what is nature you would say trees rivers mountains seaside landscape seascape when you talk about these things you talk about specific things and then they are different from each other the tree in your backyard is different from one in mind alps is not the himalayas ganges is different from the names so what connects them what is the connecting factor they all belong to that world of nature which is not made by man which is uncorrupted by human influences and anything that is not touched by man is closer to the world of ideas the ideal world this is the soul of the theories of imagination that have bugged critics down the ages and this is the soul of romanticism about which we're going to talk today in this video hello and welcome back to nibblebob we are doing this series on history of english literature and we have reached the point where we will be discussing the very important romantic period in today's video we will be looking at the different ways the word romantic is being interpreted throughout the ages and how concepts like imagination nature liberty human rights these things come into play when we talk about the romantic age first we will deal with some of the important historical factors that were effective during the period and then we will see how those historical those social changes affected the way poets expressed themselves the kind of experimentations that were going on and the kind of new attitude that was developing not just in the minds of the poets but also in the minds of the novelists and prose writers of the period so don't skip anything and stay with me till the end of this video if you have not subscribed to my channel do so immediately this is monami mukherjee welcome to our channel [Music] two key words must be understood before we start understanding the inherent meaning of the word romantic one is imagination and second is nature now many critics have tried to give different meanings and interpretations of the word imagination the gist of the matter is that imagination is a power of the mind which makes you see things beyond the obvious reality or appearance like you see something in front of your eyes sense it with your sense organs but you somehow add something to it so this process of adding something to already existing reality around you is enabled by imagination now let me take you back to plato yes the same person who said that poets should be abolished you know thrown away from the ideal republic because they present something which is twice removed from reality and why did he say that you see plato felt that or he held the view that the world around us which we see the world of appearance is an imitation imitation of what imitation of an ideal perfect world or rather a world of ideas where everything is perfect let me explain this a little bit for example if you look at a tree any tree then you look at certain characteristics like branches leaves or whatever and you match those characteristics with the idea of tree which is in your head now try to picture this tree inside your head which you have the idea of does that tree have cracks in its trunk or does that tree have a lot of worms wiggling about or is it a bad looking tree with you know dried up brunches no it's a perfect tree because whatever idea we have in our minds even ideas of goodness and badness these are perfect ideas they are like without any deformity without any exception and we try to match whatever we see in front of us based on those ideas deep inside our heads so this was plato's idea now he felt that when a poet was writing he was imitating nature all right everything that he is seeing around him including human nature and when he is imitating or making a copy of this appearance he is seeing around him this nature say a flower or a human being or a human action then he is imitating not an idea he is imitating a reflection of that idea okay because everything around you is a reflection and therefore it is twice removed from reality and therefore it is not giving you any truth and therefore poet should not be a part of the ideal republic fine what plato did not consider or did not understand or maybe he did not think about is the fact that while imitating this nature or while imitating the world of appearance which is like a reflection of the world of idea the poets might employ a power by which they will not create a different copy but actually go towards the reality so this is what i am trying to say that if a poet has that quality of imagination he can actually give you a better idea about that ideal world from those appearances that he presents through his poems and therefore we see that in some kinds of poets there is a platonic belief that yes there is a world of ideas which is perfect and yes the world we see around us is imperfect but they don't feel that writing poetry makes you go even further away from reality they feel that poetry is the way to reach that ideal reality or rather that world of ideas which is perfect now perfection is something we closely associate with god with divinity so we can say that when a poet thinks that in his poetry he can reach that perfect world then his poetry becomes a kind of worship for him a kind of act of divinity for him and therefore these kinds of poets they will be seen as harbinger of a new kind of religion something which is not institutional something which is not defined by the rules of the church but the rules of this world of ideas which is best manifested in the world of nature because in the world of human beings in society you know human interference it changes a lot of things okay because human beings they they are look they remove away from their instincts the world of the animals you know they act the way instinct tells them to so there is a lot of honesty in the way animals act and there is like absolute honesty in the way plants work because they can't lie about anything and therefore the world of the plants the world of the animals they represent a kind of truth which the human society does not offer and therefore the moment a poet thinks that imagination is important because imagination is letting him see that world of idea that true world through these appearances he has to give importance to the world of nature which is closer to that world of idea than human society which is full of deceit and lies and developments which actually make human beings suffer more and this is how imagination and nature are intimately connected with this development of romanticism in england now this whole idea will become very clear once we actually go through the events which led to this kind of sea change in ideas in sea change in attitude in the way people thought in the way the writers were writing about the world because world during those times it was very different from the world we see around us now and it was a world where the idea of absolute power that was very important if you are an indian you would know how important the year 1757 was you know why because we kind of lost our identity in that year it was the battle of plessy year so from the point of view of england it was a year of empowerment and i will take you kind of 30 years after 1757. that was like the whole of britain was turning into this workshop of the world you know it was bringing in raw materials from all kinds of colonies and producing these goods especially in the factories of manchester and even london that was getting crowded with these factories where these raw materials were processed and these finished products were resold to those colonies so we used to send them these cottons and we used to buy clothes from them this advent of consumerism turning this whole world into a shopping mall that thing started towards the end of the 18th century something very important happened in the year 1783 when king george the third he was the king of england during the time he enters his parliament and he says that okay we have lost america so when england is losing america what is happening is actually america