one must remember that throughout his life he believed himself to be visited by legions of spirits whom he actually beheld with the bodily eye. His best-known works are Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience ; but some of his greatest and most beautiful work was not published during his lifetime, and is contained in the two manuscripts known as the Rossetti and the Pickering. His Poetical Sketches show Blake to have been largely influenced in early youth by the Elizabethans (as in My silks and fine array and the Mad Song) and by the older English ballads (as in Fair Elenor and Gwin, King of Norway). Many lyrics, however, in this volume and in Songs of Innocence possess a certain magic simplicity which has never been achieved in English poetry before or since; and in the later volume Blake becomes for all time the poet of childhood. Yet it is to the Songs of Experience, and to his later poems in general, that we must look for his most distinctive, though not for his most popular work. That work owes its greatness to the inspired lyrical interpretation of inspired spiritual vision.1 CHAPTER XXVI POETRY: THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH The full tide of romanticism — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, THE poets discussed in the last chapter represent in different New fashions a breaking away from the Augustan tradition of Forces in thought and expression. From the age of Dryden to that of Poetry. Johnson, literature had been closely connected with the political life of the country, and with the intellectual and social activity of the metropolis. We have already demonstrated the effect of this connexion upon the poetry of the period. and have discussed the resulting elements of strength and weakness. When we pass to such poets as Cowper and Blake, we find that the bond has been severed. The first seeks refuge from the stir and argument of the great city in the calm pleasures of the country; the second finds his escape in the vision vouchsafed to his eyes and soul of another world at once more lovely and more terrible than the present. The love of 1 During the last two generations, a number of books have been published on Blake. The definitive text is that of Mr. John Sampson (Clarendon Press, 1905). The student's attention is also drawn to Swinburne's William Blake, to Arthur Symons' William Blake, to Gilchrist's Life of Blake, and to the edition by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats of Blake's collected works. The Essay prefixed to vol. ii is of special value in relation to the Prophetic Books. Nature, which for a while had burnt very low in English poetry, revives in the Elegy of Gray and The Task of Cowper, and flames into fiercer energy in the songs of Burns and certain of the Odes of Collins. In the Elegy, too, we find that growing sense of the pathos and worth and beauty of humble human lives, which is also a symbol of the new spirit, and reappears with a difference in many pages of Cowper and Burns. Closely akin to this are the strong love of birds and animals, and the pity for their suffering, which are common to Cowper, Blake, and Burns. The casting back to the romantic past for inspiration, which is to become so strong in Coleridge and Scott, has already been anticipated in the Rowley poems of Chatterton and in Macpherson's Ossian. The spell of the supernatural, which was soon to inspire the greatest poem of Coleridge, had already touched Collins, and had swayed the whole life and outlook of Blake. All of these things represent an instinctoften an unconscious_one—to escape from the conventional aspects of thought and experience to fresh vistas of revelation. Sometimes the search disclosed the wonder of simple things or of beings hitherto neglected or despised; sometimes it made intimate and near the glamour of the past, or the uncanny happenings of the present. But in all its various forms it represented a revolt against the tyranny of finite reason, and a desire that imagination should follow its own law, even were it to lose itself in lowliness or else' dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven'. The vastly different interpretations of life and literature offered by the poets we have mentioned, show how strongly individual was the trend of the age, and how emphatic was its departure from the Augustan standard of correctness'. The same impulse toward freedom and individualism is evident in the prosody of the period, in the instinctive shrinking of many poets from the end-stopped couplet, and in their preference for a variety of less orthodox metres ranging from the Pindaric ode and the Spenserian stanza to blank verse and the ballad measure. On every hand the ground had been broken for such fresh achievement as was realized in the publication by Coleridge and Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads (1797–8). This volume represents a direct and conscious break with the past, and has generally, and with justice, been regarded as the earliest realization of the new spirit in all its fullness. As Coleridge tells us, it was intended as a series of poems of two sorts: the one of common subjects such as will be found in every village, poetically treated; the other of subjects mainly supernatural", but made real by the dramatic truth of such emotions, supposing them real.' To Wordsworth naturally fell the first part of this attempt, to Coleridge the second. How far each succeeded is a question closely related to the poetry of both, which we may discuss Coleridge forthwith, beginning with that of Coleridge. Lyrical -The Ancient 6 His chief contribution to the volume had been The Ancient Mariner, which contains nearly all that is best and most characteristic in his genius, and has probably influenced modern English poetry more profoundly than has any other single poem. Employing the old ballad measure the fourteener' resolved into its component eights and sixes-which is one of the greatest among English metres, Coleridge has adopted every possible device of stress and line variation which might give it flexibility and variety without impairing its force and directness. Here, as in Kubla Khan and Christabel, he has divined and employed consummately that licence which, though it is one of English poetry's chief glories, had been flouted and lashed for a century and a half as an inexpiable vice. Nor does licence with Coleridge ever degenerate into lawlessness: to The Ancient Mariner, as to all his best poetry, will apply the claim which he has put forward in the Preface to Christabel: Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.' Coleridge