In Our Time - The Later Romantics

Episode Date: April 15, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry, the tragedy and the idealism of the Later Romantics. There must have been something extraordinary about the early 19th century, when six of the greatest poets in the English language were all writing. William Blake was there and Wordsworth and Coleridge had established themselves as the main players in British poetry, when the youthful trio of Byron, Shelley and Keats erupted – if not straight onto the public stage, then at least onto the literary scene. The great chronicler of the age was William Hazlitt, whose romantic maxim was: “Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar and into whom the spirit of the world has not yet entered…the world has no hand on them.” How fitting an epitaph is that for the three great poets who all died tragically young? What were the ideals that drove them and how did their unconventional lifestyles infect the poetry they left behind?With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick; Robert Woof, Director of the Wordsworth Trust; Jennifer Wallace, Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, there must have been something extraordinary about the early 19th century when six of the greatest poets in the English language were all writing.

William Blake was there, and Wordsworth and Coleridge had established themselves as the main players in British poetry, when the youthful trio of Byron, Shelley and Keats erupted, if not straight onto the public stage, then at least onto the literary scene. The great chronicle of the age was William Hazlitt, whose romantic maxim was,

happier they who live in the dream of their own existence and see all things in the light of their own minds, who walk by faith and hope, to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not yet entered, the world has no hand on them. How fitting an epitaph is that for the three great, poets who all die tragically young?

What were the ideals that drove them, and how did their unconventional lifestyles infect the poetry they're left behind? With me to discuss the later romantics, Sir Jonathan Bait, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, Jennifer Wallace, Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and Robert Woof,

director of the Words with Trust in Grasmere, currently housing an exhibition on Hazlet. Jonathan Bate, can you set the scene for us, describe the era in which this second wave of romantic poets are writing? Well, everything really begins with the French Revolution, 1789, the period of the 1790s. That was when there was a whole new way of thinking about society, about politics,

and thinking about poetry in a new way became a part of that. And the poetic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge was what really drove that new thinking as far as people were concerned in Britain. By the time you get towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, things are changing. So you remember after the revolution, England and France are at war, by the time you get to 1812, 1815, the war with France is coming to an end. The poetic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge has begun to stall. I'm sure we'll want to talk about that later.

And then onto the scene come these new figures. First of all, Lord Barron publishes this poem, Charles Harold's Pilgrimede, in 1812 and he says, I woke and found myself famous. And soon after that, Keats and Shelley start writing. And their sort of period of most intense writing is in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. And one of the things that's kind of driving them forward is a feeling that Wordsworth and Coleridge for so-called what we now call the first generation Romantics had somehow gone astray and that something new was needed.

So they were children of the revolution and also to a certain extent if one uses them. Children of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Can you just develop that a little more? Well, that's right. They're all born in the early 1790s. So that's the big difference from Wordsworth and Coleridge who were born the previous generation, born under the old regime.

It's almost a classic generation difference in age, isn't it? Absolutely, that's right. And as they grow up, start reading poetry and start getting interested in politics. the model of Wordsworth and Coleridge as poetic revolutionaries is tremendously powerful to them. William Hazlitt, who you quoted at the top there, wrote a wonderful essay called My First Acquaintance with Poets about how he first met Wordsworth and Coleridge and had a sense in 1798 of a whole new beginning for English literature and maybe English society as well.

So when you then get to the Regency period, the 1810s, where Wordsworth has got a job as a tax collector, Coleridge is writing editorials for right-wing newspapers, and the other Lake Perth, Robert Salvey, has become Poet Laureate writing sycophantic poets about the king and the Prince of Wales. For these younger poets, this was a terrible sellout. Hazlitt never really recovered from it.

And so what the younger poets wanted to do was find a kind of fresh way forward. You talk about the Regency, before I move on this, after, let's say the Battle of Waterloo, 1815, we all know where we are there. What were the pressures that young writers would be under? Would they be under particular pressure? Society was repressive.

Well, you tell us about that. What effect did it have on these younger poets? Yeah, it's a very interesting period of the Regency, because on the one hand, it is a time of great, sort of sexual indulgence in high society in particular. It is in a sense a time of freedom, but also it is a time of political oppression because after Waterloo, there was a terrific swing

to the political right all the way across Europe, there was a very right-wing government, and indeed there were various sort of attempts at sort of revolutionary action, which were violently quelled. The most famous example being, yes, the so-called Peterloo massacre. You remember in St Peter's Fields in Manchester?

