Romantic Poets

"I am pleased to find," he said, while we were talking about Byron, "that you preserve your muse chaste, and free from rank and corrupt passion. Lord Byron degraded poetry in that respect. Men's hearts are bad enough. Poetry should refine and purify their natures; not make them worse." I ventured the plea that Don Juan was descriptive, and that Shakspeare had also described bad passions in anatomising the human heart, which was one of the great vocations of the poet. "But there is always a moral lesson," he replied quickly, "in Shakspeare's pictures. You feel he is not stirring man's passions for the sake of awakening the brute in them: the pure and the virtuous are always presented in high contrast; but the other riots in corrupt pictures, evidently with the enjoyment of the corruption."

"I left him with a more intense feeling of having been in the presence of a good and great intelligence, than I had ever felt in any other moments of my life."

"Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A manifesto and a revolution in verse whose fallout is still being measured. The strongest single volume of poetry yet published?"

"There are very few days that I do not see the poet for an hour or two. What strange workings are there in his great mind, and how fearfully strong are all his feelings and affections! If his intellect had been less powerful they must have destroyed him long ago; but even in the midst of his strongest emotions his attention may be attracted to some intellectual speculation, or his imagination excited by some of those external objects which have such influence over him; and his feelings subside like the feelings of a child, and he will go out and compose some beautiful sonnet."

"As for the Poetry of Humble Life, that, even in a town, is met with on every hand. We have such a district, and we constantly meet with examples of the beautiful truth in that passage of The Cumberland Beggar."

"Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered grey hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey. He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or in bed, and wrote down after; that Southey always composes at his desk. He talked a great deal of Brougham, whose talents and domestic virtues he greatly admires; that he was very generous and affectionate in his disposition, full of duty and attention to his mother, and had adopted and provided for a whole family of his brother's children, and treats his wife's children as if they were his own."

"He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them; the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them; the great despise. The fashionable may ridicule them: but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die."

"The Wordsworthians, as Matthew Arnold told them, were apt to praise their poet for the wrong things. They were most attracted by what may be called his philosophy; they accepted his belief in the morality of the universe and the tendency of events to good; they were even willing to entertain his conception of nature as a living and sentient and benignant being, a conception as purely mythological as the Dryads and the Naiads."

"You may have experienced this fundamental energy spontaneously, at some high point in your life. Wordsworth described it as: "A sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man...""

"I am convinced that there are three things to rejoice at in this Age—The Excursion, Your Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste."

"I should recall to your recollection him, (specially now as in this honourable circle which surrounds me he is himself present,) who of all poets, and above all has exhibited the manners, the pursuits, and the feelings, religious and traditional, of the poor,—I will not say in a favourable light merely, but in a light which glows with the rays of heaven. To his poetry, therefore, they should, I think, be now referred, who sincerely desire to understand and feel that secret harmonious intimacy which exists between honourable Poverty, and the severer Muses, sublime Philosophy, yea, even our most holy Religion."

"Wordsworth would have been very upset to know that his wonderful poems were being used as a weapon of empire. That is why, as soon as I had my own garden, I planted twenty thousand daffodils on the lawn. I was going to stop at ten, but they were just so beautiful that I kept going. It was, I suppose, my reconciliation with Wordsworth."

"He became an optimist on the day when he perceived reality."

"Wordsworth said "the child is father to the man" and that poetry is "emotion recalled in tranquility." I must say that he had something there although I wouldn't exactly put it in those same words. But poetry begins with the ability to recognize that you are feeling and to be able to re-create that feeling, to get in touch with it again. It isn't lost. To emote is not poetry. To emote is absolutely necessary, but that is not poetry. It's vital to recall the emotion that moved you and to see through it to the thrill out of which that emotion grew. Then you begin to make connections. It's the seeing through that enables you to begin making the images that connect with an experience different from yours. The magic that occurs with poetry is the ability to see through emotion."

"I purchased the poet's works, and, reading them, was converted to an enthusiastic love of his writings, ever after being eager to acknowledge my gratitude to him for having made me in some respects a wiser, and excited in me the aspiration to become a better man."

"I, deaf, can hardly conceive how he, with eyes & ears, & a heart wh[ich] leads him to converse with the poor in his incessant walks, can be so unaware of their moral state. I dare say you need not be told how sensual vice abounds in rural districts. Here it is flagrant beyond any thing I ever c[oul]d have looked for: & here, while every justice of the peace is filled with disgust, & every clergy[man] with (almost) despair at the drunkenness, quarrelling, & extreme licentiousness with women,—here is dear good old Wordsworth for ever talking of rural innocence, & deprecating any intercourse with towns, lest the purity of his neighbours should be corrupted. He little knows what elevation, self denial & refinement occur in towns from the superior cultivation of the people."

"I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings."

"I also liked the Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Keats, Burns and Blake were some of my favourites. There was something about their rebellious spirit against the evils of industrialization that moved me. Of course now, some of their pessimism, mysticism and limited critical realist visions make me quite uncomfortable."

"Time-saving... became an important part of labor-saving. And as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleotechnic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing the factory whistle... earlier in the morning, or moving the hands of the clock... during lunch... Time was a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity. Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as heinous waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply: it had no mind to sit on an old gray stone and dream its time away."