is gaining its independence and that kind of set a new tone to world politics ideas of human rights ideas about liberty about democracy these ideas were taking the world as if in a storm and soon after we see that in 1789 something even more radical happens france which had been a monarchy throughout just like england threw away the whole idea of monarchy and it was not like the civil war of england you know in civil war of england it was more like okay charles one was executed and then charles 2 was brought back it was short-lived and there was less involvement of you know people from all kinds of background it was more like a battle of the parliamentarians in case of the french revolution it was a massive democratic movement it was a movement which was not just about taking down a king it was a movement about taking down this idea of kingship that human beings were capable of ruling themselves we don't need a king for that and what was england's position in the context of the american independence the french revolution it was a very peculiar stand that england had to take see in american independence what happened france supported the americans who wanted independence from england why because france hates england it has always been an enemy of england although the english writers had been indebted to the french writers and vice versa at times but there was a political clash between france and england throughout history therefore in supporting the americans france was actually taking a stand against england in case of french revolution the stand was getting even more diluted because on one hand england was happy that the king of france he was overthrown but at the same time it was always an arch enemy of the whole idea of france so there were active warfare between the two countries even after the french revolution but the intellectual community of england they responded to this idea of you know liberty fraternity the rights of man the kind of sentiments that french revolution represented because when you you do away with a king when you get rid of monarchy you want to establish your liberty your democratic self and this is what appeal to the intellectual uh community of england and they wanted those kinds of reforms for themselves but not till 1832 where those reforms materialized so 1832 is the point where finally england declared that ok slaves are no more a part of our system so i am giving rights to all slaves rights of life so this abolition of slavery which happened in 1832 can be said as the culminating point as the final point uh in that revolutionary spirit you know that started with the concepts ah started with american independence and french revolution now this was history what about philosophy in 1762 jean-jacques russo he wrote a book he published a book on raising of children it was called emily or on education now what russo was trying to establish here is that a child is a figure of wisdom and what does a child represent represents spontaneity you know you are not restricted by things like financial considerations anxiety of family so a child acts out of its instincts much like the animals right and therefore they belong to a world of innocence and a world of perfection what happens when a child grows up civilization spoils the child you know with its expectations you need to do this you need to do that you have to behave in a certain way and this civilizing mission is like a corruptive thing for the child is like it's a corruptive agent and a child outside this corruptive influence of society will grow to be a noble savage this means that a child in the lapse of nature um you know that kind of moogly uh figure okay he didn't have that figure in his mind right that way but later we have figures like mowgli in the jungle book where this child who grows up in the labs of nature represents kind of innocence which is very divine and earlier in the 18th century what kind of world view we were having the world of pope the world of dryden we had a world where a person was valued for his intellect for his wit for his handling of human interactions right and things like humor things like sophistication urbanity uh people were writing about city life so all these things which are developed by training these were the focal points of 18th century or the age of prose and reason with russo we have this tendency to focus more on those aspects of life which cannot be trained which belong to you when you're born and which kind of hide themselves the more you get trained the more you polish yourself in society russo was prioritizing a kind of education where man remains in tune with nature i i often have this feeling that this was a kind of education which tagore wanted to establish when he was setting up santiniketan but somehow that also didn't work out because it's not practical the moment you introduce the word education it means changing by adding something the moment you change by adding something it is corruptive according to russo's idea so he is contradicting himself because he is talking about education and is actually talking about not adding anything to nature so russo's book that was in paris 1762 august 1770 london a young poet who wasn't able to publish his work properly uh who was constantly forced by his family to pursue a career of a lawyer which he didn't want to do he commits suicide and his suicide kind of was seen as bringer of a sea change in the way people looked at poets earlier poets were you know kind of these figures of wheat especially because poets meant poets like the metaphysical poets poets like the worst satirists now the poet was this fragile victim christ-like figure who was voicing out against society and who is never recognized by society so the figure of this poet is a tragic figure that started to emerge and this whole idea was finally developed this idea of prioritizing the emotional side of a person prioritizing the passionate side of a person and not the intellectual side of a person this whole idea was finally brought forward in the book by gautya kotya in sorrows of young vardhar which came out in around 1774 he talks about a young man passionately in love with a woman who is married and there's no there's a future in their relationship and he doesn't create any rosy picture too whether he dies at the end but gauta is not passing any judgment he is rather making you sympathize with this figure of the passionate lover and this absence of value judgment this absence of moral judgment which was a very important integral part of 18th century and 17th century way of looking at literary heroes this stand eventually developed into the romantic stand like something which uh yes there is a value judgment in every romantic poet but that value judgment is not based on the values of human society but the values of goodness represented by the natural world so if you are passionate about somebody and if you are honest about that passion then that is justified it doesn't have to always fit into the codes of society because codes of society are made by men because of selfish intentions so we can say that from a political point of view from a philosophical point of view the year around 1780s 1790s that was a time of turmoil change people were questioning their belief systems and there was an ongoing you can say blast of scientific revolution going on around leading to industrialization of london as i was saying that london or england was turning into the workshop of the world and what happens when your country becomes a workshop well you get very stable economically you get very rich but who gets rich you know england like the gdp was soaring but there was this unequal distribution of wealth when a country gets rich you simply add the income of all people there and you have this weird calculation in economics that per capita income means gdp divided by population but is that the reality no because the wealth that was increasing was increasing the wealth of the few chosen industrialists ah the haves of the