1819. 1819, there was a big demonstration and the militia rode into the crowd and there were casualties. And Peterloo, for Shelley in particular, became an absolute symbol of the violence of the repressive regime at home. Robert Wood, can we develop the idea

of how the ideals of these young poets were nurtured? Let's take Shelley to begin with, Jonathan's mentioned Shelley, writing about the Peter Lomasker, and he seemed in many cases to be a propagandist, a radical first and the poet second. Yeah, I think there is in Shelley this, there is a history where it begins really, almost like a pamphleteer. If you read Queen Mab, which some people think is the sort of red Shelley,

and that's what's exciting. I mean, the most exciting thing there are the footnotes. It's not poetry. I mean, and an odd thing about Shelley is that when he writes about the mascavaniki, you know, I met murder on the way he had a face like Castle, that's sort of a wonderful, vicious attack, is done from Italy. And at that time, he's writing about saying that he's glad he's gone out of active politics. There's a kind of curious way in which Shelley, the active politician is the young man

who goes off to Ireland and goes off into South Wales and gets involved in actual politics. But then from 1816 onwards, there's a kind of meditation which takes place in verse. And if you like, Shelley makes no impact whatsoever on his own time. He belongs to us, the 21st century, but in his own time, it's almost as if he was a private press publishing. So there's a kind of curious element that, you know, we have the history of English poetry, but at that particular moment, Shelley's impact is almost private.

And so you're right that he's a kind of pamphleteer, but he's not making a big impact. Where did his ideals come from? And he went to Eaton, and then he went to Oxford to one term. He was sent down because in that term he published a pamphlet on favour of atheism and promptly send it to all the bishops and was expelled from oxenstein. What nurtured his radicalism?

Well, clearly, I mean, Werdt & Courage both have been interested in William Godwin, who was the rationalist with a little potonic touch to his idealism. The idea of progress really matters from Hazlitt, Wurter than Courage, and Shelley takes it up most passionately. And the idea that there is perhaps going to be perfectability in man. is really a passionate concern.

And in a kind of way, if you do active politics, you think you're going to get it now. But in a kind of way, it then transfers how to said, he was very well taught in Greek at Eden. I mean, not many people were taught so well as he was in Greek. He was one of the most bookish of writers. And so if you like, in this retirement of Italy, there was something curiously appropriate

that he could be, I think, as Word has said, the most gifted of all the poets. Didn't mean he was the best. He was the most gifted of all the poets. And he could actually then do what poets should do best, which is actually to write, if you like, through images, to write through a language which has its own rules, has its own music.

And if you start going through his treatments of, and as people around the table could tell me more about Platonism than I can, but the idea that, for instance, if you do Adaneus, which is about the death of Keats, you have it that for one moment that this world has lost Keats and then suddenly he turns it round piece to piece he is not dead, it's we who are dead

and that kind of concept of suddenly flipping things over is really, it seems to me thinking as a poet that's why in a kind of way though we're sticking them in that time they also kind of stay outside that time as well they gathered Shelley and Keats and Fields gathered around Lee Hunt a poet in Blomshire in London

was there a sense in which the London School was opposing itself to, let's call it, the Cumbrian school. Oh, well, there are links and there are kind of oppositions. But, I mean, if you think that Lee Hunt represented, if you like, the radical cause, particularly because he'd been imprisoned. He was imprisoned for a library in the Prince Regent in 1812. He was, Lee Hunt was, you know, the editor of the examiner, which was a radical newspaper,

and it was taking on the government and taking that. So that, but a person like, who was a friend of several of them, Hayden, says how much he loved Lee Hunt because he paid for him doing some of his paintings, and then he gets to loathe him because he says he represents the person who took up Voltaire, who took up atheism. And so Hayden has this wonderful account of meeting Shelley and Shelley's assess as for that detestable religion, Christianity. And then you suddenly realize that that atheistical concern, means that when Hayden does his Christ enter into Jerusalem, he paints in Wordsworth, bowing his head in reverence, he paints in Voltaire. And Voltaire is looking arrogantly ahead.

