WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth as a critic

Wordsworth was primarily a poet and not a critic. He has left behind him no comprehensive
treatise on criticism. The bulk of his literary criticism is small yet “the core of his literary
criticism is as inspired as his poetry”. There is the same utter sincerity, earnestness, passion
and truth in both. He knew about poetry in the real sense, and he has not said even a single
word about poetry, says Chapman, “which is not valuable, and worth thinking over”.

Wordsworth’s criticism is of far-reaching historical significance. When Wordsworth started,

it was the Neo-classical criticism, which held the day. Critics were pre-occupied with poetic
genres, poetry was judged on the basis of rules devised by Aristotle and other ancients, and
interpreted by the Italian and French critics. They cared for rules, for methods, for outward
form, and had nothing to say about the substance, the soul of poetry. Wordsworth is the first
critic to turn from the poetry to its substance; builds a theory of poetry, and gives an account
of the nature of the creative process. His emphasis is on novelty, experiment, liberty,
spontaneity, inspiration and imagination, as contrasted with the classical emphasis on
authority, tradition, and restraint. His ‘Preface’ is an unofficial manifesto of the English
Romantic Movement giving it a new direction, consciousness and program. After
Wordsworth had written, literary criticism could never be the same as before.

Wordsworth through his literary criticism demolishes the old and the faulty and opens out
new vistas and avenues. He discards the artificial and restricted forms of approved 18th
century poetry. Disgusted by the, “gaudiness and inane phraseology”, of many modern
writers, he criticizes poets who:

“… separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and
capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle
appetites, of their own creation”.

Discarding formal finish and perfection, he stresses vivid sensation and spontaneous feelings.
He says:

“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Scott James says:

“He discards Aristotelian doctrine. For him, the plot, or situation, is not the first thing.
It is the feeling that matters.”

Reacting against the artificiality of 18th century poetry, he advocates simplicity both in theme
and treatment. He advocates a deliberate choice of subject from “humble and rustic life”.
Instead of being pre-occupied with nymphs and goddesses, he portrays the emotions of
collage girls and peasants. There is a healthy realism in his demand that the poet should use,
“the language of common men”, and that he should aim at keeping, “the reader in the
company of flesh and blood.”

There is, no doubt, his views in this respect are open to criticism. Scott James points out, the
flesh and blood and emotions of a townsman are not more profound. Besides, by confining
himself wholly to rustic life, he excluded many essential elements in human experience.
Thus, he narrowed down his range.

“His insistence on the use of a selection of language really used by men is always in
danger of becoming trivial and mean.”

There is also, no doubt, that he is guilty of over-emphasis every now and then, and that it is
easy to pick holes in his theories. Coleridge could easily demolish his theory of poetic diction
and demonstrate that a selection of language as advocated by Wordsworth would differ in no
way from the language of any other man of commonsense.

All the same, the historical significance of his criticism is very great. It served as a corrective
to the artificial and inane phraseology and emphasized the value of a simpler and more
natural language. By advocating simplicity in theme, he succeeded in enlarging the range of
English poetry. He attacked the old, outdated and trivial and created a taste of the new and
the significant. He emphasized the true nature of poetry as an expression of emotion and
passion, and so dealt a death blow to the dry intellectuality of contemporary poetry. In this
way, he brought about a revolution in the theory of poetry, and made popular acceptance of
the new poetry, the romantic poetry, possible.

Unlike other romantics, Wordsworth also lays stress on the element of thought in poetry. He
has a high conception of his own calling and so knows that great poetry cannot be produced
by a careless or thoughtless person. He says:

“Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of
subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had
also thought long and deeply.”

Poetic process is a complex one. Great poetry is not produced on the spur of the moment. It is
produced only when the original emotion is contemplated in tranquility, and the poet passions
anew.

Wordsworth goes against the neo-classic view that poetry should both instruct and delight,
when he stresses that the function of poetry is to give pleasure, a noble and exalted kind of
pleasure which results from increased understanding and sympathy. If at all it teaches, it does
so only indirectly, by purifying the emotions, uplifting the soul, and bringing it nearer to
nature.

The credit for democratizing the conception of the poet must go to Wordsworth. According to
him, the poet is essentially a man who differs from other men not in kind, but only in degree.
He has a more lively sensibility, a more comprehensive soul, greater powers of observation,
imagination and communication. He is also a man who has thought long and deep.
Wordsworth emphasizes his organic oneness as also the need for his emotional identification
with other men.

We can do no better than conclude this account of the achievement of Wordsworth as a critic
with the words of Rene Wellek:

“Wordsworth thus holds a position in the history of criticism which must be called
ambiguous or transitional. He inherited from neo-classicism a theory of the imitation of
nature to which he gives, however, a specific social twist: he inherited from the 18th
century a view of poetry as passion and emotion which he again modified as …
“recollection in tranquility”. He takes up rhetorical ideas about the effect of poetry but
extends and amplifies them into a theory of the social effects of literature … he also
adopts a theory of poetry in which imagination holds the central place as a power of
unification and ultimate insight into the unity of the world. Though Wordsworth left
only a small body of criticism, it is rich in survivals, suggestions, anticipations and
personal insights.”
Wordsworth theory of poetic diction
It has been generally supposed that Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language is merely a
reaction against, and a criticism of, ‘the Pseudo Classical’ theory of poetic diction. But such a
view is partially true. His first impulse was less a revolt against Pseudo-classical diction,
“than a desire to find a suitable language for the new territory of human life which he was
conquering for poetic treatment”. His aim was to deal in his poetry with rustic and humble
life and to advocate simplicity of theme. Moreover, he believed that the poet is essentially a
man speaking to men and so he must use such a language as is used by men. The pseudo
classicals advocated that the language of poetry is different form the language of prose while
Wordsworth believes that there is no essential difference between them. The poet can
communicate best in the language which is really used by men. He condemns the artificial
language. Thus William Wordsworth prefers the language really used by common men.

Wordsworth’s purpose, as he tells in the Preface was, “to choose incidents and situations
from common life”, and quite naturally, he also intended to use, “a selection of language,
really used by men”. He was to deal with humble and rustic life and so he should also use the
language of the rustics, farmers, shepherds who were to be the subjects of his poetry. The
language of these men was to be used but it was to be purified of all that is painful or
disgusting, vulgar and coarse in that language. He was to use the language of real men
because the aim of a poet is to give pleasure and such language without selection will cause
disgust.

The use of such a simple language has a number of advantages. The rustic language in its
simplicity is highly emotional and passionate. This is more so the case when these humble
people are in a state of emotional excitement. It is charged with the emotions of the human
heart. Such a language is the natural language of the passions. It comes from the heart, and
thus goes direct to the heart. In other words, through the use of such a language essential
truths abut human life and nature can be more easily and clearly communicated. It is more
‘philosophical’ language inasmuch as its use can result in a better and clearer understanding
of the basic truths. But in city life emotions are not openly expressed.

Wordsworth was going to write about simple life so he writes in simple language and for this
he adds metre. In his opinion, the language of poetry must not be separated from the language
of men in real life. Figures, metaphors and similes and other such decorations must not be
used unnecessarily. In a state of emotional excitement, men naturally use a metaphorical
language to express themselves forcefully. The earliest poets used only such metaphors and
images as result naturally from powerful emotions. Later on, poets used a figurative language
which was not the result of genuine passion. They merely imitated the manner of the earlier
poets, and thus arose the artificial language and diction of Pseudo-classics. A stereotyped and
mechanical phraseology thus became current. The poet must avoid the use of such artificial
diction both when he speaks in his own person, or through his characters.

Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction is of immense value when considered as a corrective to

the artificial, inane, and unnatural phraseology current at the time. But considered in itself it
is full of a number of contradictions and suffers from a number of imitations. For one thing,
Wordsworth does not state what he means by language. Language is a matter of words, as
well as of arrangement of those words. It is the matter of the use of imagery, frequency of its
use, and its nature, Wordsworth does not clarify what he exactly means by ‘language’.

Coleridge was the first critic to pounce upon Wordsworth's theory of language and to expose
its weaknesses. He pointed out, first, that a language so selected and purified, as Wordsworth
suggests, would differ in no way from the language of any other men of commonsense. After
such a selection there would be no difference between the rustic language and the language
used by men in other walks of life.

Secondly, Wordsworth permits the use of metre, and this implies a particular order and
arrangement of words. If metre is to be used, the order of words in poetry is bound to differ
from that of prose. It does so differ in the poetry of Wordsworth himself. So Coleridge
concludes that there is, and there ought to be, an essential difference between the language of
prose and metrical composition.

Thirdly, the use of metre is as artificial as the use of poetic diction, and if one is allowed, it is
absurd to forbid the use of the other. Both are equally good sources of poetic pleasure.

Fourthly, Coleridge objected to the use of the word real. He writes:

“Every man’s language varies, according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of
his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man’s language has, first,
its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs;
and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. For, ‘real’, therefore, we must
substitute, ‘ordinary’ or lingua communis.”

Fifthly, Coleridge pointed out that it is not correct that the best parts of our language are
derived from Nature. Language is letter-moulded. The best words are abstract nouns and
concepts. It the poet wants to use the rustic language, he must think like the rustics whose
language is curiously inexpressive. It would be putting the clock back. Instead of progression
it would be retrogression.

Wordsworth's theory of language has strong weaknesses, but its significance is also far-
reaching. O. Elton concludes his discussion of the subject with the following admirable
words:

“Wordsworth, led by his dislike of, ‘glossy and unfeeling diction’ … was led to proclaim
that speech as the medium desired; that he guarded this chosen medium not indeed
from his own misapplication of it, but … proved its nobility in practice; that he did not
clearly say what he meant by, ‘language’, or see the full effect upon the diction by the
employment of metre; that he did not rule out other styles … he did not touch on their
theoretic basis; and that in many of his actual triumphs, won within that sphere of
diction which he does vindicate.”
Wordsworth's themes of poetry
The poetry of the Pseudo classical school was very artificial and unnatural. It was extreme
limited in its themes. It was confined exclusively to the city of London, and in that City to the
artificial and unnatural life of the fashionable lords and ladies. It did not care for the beauties
of Nature or for the humble humanity – farmers, shepherds, wood-cutters, etc. – which lives
its simple life in the lap of nature. Wordsworth reacted sharply and sought to increase the
range of English poetry by taking his themes from “humble and rustic life”. Himself living in
the lap of nature, he was well-familiar with the life of these humble people, and he has
rendered it in his poetry, realistically and accurately.

There are various reasons why Wordsworth preferred “incidents and situations from humble
life”, as the themes of this poetry.

For one thing, in this way he could enlarge the scope and range of poetry and make a whiff of
fresh air to blow through the suffocating atmosphere of contemporary poetry.

Secondly, he knew this life intimately, was in sympathy with it, and so could render it
accurately and feelingly.

Thirdly, he believed that a poet is essentially a man speaking to man. Since he is a man, and
he has to appeal to the heart and mind of man, he must study human nature, and try to
understand, “the primary laws of our nature”. Now these primary instincts and impulses
which govern human conduct can best be understood by studying the simplest and most
elementary forms of life. He chose rustic and humble life, because the village farmers, leach-
gatherers, even idiots, represent human life reduced to its simplest. It is for this reason also
that he glorified the child and stressed the value of childhood memories and experiences. In
such simple forms of life, behaviour is instinctive and manners are natural and uninhibited.
Feelings and passions are expressed without any reserve and human conduct is guided and
controlled, not by artificial social codes, as in more sophisticated city societies, but by
instincts and impulses. In humble and rustic conditions of life, man is more natural, and so a
proper subject of study for a poet who must write “on man, on nature and on human life”. He
did not think city life to be a proper subject o poetry, because there the fundamental passions
of the human heart are not expressed freely and forcefully but are inhibited by social codes
and considerations of public opinion.