society and the have nots of the society were getting bordered because now because of this industrialization there was this requirement of labor in cities and this happens when people find that there are opportunities in factories they rush from villages because when you depend on agriculture you depend on mercy of god sometimes there is rain sometimes there is drought and your crops fail so you would rather be working in a factory in a mine where you are assured of daily wages so there was this massive movement towards the cities the mass exodus we can say and that led to very poor living conditions in the cities and these villages they were getting emptied out and obviously therefore agriculture dropped and england was getting more and more dependent on its colonies for supply of food crops and that kind of weakens the basic backbone of a country your farmers are not getting enough your laborers are not getting the kind of oxygen they deserve to work so much and only a chosen few handful of people are getting rich we don't call that an economic stability but it was seen as a period of economic boom for england and therefore there was this reaction reaction again this kind of undemocratic wealth distribution and democratic distribution of human rights there was child labor and no recognition of the value of human labor it was like we complained that english people were hard on us english people were hard on english people so that is what the reaction was about and this reaction is the root of romanticism now when it comes to romanticism along with the two words which i had mentioned earlier imagination and nature another word is very important that is escapism people often try to say that romantics are escapists but just now i had said that romantics are the people who reacted against the ostracities of the world the undemocratic distribution of wealth in this world and everything wrong that happens in the society so how can you call that escapism well when we will look into individual poets we will see what escapism truly means in context of romanticism usually books on history of literature they prefer to give an exact date as the starting point of english romantic movement and that date is 1798 why because a book was published a collaborative collection of poems by two persons william wordsworth and his friend samuel taylor coleridge and this book the lyrical balance this contained a kind of collection of poems the kind of which were never written before or so it was believed then in the second publication a preface was added which kind of gave the reader some idea about the philosophy behind those kinds of poems publication of lyrical balance is considered by almost every historian literary historian as the starting point of english romantic movement but i beg to differ for me 1789 is actually the point where this movement or maybe not just this movement but this attitude started to flower and flourish 1789 not just because it was the year of french revolution that is an important factor but that is not why i'm talking about that year that year is the year when a book was published by a madman a madman called william blake and the book was the songs of innocence when we talk about innocence we talk about the innocence of the child when we talk about the child in 1789 we cannot ignore russo who was talking about the child as a figure of wisdom as a possibility of perfection we see this image in william blake nobody understood blake when he was writing like he was misunderstood even what's what said like he was mad but his madness was more sane he was like like this humblity and madman with more reason in him than the whole of 18th century put together william blake was a deist you know he believed in this contrary sides of reality he was not a believer in institutional religion but he was a believer in divinity so he was the one who brought forward this idea of a personal religion where you can actually talk about god from your point of view you're freeing yourself from every religious obligation and what was this world that he was talking about this world as he saw was a world of contraries and he said that without contraries there is no progression what is contrary is we are all made of contraries and there's this balance like later when scientists discovered uh like the atom and it's it's two parts the electron and the proton and the balancing act we realize that it is because of that balancing act that an atom is stable everything in this universe is like a balancing act of contrary things we are all a combination of the good and the bad the fair and the unfair the same and mad and innocence and experience we are all born with innocence and if we are to protect that innocence we need to somehow combine it with the wisdom of experience so that is contrary that is contradictory in fact and this is understood best when we look at the next book which william blake brought out that was called songs of experience and this was like these two books were very different from any previous book of poems because what blake added there was his own illustrations it was like he engraved the whole things up he was trying to tell us that poetry is like an image because he was giving you an actual picture and they were complementary to each other so this idea of this marriage between poetry and art this idea of looking at the world to see something which is not apparently there in front of you something beyond it to see an extra quality in something that is what he talks about there are poems like the tiger the lamb these are the poems which you have in your syllabus most of the times what he's doing there he's taking up these objects of nature a rose in a sick rose he takes up human beings like in the chimney sweeper and he's not just describing those things to you he is talking about some qualities that are there in these things the lamb the tiger qualities which are universal qualities which you might start thinking that does a single lamb of this quality no this quality of innocence is the quality represented by a lamb which exists in the world of ideas the quality of that ferocity that all powerful darkness removing quality of a tiger exists in a tiger which is not found in front of you in a zoo that tiger has no part at all that tiger is caged down this tiger is not caged down this guy tiger is created by uh this great creator vulcan okay vulcan is that mulciver of paradise lost vulcan creating with is this this kind of hammer which belongs to the people like thor so that kind of a glamorous tiger is the tiger of blake and that tiger doesn't exist in alipoor zoo or even the delta of sundarbans they are getting extinct they are powerless this tiger exists in the world of ideas where we have this perfect figure of strength so william blake had already brought in the idea of nature representing a kind of perfection on which words were developed on which coleridge develops but during the time when lyrical balance were published people saw wordsworth as the bringer of a new kind of verse why because wordsworth was more consistent wordsworth was more of a confident figure and he did not believe in expressing through madness he believed in expressing through reasonable sentences what he wants to say and therefore wordsworth is often found in books prescribed for students of class 3 4 5 and 6 because students of that age can understand wordsworth and this was the primary condition for which wordsworth wrote let's look at wordsworth first wordsworth had this idea that poetry should be essentially two things one it should be written in the language of man like common man's language earlier we were seeing this this age of milton and the age of dryden these were complex conceits and style and convoluted sentence structure even in pope when you read wordsworth pick up this poem deference anybody can understand what he's talking about solitary reaper very easy to understand because he's talking about an experience uh through a language which every common