Romantic Poetry

Romantic poetry is poetry of feeling, imagination, nature and the individual. It is a theme and a movement rather than a form, and it is not the same thing as a love poem: 'romantic' here names a way of looking at the world, not a subject matter. The Romantic movement in Britain and Europe put the inner life before the social order, ordinary words before ornate ones, and the natural world before the city, and it gave the poetry of the Caribbean, the Americas and Africa a language that was taken up long afterwards. Distinguishing characteristics - Nature as a living presence and a teacher, not a backdrop. - A first person who feels honestly, in plain diction. - Imagination valued over reason, and the sublime: awe, terror and beauty arriving together. - Attention to common life, the child, the past, the ruined and the overlooked. - A willingness to use the ballad, the ode, blank verse and the plain lyric. A brief original example, written for this platform These hills were here before the name I gave them, and will be here when I have gone to grass. The stream still teaches what the schoolroom could not: that everything worth knowing has to move. I have been away. The stone remains where I sat down to think and did not think, and hearing now the water over rock, I am no wiser and I am more glad. How the example works The landscape is not scenery: it is older than the speaker and it instructs him, which is the movement's central gesture. The diction is plain and the lines are unmetred, though they keep a steady measure. The turn comes at 'I have been away', and the ending refuses wisdom in favour of gladness, which is Romantic rather than solemn. Exercise to try Write eight to twelve lines about a place you have returned to after time away. Let the place be older than you and let it teach you something you did not intend to learn. Keep the vocabulary plain, and forbid yourself the words 'soul', 'eternal' and 'majestic'. Revising it Check that nature is doing something rather than decorating the page. Cut any abstraction the landscape is already carrying. Make sure the feeling is yours and not a borrowed poetic mood, and read the last three lines aloud: if they have become grand, make them smaller and truer.