Fourthly, in rustic and humble life, the fundamental passion of the human heart can be easily
studied. From a study and understanding of these elementary feelings the poet can proceed to
study, “the primary laws of our nature”. In other words, through a process of contemplation
and reflection, the poet can derive certain universal principles of human conduct which are
not true only of individuals or of particular places but are universal and general in their
application. Feelings and passions of humble humanity are not peculiar to them but are
common to all mankind. They will last as long as human nature lasts, and are not subject to
fluctuations from age to age and society to society. They are universal; they are permanent, as
contrasted with those of socially inhibited societal man. Universal significance of human
experience and human emotion can be studies only through life reduced to it simplest and, we
may add, most unfortunate levels.
Fifthly, he preferred rustic and humble life because in that condition, “the passions of men
are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”. They live in the midst of
the grandeur and beauty of nature, and as Plato much earlier has taught us, they must absorb
some of that beauty and grandeur. In one of his own Lucy poems, Wordsworth refers to the
education of nature and, “the vital feelings”, which nature confers on those who live in her.
Their emotions are noble and permanent because their souls have been moulded by the
beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Wordsworth has been criticized for thus limiting the scope of poetry in humble and rustic life.
It has been said that upper class life is as suitable for poetic treatment as humble life. In this
way, Wordsworth excluded from poetic treatment a wide range of complex human emotions
which are experienced only in more sophisticated societies. However, Wordsworth's views
are to be judged in the historical context. As resulting from his desire to extend the domain of
poetry, conquer new territories for it, and thus to ‘correct’ the contemporary predilection for
upper class life to the exclusion of humble and rustic life.
Wordsworth's conception of poetry
Critics and poets, in all ages and countries tried to explain their own theory and practice of
poetry. Wordsworth, too, expounded his views on poetry, its nature and functions, and the
qualifications of a true poet in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

On the nature of poetry, Wordsworth states that:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful passion”.

Internal feelings of the poet proceeds poetry. It is a matter of feeling and temperament. True
poetry cannot be written without proper mood and temperament. It cannot be produced to
order. It must flow out freely and willingly from the soul as it cannot be made to flow
through artificially laid pipes. Secondly, poetry is a matter of powerful feelings. It is never an
intellectual process.

“Poetry is born not in the mind but in the heart overflowing with feelings”.

Poets are gifted with greater organic sensibility. They have greater ability to receive sense
impressions. Beauties of nature, which may leave ordinary mortals untouched, excite poet’s
powerful emotions and he feels an urge to express them. Wordsworth’s heart leapt up with
joy on beholding a rainbow or daffodils dancing in the breeze and he expressed his
overflowing feelings spontaneously in his immortal poems.

According to Wordsworth, good poetry is never an instant expression of powerful emotions.

A good poet must meditate and ponder over them long and deeply. Poetry has its origin in
“emotions recollected in tranquility”. Experience has to pass at least four stages before
successful composition becomes possible. Firstly, there is the observation or perception to
some object, character or event which sets up powerful emotions in poet’s mind. Secondly,
there is recollection and contemplation of that emotion in silence. In this stage, memory plays
a very important part. An interval of time must elapse, in which the first experience sinks
deep into the poet’s insight and becomes his part and parcel. During the interval, the mind
ponders and the impression received is purged of the unneeded elements or superfluities and
is “qualified by various pleasures”. This filtering process is very slow; time and solitude are
vital. Thus, the poet’s emotion is universalized. Thirdly, the interrogation of memory by the
poet sets up, or revives, the emotion in “the mind itself”. It is very much like the first
emotion, but is purged of all superfluities and constitutes a “state of enjoyment”.

This does not mean that the creative process is a tranquil one. The poet points out that in the
process of contemplation, “tranquility disappears”. The poet has to “passion anew” while
creating and is terribly exhausted as a result. But creation, if it be healthy, carries with it joy
or “an over-balance of pleasure”. On the whole, “the mood of imaginative creation is
enjoyment”. The ability to create comes from nature and not from premeditated art.

The fourth and last stage is of composition. The poet must convey that “overbalance of
pleasure” and his own “state of enjoyment” to others. He differs from ordinary individuals in
communicating his experience to others in such a way as to give pleasure. Metre is justified
for it is pleasure super-added:

“Verse will be read a hundred times where Prose is read only once”.

Wordsworth himself closely followed his theory. He rarely made, “a present joy the matter of
a song”. He did not poetize an experience immediately; his hardly ten poems are described
unplanned. His composition had a wide interval between an experience and its poetic
delineation. He had a powerful memory and at times he would fetch out an impression, “from
hiding places ten years deep”. All his best poems resulted from emotions recollected in
tranquility.

Recalling in silence enables the poet to see into the things deeply and converse the very soul
of an experience to his readers. Through such contemplation the poet is able to impart to
everyday object a ‘visionary gleam’, a ‘glory’, a ‘light that never was on land and sea’. As
such recollection is best done in solitude, the poet loved lonely places, liked to wander all
alone, lost in reverie, and was known by the rustics of Cumberland as the Solitary.

Wordsworth asserts that the function of poetry is to give pleasure. Even the painful subject
should give pleasure. The poet in a “state of enjoyment” must commune this enjoyment to his
readers. But pleasure is not the only and the chief aim of poetry. It is not an entertainment or
a pastime. He tells:

“It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression that is in
the countenance of all science”.

To be incapable of poetic feeling is to be without love of human nature and reverence of God.
Its mission is to:

“Arouse the sensual from their sleep of Death. And win the vacant and the vain to noble
Rapture”.

Poetry must serve the purposes of life and morality.

“Poetry divorced from morality is valueless”.

He hoped to console through his own poetry, the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight, to lead
the people to see, to think and to feel and become more virtuous.

Any subject can be poetically treated but Wordsworth favored incidents and characters from
low and rustic life. He made the folks of Cumberland, their lives and objects of nature, the
subjects of his poetry, for in rustic life the basic passions and emotions can be observed more
clearly and expressed more perfectly. Such elementary passions in rural settings are linked
with, “the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”. For Wordsworth it is the feeling and
emotion that is important and not action and situation.

“Feeling developed in a poem gives importance to the action and situation and not the
diction and situation to the feeling”.

Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction was a direct outcome of his democratic preference for
simple rustic life and characters. When the theme was simple, the language must be simple
too. It must be a selection of the language really spoken by such men otherwise it would not
be in character. He is, therefore, critical of the artificial poetic diction of 18th century poetry.

Wordsworth's views on imagination and fancy

In order to understand Wordsworth's view on imagination, we have to go to his poems, and to
his letter. In ‘The Preface’, the word occur first when Wordsworth tells us that his purpose
has been to select incidents and situations from humble and common life and make them look
uncommon and unusual by throwing over them a coloring of imagination. This clarifies that
imagination is a transforming and transfiguring power which presents the usual in an unusual
light. The poet does not merely present “image of men and nature” but he also shapes,
modifies and transfigures that image by the power of his imagination. Thus imagination is
creative; it is a shaping or ‘plastic’ power. The poet is half the creator; he is not a mere
mechanical reproducer of outward reality, but a specially gifted individual, who, like God, is
a creator or maker as he adds something to nature and reality. It is the imagination of the poet
which imparts to nature, the ‘glory and freshness of a dream’, the light that never was on land
and sea.

In making the poet’s imagination a creative power, Wordsworth goes counter to the
‘associationist’ theories of David Hartley who had considerable influences on the poet.
Hartley and other associationist psychologist thought that the human mind receives
impressions from the external words, which are therein associated together to form images. In
this way, the mind merely reflects the external world. But according to Wordsworth the mind
does not merely reflect passively, it actively creates. At least, it is half the creator.
Imagination is the active, creative faculty of the mind. As Florence Marsh points out, for
Wordsworth imagination is a mental power which alters the external world creatively.

“It is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the human mind upon those
objects and processes of creation or composition, governed by certain fixed laws.”

It is through imagination that the poet realizes his kinship with the eternal. Imagination works
upon the raw material of sense impressions to illustrate the working of external truths. It
makes the poet perceive the essential unity of “man, God and Nature” while “the meddling
intellect” of the scientist multiplies diversities.

Again, he tells that the poet is a man who thinks long and deeply, and so he can treat things
which are absent as if they were present. In other words, the poet contemplates in tranquility
the emotions which he had experienced in the past and through imagination can visualize the
objects which gave rise to those emotions initially. Imagination is the mind’s eye through
which the poet sees into the ‘heart of things’ as well as into the past, the remote, and the
unknown. It is imagination which enables the poet to render emotional experience, which he
has not personally experienced, as if, they were personally felt emotions.

The power of imagination enables the poet to universalize the particular and the personal, and
arrives at universal truths. Henry Crabbe Robinson describes the process in the following
words:

“The poet first conceives the essential nature of his object, and then strips it of all
casualties and accidental individual dress, and in this he is a philosopher; … he re-
clothes his idea in an individual dress which expresses the essential quality and has also
the spirit and life of a sensual object. And this transmutes the philosophic into a poetic
exhibition.”

Stressing the importance which Wordsworth attached to the role of imagination in the process
of poetic creation, C M. Bowra writes:

“For him, the imagination was the most important gift that a poet can have, and his
arrangement of his own poems shows what he meant by it.”

The section which he calls, ‘Poems of the Imagination’, contains poems in which he united
creative power and a special visionary insight. He agreed with Coleridge that this activity
resembles that of God. It is the divine capacity of the child who fashions his own little world:

For feeling has to him imparted power

That through the growing faculties of sense
Doth like an agent of the one great Mind
Create, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds.

The poet keeps this faculty in his maturity, and through it he is what he is. But Wordsworth
was full aware that mere creation is not enough, that it must be accompanied by a special
insight. So he explains that the imagination,

Is but another name for absolute power

And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.

“Wordsworth did to go so far as the other Romantics in relegating reason to an inferior

position. He preferred to give a new dignity to the word and to insist that inspired
insight is itself rational.”

It should be noticed that here Wordsworth calls imagination, “reason in her most exalted
mood”. It is a higher reason than mere reason. It is that faculty which transforms sense
perceptions and makes the poet conscious of human immortality. It makes him have visions
of the divine.

Wordsworth deals with imagination at much greater length in his Preface to the 1815 edition
of the Lyrical Ballads. There he draws a distinction between Fancy and Imagination.
Wordsworth’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination is not so subtle and penetrating as
that of Coleridge. According to Wordsworth, both Imagination and Fancy, “evoke and
combine, aggregate and associate”. But the material which they evoke and combine is
different, and their purpose in evoking and combining is different. They differ not in their
natures but in their purpose, and in the material on which they work. The material on which
Fancy works is not so susceptible to change or so pliant as the material on which imagination
works. Fancy makes things exact and definite, while Imagination leaves everything vague
and indefinite

Rene Wellek’s comment in this respect is illuminating and interesting:

“Both Wordsworth and Coleridge make the distinction between Fancy, a faculty which,
handles, ‘fixities and definites, and Imagination, a faculty which deals with the ‘plastic,
the pliant and the indefinite’. The only important difference between Wordsworth and
Coleridge is that Wordsworth does not clearly see Coleridge’s distinction between
imagination as a ‘holistic’ and fancy as an ‘associative’ power and does not draw the
sharp distinction between transcendentalism and associationism which Coleridge
wanted to establish.”
William Wordsworth: Poet of nature
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, on the northern edge of England’s
Lake District. Educated at a school near Esthwaite Lake, he was often free to wander the
countryside, exploring the woods and valleys which would shape his poetry in the years to
come. Wordsworth’s writing frequently centers around nature and the rural landscape, and
often features recollections of childhood experiences in nature which are contrasted by the
poet’s older voice and experiences.