man understands so this was a tendency towards democratization of poetry democratization means when people have the power in democracy people have the power to rule not like in monarchy in poetry how does democracy establish itself when there is a poem that every human being can understand whoever understands little bit of english so democratization of poetry was the primary objective of wordsworth second thing that he focused on was who was he writing about if he is writing in the language of the common man then who will read his poems common men and women and if common men and women see that he is writing about these mythological heroes and these experiences of royal life added strokesy they would not identify with it right so he needs to make the subject matter democratic as well and therefore he tries to write about things which everybody knows about he talks about this daffodil these butterflies these birds and they are not to be taken lightly because when he's talking about skylark yes he also wrote a poem on skylark not just shelley he's talking about that desire for home that is there in every human being rich or poor when he is talking about this child figure he is talking about the child in each one of us in solitary reaper he's talking about not just the person who is uh you know singing all alone uh reaping no he's talking about this person who is trying to understand that language of the reaper this trying to understand the language of nature is is everything that wordsworth is about and when i'm talking about lyrical ballads the one poem by wordsworth which kind of sets the whole tone of that book was the poem tintana in tintana bay we see that he's talking about nature not just as an object but as a subject as an active agent earlier what happened nature was used in poetry but as a metaphor as simile you know she is as beautiful as the rose shall i compare thee to or someone's day even shakespeare what what's what did was he was turning the whole table now pay very close attention when you compare something or someone with nature what you are doing you are saying that a human being is made of these these qualities one of these qualities is present in an object of nature and therefore in that there is a similarity for example a person is beautiful a rose is beautiful so a person is like a rose this is what you say what the romantic idea is is that nature has all qualities you have some aspect of nature so instead of linking nature to man they are linking man to nature take for example a poem which you very well know about the skylark by shelley what is shelley doing there shelley says that the skylark is eternal the skylark song is like this forever thing i'm a mortal i only exist to listen to it for some time in my existence and this world of skylark is a world beyond human suffering and that's the kind of world that keats talks about in his poem to a nightingale and this world of the birds ah that belongs to a higher order okay so a romantic poet he thinks that the whole object of your life purpose of your life is to rise above and reach that level so it's not like comparing the skylark to your life it's like raising yourself to that world of skylark so that you can better yourself that is a kind of education they are looking for so this is how nature expands from just a metaphor although a beautiful metaphor earlier used by poets like shakespeare by like milton now nature becomes the absolute man becomes a metaphor of nature and when man is closer to that nature then he is more perfect than other people who are trapped in human society so when lyrical balance was published it was like wordsworth was talking about nature you know on its splendor and in a very straightforward common man's language and diction the other person is t coleridge what was he doing he wrote far less number of poems when it came to lyrical balance in fact he is rather known for only six poems okay he is known more for his critical prose work coleridge was representing nature at a very different light wordsworth was talking about nature as he saw it coleridge was talking about nature as he or we cannot see it super nature what is supernatural supernatural is something which does not exist in reality right in in nature and therefore supernatural is something which is like ghosts and demons things we don't see what coleridge does is he uses nature to create the effect of the supernatural now if you have watched my series on macbeth especially the porter scene you would realize that i had said something very important there shakespeare like not just the porter scene the the part where we see that macbeth goes to kill duncan and lady macbeth she hears that owl and she feels frightened this whole scenario is created which is eerie we see that shakespeare is creating a supernatural effect using natural objects because now is a natural thing here also coleridge does the same thing although in poems like crystal we see that he develops this idea of actual supernatural entities but at the core of it the heart of it he's talking about real human emotions and real natural scenarios situations which turn supernatural because of his ability to see it that way and that ability is the ability of imagination later in biographia literaria which is a very impressive work so far as literary criticism is concerned he talks about not just imagination but also degrees of imagination it's like earlier we used to say that this person is imaginative this person is not imaginative prozac he said that no imagination has layers you can have primary imagination you can have secondary imagination you can have fancy okay so many different variations and those variations were not variations in type it's not like primary imagination is something and secondary imagination is something altogether different no they are different in degree more intense like secondary and what does imagination do it takes this sensation different kind of sensation you see a bird you have a sensation if you listen to a music you have a sensation and it fuses kind of it creates something very new which can be supernatural even that happens with coleridge and the greater change you bring to that the greater is that cooking you do the bigger imagination the more higher degree of imagination you have so fancy is like everybody has it okay even a non-imaginative person at moments might feel okay wow this is wonderful and that is fancy we dream of many things that is fancy but when you connect it organically you see a connection between things and i can't explain that on video you have to have that to understand that i don't have that otherwise i would be writing poetry not explaining romantic age to you secondary imagination is the quality of the creator poet and this makes us understand how serious coleridge was about imagination these two friends what's what then cole which they started on very good terms and the period uh where warsword was living with his sister dorothy and his friend coleridge in the lake district that period is considered to be the most fruitful one in wordsworth life and critics even go on to say that coleridge created wordsworth and then these two friends fell apart we don't know exactly why or maybe they actually looked at the world in essentially very different ways the kind of goodness the kind of benevolence which was what wanted to see in nature was somehow unrealistic to coleridge perhaps he was more about honesty you know nature is not always benevolent it also has dark sides it also has eerie sides it can make you suffer that is what we see in the ancient mariner and religion was also a factor probably because what's what was giving up on his revolutionary streak and he was kind of accepting the church of england coleridge was from the beginning a religious man although not in again that institutional way he was not a religious man who goes to church every day not that his religion was this religion of imagination and he felt that divinity was reachable only if you had the