Redefining the Meaning of “Romantic”

Dr.P.K.Chhetri

 The word “romantic” connotes many meanings; it may be an adventure in a strange land or a walk late at night when the moon is shining softly. For a newspaper the description of the life of a man who has risen from office-boy to business tycoon as romantic. The matter of the fact is: anything strange, provided it is coloured with happiness, may be broadly termed romantic. 

      While speaking in terms of literature and writers, it is difficult to explain exactly what we actually mean by romantic, when we use the term, though it is liberally used by the critics every now and then to identify the character of a work, yet its general meaning is clear enough. It is said, “a romantic writer gives full play to his imagination and his emotions, and writes straight from the heart,” but it incorporates a great deal more in it than the way it has been described. In romantic work, subject matter, form, style, and language, all are involved. 

      Therefore, it is wise to analyse each of them meticulously. A romantic writer turns to romantic themes, which promise adventure and inspiration, themes that stir his emotions. Therefore, he takes shelter of history, mythology, folk lore, and tales of daring land and by sea, but they may not largely fit into the word romance. Most of the entire writer is attracted to the adventure of all living things, and the inspiring fact that there is a wide world, throbbing with life, from the tiniest blade of grass to man, the most intricate and interesting of all living things on the earth.  

     The writer examines everything with fascinated interest, and discovers two absorbing facts – that there is beauty beyond comprehension everywhere, and on the contrary there are also ugliness and wickedness. He discovers that man is responsible for much of the latter, for most indeed of what is to be seen.  Nature – that is, the entire visible world except what man has created – conceals for the most part of the cruelty that exists in the animal and the plant kingdoms, and showcases her always beautiful, bountiful, and kindly. So perfect is Nature that the romantic writer cannot help believing that hidden behind is a Divine Creator, infinitely wiser and far more capable than man, what has fashioned it all. In other words, he discovers God or Divine Being in His works. 

      Thus he immediately longs to sing about the wonder, the beauty, and the glory of it all. So he turns spontaneously to lyrics, songs, and odes, and turns away from satire, and finds little patience with parodies, burlesques, and humorous writings. Here he is deadly earnest in his attitude; when he is saddened by the thought of evil, his heart burns with indignation, or he reflects sorrowfully in elegies or laments. Obviously he is not much bound by laws and rules. If a metre does not allow him to say what he wants, then he thinks it must be altered, or he would not hesitate to create a new one to suit his purpose. He concludes he cannot be “correct” if it means he cannot be true to his inspiration. It is a fact, many of the greatest romantic writers have been sternly careful  about their style because their love of beauty made them so, however, in general, romantic literature is free, utterly careless of existing tradition, and always ready to break a rule of style if that rule gets in its way. Naturally, a romantic writer cannot bear to use language that seems artificial in any way. He uses strong, sincere words that emphasise what they mean. He restricts himself from beating about the bush and goes straight to the point. 

      Unfortunately such writers were non-existent in England from about 1670 to 1750. During the second half of the eighteenth century romance in literature manifested its existence once again, and writing struggled out of the bonds in which Dryden and Pope and their followers had imprisoned it. Prose at any time had never been so distressfully bound as poetry; but prose, since it is prose, the language of everyday life, however it may try can never reach such heights or sink to such depths as poetry. It should invariably be the language of the heart as well as of the head, because everyone uses it; but the poetry has the liberty, though it is an art practised by a few, can be forced into strangely unnatural shape.      

      In the eighteenth century it had been confined almost exclusively to one form only, the heroic couplet; dealing with a very narrow range of subjects; and its language had grown so artificial that it had become improper in poetry to call a thing by its right name. Even Thomas Gray (1716-71), who is considered one of the leaders in the romantic revival, refers to cats as “demurest of the tabby kind.” It has become a fashion, too, to make people of every emotion, and to give Hope, Fear, Passion, Anger, and so on, human qualities. William Collins (1721-59), who along with Gray is equally a leader along the road to romance, in one of his famous Odes displays to what length this practice had been carried:

      How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,

      By all their country’s wishes blessed!

      When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, 

      Returns to deck their hallowed mould,

      She there shall dress a sweeter sod

      Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.

      By fairy hands their knell is rung;

      By forms unseen their dirge is sung;

      There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,

      To bless the turf that wraps their clay;

      And Freedom shall awhile repair

      To dwell a weeping hermit there!

        All poets allow themselves to use personification, however, in the eighteen century the practice had been carried to extreme lengths. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and their contemporaries led the poetry back to romance, and thus paved the way for the finest outburst of song in modern times. 

      Romance in poetry occupied its way quite gradually. Who would think now, when the whole world of writers was pouring out correct couplets after the manner of Pope, that the scanty work of a timid professor at Cambridge, the “Odes” of a young man, who tore up his own books, the precocious forgeries of a boy Chatterton, and the ravings of a mad man were heralding one of the mightiest outbursts of romantic song the English literature has ever seen? It is easy enough, more than after two centuries, to trace the progress of the Romantic Revival, but at the time only a few people could be aware that any change was coming over the spirit of poetry. Yet between 1780 and 1800, simply within a matter of twenty years, four great poets published volumes of poetry, and of these four, one at least wrought a tremendous change in people’s ideas and opened their eyes to the fact that a “new” poetry had made its way into the world of English literature. These four poets were: Cowper, Crabbe, Blake and Burns.  

                                                                                    (drpkchhetri7@gmail.com)