And he does not put in Lee Hunt, who was his old friend, or you might have expected to be there. And then Hayden says, and Keats, who was affected by Lee Hunt, and really became atheistical through him, would stand in front of the picture, which was a life-size, and bow his head to Voltaire, just like Wordeth bowed his head to Christ.

And, you know, Hayden was willing to permit Keats that transgression. But at the same time, it was also the source of the opposition between a religious sort of basis as many as well as the politics. Jennifer Wallis, can you tell us why they were so attracted to antiquity, particularly Greece, these poets? We've heard that Shelley was a great Greek scholar, but we know Keats was attracted. And of course, Byron died in Greece.

Greece. Yes. Well, I think they were partly interested in Greece because of the intrinsic qualities, as they saw it, of ancient Greek culture, particularly Greek democracy, Athenian democracy, became for them an inspiration for their campaign for the political reform in Britain at the time. There was a kind of model for democracy. They were interested in Greek mythology because it represented. for them a kind of paganism, free love, another model of a kind of alternative to Christianity

that Robert's been talking about. But I think they were also interested in antiquity because it represented for them a complete change from the sort of subject matter that the first generation of Romantics talked about. So whereas Werthworth and Coleridge were writing about the late district and Britain and... shepherds and people who were living in contemporary times, they were looking for an alternative subject that would demarcate their difference from the first-generation romantics,

and so they looked to antiquity. I think also they were interested in Greece because as a whole, they were all more cosmopolitan as writers than the first-generation romantics. So the first-generation romantics were thinking about Britishness. They started to think about, the Orient, Europe, broad European traditions of literature. And so looking towards classical subject matter was all part of that.

And Keats got his classical subject matter by having a preview, as it were, in a shed of the Elgin Marbles, which had just been brought over. And the British government was deciding whether or not to declare them great and keep them at their time. But Keats, we speak of the three together, as if they were running around hand in hand. but we have Lord Byron and Shelley is the son of a baronet. Keats was known as Cockney Keats. Was, did his background, by lumping them together,

are we not doing them justice? I mean, are we not being interesting enough? Yes, absolutely. I mean, to get back to one of the things Robert was saying about how, in fact, these writers didn't have a very wide readership, well, actually there was a huge difference between the readership of Byron and the readership of Keats and Shelley. Byron was the biggest

selling author of his day. Completely outshone, Walter Scott, who had been the biggest selling writer up till then. His poem, The Corsese, sold 10,000 copies in the first day of going on sale.

And he was, in many ways, the pop star of his day. And Keats, as he was growing up, actually modelled himself on Byron. Somebody described him as when he was a student going around with an open shirt,

no necktie la Bayron, copying the way that Byron dressed. So there was this big difference between Byron and Shelley and Keats. But Byron and Shelley were all, as you say, they came from a different class. They were aristocrats. They both went to, well, Shelley went to Oxford. Byron went to Cambridge.

although they didn't last, neither of them lasted the full three years of their degree there. Keats left school at 15 and was apprenticed to an apothecary and then two years later went on to train as a surgeon at Guy's Hospital. And this was seen as not a terribly, not an established profession. And when Keats's poems were reviewed terribly harshly, in the contemporary magazines, John Gibson Lockhart completely attacked Keats for being in the wrong class, not being the sort of person who should write about ancient Greek subject matter. And he said, you know, go back to the pills and plasters of the apothecaries, Mr. Keats.

It's better to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet. Can we differentiate a little more, Jonathan, between the three of them before we move on? Jennifer started that, can we just pull the three apart of it? Yes, I think it's very important to remember this categorisation we have the Romantics or the Young Romantics. Those terms weren't used at the time. These are later terms that come really from 20th century literary history. But the terms that we used at the time

for the group associated with the editor, poet and publisher Lee Hunt in which Haslett the essayist participated and Keats in many ways was the leading poet, They were known as the Cockney School, which is obviously a condescending term from sort of well-to-do, well-established literary reviewers, but a real sort of class kind of political antagonism in that label. Byron and Shelley were associated with the so-called satanic school. They were the satanic school. And again, that's a term of condemnation, obviously bound up with the atheism, the questioning of traditional religion.

So in that respect, you have sort of Baron and Shelley in one group and Keats in another. But in terms of their poetic styles, there are in fact all sorts of overlaps, not least because they, all three of them use these very elaborate forms of poetic language, very rich poetic language, full of metaphor and also full of classical allusion. So you can see the similarities retrospectively in terms of literary history, literary style. But at the time, they were rather two different groups.