In 1798, Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads with his friend and fellow poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. This collection featured poems which Wordsworth wrote as celebrations of
the rural landscape, and were written in simple language in an effort to capture to voice of the
common people.

Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of
the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language;…because the manners of rural life germinate
from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are
more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the
passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Similarly, Wordsworth believed that rural inhabitants “hourly communicate with the best
objects from which the best part of language is derived,” which is why he sought to write in
the language of the rural landscape. This idealization of the rural landscape is common in
Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, often presenting Nature as a teacher, a comfort, and an
inspiration.

One example of Nature teaching the young Wordsworth is found in “Nutting”, a poem in
which Wordsworth recalls a childhood memory of a day spent wandering through the woods
in search of hazelnuts:

… in the eagerness of boyish hope,

I left our cottage-threshold, sallying forth
With a huge wallet o’er my shoulder slung,
A nutting-crook in hand; and turned my steps
Tow’rd some far-distant wood.

The poem describes how the young Wordsworth comes across a grove of hazels which
appear

Unvisited, where not a broken bough

Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
Of devastation; but the hazels rose
Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung
A virgin scene!

This quiet and untouched grove affords him several moments of peace, and he experiences
A temper known to those, who, after long
And weary expectation, have been blest
With sudden happiness beyond all hope.

However, despite the tranquility of the scene, and after resting quietly and contemplating the
murmuring brook and mossy stones, the boy rose up,

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash

And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being: and, unless I now
Confound my present feelings with the past,
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky –
Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch – for there is a spirit in the woods.

Here, Nature gives willingly to the intruder both a sense of happiness and calm, and the
physical gift of hazelnuts, responding to his violence with stillness. The recognition of these
gifts teaches the young boy to respect the silence and dignity of nature, and prompts the poet,
upon recollection, to teach others of the gentle spirit of Nature.

Also included in Lyrical Ballads is “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”, a poem which
illustrates the beauty Wordsworth sees in the isolation and uniqueness of nature and the rural
landscape. Here, Wordsworth describes the loss of Lucy, a maiden referred to in many of the
lyrical ballads.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
-Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

The presence of a single star in the sky makes that star more beautiful because it is alone, just
as Lucy is made more beautiful and more vital to the poet by her isolation. Similarly, a “half
hidden” violet is magical and unique where a fully revealed flower, appreciated by all, would
lose its brightness and beauty from too much exposure. For these reasons, the girl, and by
association the rural landscape, is made more precious to the poet.
In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that rural inhabitants are “less under the
influence of social vanity” due to their isolation, a feature which makes them better able to
“convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions,… [in] a more
philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets”. This
statement also illustrates the value Wordsworth attached to the rural landscape and which is
expressed in “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”.

In 1798, Wordsworth went on a tour with his sister that brought them to the Wye valley and
the ruins of Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth had visited the area in 1793, but found that the
present landscape was different from the landscape of his memories. While traveling from the
abbey to Bristol, a poem came into Wordsworth’s mind which he wrote down upon his
arrival in Bristol, but “not a line of it was altered”. This mediation on the landscape and its
impact on the poet’s life was included in Lyrical Ballads as “Lines composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey”, commonly referred to simply as “Tintern Abbey.”

“Tintern Abbey” begins with the recognition of the passage of time.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. – Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of a more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

This image of the landscape is one of wilderness and isolation, the only sound is that of the
river’s “soft inland murmur”, and the cliffs unite this quiet land with the more quiet sky.
However, Wordsworth was in fact gazing upon a rural landscape, and this description of what
he saw illustrates Wordsworth’s view of the rural as part of a wild nature. This is clarified as
the poet continues his portrait:

Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

The cottages and farms are part of the landscape and do not alter its nature. The homes are
“green to the very door”. There is no loss to the woods by their presence, and their smoke
“sent up in silence” has no impact on the stillness of the scene. Similarly, the cottages are
compared to a hermit’s cave or a vagrant dwelling in the “houseless woods” further
emphasizing the quiet solitude of the rural landscape and its incorporation into nature. The
cottages do not diminish the wild of the landscape; they are united with it.
In the second stanza, Wordsworth describes how the memory of this scene has influenced his
life.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: - feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

Memories of nature have not only restored the poet in moments of weariness, but may be
responsible for leading him to “acts of kindness and of love”. Wordsworth also describes how
nature has given him another gift:

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: - that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, -
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

In other words, these images of nature and the rural landscape have inspired within the poet
the stillness necessary to meditate on life, to “see into the life of things” and by association,
to write poetry. Nature has given Wordsworth a reason to write, and quite possibly, a reason
to live. As his meditations continue, he realizes that

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.

This realization leads the poet to consider how his response to nature has changed with time,
and he writes that in the past,

...like a rose
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.

However, the passions of youth have faded,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

With the loss of his youthful fits of “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” the poet has learned
from nature, and once again he presents nature as a teacher, a comfort, and an inspiration, as
it grants him a deeper understanding of human life. Nature has often been presented as still
and silent, and here the “music of humanity” is “still [and] sad”, and the poet is subdued. The
parallel images of humanity and of nature once again illustrate Wordsworth’s view of
humans as part of nature. This idea is continued as the poet describes how he has been
inspired by nature:

... I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

In his survey of wide and breathless spaces, “the light of setting suns,” “the round ocean and
the living air, and the blue sky” Wordsworth includes “the mind of man”. For Wordsworth,
the mind of man is both natural and beautiful. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
describes poetry as “an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe” and “a homage paid
to the native and naked dignity of man,” an idea which is clearly expressed in “Tintern
Abbey.”

The power of nature to inspire is expanded to describe how the poet’s perception of nature
has formed the core of his being:

Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Finally, the poet turns to address his sister, and to express to her how Nature will protect
them,

... for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

Clearly, nature has played an integral role in the development of Wordsworth’s mind and
poetry. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that “poetry is the image of man
and nature”. Not only Wordsworth’s poetry, but the rural landscape itself could be described
as an “image of man and nature”. The link between man and nature, and Nature’s ability to
teach us of ourselves, as was illustrated in both “Nutting” and “Tintern Abbey”, are a
common theme in Wordsworth’s writing. As Wordsworth captures the wisdom of Nature, he
too becomes a teacher, and as our treatment of nature too often resembles the child-poet’s
destruction of the hazel grove, it is clear that we still have much to learn.
 JOHN KEATS
Salient features of Keats' poetry
Romanticism primarily was a revolt against the artificial, pseudo-classical poetry in 18th
Century. Wordsworth was the founder of this movement. Romantic poets can be divided into
two groups – Old Romantics and Young Romantics. In old Romantics there are Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Scott. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott belong to Early Romantics, whereas
Keats, Shelley, and Byron constitute the Later Romantics. Among all the Romantics, Keats
was the last to born and first to die. But quite surprisingly he achieved in 26 years what other
could not get ever the whole of their life. Keats is also said to be the most romantic of all the
romantics. He was greatly inspired by Greek art, culture and mythology. He was also inspired
by Elizabethan poets especially Spenser.

Keats is a pure romantic poet. He writes poetry for the sake of poetry. He believes in art for
art’s sake. He does not write poetry for any palpable design or any propaganda. His major
concern is to give pleasure. It means that his chief concern is pleasure. Whereas some other
romantics have been writing poetry for the propagation of their objectives as Wordsworth and
Shelley were in the favour of French Revolution. But Keats is least concern with the social
issues of life.

Love for nature is the chief characteristic of all he romantics. Keats also loves nature but he
loves nature for the sake of nature. He does not give any theory or ideology about nature. He
only admires the beauty of nature. But on the other hand, Wordsworth spiritualizes nature,
Coleridge finds some supernatural elements in nature, Shelley intellectualizes nature and
Byron is interested in the vigorous aspects of nature.

Keats was a pure poet as he does not project any theory in his poetry. Keats believes in
Negative Capability – the capability of being impersonal. Keats does not involve his personal
feelings in his poetry. He writes poetry only for pleasure but Shelley lacks Negative
Capability. Shelley lends his personal sorrow and feeling in his poetry. He could not be
impersonal and writes about his feelings and sorrows.

Keats is a sensuous poet. It means that he writes his poetry with his penta senses. We not only
enjoy his poetry rather we can taste, touch, see and hear all the ideas presented in his poetry.
We enjoy his poetry with all our penta sense. The whole of our body is involved in his poetry
when we read him. Keats’ imagery is static and concrete whereas Shelley’s imagery is
dynamic and abstract. Keats’ imagery shows the calmness of Keats’ mind whereas Shelley’s
poetry shows his neurotic and confusing attitude.

Keats was also Hellenistic like all romantics. He was inspired by Hellenism. Hellenism was
the soul of his poetry. There are many Hellenistic features in his poetry such as his Greek
instinct, his love for Greek literature, his love with Greek sculpture and art, his Greek
temperament, his love for beauty and the touch of fatalism and tragedy. His attitude of
melancholy is also Hellenistic.
“Ode on Indolence” as a weaker ode (Keats)
“Ode on Indolence” is the weakest of all his poems because it lacks negative capability.
There is no logical sequence in its stanzas. There is repetition of the ideas of Keats’ previous
odes i.e. “Ode on Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Nightingale” and “Ode to Autumn”.

Keats wrote this poem in his weakest moments of life. One of his brothers died, other left
him. Besides, he was also suffering from inherited disease and on top of all his love Fanny
Browne deserted him. He was disappointed in his ambition to be famous, disappointed in
love and disappointed in his art of writing poetry and finally disappointed with life. He seems
to be crying in helplessness. Instead of self-control, he depicted self-pity.

The poet is in a mood of perfect indolence. Three figures happened to pass from his sight –
Love, Ambition and Poesy. At the third time, the poet is tempted by them and longs for them
but he thinks it his folly. At the fourth time, the three figures once again tempted him but now
the reality has dawned upon him. Therefore, he bid them adieu.

The poet is feeling asleep. He has lost all his faculties. Pain has ceased to be unpleasant and
pleasure has ceased to be pleasant to him. He has become very indifferent to these feelings.

Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower;

The very sleepy moment of falling asleep has captured him. His mind is sleeping but not his
senses. He is neither receptive nor productive. The only feelings he wants to have are no
feelings.

The poem is very much subjective and reflects the poet’s extreme hopelessness and
disappointment. He reaches the climax of emotions and wants to withdraw from Love,
Ambition and Poetry.

O folly! What is love? and where it is?

And for that poor Ambition! it springs
From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;
For Poesy! -- no -- she has not a joy.

When he wants to withdraw from emotions, he wants to withdraw from the world. When he
wants to withdraw from love, he wants to give up both lover and beloved. When he wants to
withdraw from poetry, he wants to give up all imagination. Now he is contended with his
“horrid indolence”.

In rest of his odes, there is element of negative capability. In Keats’ own words “Poetry
should be the outcome of the negative capability”. As in “Ode to Nightingale”, he negates
himself and wants to fly with the nightingale.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Similarly in “Ode on Grecian Urn” he escapes into the world of art and says:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Whereas in “Ode on Indolence”, he is wailing for his personal emotions and unable to
practice his own theory of negative capability.

This poem has repetition of earlier poems. When one’s creative faculties fail, one starts
repeating oneself. Same is true to Keats in this ode. He borrows ideas from earlier poems as
his genius has been exhausted.

