Before going into this critical discussion about Romantic poetry, let me briefly introduce romanticism and the theory of romantic poets about poetry. Romanticism comes from "romance" which is the term used by romantic poets in France who relied on their imagination that is able to create a new reality and not as a tool to escape from reality. The stress is on the individual and not on the society (believe in capacities of man). In other words, English Romantics who adopted this movement believed that there must be a departure of the static (rigid conventions) of the 18th century. This movement is not a sudden change it is a part of a chain, although French and German poets had a direct influence on the English romantic movement, because poetry is poetry which has roots.
The romantic movement is supported by a certain romantic theory, which backs up the romantic trend. In their theory, English Romantics gave a great importance to imagination (fundamental role). For the English Romantics the belief in imagination was like the belief in individual self. Mind is the central point and governing factor and the most vital activity of the mind is imagination. They believed when they exercised imagination, they partake of the divine activity of God. Romantics combine imagination and truth because their creations are inspired and controlled by a peculiar insight. What matters to the Romantics was an insight into the nature of things. They refused Lock's (an English philosopher) limitation of perception to physical objects because it robbed the mind of its most essential function (perceive & create). Romantics wanted to explore the world of spirit. Visible things are not everything unless they are related to an embracing power. They believed that through imagination and insight they could understand the things of spirit and present them in poetry. Therefore, it was this search of an unseen world which awakened the inspiration of the romantics and made poets of them. In nature Romantic poets found their initial inspiration. It wasn't everything to them, but they would have been nothing without it.
Coleridge classified imagination onto primary and secondary imagination; they differ only in degree. To Coleridge, poetry is the product of the secondary imagination. He believed that imagination partakes of the divine activity of God. Imagination is related to truth and reality and connected with a special insight. It sees things to which the ordinary intelligence is blind. Coleridge believed that insight and imagination are inseparable; they complete each other. Moreover, Coleridge had a deep trust in imagination as something which gives a shape to life. He believes that nature live in us, and it is we who create all that matter in it. Coleridge is a little hampered by the presence of an external world and feels in some way he must conform to it. But when his creative genius is at work, it brushes these hesitations aside. He thought that the task of poetry is to convey the mystery of life. He was fascinated by the notion of unearthly powers and it was their influence he sought to catch. He believes that life is ruled by powers which can't be fully understood. The result is a poetry more mysterious.
In any study on William Wordsworth's poetry, we are faced with the following: "He is a romantic poet." In fact, he is a romantic poet, but when we say "romantic", the danger lies in understanding that romantic means: the poet imagines, contemplates, meditates, and creates an illusion. But, when we study William Wordsworth's definition of poetry, we see that he has to abide to a theory because the poem is a practice of the theory he believes in. Wordsworth agreed with Coleridge about the distinction between imagination and fancy. He believed that imagination is the most important gift a poet can have; he didn't relate reason to anything, but he insisted that the inspired insight is itself rational. As for Coleridge's conception of the external world, Wordsworth disagreed with him. He accepted its independent existence and insisted that imagination must in some sense conform to it. Wordsworth believed that imagination must somehow be related to the external world because that world is not dead but living and has its own soul which is distinct from the soul of man. Therefore, man's task is to connect with this soul because his life is shaped by nature. Wordsworth also believed that he helped this soul of nature to become closer to man and could show how the external world and the individual mind fits each other. As concerning nature, it was the source of his inspiration. He sought for a state in which the soul of nature should be united with the soul of man.
Many critics say the following "William Wordsworth is the poet of nature." However, when we read his poetry, we find out that in many lines he insisted that he is the poet of men. Even when it is a question of nature, if we ask Wordsworth himself, he says: "The mind of man creates half what it sees." Therefore, when we say that he's the poet of nature, the risk would be that one may think he is a poet who describes nature and in that he is diminishing the estimation of Wordsworth because poetry does not describe but create. Many critics think that Wordsworth is a poet of nature because he says: "I'm a worshiper of nature. Accordingly, many readers misunderstand this statement. When critics say that Wordsworth is a poet of nature, they mislead the readers of Wordsworth's poetry. Moreover, saying that he is the poet of nature is dangerous because we will think that his poetry is about nature, or it is the mirror of nature. If we consider that the definition is true then the statement is wrong. If poetry is about nature then it is a reflection of nature. However, to Wordsworth nature was the source of his inspiration, and he could not deny to it an existence at least as powerful as man's . He didn't go so far as other romantics in relegating reasons to an inferior position. He preferred to give a new dignity to the word and to insist that inspired insight itself rational.
William Wordsworth repeatedly described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Thus, he located the source of a poem not in the outer world, but in the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were not external people and events, but the inner feelings of the author, or at any rate, external objects only after these have been transformed or irradiated by the authors feelings. But to Wordsworth, although the composition of poem originates from "emotion recollected in tranquility," and maybe preceded and followed by reflection, the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous-that is, arising from impulse, and free from all rules and the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends-if the product is to be a genuine poem. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote that "I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject"; and in a supplementary Essay he complained that from Dryden through Pope there is scarcely an image from external nature "from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed on his object." Therefore, because of the prominence of landscape in this period, "Romantic poetry" has to the popular mind become almost synonymous with "nature poetry." Neither Romantic theory nor practice, however, justifies the opinion that the aim of this poetry was description for its own sake. Wordsworth in fact insisted that the ability to observe and describe objects accurately, although a necessary, is not at all a sufficient condition for poetry, "as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects." And while most of the great Romantic lyrics-Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, The Daffodils, and Ode: Intimations of Immortality; Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, and Dejection; Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Keats's Nightingale- begin with an aspect or change of aspect in the natural scene, this serves only as stimulus to the most characteristics human activity, that of thinking. Romantic poems are in fact meditative poems, in which the presented scene usually serves to raise an emotional problem or personal crisis whose development and resolution constitute the organizing principle of the poem and not to describe this natural scene. As Wordsworth said in his Prospectus to The Recluse, not nature, but "the Mind of Man" is "my haunt, and the main region of my song."
