Romantic poetry

The French Revolution can be viewed – historically – as the ultimate achievement of Illuminism, at the same time it is one of the starting point of Romanticism. It represents the great expectation, the utopia, which the romantics carry within themselves. It is their infancy, enlightened by a joyous trust in man, in justice, in the future. The real history of France and Europe will break in a few years with sour disillusion all this imaginary dream.

The enthusiasm for the French Revolution creates a further problem for the English Romantics: they feel strangers in their own country. Britain – strong in its reformist tradition – will be the great enemy not only of Napoleon and his egemonic objectives, but also of the revolutionary values of liberty, fraternity, equality. England had had its revolution and middle-classes were already governing the country. They didn’t want a new revolution because they didn’t want to lose their political stability, necessary to the convulsive growth of production and progress.

The English romantic poets at the same time welcome The French Revolution as the realization of a noble social ideal and become opponent of Britain as a power. They will run away in search of a different national dimension in which they could identify. They will come to Italy and Greece where people (middle-classes) are struggling for their freedom and independence. They will make of their lives the realization of a romantic dream in which they fight for the liberty of people (cfr. tension to infinity).

The romantic poets are the first poets who face a modern process of industrialization.

They felt with a deep anxiety the drama of a society involved in a rapid transformation. A change which was subverting ancient rithms of life, crushing traditional community groups, overwhelming fundamental human rights and values in a frantic pursuit of production, profit and economic increase.

What is the task of poetry inside this changing world?

  • Sometimes the romantic poets identify themselves with the social groups who are suffering from a violent process of exploitation, often brutalized cause of the convulsive industrial development;

  • they feel that their poems can not be addressed (only) to educated people, so they engage in a profound linguistic innovation: they adopt elementary verses, common language, colloquial rithms;

  • they do not accept science with enthusiasm: the romantic poets believe that technology is far away from man and poetry. As far as we proceed along the path of modernization, we increasingly lose the attributes of human beings. This is still true today;

  • in this perspective the modern city (London) is viewed as a modern Inferno;

  • Nature is viewed by them as a source of purification (catharsis). Wordsworth is the poet who feels a special relationship with nature. He feels a profound love for the natural world and the rural life. He is regretful for the abandonment of small villages where the poet descries a healthier and more complete life, in contact with the natural forces and rithms.

The tension to the infinity and the myth of Faust

the tension towards infinity can be somewhat linked to the myth of Faust.

The romantics thought that human beings may be compared to an infinitely large recipient: you can pour into it whatever you like but it will never be filled up. Man’s desire of happiness, accomplishment, is never satisfied, we always look forward to new targets. Humanity can never stop in its march towards knowledge and progress. It is a march toward felicity, toward self realization. The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote in his work called Lo Zibaldone «Tutto è o può essere contento di se stesso eccetto l’uomo, il che mostra che la sua esistenza non si limita a questo mondo, come quella dell’altre cose». Men are «miseri inevitabilmente ed essenzialmente per natura nostra […]. Cosa la quale dimostra che la nostra esistenza non è finita dentro questo spazio temporale come quella dei bruti». We are not like all the other animals, we have something which is immortal (our soul).

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

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.

 

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e rimirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.