Apart from this, the poem is not only weak with regard to content but also in the form. There
is not logical sequence in the stanzas. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: narrative,
descriptive and reflective. As in the first stanza, there is narrative quality.

One morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;

Then in the middle of the poem, there is descriptive quality.

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
-----------------------------------------------
The last, whom o love more, the more of blame
-----------------------------------------------
I know to be my demon Poesy.

The last part of the poem has a reflective quality:

Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,

Into the clouds, and never more return!

The word ‘never’ reflects the determination that these three passions – Love, Ambition and
Poetry.

Keats’ odes have been changed with that they do not have any logical end as in “Ode on
Grecian Urn” and “Ode on Indolence”. But if we critically observe, to Keats the
understanding through intellect is partial understanding. He rejects all palpable designs. He
rejects all understanding and all logics and long for sensation.

“O! for a life of sensation rather than of thought”

On another occasion, he says:

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

But this poem has aesthetic continuity from first to last.

Above premises leads us to the conclusion that though poem has repetition earlier poems, it
lacks negative capability and logical sequences of stanzas yet it has a definite of aesthetic
feelings.

So, the ode on the whole is not a weak ode. It has its aesthetic merits.
Keats' Sensuousness
Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate
truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts.

Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching,
smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It
gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word
pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the
sense of smell and so on.

Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first
reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses.
Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the
great principle that:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’

Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion fro nature by giving his
whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.

Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense
impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that
excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense
impressions generate poetry.

The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is
stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature,
of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our
sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one
of his letters:

O for a life of sensation than of thoughts

He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.

SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and
solid picture of sensuous beauty.

“Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.”

And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active.

“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;”

SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.
“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days, by emperor and clown:”

In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says:

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”

SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme
cold:

“The sedge is withered from the lake

And no birds sing.”

SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and
the idea of their tastes in intoxication.

“O for a beaker full of the warm South

Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,”

SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness.
There is mingled perfume of many flowers.

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season
of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”

For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to
the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of
sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.

Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses
are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed
darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert
but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.

As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He
begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of
unfulfill’d renown”.

Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from
sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes
sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism.
However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the
beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.

Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic
detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except
Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.

Keats – Arts Versus Life

Keats, unlike other romantics, creates art for the sake of art. Life is an enigma and art makes
life understandable.

Art is imaginative reconstruction of life. Both are complementary as in the world of the Urn.
Engravings on the urn take him to the world of art and nightingale takes him into the world of
fancy. In art, there is permanence and coldness of life. It is a deadly permanence. The pictures
on the urn represent life but they lack life. In the world of reality, there is death, decay and
transience but there is also warmth of life. Art provides a window between reality and
imagination. It facilitates moments of reality and imagination.

Keats discovered the metaphor of Grecian Urn. After seeing, he was motivated to speculate
on the problems of life. He confronted the paradox of life and death, transience and
permanence, actual and ideal, stillness and action, desire and fulfillment. After all the study,
he reached the conclusion that:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

 The title of Grecian Urn is paradoxical. It is a symbol of life and death, urn is a pot in
which the ashes of the dead are kept. So it is a symbol of death. On the other hand, urn is
preserved in centuries. It has become immortal. It has led a life more than life. Hence it is a
symbol of life. So it resolves the paradox of life and death.

 “Unravish’d bride” is a paradox of permanence and transience.

 “Silence and slow time” is a paradox of time and timelessness.

 Sylvan historian – art has narrative quality

 Flowery tale – art has many stories about it and life.

 What leaf-fring’d legend – Art tickles the mind.

 What men or gods – art removes the distinction between mortal and immoral.

 What mad pursuit – art creates passion, ecstasy and excitement.

 Paradox between ideal and the real:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter;

In imagination there is no limit.

 Paradox of desire and fulfillment:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though wining near the goal – yet, do not grieve;

Art captures the life.

 There is no autumn engraved in the world of art.

Ah! happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

 Art eternalizes the passions and beauty but in real life both decline.

In the world of art, there is no deceit.

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.

 There is unending happiness in the world of art.

More happy love! More happy, happy love.

 Paradox of permanence and morality and unweariness.

And, happy melodist unwearied,

 There is newness and uniqueness in art

For ever piping songs for ever new.

 There is warmth and joy in art.

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.

 In art, there are no tensions and worries.

A burning forehead, and parching tongue.

 There is mystery in art

O mysterious priest,

 Paradox of the universal and the particular

What little town by river or sea shore.

 Art has all signs of life except life.

With forest branches and the trodden weed:

 Art mimics life

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought.

 Art is profound.

When old age shall this Generation waste.

 Art is prophetic. It gives the message

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty
Truth sometimes means reality, while reality is usually not beautiful at all. Reality can be
disappointing or cruel or ugly. By choosing beauty to believe in as the total truth, we can
surpass the ugly part of reality the same way we surpass the fear of death by believing in
God. From here, we can even understand the poet's eagerness to make the living as happy as
possible in stanza 3, by repeating 6 times "happy". He is rather decided to see beauty, which
is connected with happiness and away from sorrow. He has made up his mind to choose
beauty as his only truth at that time (or even earlier). It is why he uses the urn's tone to make
his statement, as if the urn, a steady and still ancient thing, is saying that "why do not you
believe in me? This is all you need to know on earth."

If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement with the fluid
expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays his attempt to engage with
the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries
to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense--it does not
age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker's meditation, this
creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are
free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront
aging and death (their love is "for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the
youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their
homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks
different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit" and
wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: "What men or gods are these? What
maidens loth?" Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of
the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover
beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the
urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from
temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the eternally
unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient human
passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity--when
passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burning
forehead," and a "parching tongue." His recollection of these conditions seems to remind
the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify
with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they
were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the "little
town") and a destination (the "green altar"). But all he can think is that the town will forever
be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he
confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and
wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the
destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to
engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt
identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and
thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a real
and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails
simply because there is nothing more to say--once the speaker confronts the silence and
eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at
least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to
engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its
ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth eternity." If human life is a succession of
"hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and self-
contained world. It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the
kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to
human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind--
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the
Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no
one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know." It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn
addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his
awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of
beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple
and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge.
If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important
lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know
on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal
interpretation which reading to accept.
Keats' concept of beauty
Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover of
beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism.
Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the
most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover of the
world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or
word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the
incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He
hated didacticism in poetry.

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”

He believed that poetry should be unobtrusive. The poet, according to him, is a creator and an
artist, not a teacher or a prophet. In a letter to his brother he wrote:

“With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.”

He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social
reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as he said:

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”

For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience.
He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination.
Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary
theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and
“Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived
he would have established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of
escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical
doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.

Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards.
He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things that are not thought beautiful by
ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:

“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”

In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on
the other. Keats was neither rebel nor utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature,
he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost
complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of hostility of the existing order
of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the
world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes
the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he
habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for
the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than
he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was
never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely
telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley
advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political
measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own
heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had
the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to
philosophy or politics.

Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that
distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty
and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of
beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because
he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.

Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural
solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied
Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and
indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring.
What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret,
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”

“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems
is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of poet is to be a
friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he
attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very
doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.

Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest
in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive
and suggestive picture of women:

“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,
And so live ever.”

Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he
developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers
beauty. This idealism, assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in
“Endymion” and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney
Colvin says:

“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the
cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but
of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of
life and imagination.”

As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his
conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the
heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of
human life.
 S.T COLRIDGE
S.T.Coleridge as a critic
Coleridge is one of the greatest of literary critics, and his greatness has been almost
universally recognized. He occupies, without doubt, the first place among English literary
critics. After eliminating one after another the possible contenders for the title of the greatest
critic, Saintsbury concludes:

“So, then there abide these three – Aristotle, Longinus and Coleridge.”

According to Arthur Symons, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is,

“… the greatest book of criticism in English.”

Herbert Read concludes Coleridge as:

“ … head and shoulders above every other English critic.”

I. A. Richards considers him as the fore-runner “of the modern science of semantics”, and
Rene Wellek is of the view that he is a link, “between German Transcendentalism and
English Romanticism.”

A man of stupendous learning, both in philosophy and literature, ancient as well as modern,
and refined sensibility and penetration intellect, Coleridge was eminently fitted to the task of
a critic. His practical criticism consists of his evaluations of Shakespeare and other English
dramatists, and of Milton and Wordsworth. Despite the fact there are so many digressions and
repetitions, his practical criticism is always illuminating and highly original. It is rich in
suggestions of far reaching value and significance, and flashes of insight rarely to be met with
in any other critic. His greatness is well brought out, if we keep in mind the state of practical
criticism in England before him. The Neo-classic critics judged on the basis of fixed rules.
They were neither legislative nor judicial, nor were carried away by their prejudices.
Coleridge does not judge on the basis of any rules. He does not pass any judgment, but gives
his responses and reactions to a work of art. His criticism is impressionistic-romantic, a new
kind of criticism, a criticism which dealt a knock out blow to neo-classic criticism, and has
been in vague, more or less, ever since. He could discover new beauties in Shakespeare and
could bring about fresh re-valuations of a number of old English masters. Similarly, his
criticism of Wordsworth and his theories enable us to judge him and his views in the correct
perspective.

In the field of theoretical inquiry, Coleridge was the first to introduce psychology and
philosophy into literary criticism. He was interested in the study of the process of poetic
creation, the very principles of creative activity, and for this purposes freely drew upon
philosophy and psychology. He thus made philosophy the basis of literary inquiry, and thus
brought about a union of philosophy, psychology and literary criticism. His literary theories
have their bases in philosophy; he imparted to criticism the dignity which belongs to
philosophy. He philosophized literary criticism and thus brought about a better and truer
understanding of the process of creation and the nature and function of poetry.

His greatest and most original contribution to literary criticism is his theory of imagination.
Addison had examined the nature and function of imagination, and Wordsworth, too, had
developed his own theory on the subject. But all previous discussions of imagination look
superficial and childish when compared with Coleridge's treatment of the subject. He is the
first critic to differentiate between Imagination and Fancy, and to differentiate between
primary and secondary Imagination. Through his theory of imagination he revolutionized the
concept of artistic imitation. Poetic imitation is neither a servile copy of nature, not is it the
creation of something entirely new and different from Nature. Poetry is not imitation, but
creation, but it is creation based on the sensations and impressions received from the external
world. Such impressions are shaped, ordered, modified and opposites are reconciled and
harmonized, by the imagination of the poet, and in this way poetic creation takes place.

Further, as David Daiches points out:

“It was Coleridge who finally, for the first time, resolved the age old problem of the
relation between the form and content of poetry.”

Through his philosophical inquiry into the nature and value of poetry, he established that a
poem is an organic whole, and that its form is determined by its content, and is essential to
that content. Thus metre and rhyme, he showed, are not merely, “pleasure super-added”, not
merely something superfluous which can be dispensed with, not mere decoration, but
essential to that pleasure which is the true poetic pleasure. This demonstration of the organic
wholeness of a poem is one of his major contributions to literary theory.

Similarly, his theory of “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” marks a significant advance over
earlier theories on the subject. His view that during the perusal of a poem or the witnessing of
a play, there is neither belief nor disbelief, but a mere suspension of disbelief, is not
universally accepted as correct, and the controversy on the subject has been finally set at rest.

However, it may be mentioned in the end that as Coleridge’s views are too philosophical, he
is a critic no easy to understand. Often it is fragmentary and unsystematic. Victorians, in
general, could not appreciate him and his appeal was confined to the few.