imagination to reach it these two friends they fell apart later at the end of uh his life like four which was again close towards what it was like a reconciliation but the spark of these early days that was never revived if you have listened to uh this explanation i made on the kubla khan poem you would know that in coleridge we have this feeling that nature is like a teacher it offers you options and you are to make a choice there so there are different ways of approaching nature one can be a destructive way one can be a constructive way and the outcome of your life will depend on the way you choose it or the choices that you make what choices did coldridge make he was a taker of opium he never could complete what he started the rest of his poems are fragments he's known for very little actual real accomplishment like we only know him for poems like the shin mariner then we have cristobal with two parts and then this fragment kublai khan frost at midnight and finally dejection and ode if you ever read dejection and old you would see that broken man is speaking to you a dissolution man why is he broken has he made the wrong choice has all his ideas failed he was writing dejection and ode after that initial euphoria of revolution has passed so what we see is that romanticism in its root has this emotion you have to be honest if you are sad you have to show that you are sad if you are happy you have to show that you are happy when you read rape of the lord do you realize pope was an unhappy man do you realize he was a happy man we don't know what he was that is like completely separating yourself from your work in milton we do have a lot of milton in his paradise lost but it's not actually militant we can never be sure of that it is satan or milton but in romantic poetry you are sure you are certain that this is what's worth talking to us in international this is coleridge speaking to us dejected in his poem ode on rejection when we talk about wordsworth coleridge we should not forget the name of robert sade uh together with uh wordsworth and coleridge he is the third poet of this group of lake district poets uh in sade uh we don't have that kind of spark which uh coleridge provides us with or what's what even but he was you know gaining popularity because he eventually became the poet laureate of england sade was a possibly a better prose writer but he continued the kind of romantic ideas that were developed by wordsworth and coleridge coming to the second generation of romantic poets we have three very important names byron shelley and keats interestingly all of them died by 1824 all of them it was as if the whole generation was annihilated and after they were gone even wordsworth stopped writing literally he didn't publish anything worthwhile it was as if they flourished the whole thing and with their disappearance from this world they kind of suck what's what dry and cold ridge was already gone like he was deep down in his hole of depression we can say so although byron shelley and keats they are called the second generation of romantic poetry i see them as the soul of romantic poetry because when they were gone the first generation although they were alive they were not living anymore when we talk about byron you'll see there are two kinds of people one kind of people will say byron he was a lecherous man okay kind of incestuous he had an affair with his sister he was bisexual he had so many he had like more than 50 affairs sometimes some people he had more than 200 women with him and he was not a follower of rules not disciplined and all that value judgment and there's this other class of people who say byron he was a re-creator of this myth uh you know he was bringing in these magical romances back to life he was talking about these heroes in his poems and he was not talking about birds and bees and daffodils and butterflies like what's what did what he was talking about these heroes on horses okay both these views are correct and both these views are not correct if taken in isolation byron was both of these and that was because he was a product of an age that represented a kind of a dichotomy a contrary why was he bringing in back these romances he's famous for his poem donchuan he was bringing in these romances or his romantic heroes because he felt that they offered a kind of grandeur which the industrial petty world commercial world of london was not having now therefore just like the daffodils they represent pristine beauty for what's what these medieval heroes romances they represent for byron the kind of majesty that he wants people to have now but they don't have the problem with byron is when you talk about these uh you know larger than life heroes you should offer some variety you know you should talk about one kind of hero and in the next poem a different kind of a person with some objective dramatic distance then you write like shakespeare then you write like browning but what happens in case of byron is we see byron all the time when we look at donjo and we see byron donchuan is presented as a womanizer who ends in hell but we don't see don't ruin when he writes about donjon we see byron and his dejection and with a kind of humor in fact so in byron the problem is egotism although egotism is something subjectivity what i'm saying that when i'm writing a poem i am writing a poem okay like you find what's what in verse was poem that is egotism that is like subjectivity of a poet which is highlighted in romantic period but when you overdo it it's like an overkill that is what happens in case of violence poem same kind of egotism is seen in case of shelly shelley was a rebellious hothead he was expelled from his university in fact he was also expelled from his university interesting how many romantic poets were actually hated by the people around them uh they were excluded because of their radical thinking now when we read a person like wordsworth or shelley or do we actually see a person who is expelled from university or do we see a person who actually voiced out again the setting up of railroads in lake district that's what wordsworth did when those companies wanted to establish railroads in lake district he finally protested against it and that is a kind of revolutionary figure we don't notice when we read poems because we end up thinking that romantic poets are the ones who sit under a tree uh you know maybe chewing on his pencil with a glass of wine perhaps thinking about things we don't exist anymore thinking about things which are not needed in this world anymore we think that right but these people were rebels shelley was a rebel and why was he expelled from his university oxford because he chose to write on atheism atheism is when you don't believe in god you don't believe in the institution of church and he wanted to write on that and it was so disturbing that he was thrown away he ran off with a girl shelly he he believed in this concept of liberalism free mind free love he believed that in marriage women are trapped there was another man who believed that in marriage women are trapped that man was william holding but the point is shelley ran away with daughter of william golding and married her and her name was mary who then became mary shelley and eventually went on to write this wonderful book frankenstein william golding was again married to this woman very fiery woman called mary wollstonecraft who is known for uh the vindication on the rights of woman the massive text on feminist studies and is usually the first text that is prescribed for any gender studies paper so shelley when he was 16 ran off with a lady got married to her not lady she was a girl then and even before he turned into a mature human being he commits suicide and while committing suicide he has this poem by john keeps in his pocket i am telling you he committed a suicide i'm not sure of that uh there is no evidence you can say it could have been an accident it happened in italy it drowned but whether it was a suicide or not the death of