Every period of time is, of course, considered with the current historical cut full of global changes and peculiarities which fell into artistic manifestations in every type of art. In this respect, literature can be proud of the Romanticism and Victorian literature, because of their gradual framework and applicable emergence due to the significant events, such as the French Revolution, American Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the period of the longest reign in Great Britain outlined with Queen Victoria.
Romanticism is the period when poets and writers were intended to find out the ways of better living involving the ideas of love, freedom, passion, natural unity and natural man. Romantic poets were idealists and their likely themes were about youth and innocence and the process of growing up. Furthermore, they wanted to depict a man compared with nature. These touches were accompanied with the lyrical poetry and courageous attitudes toward peoples’ state of freedom and prosperity by George Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott and others. This period in the literature is emphasized with more intensive and patterned language. “Romantic poet writes an “ode,” he refers to a state of mind, not so much to an ancient poetic “genre” (Drake para. 15). It was allegedly waiting for something new and progressive, because, for example in England the defeat in the thirteenth colony, America. Nonetheless, a desire to feel happy in a beautiful state of innocence in a man’s life was greatly described in the poem by William Blake The Ecchoing Green. In this work the poet provides his mastership in making the vivid scenes of youth’s beautiful life compared with oncoming changes in the civilized world:
Such such were the joys,
When we were all girls & boys,
In our youth time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green (Abrams and Greenblatt 25).
The Romantic era was disturbed by the resonance event of the French Revolution and the impact of industrial progress. The flow of artistic thought was shaped at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. This time is outlined as the period of relevant stability and prosperity. However, it was not so in all spheres of British influence in the world arena. There were also cases of poverty and even famine in Ireland (Drake para. 7). Nonetheless, the period of Romanticism was not so splendid and fascinating, if there were not such poets as Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Arnold, etc. The motives of love and passion accompanied with tints of a prolific tendency for the renovation of mind and heart are felt in Romantic poetry. In fact, Coleridge shared such ideas with his contemporaries and Wordsworth, in particular. The poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel encompassed the poet’s passions which he had toward some significant women in his life:
She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heaved were soft and low,
And naught was green upon the oak,
But moss and rarest mistletoe:
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she (Abrams and Greenblatt 45).
Some among the most outstanding poets of the Victorian epoch were Charles Lamb, Thomas Moore, John Clare and others. The main difference between the two periods is in the fact that in the Victorian era a large middle class emerged, and writers were intended to please the interests of also a new class of people instead of only rich ones. The manner of writing poems is presupposed with the wealth and beauty of the writing style. However, Victorian poets did not reject the heritage of previous poetry and some motives from earlier epochs of literature are heard within Victorian poets. Thus, a Victorian poet Walter Savage Landor in his poem Mother, I cannot mind my Wheel described a fabulous picture of his feelings toward life in an allegedly constructed dialogue with his mother. The splendid organization of the poem provided a distinct and straightforward adornment about the world of relationships between close relatives:
MOTHER, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
O, if you felt the pain I feel!
But O, who ever felt as I (Abrams and Greenblatt 108)?
The points on Darwinian Theory of evolution as well as the fast development of industrialization were outlined with social affairs and the emergence of emancipation, as a women’s movement for their rights. “Laissez-faire economics” was provided for the manufacturers of the middle class, but it resulted in nothing, but women being oppressed by the hardships of their workdays and children who were like slaves in workhouses (Drake para. 3). The story by Charles Dickens Oliver Twist greatly depicts the realities of this peculiarity in the Victorian era. Elizabeth Barrett Browning described this sad period in the lives of many children living in the Victorian period in her outstanding poem The Cry of the Children:
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,
Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do.
Pluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty.
Laugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through (Browning para. 5)!
Thus, the idea of prosperity and stability in Victorian times was also outlined with the inconveniences in the social internal life of Britain. Romantic poetry was not outlined with a mere silence and harmony, but with the impulsiveness of its ideas finding their implementation in the times foregoing the Revolution and industrial as well as social innovations in the everyday life of human beings. Literature just reflected the differences of both periods with the help of artistic features, so that to make the whole picture of the splendid and diverse themes of poems.
Reference
Abrams, Meyer Howard and Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Cry of the Children. Web.
Drake, Alfred J. Romantic and Victorian Characteristics. Web.
O’Gorman, Francis. Victorian poetry: an annotated anthology. Hobboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Wordsworth, William. The World Is Too Much With Us. Web.