It is only in the 20th century that his literary criticism has been truly understood and
recognition and appreciation have followed. Today his reputation stands very high, and many
go to him for inspiration and illumination. Despite the fragmentary nature of his work, he is
now regarded as the most original critic of England.
S. T. Coleridge: Criticism on Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction
Wordsworth and Coleridge came together early in life and mutually arose various theories
which Wordsworth embodied in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” and tried to put into
practice in his poems. Coleridge claimed credit for these theories and said they were “half the
child of his brain”. But later on, his views underwent the change; he no longer agreed with
Wordsworth’s theories and so criticized them.

In his Preface, Wordsworth made three important statements all of which have been objects
of Coleridge's censure.

First of all Wordsworth writes that he chose low and rustic life, where the essential passions
of the heart find a better soil to attain their maturity. They are less under restraint and speak a
plainer and more emphatic language. In rustic life our basic feelings coexist in greater
simplicity and more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated. The manners
of rural life, sprang from those elementary feelings and from the necessary character of rural
occupations, are more easily realized and are more durable. Lastly the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Secondly, that the language of these men is adopted because they hourly communicate with
the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived. Being less under
social vanity, they convey their feelings and ideas in simple and outright expressions because
of their rank in society and the equality and narrow circle of their intercourse.

Thirdly, he made a number of statements regarding the language and diction of poetry. Of
these, Coleridge refutes the following parts: “a selection or the real language of men”; “the
language of the men in low and rustic life”: and, “Between the language of prose and that of
metrical composition there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference”.

As regards the first statement, i.e. the choice of rustic characters and life, Coleridge points
out, first, that not all Wordsworth characters are rustic. Characters in poems like Ruth,
Michael, The Brothers, are not low and rustic. Secondly, their language and sentiments do not
necessarily arise from their abode or occupation. They are attributable to causes of their
similar sentiments and language, even if they have different abode or occupation. These
causes are mainly two: (a) independence which raises a man above bondage, and a frugal and
industrious domestic life and (b) a solid, religious education which makes a man well-versed
in the Bible and other holy books excluding other books. The admirable qualities in the
language and sentiments of Wordsworth’s characters result from these two causes. Even if
they lived in the city away from Nature they would have similar sentiments and language. In
the opinion of Coleridge, a man will not be benefited from a life in rural solitudes unless he
has natural sensibility and suitable education. In the absence of these advantages, the mind
hardens and a man grows, ‘selfish, sensual, gross and hard hearted’.

As regards the second statement of Wordsworth, Coleridge objects to the view that the best
part of language is derived from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates. First,
communication with an object implies reflection on it and the richness of vocabulary arises
from such reflection. Now the rural conditions of life do not require any reflection, hence the
vocabulary of the rustics is poor. They can express only the barest facts of nature and not the
ideas and thoughts which results from their reflection. Secondly, the best part of a man’s
language does not result merely from communication with nature, but from education, from
the mind of noble thoughts and ideals. Whatever rustics use, are derived not from nature, but
from The Bible and from the sermons of noble and inspired preachers.

Coleridge takes up his statements, one by one, and demonstrates that his views are not
justified. Wordsworth asserts that the language of poetry is:

“A selection of the real language of men or the very language of men; and that there
was no essential difference between the language of prose and that of poetry”.

Coleridge retorts that,

“‘Every man’s language’ varies according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of
his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings”.

Every man’s language has, first, its individual peculiarities; secondly, the properties common
to his class; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use.

“No two men of the same class or of different classes speak alike, although both use
words and phrases common to them all, because in the one case their natures are
different and on the other their classes are different”.

The language varies from person to person, class to class, place to place.

Coleridge objects to Wordsworth’s use of the words, ‘very’ or ‘real’ and suggests that
‘ordinary’ or ‘generally’ should have been used. Wordsworth’s addition of the words, “in a
state of excitement”, is meaningless, for emotional excitement may result in a more intense
expression, but it cannot create a noble and richer vocabulary.

To Wordsworth’s argument about having no essential difference between the language of

poetry and prose, Coleridge replies that there is and there ought to be, an essential difference
between both the languages and gives numerous reasons to support his view. First, language
is both a matter and the arrangement of words. Words both in prose and poetry may be the
same but their arrangement is different. This difference arises from the fact that the poetry
uses metre and metre requires a different arrangement of words. Metre is not a mere
superficial decoration, but an essential organic part of a poem. Even the metaphors and
similes used by a poet are different in quality and frequency from prose. Hence there is bound
to be an ‘essential’ difference between the arrangement of words of poetry and prose. There
is this difference even in those poems of Wordsworth’s which are considered most
Wordsworthian.

Further, it cannot be confirmed that the language of prose and poetry are identical and so
convertible. There may be certain lines or even passages which can be used both in prose and
poetry, but not all. There are passages which will suit the one and not the other.

Thus does Coleridge refute Wordsworth’s views on the themes and language of poetry.
S. T. Coleridge: Imagination and Fancy
In Chapter XIII of Bigraphia Literaria, Coleridge writes:

“The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary”.

According to Coleridge, Imagination has two forms; primary and secondary. Primary
imagination is merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world through the
senses, the power of perceiving the objects of sense, both in their parts and as a whole. It is a
spontaneous act of the mind; the human mind receives impressions and sensations from the
outside world, unconsciously and involuntarily, imposes some sort of order on those
impressions, reduces them to shape and size, so that the mind is able to form a clear image of
the outside world. In this way clear and coherent perception becomes possible.

The primary imagination is universal, it is possessed by all. The secondary imagination may
be possessed by others also, but it is the peculiar and typical trait of the artist. It is the
secondary imagination which makes artistic creation possible. Secondary imagination is more
active and conscious; it requires an effort of the will, volition and conscious effort. It works
upon its raw material that are the sensations and impressions supplied to it by the primary
imagination. By an effort of the will and the intellect the secondary imagination selects and
orders the raw material and re-shapes and re-models it into objects of beauty. It is
‘esemplastic’, i.e. “a shaping and modifying power”. Its ‘plastic stress’ re-shapes objects of
the external world and steeps them with a glory and dream that never was on sea and land. It
is an active agent which, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to create”.

This secondary imagination is at the root of all poetic activity. It is the power which
harmonizes and reconciles opposites. Coleridge calls it a magical, synthetic power. This
unifying power is best seen in the fact that it synthesizes or fuses the various faculties of the
soul – perception, intellect, will, emotion – and fuses the internal with the external, the
subjective with the objective, the human mind with external nature, the spiritual with the
physical. Through this unifying power nature is colored by the soul of the poet, and soul of
the poet is steeped in nature. ‘The identity’ which the poet discovers in man and nature
results from the synthesizing activity of the secondary imagination.

The primary and secondary imaginations do not differ from each other in kind. The
difference between them is one of degree. The secondary imagination is more active, more a
result of volition, more conscious and more voluntary than the primary one. The primary
imagination is universal while the secondary is a peculiar privilege enjoyed by the artist.

Imagination and fancy, however, differs in kind. Fancy is not a creative power at all. It only
combines what is perceives into beautiful shapes, but like the imagination it does not fuse and
unify. The difference between the two is the same as the difference between a mechanical
mixture and a chemical compound. In a mechanical mixture a number of ingredients are
brought together. They are mixed up, but they do not lose their individual properties. In a
chemical compound, the different ingredients combine to form something new. The different
ingredients no longer exist as separate identities. They lose their respective properties and
fuse together to cerate something new and entirely different. A compound is an act of
creation; while a mixture is merely a bringing together of a number of separate elements.
Thus imagination creates new shapes and forms of beauty by fusing and unifying the
different impressions it receive from the external world. Fancy is not creative. It is a kind of
memory; it randomly brings together images, and even when brought together, they continue
to retain their separate and individual properties. They receive no coloring or modification
from the mind. It is merely mechanical juxtaposition and not a chemical fusion. Coleridge
explains the point by quoting two passages from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The
following lines from this poem serve to illustrate Fancy:

Full gently now she takes him by the hand.

A lily prisoned in a goal of snow
Or ivory in an alabaster band
So white a friend engirds so white a foe.

In these line images are drawn from memory, but they do not interpenetrate into one another.
The following lines from the same poem illustrate the power and function of Imagination:

Look! How a bright star shooteth from the sky

So glides he in the night from Venus’ eye.

For Coleridge, Fancy is the drapery of poetic genius but imagination is its very soul which
forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

Coleridge owed his interest in the study of imagination to Wordsworth. But Wordsworth was
interested only in the practice of poetry and he considered only the impact of imagination on
poetry; Coleridge on the other hand, is interested in the theory of imagination. He is the first
critic to study the nature of imagination and examine its role in creative activity. Secondly,
while Wordsworth uses Fancy and Imagination almost as synonyms, Coleridge is the first
critic to distinguish between them and define their respective roles. Thirdly, Wordsworth
does not distinguish between primary and secondary imagination. Coleridge’s treatment of
the subject is, on the whole, characterized by greater depth, penetration and philosophical
subtlety. It is his unique contribution to literary theory.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
No phrase in the language has acquired such wide and universe popularity, and has had such
a profound impact on subsequent literary theory as Coleridge's phrase, “Willing suspension
of disbelief”, which he used to indicate the nature of poetic dramatic illusion. All through the
Neo-classics era the question of dramatic illusion and credibility had exercised the mind of
critics, and the observance of the unities was considered essential for, their violation puts too
severe a strain on the credibility of the audience and thus dramatic illusion is violated. The
topic was hotly debated and both Dryden and Dr. Johnson have expressed their views on it,
views which are in advance of those of their contemporaries. However, it was Coleridge who
said the last word on the subject, and finally put the controversy at rest.

Coleridge uses the phrase in connection with his account in Chapter XIV of the Biographia
Literaria of the origin and genesis of the Lyrical Ballads. He writes,

“In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical ballads; in which it was agreed that my
endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith”.

Thus he was to treat of characters supernatural, which are incredible and improbable and
which under normal circumstances we would not believe in but the treatment was to be such
that as long as we were reading his poems, there would be, “a willing suspension of
disbelief”, and we would believe for the moment in what is essentially incredible and
improbable. In other words, the treatment should be such as would send the judgment of
readers to sleep, so that they would pursue the poem with delight.

In Chapter XXIII of the Biographia Literaria he explains himself further and writes:

“The poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield
ourselves to a dream; and this, too, with our eyes open, and with our judgment pursue
behind the curtain, really to awaken us at the first motion of our will, and meantime,
only, not to disbelieve”.

The poet sends our judgment to sleep, for as long as we are reading his word or seeing his
play. He does not ask us to believe in what is presented to our mind; he only requires that we
should not disbelieve. Only a momentary suspension of disbelief is required for an enjoyment
of imaginative literature. We are not under any illusion that it is reality; only, for the moment,
there is a voluntary remission of judgment, we enjoy what we dream of. Similarly, the poet, if
he is sufficiently skilful, sends our judgments to sleep so that we neither believe nor
disbelieve, it to be reality, but merely enjoy what is presented to the mind’s eye. Our reason,
or rational judgment, our consciousness, is in voluntarily suspension and this suspension of
judgment enables us to enjoy what is in our waking moments when the spell is broken, we
would condemn as incredible. Distancing in time and place, humanizing of the marvelous and
the supernatural, etc., are some of the devices used to procure such, “willing suspension of
disbelief”.

