kind of poetic diction as the proper uniform of verse, and (despite isolated attempts at truer metrical theory as well as practice) they clung to the separated couplet as the serious meter beyond which there was no salvation. All this... the new age. . . ' peremptorily and irrevocably denied. " Denial, however, was only part of the task. To break bonds, is only the first step to freedom. One must use Ancient Mari of New Ideas one's freedom; one must enter upon the new way. And this the writers of Lyrical Ballads ner as Typical did. Let us take one of the poems in it, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, a poem accessible to any high-school student, and see how it illustrates the breaking away from the "classic age.' And let us test it by the points given previously (page 314 ff.), as marks of the new spirit. I. It shows enthusiasm and earnestness. 1. It is full of religious and moral seriousness. Its purpose is to give an account of an overwhelming experience, one that sends the hearer away stunned, "a sadder and a wiser man." It aims to arouse the reader and to thrill him with fear and wonder. 2. It shows a love for man and all living things just because they are fellow beings. The sin of the Ancient Mari ner lay in his failure to feel this brotherhood. Through blindness to this he killed the Albatross, and he won forgiveness only when the love for the "slimy things" showed that his heart had changed. 3. On account of the subject of the poem, we find no treatment of political ideas. 4. The poem is filled with the beauty and wonder of nature. It is a series of nature pictures, visions of sea and sky, sunshine and cloud. And it does not merely admit that "nature has its good points." There is a simple admiration, devout, almost religious. We find not the form of nature but its soul. A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night, And we find, besides, underlying the poem a sense of mysticism, a feeling that nature is not a dead thing outside of man and his life, but that through man and nature there runs one spiritual being, the soul of all that is. 5. The poem deals not with ordinary experiences of respectable people, but with far places and uncommon events. Most of what it tells could not happen in the world of "facts." It sets before us sights that could be true only in imagination, in dream and delirium. But to the experience of imagination it is true. For the fact that a man imagines a supernatural experience is a fact, though the experience is imagination. The man who "sees" a ghost, sees it, though there be no ghost to see. What Coleridge shows us is, not what exists outside man's mind, but what goes on within it. II. The poet casts off the old restrictions upon poetic form: 1. He abandons the heroic couplet for the "ballad meter," a verse that has always been a meter of English popular song. (See page 96 ff.) And this meter is treated, not according to French standards, with carefully counted syllables, but with free rhythmic expression, suiting sound to sense, a singing in spoken words. 2. The old restrictions upon words are disregarded. True, Coleridge did not do what Wordsworth urged. He did not use any prosaic word in verse. (Wordsworth stopped far short of this himself!) Coleridge felt that whether a word suited a particular place in his poem, rested not on rule, but on poetic instinct. So he pays no attention to the old "taboos." He uses obsolete words, picturesque forms, kirk, gramercy, clomb, clifts, and countree. And he uses common words, which a "classical" writer would have regarded as "lowering" to his style, -words like fathoms, weathercock, planks, skinny, and buckets. 3. He uses specific words, and his descriptions are clear-cut in detail. We find such definite bits of description as the following: With sloping mast and dipping prow. Ice mast-high, came floating by As green as emerald. The fair breeze flew, the white foam flew, And we find none of the "stock" phrases of the classical writers, the "bounding main," "gentle zephyrs," "sweet songsters," "the azure vault." Each phrase is made to fit the poet's thought; all is new and his own. If he |