shelley that kind of reinforced this idea of the victim tragic figure of the poet that that figure of the poet which uh was started by the suicide of chatterton remember in the very beginning i was talking about him so romanticism is this development of this poet as a christ-like figure as a victim figure and when you have this figure of a poet then that poet becomes like christ and so this idea of poetry becomes like an alternative to christianity and therefore we see that when shelley talks about poets and says that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world unacknowledged means nobody gives a damn about poets whatever you say we don't care that is unacknowledged nobody gives any validation legislators rule makers who decide what is going to be the future of the world so when you are a legislator you are very powerful but when you are unacknowledged then that power is like zero so that is a contradiction in itself and shelly says that poets are like prophets they are like that person who gives who shows light to the people living in a cave that light through which enlightenment comes that is again a platonic idea so with shelley we have another dissolution man whose rebellion is seen not just in poems like when he talks about prophecy and rebellion and revolt reaction against everything that is assorted and socialized and civilized we see these things in poems like the west wind where he is actually praying like as if this west wind is like god that left me as a wave like i want to be with you because he knows that in his childhood in his younger days he was like the west wind it was like this educating mission of society that has corrupted him so he's going back to russo you can't avoid going back to russo if you are writing in like the early part of 19th century so shelley was platonic in his views that the world of appearances that you see around you they are imperfect and the world of ideas they represent a kind of perfection now when somebody has that kind of an idea there are two ways in which they react to it either they become nostalgic for the past which we see in case of you know some of byron's works and even in wordsworth at times who looks back at this pre-industrialized world as a better world but with shelley he was more about a person talking about the future with the possibility of perfection that is why he sees poet as prophetic they kind of look into the future as something that might happen and this line from his poem is ever popular that if winter comes can spring be far behind that is a line from the west wind this means that this is winter the kind of chaos the kind of anarchy we are seeing around us and there will be some spring after this because he believes in the cycle of nature that after every wrong thing comes the right one and this vision to look through the winter to see that spring to look through the world of suffering to perceive the world of the skylark which does not know about the world of human sufferings which is beyond human sufferings that is the power which imagination gives shelly and if he committed suicide why maybe he couldn't somehow live up to his own expectations of being a prophet when we look at the drama that he wrote prometheus unbound we see prometheus the person who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man prometheus was punished because he did something that was that he was not supposed to do but that is something which empowered men so prometheus is like a hero for human beings shelley presents prometheus as kind of a satanic figure satanic in a glorified way because it was unique the way uh the romantics like blake like shelley they looked at milton's presentation of satan they thought that milton belonged to the devil's party without even realizing it and therefore in prometheus we see satan's picture of a failed hero but a hero who hopes in the future because you know milton says that in hell there is no hope but we see satan hoping all the time that he is going to win against god and his plans so this hope this hope and this faith in a possibility of change in a possibility of victory in possibility of a spring beyond winter this is what shelly is about and if he was dissolutioned maybe that led to his death and if it was an accident maybe he still had some faith in that in any case then human mind is seen by romantic poets as a very active agent like you view the world appearances and you activate that power of imagination and you see some reality which is beyond the appearance what had john locke said when i was talking about the age of reason i had talked about john locke he was talking about this tabula rasa that when we are born our minds are like this blank slate on which sense experiences they bombard and they have an effect and we have this sense of the world okay there is no pre-existing quality in a mind when a child is born that is locke's idea newton he was trying to explain the world scientifically this was the scientific revolution stage what the romantics were doing they were saying that no our mind is not like a tabula rasa it's not like a blank slate because they were going back to plato who was talking about these innate ideas in the world of ideas they say that mind is a powerful weapon you engage with your mind and that is true in some way because you see if our minds were tabula rasa blank slate when we are born then two children born in the same household exposed to the same kind of experiences same kind of visual sensations originally sensations would develop into same kinds of human beings but they do not because somehow there are differences in the way human minds are created and this is a scientific fact proven today and therefore this faculty this quality this power of the mind to look at to perceive a kind of reality and reach a different kind of meaning is very possible two different human beings listening to a particular song will react differently to it and that will depend lot of circumstances that will also depend on their power of imagination so we see that the way they interpreted reality was a subjective position it was not an objective one that is i am engaging in my poem as a subject but the one poet who could achieve the greatest objectivity within this subjective field was john keats and why he could do that because he was john keats because he was to die so soon because he knew that if he gave value to his subject position if he gave value to his body his physical existence and if he could somehow not think about something beyond the body beyond the subject then he would cease to exist very soon this might happen to anybody if you are doomed and he was such a young man at 26 he died of tuberculosis he was not like shelley or byron he was not like born into aristocratic family he saw his brother die of the same disease and he could understand that it's going to be his end too and within a very short time he produced such brilliant poems and what were the central themes of keith's poems mostly the central themes revolved around the idea of what is permanent what is beautiful what is art how does art offer you permanence like something is painted it is more permanent than human life but then that painting does not have the vitality of human life so always we have this contradiction in him this yearning in him yearning to understand what is beautiful so how is beauty related to truth because by truth now they felt that truth was something which resided in the world of ideas so does beauty also reside there so all these concepts were bugging him he was talking about these things especially in his odds especially connected at these three order or to a nightingale and then we have odon agricion on and finally to autumn first he asked this question to the nightingale that you have this world of perfection in which you live and i live in a world where young men die and this old age and suffering is something which probably you know gautam buddha he was thinking about when he was looking at the sufferings of the