Robert Wood, can you tell us why you think that Byron caused such a sensation when child Harold came out in 1812? Can we just go into that a bit more? Well, I think that he, in a way, he was using quite a difficult stanza. I mean, it was the traditional Spencerian stanza, which he picked up the cest from Beatty, the Scottish

poet. And so, any way he said it was going to be full of humor and so on. The thing about Child Harold is that it's not very humorous actually. He's almost using a style that won't allow him to be what he was really naturally good at. And Don Juan allows him to get that full force out. But what Child Harold does is able to give you that sort of sense of trafalog, give you that sense of slight melancholy. He's really good at bringing ego into it

so that you always feel that this is a chap who's rather interesting and rather mysterious. where if he does it in child, Harold, he will do it just next in the romances where, you know, the characters are all mysterious while they're just with Gothic secrets and so on. And they're almost like forces of the appetite. You know, they don't act just like human beings. They act darkly and savagely.

And with everything laid out, you know, more or less for a psychiatrist to do. I mean, what the Gothic is good at is actually analysing before Freud got there. You can go on to these forbidden subjects. He can make everything that seems, a bit ordinary about a travelogue seem extraordinary by having this sense and mystery about it. I mean, I would, the first two parts of Child Harold were all available.

Boweren can make you understand him at once. Shelley will not make you understand him all at once. So in a kind of way that he didn't sell at that time, makes sort of sense that he wasn't actually easy to understand. Was the fact that he was laud, the fact that he was so aristocratic? Did that have a pool for the audience? were they very pleased that he was an Irishman. Did that take them to his books? Well, I presume it was a good thing for sales,

but it was actually that he had a capacity to be popular. And it seemed to be that he does those things, and he's extraordinarily rapid in the way that he can get out one thing after the other. But really, if you weren't really barren to become interesting, for me, it isn't the first two books of Charles Harold, is really when you get to the third one. Because then you've got the separation crisis.

Where he's separated from his wife, who he's only married for a year. I mean, during that time he has a brief period where he's actually saying to visitors from America, actually, I really rather like words from Co-Ries now. I wish I'd never done English bars and Scots reviewers, which, of course, he'd never really read them. He read the Edinburgh Review and took that very condescending turn that the Edinburgh Review had.

So what he manages to do in Child Harrell III is to say, I hate my wife. She's stolen my daughter. And I can't tell you how much I loathe. That's the ego, the scandal out in the front. And then he gives the great, you know, if you like, lament for the Battle of Waterloo.

This wonderful account of the Battle of Waterloo where you're suddenly aware of... I mean, it's like a Hollywood film, you know, where they're all young and dancing, and then the next thing are all dead. But it's a very adequate account in popular tones. Jennifer, in Don Juan, the emphasis there obviously is on sexual love, but he takes the Don Juan idea and does a somersault with it, doesn't it? Yes. Can you tell us what that says about Byron and sex? Because that obviously interested his readership greatly about himself and about his work.

Yes. Well, the joke in Don Juan is it's based on the myth of Don Giovanni, but instead of the great seducer of the traditional tale, this is a hero who in fact finds himself seduced by one woman after a woman. another and really enjoys it. So he's this passive, rather passive, a man rather than the active rake that we're used to. The interesting thing about Don Juan is that in that poem, Byron basically deconstructed the earlier poem of Child Harold. Child Harold was the poem which actually made women throw themselves at him. Matters of women were falling in love with him because they confused Byron with the hero that he had created in this earlier poem, Child Harold. I think the key thing of why it was such an impact in 1812 wasn't just the stanza form or

whatever. It was this image of a romantic hero who was mysterious, gloomy, brooding, handsome, and it was that kind of image that people fell in love with. and this gloomy reflecting hero of Charles Harold suddenly becomes the hero of Don Duan who has no kind of inner life or sense of memory at all. In that poem he spends the first part of one canto weeping over the love letter

that he's received from one of the women who has seduced him. And at the end of the canto, he's tearing the letter up to use as lots to decide, who's going to be the person who's eaten. There are a whole lot of people in a boat having been shipwrecked, and they're running out of food, and they have to decide who's going to be eaten because they're going to engage in cannibalism,

and they draw up lots by tearing up the love letter and using that to decide who gets the equivalent of the short straw. So it's a completely debunking poem, and it completely mystified by its readers. It's the kind of reason why Haslick can't stand Lord Byron, because he has not got high seriousness. He takes you up and then he knocks you down. Whereas, in fact, what we see is that, I mean,

although it's the character of Don Juan is central, the bigger character almost is Byron or the narrator figure himself, who is the knockabout figure who raises you up and knocks you down. And as it were, it's always interfering. It's like a Tristram Shandy, you know, anything but straightforward narrative.

