French Revolution and the Romantic Poets

French Revolution and the Romantic Poets

The French Revolution bought to Europe the hope of political freedom and social reconstruction. Though the hope was dashed to the ground with the accession to power of Napoleon, its place was taken by the enthusiasm of the struggle of the nations against old regimes. Wordsworth was deeply saturated with the dogmas of the French Revolution. The Prelude analyses as well as communicates the progress of Wordsworth‘s political sympathies.

The French Revolution stirred in him republican sympathies, which were strengthened by his visits to France. Wordsworth records the feelings of those days:

Bliss was it in those days to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were intimate friends. Coleridge like Wordsworth went through a phase or revolutionary ardour. All his poetical characteristics were deeply affected by his age. The French Revolution disillusioned him and he diverted his attention to spiritual idealism which provided him mental satisfaction. The daring of a personal inspiration, and that of a fresh-created language, came to him at the same time and this is the hour when his social zeal, his hopes for mankind, freed from the hope of any immediate realization, are transformed into a spiritual idealism. Although Byron did not express

the French Revolution in his works, yet he imbibed the revolutionary spirit in its action against old social conventions. He simply inherited the revolutionary aspirations which were cherished by Wordsworth and Coleridge and then later on rejected by them because of the violence of the Region of Terror. Byron excelled most other poets of England in his being one of the supreme poets of the revolution and liberty. Shelley also became the most melodious singer of the Revolution and the poet of revolutionary idealism. He probed into the springs of Godwinian philosophy. He was essentially the poet of the Future. ―His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance, his impatience of control for self and others, his vivid logical sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme opinions.

Growth and Progress in Literature

Literature as a whole grows and changes from generation to generation. It is not static but dynamic. It means that each age has its own particular point of interest and its own particular way of thinking and feeling about things. So the literature which it produces is governed by certain prevailing tastes. These tastes last for a time only. The tastes of one age are sure to differ and often is found to differ enormously from those of another [4]. We all know that there was no public to enjoy the same kind of poetry in Pope’s day as in Spenser’s, or in Scott’s day as in Pope‘s. In Spenser’s day, there was boundless enthusiasm for The Farerie Queene; in Pope‘s for the Essays of Man; in Scott‘s for the Lady of the Lake.

Thus, for example, one of the principal forces behind the English literature of the Elizabethan era was the immense enthusiasm for the Greek and Latin classics which come with what we call the Renaissance. Our writers and readers alike were under the powerful spell of Italian literature during the same period, under that of French literature at the end of seventeenth century, under that of German Literature a hundred years later. The Reformation, Puritanism, the French Revolution, the enormous progress of science during the nineteenth century: it is enough to mention these to show the intimate connection between the story of literature and general history.