The Romantic Manifesto: Spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling...?

Those of us who've studied English in school or college would be familiar with the works of the Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley, John Keats and a few others. The lyrical beauty of their poems have so entered our consciousness that we can't imagine literature without them and, yet, it took an act of courage by two men to herald the Romantic era as a revolutionary departure from the Enlightenment period that had celebrated logic and reason and highly stylized forms of poetry. Then suddenly came The Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (published anonymously) with poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abbey, The Female Vagrant and so on. Wordsworth was acutely aware of the furore these works might cause for he says in an introduction to that edition: readers "will perhaps have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness". But once the Ballads became popular, a second edition came out with Wordsworth's famous preface in which he put forth the basic principles of Romanticism, basically an emphasis on feelings and emotions and the beauty of nature. All good poetry, he says, is

"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling".

It originates, he says, from

"emotion recollected in tranquility."

Hence, we see at the end of The Solitary Reaper:

"The music in my heart I bore,

            Long after it was heard no more."

And The Daffodils concludes thus:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie 

 In vacant or in pensive mood,

           They flash upon that inward eye
           
           Which is the bliss of solitude;

           And then my heart with pleasure fills,

            And dances with the daffodils."

We're so familiar with poems of heightened passion such as Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind that we forget it took a revolutionary Lake poet like Wordsworth to perform that first act of brazenness and produce something new and utterly different from the prevailing poetic diction.
I suppose good writing always requires loads of courage.
Oui ou non?

 

 

 

Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge: Why we are drawn to flawed characters

Jane Austen is a novelist that's always in the news and her books are often retold on screen but a novelist I'd really like to see adapted for the big screen more often is Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is one of Hardy's best novels and many of us must be familiar with the plot. Its main protagonist Michael Henchard is one of the most riveting characters in English Literature. No wonder then that Hardy himself calls him 'a man of character' in the byline to the title (The Life and Death of The Mayor of Casterbridge: A story of a man of character).

The story begins with a drunken Henchard selling his wife Susan and infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane at an auction to a sailor called Newman for five guineas. Once he realizes his mistake, it's too late. They've left town and he loses them. He was 21 years old at the time and vows not to touch liquor for another 21 years. Henchard goes on to become a successful businessman and, eventually, the Mayor of Casterbridge (a fictional town believed to have been modeled on Dorset, England). As the novel progresses, we see Henchard as a man of contradictions: he possesses raw energy and he's capable of hard work but he also has a cruel and self-destructive streak that makes him push people away. His character has a distinctly Aristotelian feel to it: he's the typical tragic hero with classic flaws- hubris (pride) and hamartia (error of judgement). Why, then, do we keep reading?

Personally, it's the very fact that Henchard is flawed that makes him seem real to me. Equally important is the sheer power of Hardy's narrative style. Sample this: it's said of Elizabeth-Jane when she grows up and her fortunes improve:

"Her triumph was tempered by circumspection. She had still that field mouse fear of the coulter of destiny, despite fair promise, which is common among those who have suffered early from poverty and oppression."

Gosh, I wish I could write like that!

When Henchard declares in the end, having lost everything: "My punishment is not more than I can bear" one almost wants to applaud his defiance of fate and the powers that be.

It's always- always- worth it to go back to the classics.