Reform was to go on, by stages, until Britain acquired universal adult suffrage in 1928.
'THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE'
Writers working in the period 1785?1830 did not think of themselves as 'Romantic'; the word was not applied until half a century later, by English historians. Contemporary reviewers treated them as independent individuals, or else grouped them (often maliciously, but with some basis in fact) into a number of separate schools: the 'Lake School' of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey; the 'Cockney School,' a derogatory term for the Londoners Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and associated writers, including Keats; and the 'Satanic School' of Percy Shelley, Ryron, and their followers.
Many writers, however, felt that there was something distinctive about their time?not a shared doctrine or literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some of them called 'the spirit of the age.' They had the sense that (as Keats wrote) 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and that there was evidence of the experimental boldness that marks a literary renaissance. In his 'Defence of Poetry' Shelley claimed that the literature of the age 'has arisen as it were from a new birth,' and that 'an electric life
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INTRODUCTION /
burns' within the words of its best writers, 'less their spirit than the spirit of the age.' He explained this spirit as an accompaniment of revolution, and others agreed. Francis Jeffrey, the foremost conservative reviewer of the day, connected 'the revolution in our literature' with 'the agitations of the French Revolution, and the discussions as well as the hopes and terrors to which it gave occasion.' Hazlitt, who devoted a series of essays entitled The S-pirit of the Age to assessing his contemporaries, maintained that the new poetry of the school of Wordsworth 'had its origin in the French Revolution.'
The imagination of many Romantic-period writers was preoccupied with revolution, and from that fact and idea they derived the framework that enabled them to think of themselves as inhabiting a distinctive period in history. The deep familiarity that many late-eighteenth-century Englishmen and -women had with the prophetic writings of the Bible contributed from the start to their readiness to attribute a tremendous significance to the political transformations set in motion in 1789. Religious belief predisposed many to view these convulsions as something more than local historical events and to cast them instead as harbingers of a new age in the history of all human beings. Seeing the hand of God in the events in France and understanding those events as the fulfillment of prophecies of the coming millennium came easily to figures such as Barbauld, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and, above all, Blake: all were affiliated with the traditions of radical Protestant Dissent, in which accounts of the imminence of the Apocalypse and the coming of the Kingdom of God had long been central. A quarter-century later, their millenarian interpretation of the Revolution would be recapitulated by radical writers such as Percy Shelley and Hazlitt, who, though they tended to place their faith in notions of progress and the diffusion of knowledge and tended to identify a rational citizenry and not God as the moving force of history, were just as convinced as their predecessors were that the Revolution had marked human- ity's chance to start history over again (a chance that had been lost but was perhaps recoverable).
Another method that writers of this period took when they sought to salvage the millennial hopes that had, for many, been dashed by the bloodshed of the Terror involved granting a crucial role to the creative imagination. Some writers rethought apocalyptic transformation so that it no longer depended on the political action of collective humanity but depended instead (in a shift from the external to the internal) on the individual consciousness. The new heaven and earth promised in the prophecies could, in this account, be gained by the individual who had achieved a new, spiritualized, and visionary way of seeing. An apocalypse of the imagination could liberate the individual from time, from what Blake called the 'mind-forg'd manacles' of imprisoning orthodoxies and from what Percy Shelley called 'the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions.'
Wordsworth, whose formulations of this notion of a revolution in imagination would prove immensely influential, wrote in The Prelude the classic description of the spirit of the early 1790s. 'Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, / France standing on top of the golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again' (6.340?42). 'Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth, / The beauty wore of promise' (6.117?18). Something of this sense of possibility and anticipation of spiritual regeneration (captured in that phrase 'born again') survived the disenchantment with politics that Wordsworth experienced later in the decade. His sense of the emancipatory opportunities
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8 / THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
brought in by the new historical moment carried over to the year 1797, when, working in tandem, he and Coleridge revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. The product of their exuberant daily discussions was the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.
POETIC THEORY AND POETIC PRACTICE
Wordsworth undertook to justify those poems by means of a critical manifesto, or statement of poetic principles, which appeared first as a short Advertisement in the original Lyrical Ballads and then as an extended Preface to the second edition in 1800, which he enlarged still further in the third edition of 1802. In it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those writers of the eighteenth century who, in his view, had imposed on poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural expression. Many of Wordsworth's later critical writings were attempts to clarify, buttress, or qualify points made in this first declaration. Coleridge said that the Preface was 'half a child of my own brain'; and although he developed doubts about some of Wordsworth's unguarded statements, he did not question the Tightness of Wordsworth's attempt to overthrow the reigning tradition. Of course, many writers in eighteenth-century England had anticipated Wordsworth's attempt, as well as the definitions of the 'authentic' language of poetry it assumed. Far from unprecedented, efforts to displace the authority of a poet such as Pope can be dated back to only a few years after Pope's death in 1744; by 1800 readers were accustomed to hear, for instance, that Pope's propensities for satire had derailed true poetry by elevating wit over feeling. Moreover, the last half of the eighteenth century, a time when philosophers and moralists highlighted in new ways the role that emotional sensitivity ('sensibility') plays in mental and social life, had seen the emergence of many of the critical concepts, as well as a number of the poetic subjects and forms, that later would
be exploited by Wordsworth and his contemporaries.
Wordsworth's Preface nevertheless deserves its reputation as a turning point in literary history, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory, and made them the rationale for his own achievements. We can safely use concepts in the Preface as points of departure for a survey of some of the distinctive elements in the poetry of the Romantic period? especially if we bear in mind that during this era of revolution definitions of good poetry, like definitions of the good society, were sure to create as much contention as consensus.
The Concept of the Poet and the Poem
Seeking a stable foundation on which social institutions might be constructed, eighteenth-century British