Further light on Coleridge's views in this connection is thrown through a comparison with the
view of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson was of the view that the reader or the spectator deludes
himself into believing a play to be a reality, as long as he is witnessing it. The spectator
knows, “from the first to the last that the stage is only a stage and that the players are only
players”. But knowingly he deludes himself and regards it as the reality. Not unlike Johnson,
Coleridge is of the view that it is not in this state that a tale or play is enjoyed, or that the
reader or the spectator allows himself to be deluded even temporarily, to be able to enjoy it.
On the contrary, he just takes leave of his judgment for the time being. ‘The true stage-
illusion consists not in the mind’s judging it to be a forest, but in its remission of the
judgment that it is not a forest’. While Dr. Johnson believed that the spectator is in full
exercise of his judgment and knows that what is being presented to him is not reality,
Coleridge believes that the spectator does not voluntarily exercise his judgment for the time
being. His critical faculty is asleep so to say. Thus Coleridge’s position is a middle one: the
spectator or the reader does neither actively believe nor disbelieve. His judgment is in a state
of suspension for the time being. Voluntarily he is persuaded not to exercise it as long as he is
reading a poem or witnessing a play. Imaginative literature owes its appeal to such
suspension of disbelief.
S. T. Coleridge: Function of Poetry
Coleridge poses numerous questions regarding the nature and function of poetry and then
answers them. He also examines the ways in which poetry differs from other kinds of artistic
activity, and the role and significance of metre as an essential and significant part of a poem.

He begins by emphasizing the difference between prose and poetry.

“A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition.”

Both use words. Then, the difference between poem and a prose composition cannot lie in the
medium, for each employs words. It must, therefore, “consists in a different combination of
them, in consequence of a different object being proposed.” A poem combines words
differently, because it is seeking to do something different.

“All it may be seeking to do may be to facilitate memory. You may take a piece of prose
and cast it into rhymed and metrical form in order to remember it better.”

Rhymed tags of that kind, with their frequent, “sounds and quantities”, yield a particular
pleasure too, though not of a very high order. If one wants to give the name of poem to a
composition of this kind, there is no reason why one should not. As Coleridge says:

“But we should note that, though such rhyming tags have the charm of metre and
rhyme, metre and rhyme have been ‘superadded’; they do not arise from the nature of
the content, but have been imposed on it in order to make it more easily memorized.”

The “Superficial form”, the externalities, provides no profound logical reason for
distinguishing between different ways of handling language.

“A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction.”

The philosopher will seek to differentiate between two ways of handling language by asking
what each seeks to achieve and how that aim determines its nature. “The immediate purpose
may be the communication of truth or the communication of pleasure. The communication of
truth might in turn yield a deep pleasure, but, Coleridge insists, one must distinguish between
the ultimate and the immediate end.” Similarly, if the immediate aim be the communication
of pleasure, truth may nevertheless be the ultimate end, and while in an ideal society nothing
that was not truth could yield pleasure, in society as it always existed, a literary work might
communicate pleasure has always existed, a literary work might communicate pleasure
without having any concern with “truth, either moral or intellectual”.

“The proper kinds of distinction between different kinds of writing can thus be most
logically discussed in terms of the difference in the immediate aim, or function, of
each.”

The immediate aim of poetry is to give pleasure.

But, “The communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically
composed” – in novels, for example. Do we make these into poems simply by superadding
metre with or without rhyme? To which Coleridge replies by emphasizing a very important
principle: you cannot derive true and permanent pleasure out of any feature or a work which
does not arise naturally from the total nature of that work. “To ‘superadd’ metre is to provide
merely a superficial decorative charm.” “Nothing can permanently please, which does not
contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other
parts must be made consonant with it.” Rhyme and metre involve, “an exact correspondent
recurrence of accent and sound” which in turn “are calculated to excite” a “perpetual and
distinct attention to each part.” “A poem, therefore, must be an organic unity in the sense that,
while we note and appreciate each part, to which the regular recurrence of accent and sound
draw attention, our pleasure in the whole develops cumulatively out of such appreciation,
which is at the same time pleasurable in itself and conductive to an awareness of the total
pattern of the complete poem.”

“Thus a poem differs from a work of scientific prose in having as its immediate object
pleasure and not truth, and it differs from other kinds of writing which have pleasure and not
truth as their immediate object by the fact that in a poem the pleasure we take from the whole
work in compatible with, and even led up to by the pleasure we take in each competent part.”
Therefore, a legitimate poem is a composition, in which the rhyme and the metre bear an
organic relation to the total work; in it, “parts mutually support and explain each other, all in
their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of,
metrical arrangement.”

Thus Coleridge puts an end for good to the age old controversy whether the end of poetry is
instruction or delight or both. Its aim is definitely to give pleasure, and further poetry has its
own distinctive pleasure, pleasure arising from the parts, and this pleasure of the parts
supports and increases the pleasure of the whole.

Not only that, Coleridge also distinguishes a ‘Poem’ from ‘Poetry’. According to Shawcross:

“This distinction between ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’ is not very clear, and instead of defining
poetry he proceeds to describe a poet, and from the poet he proceeds to enumerate the
characteristics of the Imagination.”

This is so because ‘poetry’ for Coleridge is an activity of the ‘poet’s’ mind, and a ‘poem’ is
merely one of the forms of its expression, a verbal expression of that activity, and poetic
activity is basically an activity of the imagination. As David Daiches points out:

“’Poetry’ for Coleridge is a wider category than that of ‘poem’; that is, poetry is a kind
of activity which can be engaged in by painters or philosophers or scientists and is not
confined to those who employ metrical language, or even to those who employ language
of any kind. Poetry, in this large sense, brings, ‘the whole soul of man’, into activity,
with each faculty playing its proper part according to its ‘relative worth and dignity’.”

This takes place whenever the ‘secondary imagination’ comes into operation. Whenever the
synthesizing, the integrating, powers of the secondary imagination are at work, bringing all
aspects of a subject into a complex unity, then poetry in this larger sense results.

“The employment of the secondary imagination is, a poetic activity, and we can see why
Coleridge is led from a discussion of a poem to a discussion of the poet’s activity when we
realize that for him the poet belongs to the larger company of those who are distinguished by
the activity of their imagination.” A poem is always the work of a poet, of a man employing
the secondary imagination and so achieving the harmony of meaning, the reconciliation of
opposites, and so on, which Coleridge so stresses; but a poem is also a specific work of art
produced by a special handling of language.

The harmony and reconciliation resulting from the special kind of creative awareness
achieved by the exercise of the imagination, cannot operate over an extended composition;
one could not sustain that blending and balance, that reconciliation, “of sameness, with
difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the
representative; the sense of novelty and freshens, with old and familiar objects”, and so on,
for an indefinite period. A long poem, therefore, would not be all poetry. Indeed, Coleridge
goes to the extent of saying that there is no such thing as a long poem. Rhyme and metre are
appropriate to a poem considered in the larger sense of poetry, because they are means of
achieving harmonization, reconciliation of opposites, and so forth, which, as we have seen,
are objects of poetry in its widest imaginative meaning.

In a legitimate poem, i.e. in a poem which is poetry in the true sense of the word, there is
perfect unity of form and content. The notion of such organic unity runs through all
Coleridge’s pronouncements of poetry. Rhyme and Metre, are not pleasure superadded for,

“Nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is
so, and not otherwise.”

Nothing that is, “superadded”, merely stuck on for ornament or decoration, can really please
in a poem; every one of its characteristics must grow out of its whole nature and be an
integral part of it. Rhyme and metre are integral to the poem, an essential part of it, because
the pleasure of poetry is a special kind of pleasure, pleasure which results both from the parts
and the whole, and the pleasure arising from the parts augments the pleasure of the whole.
Thyme and metre are essential parts for by their, “recurrence of accent and sound”, they
invite attention to the pleasure of each separate part, and thus add to the pleasure of the
whole. “When, therefore, metre is thus in consonance with the language and content of the
poem, it excites a ‘perpetual and distinct attention to each part’, ‘by the quick reciprocations
of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited’, and carries the reader forward to the end ‘by
the pleasurable’ activity of the mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. There is
no stopping for him on the way, attracted by the parts; nor any hastening forward to the end,
unattracted by the parts. It is one unbroken pleasure trip from the parts to the whole.”

Thus Coleridge's contribution to the theory of poetry is significant. First, he puts an end for
good to the age old controversy between instruction and delight being the end of poetry, and
establishes that pleasure is the end of the poetry, and that poetry has its own distinctive
pleasure. Secondly, he explodes the neo-classical view of poetry as imitation, and shows that
it is an activity of the imagination which in turn is a shaping and unifying power, which
dissolves, dissipates and creates. Thirdly, he shows that in its very nature poetry must differ
from prose. He controverts Wordsworth's view that ‘rhyme and metre’ are merely
superadded, shows that they are an organic part of a poem in the real sense of the word.
 P. B SHELLEY
Shelley as a revolutionary poet
Shelley was a true-born child of the French Revolution. The spirits of that revolution found
its expression in Shelley’s poetry. But as a critic observes:

“The greater rigour of his nature begot in him a passion for reform and a habit for
rebellion which are the inspiration of his longer poems.”

Throughout his life he dreamt of a new society, a new world, absolutely free from tyranny
and exploration. He was a dreamer of dreams and was always at war with the existing world
of complete chaos and confusion. He led a ceaseless war against the existing political, social
and economic institutions.
The Age of Romanticism is one of great turmoil in which Europe faced the greatest and
frightful uprising – the French Revolution. The watchwords of the Revolution were Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity. It stood for the natural rights of man and total abolition of class
distinctions. Its impact on the civilized world was unimaginable. The English people,
embarked on an age long struggle monarchy, found in the watchwords a reflection of their
own ideas and ideals.

In spite of the failure of the French Revolution, the social and political upheaval in France
played a great part in influencing English Romantic Movement. The Revolution was
characterized by three phases which affected English romanticism. These are:

1. The Doctrinaire Phase – The Age of Rousseau

2. The Political Phase – The Age of Robespierre and Danton
3. The Military Phase – The Age of Napoleon

These phases had a deep impact on Shelley’s mind. Shelley was the only passionate singer of
the Revolution. This was not because he looked beyond the instant disaster to a future
reconstruction, but because his imagination was far less concrete than those of his great
contemporaries. Ideas inspired him, not episodes. So he drank in the doctrines of Godwin,
and ignored the tragic perplexities of the actual situations. Compton Rickett is of the view:

“Widely divergent in temperamental and genius as Shelley and his mentor were, they
had this in common – a passion for abstract speculation. Only Godwin expressed them
in ‘Pedestrian’, Shelley gave to them music and colour.”

Shelley’s revolutionary attitude was constructive in the long run. In his preface to “The
Revolt of Islam”, he pointed out that the wanted to kindle in the bottom of his readers a
virtuous enthusiasm for liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which
neither violence nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind. In another work
“Prometheus Unbound” Shelley made his hero arch-rebel and compared him with Satan of
“Paradise Lost”. In the concluding stanza of the song there is a return of belief that Earth
shall share in the Emancipation of man:

Where morning dyes her golden tresses,

Shall soon partake our high emotions;
Kings shall turn pale!
In “Queen Mab”, he propagated the necessity of reform. As a poet, Shelley conceived to
become the inspirer and judge of men. He had a passion for reforming the world which was
the direct outcome of that attitude of mind which the French Revolution had inculcated in
him.

A third idea contained in the original conception of the Revolution was ‘The Return of
Nature’. It held that the essential happiness of man consisted in a simple life in accordance
with Nature. Not that it was peculiar to the Revolution; but that it came as a logical result
from the first idea. It is a well-known fact that when man groans under the heels of tyranny,
corruption, selfish interest and social conventions; when he “lives like worms wriggling in a
dish, away from the torment of intelligence and the uselessness of culture”; he cries, almost
unwillingly:

“Let me go back to the breast of Mother Earth where my own hands can win my own
bread from woods and fields.”

