The Romantic Age2 Marks Questions with Answers · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, a small volume opening with Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closing with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. Its deliberate turn to common language, common life and imagination is treated as the formal beginning of English Romanticism, which conventionally ends with Victoria's accession in 1837 (or Scott's death and the Reform Act, 1832).

In the Preface (added to the second edition, 1800, expanded 1802), Wordsworth defines poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', which 'takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity'. He also declares that the poet is 'a man speaking to men' and chooses 'incidents and situations from common life' in 'a selection of language really used by men'.

In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge calls fancy a mere 'mode of memory' that mechanically aggregates ready-made images, while imagination is the truly creative power that dissolves and recreates experience. He further divides imagination into primary (the living power of all human perception) and secondary (the poet's conscious echo of it, which 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate').

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey — so called because they lived in the Lake District of north-west England. The label was first used dismissively by the Edinburgh Review. They form the 'older generation' of Romantics, against the younger trio of Byron, Shelley and Keats.

'Satanic School' is Robert Southey's hostile label, coined in the preface to his A Vision of Judgement (1821), for Byron and Shelley (and their circle), whose poetry he condemned as immoral and rebellious. Byron retaliated with his own satirical The Vision of Judgment (1822) — the spelling difference itself is an exam point.

The Cockney School was a sneering label applied by Blackwood's Magazine (in articles signed 'Z', chiefly by John Gibson Lockhart, from 1817) to the London circle of Leigh Hunt, including Keats and Hazlitt, mocking their supposedly vulgar, lower-class diction and rhymes.

Negative capability is Keats's phrase, from a letter of December 1817, for the poet's power of 'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. He saw Shakespeare as its supreme possessor — the poet who erases his own personality to enter imaginatively into everything.

Adonais (1821) is Shelley's pastoral elegy on the death of John Keats, written in Spenserian stanzas. It stands in the elegiac line of Milton's Lycidas and is itself mourned-over in exam halls: remember that Arnold's Thyrsis and Tennyson's In Memoriam are the Victorian members of the same tradition.

Walter Scott's Waverley is regarded as the first historical novel in English. Published anonymously, its enormous success founded the 'Waverley Novels' and made the historical novel a major genre across Europe, influencing writers from Dickens to Tolstoy. Scott was nicknamed 'the Wizard of the North'.

Elia is the pen-name under which Charles Lamb published his famous personal essays in the London Magazine, collected as Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833). Lamb borrowed the name from an Italian clerk he had known at the South Sea House — the subject of the first essay.

The older generation — Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey — lived long, grew conservative, and centred on the Lake District. The younger generation — Byron, Shelley and Keats — were radicals who all died young and abroad: Keats in Rome (1821), Shelley drowned off Italy (1822), Byron at Missolonghi in Greece (1824). The order of their deaths is a favourite chronology question.

'The Renascence of Wonder' is Theodore Watts-Dunton's celebrated definition of Romanticism, describing the movement's recovery of mystery, awe and the supernatural after the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Pater's 'addition of strangeness to beauty' and Hugo's 'liberalism in literature' are companion definitions worth quoting.

The Edinburgh Review (1802, Whig), the Quarterly Review (1809, Tory), Blackwood's Magazine (1817, Tory — home of the 'Cockney School' attacks) and the London Magazine (1820, which published Lamb's Elia essays and De Quincey's Confessions). Their dates and politics are standard match-the-following material.

The Prelude, subtitled 'Growth of a Poet's Mind', is Wordsworth's autobiographical epic in blank verse, begun in 1798–99 and revised throughout his life. It was published posthumously in 1850, the year of his death, with its title supplied by his widow. It was addressed to Coleridge.

Blake engraved and hand-coloured Songs of Innocence (1789) and combined it with Songs of Experience in 1794, subtitled 'Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul'. Paired poems answer each other across the divide — 'The Lamb' against 'The Tyger', the two 'Chimney Sweeper' and 'Holy Thursday' poems — innocence and experience as permanent contraries, not stages.

