The Supernatural, the Romance, and Psychological Extremes
In most of his poems, Coleridge, like Wordsworth, dealt with everyday things, and in 'Frost at Midnight' he showed how well he too could achieve the effect of wonder in the familiar. But Coleridge tells us in Biographia Literaria that, according to the division of labor that organized their collaboration on Lyrical Ballads, his assignment was to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and of the ordinary course of events: in his poems 'the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural.' And in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christahel, and 'Kubla Khan,' Coleridge opened up to modern poetry a realm of mystery and magic. Stories of bewitchings, hauntings, and possession?-shaped by antiquated treatises on demonology, folklore, and Gothic novels?supplied him with the means of impressing upon readers a sense of occult powers and unknown modes of being.
Materials like these were often grouped together under the rubric 'romance,' a term that would some time after the fact give the 'Romantic' period its name. On the one hand romances were writings that turned, in their quest for settings conducive to supernatural happenings, to 'strange fits of passion' and strange adventures, to distant pasts, faraway places, or both? Keats's 'perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn' or the China of 'Kubla Khan.' On the other hand romance also named a homegrown, native tradition of literature, made unfamiliar and alien by the passage of time. For many authors, starting with Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1764) began the tradition of Gothic fiction, writing under the banner of romance meant reclaiming their national birthright: a literature of untrammeled imagination? associated, above all, with Spenser and the Shakespeare of fairy magic and witchcraft?that had been forced underground by the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and refinement. Byron negotiated between romance's two sets of associations in Childe Harold, having his hero travel in far-off Albania
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and become entranced by the inhabitants' savage songs, but also giving the poem the subtitle 'A Romaunt' (an archaic spelling of romance) and writing it in Spenserian stanzas. This was the same stanzaic form, neglected for much of the eighteenth century, that Keats drew on for The Eve of St. Agnes, the poem in which he proved himself a master of that Romantic mode that establishes a medieval setting for events that violate our sense of realism and the natural order. The Romantic period's 'medieval revival' was also promoted by women: Robinson, for instance (author of 'Old English,' 'Monkish,' and 'Gothic' Tales), as well as Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Joanna Baillie, and others, women who often matched the arch-medievalist Sir Walter Scott in the historical learning they brought to their compositions.
The 'addition of strangeness to beauty' that Walter Pater near the end of the nineteenth century would identify as a key Romantic tendency is seen not only in this concern with the exotic and archaic landscapes of romance, but also in the Romantic interest in the mysteries of mental life and determination to investigate psychological extremes. Wordsworth explored visionary states of consciousness that are common among children but violate the categories of adult judgment. Coleridge and De Quincey shared an interest in dreams and nightmares and in the altered consciousness they experienced under their addiction to opium. In his odes as in the quasi-medieval 'ballad' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' Keats recorded strange mixtures of pleasure and pain with extraordinary sensitivity, pondering the destructive aspects of sexuality and the erotic quality of the longing for death. And Byron made repeated use of the fascination of the forbidden and the appeal of the terrifying yet seductive Satanic hero.
There were, of course, writers who resisted these poetic engagements with fantasized landscapes and strange passions. Significant dissent came from women, who, given accounts of their sex as especially susceptible to the delusions of romantic love, had particular reason to continue the Enlightenment program and promote the rational regulation of emotion. Barbauld wrote a poem gently advising the young Coleridge not to prolong his stay in the 'fairy bower' of romance but to engage actively with the world as it is. Often satirical when she assesses characters who imagine themselves the pitiable victims of their own powerful feelings, Jane Austen had her heroine in Persuasion, while conversing with a melancholy, Byron-reading young man, caution him against overindulgence in Byron's 'impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony' and 'prescribe' to him a 'larger allowance of prose in his daily study.' And yet this heroine, having 'been forced into prudence in her youth,' has 'learned romance as she grew older.' The reversal of the sequence that usually orders the story line of female socialization suggests a receptivity to romance's allure that links even Austen to the spirit of the age.
Individualism and Alienation
Another feature of Byron's poetry that attracted notice and, in some quarters, censure was its insistence on his or his hero's self-sufficiency. Hazlitt, for instance, borrowed lines from Shakespeare's Coriolanus to object to Byron's habit of spurning human connection '[a]s if a man were author of himself, / And owned no other kin.' The audacious individualism that Hazlitt questions here (a questioning that he carries on in part by enacting his own reliance on others and supplementing his words with Shakespeare's) was, however, central to the celebrations of creativity occupying many Romantic-period writers:
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indeed, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (as if anticipating and preemptively defying Hazlitt) had already characterized his poetic experimentation as an exercise in artistic self-sufficiency. The Preface has been read as a document in which Wordsworth, proving himself a self-made man, arranges for his disinheritance?arranges to cut himself off, he says, 'from a large portion of the phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets.' The German philosophers who generated many of the characteristic ideas of European Romanticism had likewise developed an account of how individuals might author and create themselves. In the work of Kant and others, the human mind was described as creating the universe it perceived and so creating its own experience. Mind is 'not passive,' Kant's admirer Coleridge wrote, but 'made in God's image, and that too in the sublimest sense?the Image of the Creator.' And Wordsworth declared in The Prelude that the individual mind 'Doth, like an Agent of the one great Mind, / Create, creator and receiver both.' The Romantic period, the epoch of free enterprise, imperial expansion, and boundless revolutionary hope, was also an epoch of individualism in which philosophers and poets alike put an extraordinarily high estimate on human potentialities and powers.
In representing this expanded scope for individual initiative, much poetry of the period redefined heroism and made a ceaseless striving for the unattainable its crucial element. Viewed by moralists of previous ages as sin or lamentable error, longings that can never be satisfied?in Percy Shelley's phrase, 'the desire of the moth for a star'?came to be revalued as the glory of human nature. 'Less than everything,' Blake announced, 'cannot satisfy man.' Discussions of the nature of art developed similarly. The German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel's proposal that poetry 'should forever be becoming and never be perfected' supplied a way to understand the unfinished, 'fragment' poems of the period (Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' most famously) not as failures but instead as confirmations that the most poetic poetry was defined as much by what was absent as by what was present: the poem, in this understanding, was a fragmentary trace of an original conception that was too grand ever to be fully realized. This defiant attitude toward limits also made many writers impatient with the conceptions of literary genre they inherited from the past. The result was that, creating new genres from old, they produced an astonishing variety of hybrid forms constructed on fresh principles of organization and style: 'elegiac sonnets,' 'lyrical ballads,' the poetic autobiography of The Prelude, Percy Shelley's 'lyric drama' of cosmic reach, Prometheus Unbound, and (in the field