Shelley found in Skylark a symbol of the ideal poet who lives in isolation. He appeals to the
bird:

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then – as I am listening now.

“Ode to the West Wind”, was also written by the poet under the direct influence of the times.
The moral, social and political regeneration seemed to Shelley possible in the atmosphere of
Nature. The ‘West Wind’ seemed to be an expression of this background. Finding his life
miserable, he implores the wind:

Oh, life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Shelley’s revolutionary passion flows from his idealism. All his life he dreamed of an ideal
world without evil, suffering and misery. It would be a world where reason would rule
supreme, and Equality, Liberty and Fraternity wound be no empty words. “Ode to West
Wind” expresses the poet’s intense suffering at the tyranny of life and his great hope in the
bright future of humanity. The poem symbolizes three things; freedom, power and change.
Clutton Brock, his great critic says:

“For Shelley, the forces of nature have as much reality as human beings have for most
of us, and he found the same kind of beauty that we find in the beauty of human beings
in the great works of art.”

Thus the poet finds the “West Wind” a fit symbol to raise and enliven his spirit out of the
depths of desolation, dejection and weariness. Moreover the ‘Wind’ should scatter his
thoughts among the universe:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of his verse,
Scatter, as form an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

It may be said that the Revolution to Shelley was a spiritual awakening, the beginning of a
new life. He traced all evil in life to slavery. Free and natural development is only possible
when he enjoy liberty. And liberty in his opinion was freedom from external restraints.
Freedom was the first watchword of the French Revolution. Thus the Revolution kindled the
imaginative life of Shelley as it did that of Wordsworth. But the fire in Wordsworth
extinguished before long; whereas in Shelley it kept burning all through his brief career and
permeated all through is poetic work. Cazamian said:

“Shelley belongs to that rare species of mankind whom reason and feeling convert
revolutionaries in the flush of youth an who remain so for the rest of their life.”
Shelley's Lyricism
Cazamian detects: “Shelley’s lyricism is incomparable. In no other, do we find the perfect
sureness, the triumphant rapidity of this upward flight, this soaring height, the super
terrestrial quality as well as poignant intensity of the sounds which fall from these aerial
regions. Truly, never was the soul of a poet so spontaneously lyrical”.

Shelley lyrics reflect upon the highest achievement of romantic poetry. The beauty and charm
of his lyric have hardly been surpassed by any English poet. “Ode to the Westwind”, “To a
Skylark”, “To Night” and a number of other lyrics of Shelley are the treasure of English
literature.

Shelley was highly sensitive and imaginative, especially responsive to lyrical impulses. His
poetic genius was lyrical. Milton, Wordsworth, Keats were lyrical too, but Shelley’s lyrical
faculty was paramount. His lyrics are personal as well as impersonal. He deals with love,
nature, future life, regeneration of mankind, etc. His technique is lively and fresh and he
revels in it. The perfection lies in the fusion of imagery and rhythm in a diction.

Spontaneity is one of the remarkable features of Shelley’s lyrical poetry. His lyrics seem to
have been written without the least effort, arising directly from his heart. To Morgan, his
lyrics burst from the nature, the sunshine, the air. Nothing can be more spontaneous than the
following lines, addressed to Skylark.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poets were, thou scorner of ground!

In “Adonais”, he calls himself ‘a dying lamp’, ‘a falling shower’, ‘a breaking

billow’ which indicates the spontaneity of feelings.
There is a great intensity of feelings in Shelley’s lyrics. Emotions, with him, exceed the
normal taints. Normally, he reaches the stage of emotional ecstasy.

A note of sadness runs through most of his lyrics. His best lyrics are cries of pain and
anguish. He appears to be crying like ‘a tired child’, weeping away his life. ‘Our sweetest
songs’, to him, ‘are those that tell of saddest thought’.

Sometimes, he is just melancholic. He discloses his hidden miseries, distractions, sufferings,

tortures in a very painful manner.

Despair is one of the keynotes of his lyrical poetry. He is always longing and craving for the
impossible. There is little peace in his lyrics. ‘To Night’ reflects his crave and longing and
sigh for the night. This longing can also be found in the ‘Song’, in which he calls it
the ‘Spirit of Delight’.

Shelley’s lyrics are absolutely simple, smooth and fluent. This note of simplicity adds to
their beauty. How simple he is in the following lines, taken from “Ode to the Westwind”:
“The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Shelley’s lyrics are surpassingly musical and sweet. Granted that his lyrics are cries of pain,
but these cries are beautifully transformed into loveliness by sweet music. Even his most
pessimistic lyrics produce a sense of delight. It is the sadness of these lyrics which makes
them melodious. ‘To Night’, ‘Ode to the Westwind’, etc. are masterpieces of musical
lyricism.

Many of Shelley’s lyrics are ethereal and abstract. They seem to have been attempted by an
inhabitant of the aerial regions. ‘The Cloud’ and ‘Ode to the Westwind’ particularly
illustrate this ethereal temper. In ‘Ode to the Westwind’, he compares ‘loose
clouds’ to ‘earth’s decaying leaves’, ‘shook from the boughs of Heaven and Ocean’. It is
this kind of poetry which justifies the criticism of Shelley as “an ineffectual angel, beating
in the void on luminous wings in vain”.

Shelley’s lyrics are highly embellished compositions. They abound in ornamental

imagery. ‘The Cloud’, and ‘To a Skylark’ are the most striking examples. He paints a
beautiful picture of the moon, calling it a ‘silver sphere’, its rays ‘beam arrows’ and its
light, ‘intense lamp’.

We find wonderful similes decorating his lyrical poetry. He compares the skylark to a ‘poet
hidden in the light of thought’ and moon to an ‘orbed maiden with white fire laden’.

Shelley’s lyrical poetry has a prophetic note soaked with humanism. In ‘Ode to the
Westwind’ he gives a memorable message of hope to humanity; ‘If Winter comes, can
Spring be far behind?

Though some critics accuse Shelley of ineffectuality due to his ethereality and abstractness,
yet most of the critics are all praise for him on account of his lyricism. Saintbury ranks
Shelley as ‘one of the two or three major lyrical poets in the English tradition’. ‘There is
no poet’, observes Morgan, ‘not even Shakespeare in his lyrics, who has Shelley’s effect of
bird-song pouring and pouring out’.

Shelley’s more sentimental lyrics are not much appreciated today and perhaps he himself
didn’t like them, for none of them was published in his life time. This flaw mars few of his
poems. In majority of poems, he is unsentimental and reasonably careful; rather he combines
passion with intellect.

Shelley was a remarkable lyrical poet. ‘The Cloud’, ‘To a Skylark’, and ‘Ode to the
Westwind’ as lyrical poems are still ‘unsurpassed and almost unchallenged – the supreme
lyrics – of the sky’.
Shelley's Abstractness & Visionary Idealism
Shelley’s poetry is regarded as abstract, lacking the note of high seriousness and having
nothing solid and substantial. That’s why Mathew Arnold referred to Shelley as “a beautiful
and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. It is alleged that he
cherishes fanciful ideals, weaves dreams and does not deal with real life.

In fact, Shelley does not get raw material from the day to day experiences of life as Byron or
Wordsworth does, rather he obtains it from:

i- Mental process (Idealistic revolution)

ii- Wide study (Plato, Greek, Latin)
iii- Visions of future (The time of change)
iv- Dreams of the past (Past memories)

Primarily, he draws his raw material from these four sources and not from the rest world
around. That’s why he is called a visionary idealist. Unmindful of the bitter realities of the
woeful world, he dreams of a heavenly world, free from all evil. Arnold thinks, “Shelley is a
vision of beauty, availing nothing and affecting nothing”.

It is true that Shelley’s poetry relating to love, beauty, nature and human life is very much
near visionary picture. The reason is that throughout his life he remained in the grip of such
visions. This affected his poetry as well. It is said that Shelley’s poetry is substanceless and
almost a fabric of vision. He has ghostly and dreamy imagery in his poems. Despite this, no
vagueness of effect or intellectual mistakenness involve his poetry. Outlines may be faint, but
they are unmistakable.

We may not shun from the fact that Shelley was an idealist and a prophet. He conjured up
idealistic pictures of the gracious future of mankind. He was a pessimist, rather he believed in
the regeneration and reconstruction of mankind with equality, justice, peace and social
brotherhood. He had a dream that the present odd world would disappear and a new world of
glory would dawn. “Ode to the West Wind” is both idealistic and prophetic in which he is
confident that, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind”. In “Queen Mab” he hopes
for new world and desires change. In “Prometheus Unbound” the poet hopes that humanity
will rise from the stage of sufferings and miseries. Needless to mention, that the hope of the
poet has gradually been realized. His ideals, which once looked visionary, now do have a
practical shape. Many of his dreams have either come true or are in the process of being
realized.

Visionary idealist, he was, yes to say, that he as ineffectual, divorced from reality, would be
doing injustice to him. Though some of his visions were phantoms, yet he dealt with
democracy, science and spirituality. He presented the struggle of the miserable and the
downtrodden in hostile world. He was a revolutionary poet. He revolted against prejudices,
customs, ignorance, even against dogmatic religion. He found religion in many cases, serving
as an instrument of suppressing Man’s freedom and as an alloy of political despotism. Being
a lover of liberty and freedom, he was a conformed rebel against all the existing institutions,
conventions and traditions. The love of liberty and hatred of oppression made him to revolt
against all the established institutions, political, moral, social etc. “Queen Mab”, “The
Revolt of Islam”, “Prometheus Unbound” etc. stand testimony to it.

So, we cannot say that Shelley’s poetry was without substance. His visions were not of a mad
man rather that of a person, devoted to the regeneration of mankind in a better world to come.
His visions are of a sane and right minded person who thought good of mankind at heart. His
visions are those of an idealist and a prophet, dissatisfied with the real world.
In “Prometheus Unbound” this vision is paramount. In “Ode to the West Wind” he is
optimistic about future. In “Hellas” he hopes that humanity will rise from the shape of
suffering and miseries.

To Byron, Shelley was the best and the least selfish man he ever came across. He is not
ineffectual, for he broke away from customs, traditions, conventions, sham morality and
religion. He was a rebel and a reformer. He tried to reform by giving an idealized picture of
the world. The conservative readers of his age could not accept his reform, however, today he
is considered as a prophet and idealist – a man for advance of his time. Shelley interprets the
longings and aspirations of his age. He reflects strive for freedom and justice. His prophecies
are coming true. Arnold’s estimation is, therefore, unjust. He is, no doubt, beautiful, but
not “ineffectual”. He is, in fact, a prophet of a new faith. Eliot has leveled upon him the
charge of adolescence and Lewis and Tate, that of defective workmanship. Both are extreme
views.

Daiches, giving a balanced view, points pout that the charge of adolescence cannot be
completely ruled out because of hysteria, self-pity and emotionally, but there is poet of
conviction in his best work. Byron preached liberty, but his approach was emotional.
Wordsworth was a thinker, but lacked passion and Shelley, however, was that great poet who
combined passion with intellect
Shelley's Love For Nature
Love for Nature is one of the prerequisites of all the Romantics and Shelley is no exception.
Love for Nature is one of the key-notes of his poetry. His poetry abounds in Nature
imagery. ‘On Love’ reflects colourful Nature imagery and glorification of Nature. He shows
fruition and fulfillment in his poems. Other poems e.g. ‘A Dream of the Unknown’, ‘Ode to
the Westwind’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘To Skylark’, ‘To the Moon’, etc. are remarkable poems of
Nature in which we find a profusion of Nature.