had, in fact, deserted that code whose symbolic expression was the endstopped couplet, for the higher law of our poetry whose service is perfect freedom. In subject and general design, The Ancient Mariner embodies more strongly perhaps than any English poem outside Coleridge, that Imagination which he, like Wordsworth, recognized as the supreme poetic quality, and which both strove with might and main to bring back into the language after its long banishment. A friend's dream, a saint's legend, a hint from Wordsworth based on a reading of ShelVocke's voyages, these were all his materials, and with them he dealt after a fashion of which we can only say, And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. The story of the poem is known to all; as for its spirit, it should be noted that though the Ancient Mariner's salvation is eventually achieved through his blessing the water-snakes, and thus putting himself in touch with Nature, the poet's main object is not to draw a moral,1 however beautiful and sublime, but to awaken delight and wonder through describing with strange realism the adventure of a human soul upon a wide, wide sea of miracle and terror. It is at once impossible and unnecessary to analyse here the consummate process by which this thing is done. The first part of the unfinished Christabel was written during Christabel. the same period as The Ancient Mariner, though it was not included in the Lyrical Ballads; it again shows Coleridge's imagination working at its highest pitch. In it he once more achieves 1 To Mrs. Barbauld, who had complained that The Ancient Mariner had no moral, Coleridge replied that in my own judgement the poem had too much, and that the only, or chief, fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination ›, Kubla His other the supremely difficult task of rendering the marvellous real and The one red leaf, the last of its clan, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. The Second Part, while preserving the sense of mystery, has a more realistic setting than the First, and portrays the wild countryside from Bratha Head to Wyndermere', near which it was written. The whole poem is richly romantic in the specific, as in the general, sense of the word, and its reversion to the age of chivalry is typical of the new spirit at work in English poetry. In his various and powerful handling of the mighty four-stressed metre1 of his choice, Coleridge shows that he has once more intuitively divined and mastered the genius of English poetry; and the prosodical note with which he prefaces the poem, though it errs in describing his principle of variation as a new one, goes to the very heart of English metre, and certainly does not deserve the disparaging treatment recently accorded to it in certain quarters. Still more characteristic of the profound and subconscious depth from which all Coleridge's best poetry seems to have been flung up, is Kubla Khan, produced after a reading of Purchas his. Pilgrims, during a deep slumber'in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort'. The poem consists of less than seventy lines, yet in it are summed all Coleridge's greatest qualities-rich sensuousness of expression, vivid and unearthly imagery, form adapted to emotion with consummate beauty and variety, imagination projecting itelf into the unknown, and returning to earth aglow and quivering with infinity. Besides the three great poems just mentioned, Coleridge wrote a considerable amount of verse, but only the merest handful of this is of the first order, and by far the greater part is uninspired save by a few stray gleams. Such gleams are evident in his Religious Musings and The Destiny of Nations, which preceded the Lyrical Ballads. In the fragmentary Three Graves Coleridge attempts to adapt to ordinary life the theme 1 For a detailed account of this see Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, vol. i, pp. 112-13. of a curse or spell laid upon the human soul, which in The Ancient Mariner he had developed with romantic wildness. In two beautiful poems, Frost at Midnight and Lewti, Ke approaches Wordsworth in the detection of mystical affinities between Nature and the human soul; but in the powerful Ode Dejection (1802) he has moved from this position, and believes that the soul can find no revelation outside itself. Thus he writes: and O Lady, we receive but what we give, I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. It is instructive to contrast the superbly sure language of his greatest Ode, France, with the rhetoric which almost baffles inspiration in its immediate predecessor, the Ode to the Departing Year. In drama Coleridge's first work was his crude and hastily His Plays. written contribution to The Fall of Robespierre, a play in which he collaborated with Southey and Lovell. His tragedy Osorio is still early work, but was subsequently revised and produced under the title of Remorse in 1813 at Drury Lane, where it had a successful run. It is melodramatic and faulty in construction, but contains fine poetry, as does its successor, the dramatic idyll, Zapolya. The influence of Coleridge on English poetry has been steady His Influsince his death, and was never more strong than it is to-day. ence. Poems like Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, and Mr. Herbert Trench's Apollo and the Seaman, owe much of their form and expression to The Ancient Mariner; and the successive books of Georgian Poetry (1911-19) show that the younger men are striving with might and main to recapture Coleridge's intimate strangeness, his magical word and vision. The miracle of his influence becomes all the greater when it is remembered that it is by three or four poems alone that he lives for the majority of men. The influence of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is less Wordsformally obvious than that of Coleridge in its bearings upon worth. modern poetry, but even more profound in point of thought and spirit. No true understanding of his poetry and teaching is possible without close study of his two longest poems, and especially of the one in which he gives the history, material and spiritual, of his earlier years. This work, The Prelude, was originally intended to be preparatory to a huge autobiographical and speculative poem in three books called The Recluse. This Wordsworth likened to a vast Gothic cathedral, of which the earlier poem was to be the antechapel. Of the main fabric we only possess entire the second part, The Excursion. The third part was never written; the first book of the first part was not published till 1888, and is now generally known as The Recluse. |