world the same kind of questions were bugging john keats in into a nightingale and he was you know taking a drink and he was trying to escape to that world of the nightingale being an escapist as it is and then he realizes at the end of the poem that it's not possible it's not possible to remain there continuously if you are taking the help of something like a drink or maybe just a flash of fancy it's temporary that that escape to the world of the nightingale is temporary you can't remain there permanently and then he asks in on aggression on that if that is not a possibility of permanence if he cannot reach a permanent state of happiness uh through fancy or through intoxication can i reach it through beauty can i reach it through art uh you know he was looking at this urn this green on on which different kinds of scenes were painted scenes which represent happy moments and eternally crafted moments eternally beautified on that one and he realizes that yes there is a lover on that urn trying to kiss but these pairs of lovers can never end up kissing each other that woman will remain young forever but there is no life there is no continuity there is no fertility you know there's this line in king lear rightness is all there is no ripeness there is no maturity the music cannot be heard it is imagined so it is a more beautiful music than anything that you can hear because the thing that you can hear belongs to the world of reality is not as good as the music which you imagine so he is talking about platonic idea here but where is permanence and if this is permanent what kind of permanence is this there is no fulfillment and then he goes on to this oath to autumn and there he says that there is a music that autumn has thai has type music too you might not be the spring but you have your own beauty because you represent maturity you represent fulfillment satisfaction so life doesn't have to be a long one autumn can come easily early but it is still beautiful so we don't have this prophetic dream of a spring beyond winter in uh kids like we have in shelley he's talking about winter being good because spring will come he's saying that i don't care if spring comes i know you are beautiful so for him beauty is there in autumn because autumn is reality and reality is beauty so we see a kind of capability in keats to distance himself go away from his own suffering talk about autumn looking at autumn not through his own eyes but through some universal poets eyes and that gives him a kind of objectivity which like no other romantic poet had even coleridge with so much crisis in his life i don't know how he managed that even milton couldn't manage to distance himself that was something that shakespeare could he didn't have so much crisis in his life perhaps not but with so much crisis it's natural for you to be subjective it's okay for you to be emotional but kids chooses not to be those things he recreates that shakespearean beauty that magnificence where he knows that it's the only way to survive it he knows that i'm going to die but if i'm going to make my poem just me like byron did people will only read my poems if they like me but he wanted his poem to be something which is beyond him which has a life of its own because that will be closer to truth and that is why his poems are so relatable when you read those lines you can identify yourself in them because he's so objective and he is closer to truth so i don't call that escapism that is not escaping reality that's like pushing you right into reality what kind of reality he's not talking about the reality of his immediate world but a reality which exists beyond 18th century 19th century even 20th century england because what is universal cannot be existing at one historical point when you talk about universal thing things which are applicable to all people to all generation of people across the world you've got to be a little bit of unreal because when you talk about a real thing you locate that thing it's like you put that pin on a google map he is unpinning poetry from any local coloring and that makes him universal that makes every romantic poet more universal than poets like pope or dryden who were located within their cultures and it was important to understand the historical context of pope or dryden to understand their poems so in a sense romantic poetry is about the spontaneity of expression at the same time thinking about that emotion you are spontaneous you are emotional but you need to be detailed and objective about your emotion so emotion is the subject of your poem if you are a romantic poet and they reflect a kind of human nature which is unaffected by society civilization now when we talk about romantic age we mostly talk about poetry what was happening in novel novel is it was like a kind of genre that was developing you know just around 18th century we had seen that and it was at its very early stages now novel is based on real life real life incidents uh so how did novel change during this time did it change at all where novelists also affected by this romantic idea with by this escapism this concept of imagination yes when we look at people like walter scott what we see is he brought in this new kind of novel the historical novel and especially he was uh placing before us these romances uh these scottish legends and showing us that these legends these historical stories of scotland they are like the representative of a glamorous world a world you look back at with nostalgia so the kind of nostalgia you can say escapism from the present world is something which we see in sir walter scott as well his novels famous as waverly novels they made him very popular he wrote anonymously out of his 25 scottish historical novels we have novels like the heart of midlothian then we have the antiquary and then we have this english medieval romance in ivanhoe so when it came to walter scott uh he was more like writing on themes and content that appeal to public interest not so much on private emotions and private relationships there were a few exceptions of course jane austen on the other hand she brought forth a kind of novel that talked about personal relationships the home and that home as a site of romance different ways of looking at relationships so in jane austen especially in the novel the pride and prejudice we have a kind of imaginative beauty that was really unique interestingly this was an age when a lot of women novelists were coming up women writers were coming up i've already talked about mary shelley to you right and she was writing frankenstein and what was frankenstein frankenstein was like this figure of prometheus you can say the figure of the prodigal son the satan figure who is more sinned against than sinning so prometheus frankenstein these humanization of accepted devil characters accepted negative anti-god figures you can say antichrist figures all these kinds of representations were coming up and it was quite natural that mary shelley would do something she was the daughter of this radical man william golding this woman mary wollstonecraft and the wife of uh persuli no wonder she would be writing things like the frankenstein and it's not just the story of a monster at all it is the story of monstrous humanity defining monstrosity how we define a monster she questions our definition of evil our definition of monster because we abide by we follow some social codes when we mark somebody as the devil and what is the story of frankenstein frankenstein is like a monster is created through science like an act of god reenacted so we are left with so many questions that is she talking about the act of going against god as evil is she talking about this monster as monster and if this is not a monster then is this act of man trying to go even beyond god's work recreating god's work is she going for it or against it she doesn't make a value statement here she wants us to draw our own conclusions maria edward another woman annie ratcliffe another person in radcliffe we see