A poet is the product of his time. Shelley observes that there is a resemblance, which does not depend on their own will, between the writers of any particular age. They are all subjected to a common influence “which arises out of a combination of circumstances belonging to the time in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.” Hence it is that the works of any poet cannot be thoroughly appreciated unless the spirit that pervaded the life of the period be understood. This is particularly true of the poetry of Shelley. It embodies the aspirations and ideals of the philosophers of his time. Its themes are liberty, justice and revolt. On every side are heard protests against conventionality, against government, and against religion. The philosophers of the French Revolution are hailed as the saviors of society and their theories put forth as a panacea for all human ills. Shelley is the high water mark of the waves of revolt which threatened to inundate the country. A brief investigation, then, of the poetical atmosphere of the end of the eighteenth century will help us in our study of the sources of his radicalism.
There can be no doubt but contemporary literature had some influence on his sensitive nature. “The writings of the future laureate (Southey) as likewise of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Landor’s Gehir were among those for which Shelley in early youth had a particular predilection.”[168] Since the influence of Southey soon began to decline on account of his fulsome praise of George III, we shall confine our attention to Wordsworth and Coleridge. “One word in candor,” Shelley writes, “on the manner in which the study of contemporary writing may have modified my composition. I am intimately persuaded that the peculiar style of intensive and comprehensive imagery in poetry which distinguishes modern writers has not been as a general power the product of the imitation of any particular one. It is impossible that any one contemporary with such writers (Wordsworth and Coleridge were specified at first) as stand in the front ranks of literature of the present day can conscientiously assure themselves or others that their language and tone of thought may not have been modified by the study of the productions of these extraordinary intellects.”[169]
Radicalism, we said, was the characteristic of this period and this extended both to the form and the matter of poetry. Byron characterizes one eminent poet as “the mild apostate from poetic rule.”[170]
During the greater part of the eighteenth century conservatism and classicism were in the ascendant. After the Revolution of 1688 everything medieval and Catholic was looked upon with suspicion. Old customs and festivities were allowed to fall into disuse. Compared with the past it was a material age. In the early part of the century agriculture and commerce flourished and with this advance in material prosperity came the decline of romanticism. “Correctness” in form and thought is the guiding light of prince and peasant, of poet and philosopher. Imagination is concerned almost entirely with society and fine manners. Pope’s themes are beaux and belles, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. He preferred the artificial to the natural. Form, imitation of the classics, is to him and the men of that period, the all important matter in literature. In his Essay on Criticism he tells us again and again
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem
To copy nature is to copy them.
“To his immediate successors Pope was the grand exemplar of what a poet should be,”[171] but unfortunately he was followed by a horde of imitators whose only claim on the muse of poetry was ability to turn out heroic couplets. As a consequence poetry became a cold, lifeless affair, devoid of imagination and “divorced from living nature and the warm spontaneity of the heart.”[172]
A reaction against this pseudo-classicism was inevitable. That small but constantly flowing stream of romanticism which is found in the works of Thomson, Blake, Warton and Gray, increased in size until it broke loose in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. This was the joint work of Coleridge and Wordsworth. The two poets met for the first time in 1796. Coleridge was then 24 years of age and Wordsworth but two years his senior. In July, 1797, Wordsworth and his sister moved to Alfoxden, in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, who was living with his wife at Nether-Stowey. They were, as Coleridge has said somewhere, three people but one soul. A good description of the relationship between them is given in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal, and in Coleridge’s The Nightingale; a conversation poem. Their most frequent topic of conversation was “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.”[173] From these conversations originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads. The work was divided into two parts. Coleridge was to direct his attention to romantic and supernatural characters and to enshroud these with a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to engage our interest and attention. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to produce the same effect by giving the charm of novelty to objects chosen from ordinary life. It seemed to them that the beauty of a landscape often depended on the accidents of light and shade; that moonlight or sunset sometimes transformed an uninviting scene into one of entrancing beauty; and so they believed that they could diffuse the glow of their imagination over any object and make it attractive. As might be expected the publication of the Ballads did not meet with success. The change from the stereotyped verse of the age to these carelessly formed effusions was too much for the critics. Some scoffed at them; others thought they were being hoaxed. The subjects dealt with in these poems were long considered as unfit for poetry; and of course the conservative felt it his bounden duty to protest against the innovation. In the second edition of the Ballads, which was entirely Wordsworth’s own work, an attempt is made to justify this radical departure from the beaten path. A poet, he explains, is a genius, and should not be hampered by any conventions of art or traditions of society. His imagination is the purifying fire which transmutes the rough ore of the commonplace into the choice gold of literature. “Good poetry,” he writes, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” “He (the poet) is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”[174] This is a good picture of Shelley. “With a spiritual gaze turned first inward, on his own passions and volitions, and then turned outward upon the universe, Shelley looked in vain for external objects answering to the forms generated by his dazzling imagination.”[175]
Meter and poetic diction, Wordsworth says, are something altogether accidental to poetry, and consequently there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and that of prose. “The distinction,” Shelley writes, “between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. Plato was essentially a poet.”[176] Wordsworth contends, too, that the proper language of poetry is the ordinary language of the rustic. The excellence of poetry depends not so much on the dignity of the words used as on their capacity to arouse emotions. “The language of poets,” Shelley writes, “is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before-unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension; until words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts.... Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem.”[177]
Not only Shelley’s principles as regards “the use of language” but also his “tone of thought” was influenced by Wordsworth. Coleridge and Wordsworth removed the sphere of poetry from social action to philosophical reflection; they exchanged the ancient method, consisting in the ideal imitation of external objects, for an introspective analysis of the impressions of the individual mind.[178] Many of Wordsworth’s poems are records of the moods of his own soul, and of phases of his life; so also are Shelley’s. A brief examination of some of Wordsworth’s works will serve to make this clear.
Wordsworth planned an epic poem, The Recluse, of which The Prelude, or introduction, and The Excursion are the only parts extant. In these two poems we can trace out the history of his radicalism. The Prelude is his autobiography; and The Excursion supplements what is lacking to a thorough revelation of the workings of his mind. He begins The Prelude by telling about his childhood and schooltime, his residence at Cambridge, vacation and love for books. He then treats of his first trip to the Continent and his residence in London. Book IX is concerned with his second visit to France in 1791. While there he mixed up with all classes