Romantic Poetry

Classical pastoral aims at mystifying environmental history and experience. It also offers a space in which the feeling of alienation from nature can be -restore-d. The development and reciprocity of ecologically inclined natural poetry in the romantic era, had been namely associated with William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It traces how romantic poets gave up writing ‘conversation’ poems while devoting much of their efforts to defending a transcendental insight of romantic proto-ecological nature poetry.
Accordingly, what was so especial and new about ecologically inclined romantic poetry and what additions have these poets presented to the field in general?
To my purposes, let us begin with a general overview of romantic poetry and some of its basic tenets. Most romantics believe in a proto-ecological thought and attitude towards the natural world, that humans are an integral part of nature s intricate web of connections. They treated nature ethically and philosophically as a way to self-realization and the source of well-being, beauty, and moral perfection. By being committed to ‘subjectivity’, romantics perceived nature as the ground of the struggle between Subject and Object. In other words, romantics focused on humanity s alienation from nature and the need to relocate the human to a wider place of intimate and interacting relationships with other life forms. This essay is going to tackle the three following poems: ‘‘Lines Left Upon a Seat’’, ‘‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’’, and ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats respectively.
In the first edition of Lyrical ballads in 1798, the first poem is written by William Wordsworth and had its longest title: ‘‘Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which Stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, yet Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’’. And it was soon followed by ‘‘the Nightingale’’: A Conversation Poem by Samuel Coleridge. What is so especial about Wordsworth is that he allowed natural scenes, to speak to readers -dir-ectly, instead of presenting scenes inundated by allegorical and rhetorical devices:
‘Lines Left Upon a Seat’ marks the breakthrough point at which a distinctive new form emerges out of the combining of epigram (this source suggested by the cumbersome title), the nature in-script-ion, and the votive epitaph—which distinguishes the genus loci, the divine spirit, of a particular place…, Wordsworth in his new kind of nature poetry replaces rhyme with blank verse. This ‘‘opening’’ of form helped him to dissolve the boundary between poet and natural world that had been emphasized by elaborate artifices in epigrammatic and epitaphic verse. (68)
This new view and imagination provided the poet with a kind of personal and close interaction with nature. Wordsworth s nature represents a shrine that can never be endangered. It is adulated for its beauty and indomitable greatness. As opposed to real landscape, nature is envisaged through picturesque and sublime imageries. The personifying features shown in this poem represent a ‘speaking’ landscape, which assigns human traits and feelings to natural elements and phenomena. This could be seen in the following verses:
Yet, if the wind breathes soft, the curling waves,
That break against the shore, shall lully thy mind
By one soft impulse saved from vacancy.
The lyrics here demonstrate the ability to feel natural phenomena as humanized events, and the capacity of human beings to feel appealing sensations despite the loneliness of the setting-;- it is without ‘‘sparkling rivulet’’´-or-‘‘verdant herb’’, and the ‘‘barren boughs’’ abandoned by bees. This Wordsworthian nature therefore revolutionizes and turns upside down the elegiac mode dominant in the traditional epitaphic and in-script-ive forms. Wordsworth pays a great homage to the man ‘‘of no common soul’’ who constructed the seat that generates the verses. However, the poem presents him as a pejorative model, highly ravaged by exasperating narcissism. Therefore, he has relied upon ‘‘visionary views’’ and perished disadvantageously, and hence:
Who feels contempt
For and living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used.
The verses refer to a moral suicide caused by the victim s relentlessness against the healing impact offered by the natural world. The ethical dimension that can be apprehended here is that the human being must never become self-contemptous and that the most flivorous and minor commonpalce neglected by most of us is naturally deserving regard and respect as equally as an individual deserves consideration and esteem, and that s precisely the fundamental romantic political commitment -;- It is based on the fact that we are not alienated, only through vile narcissism we alienate ourselves and reject the full reciprocity with the natural world.
Samuel Coleridge’s ‘‘The Nightingale’’ affirmatively establishes the softness and tacit yield of the lyric of Wordsworth through soundly felt and reciprocal poetry:
And hark! the Nightingale begins its song,
‘‘Most musical, most melancholy’’ Bird!
A melancholy Bird? O idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering Man, whose heart was pierc d
With the rememebrance of a grievous wrong ,
´-or-slow distemper of neglected love,
(And so poor Wretch! fill d all things with himself
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrows) heand such as he
First nam d these notes a melancholy strain,
And many a poet echoes and conceit,…
However, a true poet, he tells us, can with his song ‘‘make all nature lovelier, and itself / Be lov d, like nature!’’. Yet in his mind, Coleridge regrets traditional preconceptions and unrealistic experiences of nature that are still dominating poetic imagination:
And youths and maidens most poetical
Who lose the deep’ning twilights of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still
Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs
O er Philomela’s pity-pleading strains.
The poet therefore informs us that he has learned a new conviction and reached an absolute truth, that ‘‘In nature there is nothing melancholy’’, and that ‘‘Nature s sweet voices’’ are ‘‘lways full of love / And joyance!’’. Coleridge in these passages alters his old theorizing by following Wordsworth into naturally luring psychological complexities of experential relationship with nature based on reception and projection. The poem informs us that one ravages the truths of natural being when one submits to external natural narcissistic feelings. However, human beings appreciate the beauty and healing qualities that nature offers only if they give it their best and most vehement feelings. ‘‘The Nightingale’’ therefore categorizes itself as a contradiction to Wordsworthian reciprocity, ‘‘claiming that one beneficently gives is in fact a return of what one has already received from natural phenomena by attending and attuning oneself to their most subtle and life-enhancing qualities’’.
John Keats’ ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ was to a great extent inspired by Colerdge s poem. Traditionally the most formal of lyrics, the poem starts by a lucid joy and happiness-;- ‘‘By being too happy in thine happiness’’. Yet he rapidly moves away from Wordsworthian-Coleridgean softness towards immediate darkness and despondency:
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan-;-
Darkling I listen-;- and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath-;-
For Keats, the process here is that sorrow enters the world with the human being s recognition of his´-or-her own separation from natural joyance. It elucidates humanity s self-consciousness as separate from the natural world. For these reasons, we can imagine what the bird can never get to know, not just our physical deaths, ‘‘to thy high requiem become a sod’’, but even the failing to acknowledge the achievements of the imagination that ensure our delights and aspirations.
In short, romantic poetry is not about nature, it is about human alienation and distance from the natural world from which Man has emereged. It aims at redefining environmental history and experience. It also suggests a possibility to retrieve the lost concept of nature, the beautiful, and the sublime.

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