In Biographia Literaria, chapter 14, Coleridge describes the plan of Lyrical Ballads as a division of labour: his own poems would treat supernatural subjects so as to produce 'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith', while Wordsworth would give 'the charm of novelty to things of every day'. The phrase is now the basic term for how fiction works at all.

Coleridge composed 'Kubla Khan' in an opium dream at a Somerset farmhouse (1797); interrupted while writing it down by the famous 'person on business from Porlock', he could recall no more — hence its subtitle, 'A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment'. He published it only in 1816, at Byron's urging, together with Christabel. Porlock has become criticism's shorthand for lost inspiration.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — opening poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) — is Coleridge's ballad of crime and penance: the shot albatross, the becalmed ship ('Water, water, every where'), the blessing of the water-snakes, and the compulsion to retell. Coleridge added the prose marginal gloss in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Its moral — 'He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small' — is endlessly quoted and examined.

'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey' closes Lyrical Ballads (1798). Revisiting the Wye after five years, Wordsworth traces the three stages of his relationship with nature — boyish 'glad animal movements', aching passion, and the mature sense of 'a presence... deeply interfused' — before turning to his sister Dorothy as the keeper of his former self. It is the manifesto-poem of Wordsworthian nature-religion.

'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' (composed 1802–04, published 1807) mourns and consoles the fading of childhood's 'celestial light'. Built on a Platonic myth of pre-existence — 'trailing clouds of glory do we come' — it carries the epigraph 'The Child is father of the Man' from Wordsworth's own 'My Heart Leaps Up', and ends in 'thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'.

The Byronic hero — moody, proud, guilt-haunted, magnetic and contemptuous of society — appears in Childe Harold, the Oriental tales and Manfred, and was instantly identified with Byron himself ('mad, bad, and dangerous to know', in Lady Caroline Lamb's phrase). His other manner is the conversational satire of Don Juan (1819–24), in ottava rima, left unfinished at his death — the comic masterpiece of the age.

Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' (written near Florence, 1819; published with Prometheus Unbound, 1820) is five sonnet-length sections in terza rima — Dante's metre — invoking the wind as 'destroyer and preserver'. The poet asks to be its lyre and trumpet of prophecy, ending with the most quoted line of English Romanticism: 'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?'

In the miraculous months of 1819 Keats wrote the odes 'to Psyche', 'to a Nightingale' (in Brown's Hampstead garden), 'on a Grecian Urn' ('Beauty is truth, truth beauty'), 'on Melancholy', 'on Indolence' and — that September — 'To Autumn', often called the most perfect short poem in English. All appeared in the 1820 Lamia volume, his last.

Austen published six novels anonymously ('By a Lady'), from Sense and Sensibility (1811) through Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815) to the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817) — comedies of manners about '3 or 4 families in a country village', worked, as she joked, on a 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory'. Untouched by Romantic sublimity, she perfected the realist novel in the middle of the Romantic age — the paradox examiners love.

The Gothic reached its peak and its parody together: Ann Radcliffe's 'explained supernatural' in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the lurid horror of M. G. Lewis's The Monk (1796), then Frankenstein (1818) and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817) mocks the fashion, while Scott absorbed its castles into the historical novel.

Hazlitt is the age's great critical essayist: Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and The Spirit of the Age (1825), the brilliant portrait-gallery of his contemporaries. His ideal of 'gusto' — passionate relish in art — and his combative 'familiar style' make him the standard pairing (and contrast) with Lamb in exam questions on the Romantic essay.

Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals (1800–03, unpublished in her lifetime) record the daily life behind her brother's poems — her entry on the daffodils beside Ullswater (15 April 1802) precedes and feeds 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'. 'Tintern Abbey' addresses her directly. She is now studied as a major Romantic prose writer in her own right.

Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy in Italy within weeks of the Peterloo Massacre (August 1819) — the cavalry charge on a peaceful Manchester reform meeting. Too inflammatory to print, it appeared only in 1832, after his death, edited by Leigh Hunt. Its call to 'Rise like Lions after slumber' and the refrain 'Ye are many — they are few' made it the founding poem of English protest literature.