Always to be, the bleak, angle onto the main subject, and that's wonderful, I think, of always never been sure where you are. It's really modern in that feeling. And the one in, and we seem, well, it set a lot of modern things going. One thing is the ready confusion between the author and the subject, and Shelley and Barron, as of know, both of them were interested, for instance, in incest, which was scandalous, but of course very seductive at the time to readers. Can you develop that a little, Jonathan, right?

Yeah, I think this is a crucial thing about Barron's success. This was a time where it was really the first era in English history where there were lots and lots of daily newspapers. So it was really the first era where celebrity, in our modern sense, sort of was possible. And that meant Barron was a very, very well-known figure. And so inevitably, whenever Barron wrote a poem about some figure with a strange dark secret.

Often he wrote these kind of oriental tales. People would think, what is this dark secret? It must be Barron's own secret. Maybe it's something to do with his marriage. And rumours pretty quickly spread that he was having an affair with his half-sister, more or less whilst he was still on his honeymoon. So a great deal of scandal there,

binding up the life and the work. Then, of course, the same thing happens with Shelley. I mean, as Robert said earlier, Shelley was by no means well known at the time. But in literary circles, his lifestyle was very well known. Shelley, whilst still quite a young man, eloped to the continent with two teenage girls, one of whom was the daughter of William Godwin, the great radical philosopher of the previous generation,

and Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist writer. and Shelley then sort of set up on famously on the banks of Lake Geneva this pretty kind of racy lifestyle. Barron visited them there and of course it was there that we had the famous night where they all started telling ghost stories and that became the origin of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The fascination with sisters, incest, It runs through a lot of the poetry.

Shelley wrote a big epic poem called The Revolt of Islam, and at the heart of that is a brother-sister, incestuous relationship. It must be something to do with casting off the fathers, mustn't it? Having a sort of obsession with your own brother and sister. It's a way of sort of detaching yourself from the generation of the father. What do you make of it, Robert? Well, I think the sexuality of Baron and Shelley are rather different. I mean, it's quite clear that Byron was bisexual

and that it was quite clear that even when he was in Dundee, his nurse, as it were, brought sexual experience to him probably before he was 10. So this seems to have affected him quite seriously. He fell in love quite seriously. He's very capable of giving you a sense of feeling about being in love, that passion exists. I think his own sexuality,

runs through it. He is very guilty about the marriage breaking up. But then he then goes to a series of very black poems like writing total depression poems like darkness, which some people think expresses what the nuclear disaster would be like. Wonderful poems there. But he goes through that pit and then comes out with this really quite different feeling when he gets to Venice, when he writes poems like Beppo,

where he can be just mocking and not to. taking anything too seriously and not allowing you to take care. So the sexuality, in a way, he finds ways of accommodating, he falls in love with many women, but at the end of his life, you know, he ends up with this kind of marvellous poem, my 36 year, which way he's fallen in love with some Greek boy who does not return his love. And in a way, he lets it whole out. Well, Shelley, it seems to me, when he talks about incest, he's really in a way talking about that the sister is really the ideal. She's really, you know, like the Pharaohs.

You can only marry your sister because they're the only person on the same wrong. It's a kind of moral incest that Shelley talks about. And where does Keats fit into this, then, Jennifer? Well, Keats fell in love with the girl next door. And much to the disgust of his friends, Fanny Braun, who was renting the other half of Wentworth Place. Keats was always... I mean, he died when he was talking about.

So he was always in some ways an adolescent, one could say. And he was always very nervous in the presence, as he said, of blue stockings, of intelligent women. He would find himself stammering. And so he, I think he found the girl next door, the easiest person to get on with. But he believed that Fanny Braun's refusal to allow him to concentrate. who make their love just when he knew that he was dying, probably exacerbated the onset of his consumption. There's a description of him going for a walk with Lee Hunt in Hampstead

and sitting on a bench in Well Walk and telling Lee Hunt that his heart was breaking because Fanny Braun wouldn't comply with his wishes. And then he left for Italy when he was told he wouldn't survive another winter in Britain. because he was dying of TB. And Fanny Braun's letters arrived at his house in Rome, where he was dying, and he couldn't face opening them because the emotional torment would be too great for him in his condition.