romances in mary edgewood we see irish stories so these local flavors regional flavors were coming up a novel is about that it brings you a chunk of reality and within the context of uh romantic period which kind of refutes reality as a good thing at all as something which gives you truth at all novel is showing that yes reality is giving you truth you have to have the eyes to see and that eyes uh is like the eye of imagination this was what was happening in fiction in non-fiction you have people like charles lam de quincy hazlitt charles lamb suffered in a really different way because his suffering was not so much due to his own life but because of his sister sister was in a very unstable state and she actually ended up killing their mother she was institutionalized and then he took her out took care of her for the rest of his lives he didn't even get married to anybody he was so devoted to his sister and that combination that do they produce this beautiful book lamb's tales from shakespeare in the essays that lamb wrote we see so much of wordsworthian ideas we see london and then we see a man looking at london and seeing beyond its pollution if you read the poem on westminster bridge uh by washburn you would know what i am saying there wordsworth looks at london before the day begins so it's like before the frenzy of action pollution that starts he looks at london so london there is a part of nature it's not yet a part of civilization so it's beautiful in lamb you see the streets of london you see the life he presents to you the reality which might be city life but it is so beautifully presented and he shows you those glimpses of humanity those moments when a person acts like a human being and those are the moments where even when you are in a political city who are maybe an industrial worker and you are living in a slum and living in these crowded streets those moments make you more than your circumstance go beyond your limited polluted life that is what charles lamb gives us as i said it's like an outpouring of autobiographical genius we see the humor and we see the pith holes and very rarely can a person combine these two things huber and peters together and that is what charles lab gives you decency he is more romantic melodious sometimes he's less real than charles lamb he talks about things which are not uh you know like those chunks of reality which charles lamb gives you but dequeuency is a beautiful essays is a lovely flow to his style we have hazlitt hasley talks about common experiences so in romantic period so far as essays were concerned or non-fiction was concerned we see a flowering of a reaction against the kind of essays that were developed during the 18th century the periodical assays so they were not like those moral statements on society they were more like what was happening to a person the crisis of individual that was the focus of the kind of essays those were being written the personal touches the development of the personal essay that was the central focus of the non-fiction writers during the times because i am talking about non-fiction i should also say that there were critical works literary criticism like coleridge's biography literaria shelley's defense of poetry uh okay and then we have keith's letters from where we derive a lot of our idea about romantic poets how they thought about poetry how they thought about literature but in general what we see that there is a poetic essence to whatever was written whatever was constructed and when you put that parallelly with what was happening in america you would see that this was happening worldwide ah i had uh talked about this in uh the story the ambitious guest how nathaniel hawthorne and uh the painters during the time the white mountain painters they were bringing in the grandeur of nature and the littleness of human beings as contrary to each other so romantic period was very much like the renesa humanism because it was about human rights about liberation but it was so much different from humanism because humanism did what it placed man at the center of the universe it was all about you it was all about man but romantics placed man at the periphery at the side you will come to the center if you come in terms with nature nature is at the center so the romantics were the first of the environmentalists we can say the first of the eco critics who were bothered about the environment uh shelley himself was a vegetarian and they had different ways in which they advocated the preservation of nature the conservation of nature and we owe to them every time there is a movement like a chipko movement every time there is a movement where man stands for the sake of nature against human advancement against human corruption they owe it to the romantics and therefore we cannot say that uh the romantic age stopped with the ascension of victoria on throne in 1837 although that is considered to be in one way the end of romantic age and the beginning of the victorian age because as i had told you wordsworth had stopped writing after shelly kids byron they died and somehow victoria we will come to that in our next lecture victoria represent a different kind of world view altogether and that is also equally very interesting but what i am trying to say is that i don't believe that 1837 is the ending point of romantic period even 1850 when warsworth had died it was not the end of the romantic period it was not even like in 1789 it was french revolution in 1889 we have this man called charlie chaplin who again represents that trump figure careless of the world moving about the streets of london imitating in its own way the kind of atrocity that hitler represents and at the same time the angst of the modern man it doesn't even end there the romantic age continues even today in the moments when we choose to be romantics so romanticism is not just about an age it's not about a period it's not about a historical movement only it's about a change which still continues to run through us and although we try to define it by words like escapism nostalgia medievalism priority of imagination and worship of nature we cannot restrict these things to one age only it remains even now even now when writers like ishiguro he talks about the landscape that imagined landscape and this is what being a romantic means is this continuity this train that runs through ages down the ages across the continent across the globe i have talked about a lot of things and i have missed like 95 percent of what i should have talked about i'm definite about it because you cannot talk about romanticism even in five six hours it deserves more maybe when i will be taking up individual poets and their works we will have the chance of you know developing on these ideas but i wanted to give you a ground work more like an orientation of attitude that now after knowing all this if you approach a poem by shelley if you approach a poem by kids you would have this idea at the back of your mind that now i know the man behind it who wrote this i will advise you to go to the lives of these poets their individual works but above everything else try to link them and don't see them as escapist lazy people effeminate people they were the strongest voices of revolt in a society where everything was easy where people could you know very well be happy about their economic progress but they chose not to be happy they chose not to be satisfied and as was what said bliss was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven that dawn was the dawn of a new kind of civilization a new kind of poetry that redefined poetry for not just english people but for the rest of the world thank you all for being with me i hope to catch you soon with our discussion on the victorian age with which we will wrap up our long long series on history of english literature i hope this series is helping you out do like share comment if you think our content is worth it thank you so much once again this is munami mukherjee signing off stay happy stay safe [Music]