Like Wordsworth, Shelley believes that Nature exercises a healing influence on man’s
personality. He finds solace and comfort in Nature and feels its soothing influence on his
heart.

Shelley, in his poetry, appears as a pantheist too. In fact, his attitude towards Nature is
analogous to that of Wordsworth, who, greatly influenced Shelly. However, as against
Wordsworth, who linked the spirit in Nature with God, Shelley, on the other hand, linked it
and identified it with love, for he was an atheist and a skeptic. He believes that this
spirit ‘wields the world with never wearied love’.

“Adonais” reflects the most striking examples of Shelley’s pantheism. At an occasion, he

thinks that Keats ‘is made one with Nature’ for the power, moving in Nature. Nature’s spirit
is eternal. ‘The one remains, many change and pass’. He agrees that there is some
intelligence controlling Nature. In fact, he fuses the platonic philosophy of love with
pantheism. He finds Nature alive, capable of feeling and thinking like a human organism.
Wordsworth equates it with God, Shelley with love.

Shelley loved the indefinite and the changeful in Nature. He presents the changing and
indefinite moods of Nature e.g. clouds, wind, lightening etc. ‘Ode to the Westwind’ reflects
this particular trend of Shelley, wherein, he shows the West Wind driving the dead leaves,
scattering the living seeds, awakening the Mediterranean and making the sea-plants feel its
force. His poetry lacks pictorial definiteness and, often, his Nature description is clothed in
mist. As compared with Coleridge, Wordsworth etc. he is the least pictorial. It is partly due to
the abstract imagery and partly, owing to swift succession of similes which blur the picture.
Yet, sometimes, his image is definitely concrete. The picture of the blue Mediterranean,
lulled to sleep by his crystalline streams and awakened by Westwind is virtually remarkable
and substantial.

Despite his pantheistic attitude, Shelley conceives every object of Nature as possessing
a distinct individuality of its own, too, though he believes that the spirit of love unites the
whole universe, including Nature, yet he treats all the natural objects as distinguishable
entities. The sun, the moon, the stars, the rainbow – all have been treated as separate beings.
This capacity of individualizing the separate forces for Nature is termed as Shelley’s myth
making power which is best illustrated in “Ode to the Westwind”. He gives the West Wind,
the ocean an independent life and personalities. He presents the Mediterranean sleeping and
then being awakened by the West Wind, just like a human body.
The ancient Greek gave human attributes to the natural objects whom they personified.
Shelley, too, personifies them, but he retains their true characteristics. He personifies the
West wind ad the Mediterranean, but both remains wind and ocean. They have not been
endowed with human qualities. He has almost scientific attitude towards the objects of
Nature. Whatever he says is scientifically true. The Westwind virtually drives the dead leaves
and scatters the seeds to be grown in this wind; the sea plants undoubtedly feel the destructive
effects of the strong Westwind. Likewise, clouds do bring rain, dew-drops, snow, lightening,
thunder etc. He observes the natural phenomenon with a scientific eye, though the description
remains highly imaginative.

Time and again, Shelley’s Nature description has a touch of optimism having all the
sufferings, tortures, miseries of the world. In “Ode to the Westwind”, he hopes for the best
and is confident that “If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?” His nature treatment is
multidimensional; scientific, philosophic, intellectual, mythical and of course human. He is a
marvelous poet of Nature.
Shelley: A Poet Of Love
Shelley is primarily a poet of love, as Keats is of beauty. The story of his life is, in fact, a
story of love. But it has to be remembered that Shelley as a love poet is a complex
phenomenon. For him love, is not the name of one particular feeling or thing. It is tinged with
many colours. It is sexual love, Platonic love, cosmic energy and love of humanity. Shelley
devoted his brief life to the pursuit of love. Yearning for perfect Love, Beauty and Liberty is
keynote of Shelley’s poetry. He considers love a regenerating power, which is closely bound
up with his conception of human perfectibility.

Shelley’s attitude of love was greatly influence by the teachings of Plato. According to Plato,
beauty has such as enormous power over men because they have previously beheld it in a
heaven and since, sight is the keenest of bodily senses. Shelley looked upon love that is, by
no means, a simple phenomenon. In his essay, ‘A Defense of Poetry’, he has defended this
concept as:

“This is the bond and connection and the sanction that connects not only man with man,
but with everything, which exists in man.”

Shelley’s concept of ideal love finds it best expression in “Epipsychidion”. No poet felt
deeply the dynamic influence of love in moulding human destiny; none realized utterly the
triviality of life devoid of love; yet Shelley’s women are merely lovely wraiths that greet us
to the strains of delicious music.

“See where she stands! A mortal shape induced

With love and life and light and deity,”

From love as sexual passion, Shelley proceeds to look at love as Plato looked at it. Here his
concept of love is mainly Platonic, though the view of Godwin on free love also had a
profound influence on him. In “Phaedrus”, Plato observes that Love and Beauty are nothing
concrete but abstract and ideal. Thus love is regarded as a kind of madness.

Plato further held that every object of Nature is governed by love and are forever trying to
unite them with the spirit of divine love diffused through the universe. Shelley’s conception
of Platonic idealism finds its vent in the following verses.

“Nothing in world is single;

All things by a law divine;
In one spirit meet and mingle,
Why not I with thine?”

Shelley devoted his whole life not to the pursuit of physical but to the ideal Love and Beauty
which he yeaned for all his life. In this respect, he has beautifully described in “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty”:

“Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon”
Love to Plato is also an aspiration towards the good and the beautiful. In “Prometheus
Unbound”, Shelley comes very close to the thinking of Plato. Prometheus exercised the
freedom of the pursuit of good. And Demogorgan’s statement that Love is free is the only
most philosophic statement. Only Love is exempt. Only love is free. Thus, love in
Prometheus represents the more general Platonic notion, the notion of all things good and
beautiful:

“How glorious art though Earth! And if thou be

---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
I could fall down and worship that and thee.”

In his later years Shelley seems to have been moving away from the way of Affirmation
towards of Rejection, towards the Rejection of the Image of Woman. He never lost his basic
faith, but he laid more stress that before on the transcendent of that which he sought. His
desire is:

“The desire of the moth for the star,

Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion of something afar,
From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Like Plato Shelley believes that Love is the source of the greatest benefits for both the lover
and the beloved since they encouraged each other in the practice of virtue. Love implants the
sense of honour and dishonour and therefore impels to all noble deeds.

This is how Shelley looked at love. Though his concept of love is severely criticized by so
many critics who contend that though intellectually mature, Shelley remained perhaps in
some ways emotionally adolescent. His whole approach to love is not only unhealthy but his
ideals, his visions, are only whims conceived in his own mind. But we should not forget that
Shelley has his won philosophy of love, which was, to him, something higher and nobler than
a mere sexual feeling, for him it was a perfection of all that is good and noble in the world.
Shelley: A Revolutionary Poet
Shelley was a true-born child of the French Revolution. The spirits of that revolution found
its expression in Shelley’s poetry. But as a critic observes:

“The greater rigour of his nature begot in him a passion for reform and a habit for
rebellion which are the inspiration of his longer poems.”

Throughout his life he dreamt of a new society, a new world, absolutely free from tyranny
and exploration. He was a dreamer of dreams and was always at war with the existing world
of complete chaos and confusion. He led a ceaseless war against the existing political, social
and economic institutions.

The Age of Romanticism is one of great turmoil in which Europe faced the greatest and
frightful uprising – the French Revolution. The watchwords of the Revolution were Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity. It stood for the natural rights of man and total abolition of class
distinctions. Its impact on the civilized world was unimaginable. The English people,
embarked on an age long struggle monarchy, found in the watchwords a reflection of their
own ideas and ideals.

In spite of the failure of the French Revolution, the social and political upheaval in France
played a great part in influencing English Romantic Movement. The Revolution was
characterized by three phases which affected English romanticism. These are:

1.The Doctrinaire Phase – The Age of Rousseau

2.The Political Phase – The Age of Robespierre and Danton
3.The Military Phase – The Age of Napoleon

These phases had a deep impact on Shelley’s mind. Shelley was the only passionate singer of
the Revolution. This was not because he looked beyond the instant disaster to a future
reconstruction, but because his imagination was far less concrete than those of his great
contemporaries. Ideas inspired him, not episodes. So he drank in the doctrines of Godwin,
and ignored the tragic perplexities of the actual situations. Compton Rickett is of the view:

“Widely divergent in temperamental and genius as Shelley and his mentor were, they
had this in common – a passion for abstract speculation. Only Godwin expressed them
in ‘Pedestrian’, Shelley gave to them music and colour.”

Shelley’s revolutionary attitude was constructive in the long run. In his preface to “The
Revolt of Islam”, he pointed out that the wanted to kindle in the bottom of his readers a
virtuous enthusiasm for liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which
neither violence nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind. In another
work “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley made his hero arch-rebel and compared him with
Satan of “Paradise Lost”. In the concluding stanza of the song there is a return of belief that
Earth shall share in the Emancipation of man:

Where morning dyes her golden tresses,

Shall soon partake our high emotions;
Kings shall turn pale!

In “Queen Mab”, he propagated the necessity of reform. As a poet, Shelley conceived to

become the inspirer and judge of men. He had a passion for reforming the world which was
the direct outcome of that attitude of mind which the French Revolution had inculcated in
him.

A third idea contained in the original conception of the Revolution was ‘The Return of
Nature’. It held that the essential happiness of man consisted in a simple life in accordance
with Nature. Not that it was peculiar to the Revolution; but that it came as a logical result
from the first idea. It is a well-known fact that when man groans under the heels of tyranny,
corruption, selfish interest and social conventions; when he “lives like worms wriggling in a
dish, away from the torment of intelligence and the uselessness of culture”; he cries,
almost unwillingly:

“Let me go back to the breast of Mother Earth where my own hands can win my own
bread from woods and fields.”

Shelley found in Skylark a symbol of the ideal poet who lives in isolation. He appeals to the
bird:

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then – as I am listening now.

“Ode to the West Wind”, was also written by the poet under the direct influence of the
times. The moral, social and political regeneration seemed to Shelley possible in the
atmosphere of Nature. The ‘West Wind’ seemed to be an expression of this background.
Finding his life miserable, he implores the wind:

Oh, life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Shelley’s revolutionary passion flows from his idealism. All his life he dreamed of an ideal
world without evil, suffering and misery. It would be a world where reason would rule
supreme, and Equality, Liberty and Fraternity wound be no empty words. “Ode to West
Wind” expresses the poet’s intense suffering at the tyranny of life and his great hope in the
bright future of humanity. The poem symbolizes three things; freedom, power and change.
Clutton Brock, his great critic says:

“For Shelley, the forces of nature have as much reality as human beings have for most
of us, and he found the same kind of beauty that we find in the beauty of human beings
in the great works of art.”

Thus the poet finds the “West Wind” a fit symbol to raise and enliven his spirit out of the
depths of desolation, dejection and weariness. Moreover the ‘Wind’ should scatter his
thoughts among the universe:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of his verse,
Scatter, as form an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

It may be said that the Revolution to Shelley was a spiritual awakening, the beginning of a
new life. He traced all evil in life to slavery. Free and natural development is only possible
when he enjoy liberty. And liberty in his opinion was freedom from external restraints.
Freedom was the first watchword of the French Revolution. Thus the Revolution kindled the
imaginative life of Shelley as it did that of Wordsworth. But the fire in Wordsworth
extinguished before long; whereas in Shelley it kept burning all through his brief career and
permeated all through is poetic work. Cazamian said:

“Shelley belongs to that rare species of mankind whom reason and feeling convert
revolutionaries in the flush of youth an who remain so for the rest of their life.”