So when he was finally buried, Fanny Braun's letters were left in their unsealed envelopes on his heart. Sorry, John, we've talked a little bit about sex, and just touched on radicalism. Was sex the central, the attitude of sex, would you say one of the central, notion central to these later romantics or have we over-exaggerated it so far in this discussion? I think we are in danger of over-exaggerating it.

I mean, one of the things that interests me going back to this question of the difference between the lake poets of the earlier generation and this group, is the point you made a lot earlier about them as London poets and just sort of picking up on Jenny's image there of Keats in Hampstead falling in love with the girl next door

and Wentworth Place, walking on Hampstead Heath. It seems to me the way in which Keats in particular writes about nature is very different from how Wordsworth and Coedridge wrote about nature. You know, for Wordsworth it's all high mountains whereas for Keats it's Hampstead Heath. The famous ode to a Nightingale

that's in his garden in Hampstead. One of the other poets of this period was John Clare, the Northamptonshire agricultural poet. And there's a lovely moment that he and Keats shared a publisher. And there's a lovely moment where Claire is writing to the shared publisher about Keats and says the problem with Keats' poetry is that its poetry as written by a tawny. Keats is Nightingale. It's not about real nightingale.

It's about the sort of poetic image of a nightingale. It's full of allusions to the classical figure of filamel, you know, the mythical nightingale in. in ancient Greek mythology. And it does seem to me that Claire is a London poet, perhaps even a suburban poet, places like Hampstead and, indeed, where Shelley lived, Marlowe on the Thames. These kind of landscapes that informed their work,

they're kind of on the verge between the town and the country. We're a very, very long way from Wordsworth's High Mountains here. They all died young in southern Europe, Robert Wood. Is it because they died young that we can find so many traces of, as it were, half in love with easeful death in their works? Well, I... What do you think it was there? Should I say, when Keats knew that he had TB, which he kind of knew when he got to Ben Nevis and spit blood, there's a wonderfully black sonnet that he writes.

He's got in his pocket. I mean, Keats is the most rapido, self-taught person. and he had the translation of Dante in his pocket, and all that kind of dark sense of hell opening below him in Ben Nevis comes then. It seems to me that that sense of knowing about death makes all his work powerful. It seems to me, although Jonathan says that we exaggerate the sex too much, but I mean if you're going to go take the Eva Centacognos, you're going to take Lamia, in a way, sex is one of those things which he writes about very well imaginatively,

and that it is about consummation, and he doesn't want it to be anything other. But at the same time, he's also writing, for instance, in his second Hyperion, which he actually describes himself as a young poet, trying to come to terms with this goddess figure who's Manator. And it is that he has to struggle up to know what suffering is. I mean, it is really that contemporary feeling is, can I actually be a poet, can I really write these romances, and be a serious person?

And Keats does take you through that sense in the beginning of Hyperion that it is to be a responsible person doing good for other people through writing about, if you would say, what the condition of the world is. And it does seem to me that, you know, even when he's going to the Lake District in a place called Ivy, he looks around and sees these young people, he says, I will write poetry to do some good for these young people.

And it does seem to me that that's a real moral force, which is made all the stronger because he knows that he's only got so long. Those last points are just terrific. And although it isn't the nightingale of John Clare, it is a nightingale which, you know, the great sonneteer of Keats, he was the fastest sonnet writer there was. He could do it in two, you know, about two minutes, faster than Lee Hunt, they used to have competitions.

Shelly would join in the competitions too. But when they got to, if you look at the sonnet, the odes, it's just one sonnets after the other, short sonnets, just taking up a new idea each time, you know, to thy high requiem become a sod. Then thou was not born for death, immortal bird. In other words, if they're talking about death, they're also talking about triumphing over death. Do you find that, sorry, Jennifer.