"But that which Wordsworth knew, even the old man When poetry had failed like desire, was something I have yet to learn, and you, Duddon, Have learned and re-learned to forget and forget again. Not the radical, the poet and heretic, To whom the water-forces shouted and the fells Were like a blackboard for the scrawls of God, But the old man, inarticulate and humble, Knew that eternity flows in a mountain beck."

"I think that poetry, in general, after a certain point in a poet's life, has to do with the acknowledgment of mortality. And even the most joyful poems have to do with, "Yes, let's not forget that life is brief." Once I started dealing with grief in poetry, I discovered that I had found my way to poetry. I think that so many young poets are only writing about the joy of love and that sort of thing and don't understand that the great poetry, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" and like Wordsworth's "Intimations" and "Tintern Abby," has all been a moment when the poet realizes that "this is my time to express what I have gathered in this brief life.""

"He wasn't a man as was thowte a deal o' for his potry when he was hereabout. It hed no laugh in it same as Lile Hartley [Coleridge]'s, bided a deal o makkin I darsay. It was kept oer long in his heead mappen. But then for aw that, he had best eye to mountains and streams, and buildings in the daale, notished ivvry stean o' the fellside, and we nin on us durst bang a bowder stean a bit or cut a bit coppy or raase an old wa' doon when he was astir."

"I began seriously writing in a period (the 1950s to late 1960s) in American poetry that assumed extreme gender positioning-"the poet is a man speaking to men," as Wordsworth had put it even as he was trying to democratize English poetry."

"In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period he was called a "bad" man. Then he became "good", abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry."

"Wordsworth's attitude in the above lines, after he had liberated himself from the tenets of Godwinian social engineering, was diametrically opposite to the assumptions of some contemporary sociologists who summon faiths and passions to the bar of empirical investigation as an article of discipline; and possibly the only contemporary English political philosopher he might have sympathized with is Professor Michael Oakeshott, with his way of looking at political attitudes as a matter of men's habitual arrangements, and not either of theory or of scientific scrutiny. To say this is to recognize that as a severe critic and eloquent victim of liberal, utilitarian thought Wordsworth is still intellectually present to us in an age dominated by concepts of social engineering which are now invading the universities. He may not be a Dostoievsky, but we have not got a Dostoievsky, so we must make do with him as gad-fly to our liberal complacency."

"What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth! That such a man should be such a poet! I can compare him with no one but Simonides, that flatterer of the Sicilian tyrants, and at the same time the most natural and tender of lyric poets."

"Two voices are there: one is of the deep; It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: And one is of an old half-witted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony, And indicates that two and one are three, That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep And, Wordsworth, both are thine."

"No poet has been more loved because none has expressed more forcibly and truly the deepest moral emotions."

"A certain clumsiness always remains; but in his earlier period he had the power of arresting simple thought with the magic of poetical inspiration. The great stimulus came from the French revolution. The sympathy which he felt with the supposed restoration of an idyllic order disappeared when it took the form of social disintegration. The growth of pauperism and the factory system, and the decay of old simple society, intensified the impression; and some of his noblest poems are devoted to celebrating the virtues which he took to be endangered. Wordsworth's love of ‘nature’ is partly an expression of the same feeling. He loved the mountains because they were the barriers which protected the peasant. He loved them also because they echoed his own most characteristic moods. His ‘mystical’ or pantheistic view of nature meant the delight of the lonely musings when he had to ‘grasp a tree’ to convince himself of the reality of the world. The love of nature was therefore the other side of his ‘egotism.’ He hated the scientific view which substituted mere matter of fact for emotional stimulus. The truth and power of his sentiment make this the most original and most purely poetical element in his writings. He could as little rival Coleridge and Shelley in soaring above the commonplace world as Byron or Burns in uttering the passions. But in his own domain, the expression of the deep and solemn emotions of a quiet recluse among simple people and impressive scenery, he is equally unsurpassable."

"Scott could make men breathe the breath of battle; Byron could only make men smell the reek of carnage; but Wordsworth alone could put into his verse the whole soul of a nation armed or arming for self-devoted self-defence; could fill his meditation with the spirit of a whole people, that in the act of giving it a voice and an expression he might inform and renovate that spirit with the purity and sublimity of his own."

"Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there."

"If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little child could understand — nature; and do what a little child could do — love."

"So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God."

"Hold on yet awhile. More ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream."

"Science frees us in many ways...from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming."

"Tell us not that the world is governed by universal law; the news is not comfortable, but simply horrible, unless you can tell us, or allow others to tell us, that there is a loving giver, and a just administrator of that law."

"Don't holla till you are out of the wood. This is a night for praying rather than boasting."

"I have fought my fight, I have lived my life, I have drunk my share of wine; From Trier to Coln there was never a knight Led a merrier life than mine."

"For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue."

"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . .""

"All but God is changing day by day."

"Toil is the true knight's pastime."

"Changeless march the stars above, Changeless morn succeeds to even; And the everlasting hills, Changeless watch the changeless heaven."

"Oh! that we two were Maying."

"Oh! that we two lay sleeping, Under the churchyard sod; With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast, And our souls at home with God!"

"Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?"

"'O Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee;' The western wind was wild and dank with foam, And all alone went she."

"They rowed her in across the rolling foam, The cruel crawling foam, The cruel hungry foam, To her grave beside the sea: But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee."

"For men must work, and women must weep, And there's little to earn, and many to keep, Though the harbor bar be moaning."

"And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep— And good-bye to the bar and its moaning."