I think that the crucial difference or why they talk about sex and death so much, the younger romantics, is basically, as with the first-generation romantics, they're all interested in the imagination. But they describe the process of the imagination and how it works in different ways. So the first generation, particularly Wordsworth, thinks about imagination in terms of memory. It's all about thinking about the memory of past joys which have now been lost. It's that kind of rather elegiac sense of the way the imagination works, a kind of much more mature way in some ways of writing, whereas particularly Shelley and Keats think of the imagination as being instantaneous

and absolute in its subject matter in its process, or it doesn't come at all. It has to be something which is an all or nothing, experience. And so the ways in which they describe it, the kind of metaphors they describe for that complete immersion in the world of the imagination

tend to be either sexual climax or death and sometimes the two come simultaneously. So the end of Shelley's poem Epicycidion where he imagines uniting with the ideal woman Amelia

is actually a moment of of both sexual climax and death and complete imaginative creativity. He finishes with the lines one immortality and one annihilation, a kind of subalaneous death and sex. When Shelley and Byron went to southern Europe, Italy,

but Italy and Hungary, are they rejecting this country, as it were, or did they feel this country was rejecting them, Jonathan? I think they felt this country was rejecting them. Well, in a sense, I mean, Barron in a sense, did have to leave because of a scandal surrounding his marriage. But I think this business about Southern Europe is really interesting. In a way, it helps us with our distinction between the two generations of the Romantics. Because if we think back to the older Romantics, one of the driving forces for their originality

was the discovery of German philosophy, Kola Ridge's theory. of the imagination and all that. It all comes from Germanic, northern European philosophy, whereas these younger romantics, from a very early stage, they're constantly looking to the Mediterranean, they're looking to the history of the South. The memory of ancient Greece as a kind of model of democracy is part of that. And I think the weather is really important as well for them.

They are poets who enjoy and in some senses require warm weather. I mean, think of, you know, Keats in the Oads, talking about dance and Provenzao song. A beaker full of the warm south. A beaker full of the warm south, exactly. And it seems to me, although it was sort of chance and coincidence that led to the fact that all three died in the Mediterranean, it is supremely fitting.

Would you agree with that south-north-north distinction, Robert from where you sit at Grasmere? Well, I mean... The Aryan of Grasmere. I mean, I think they all, you know, even the first generation, and are all kind of European conscious, as really the same with the Germanic stuff. But I suppose that even when Keats has never been there,

you talk about the week of the warm south, but at the end of Eva St. Agnes, he says, I have a southern home for you. And they magically escape. He's actually the hero in that point. Porfiro is said to have elfin qualities. They actually escaped, step over dragons as they leave the house. But they're going south.

So there is this peculiar, I think it's really, that, you know, money power has come to England in 1814. They can all travel south. Europe is open to the English in the way that it wasn't before. You didn't need even be passports at that time. So there's a kind of way where that money power does actually have this kind of impact that, you know, even naval power, naval power got Byron round the Mediterranean before he wrote the first child, Harold parts. So there was that kind of curious bit there on the crest of a wave, which is not just the same for words and courage, who, anyway, was crammed into England because of the war.

Jennifer. Byron, of course, died in Greece in the Greek War of Independence, which started in 1821 at the very end of the period we're talking about. He died in 1824 on the 19th of April, which is four days' time as his 180th anniversary of his death. And he was out there. at the behest of the London Greek committee, which was raising money to fund the Philolenic army

and various other Greek faction armies in their fight against the Ottoman Empire. And Byron, being out in Greece, this was really, in some ways, the climax of an over 10-year interest that he'd had in Greece. in the Greek cause. And it was his poem, Child Harold, of course, which really inspired all sorts of people to come from across Europe to go and help in the Greek cause. Rather, the equivalent in 1821 of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, all sorts of idealistic people went to Greece

to go and help fight to save Greece for the West. And Byron died there of fever in Mexico. Selongy and excessive leaching to try and get rid of the fever. So in some ways there was the reason that he died in Greece. There was a sort of intellectual reason. It was all part of his poetic herb. Fine it very briefly, because unfortunately we've come into the end of the Jonathan Bay. Hazlitt sat in cruel judgment over Coleridge. What did he make very briefly of these three poets?

He was very fond of Keats. He didn't quite know what to make of Shelley. Barron, though, was the most interesting one. He wrote in his spirit of the age, his collection of pen portraits of the great figures of the age, he wrote a tremendous attack on Barron, but then he heard the news of Barron's death. And this was just before the book went to press. So he added a postscript, an apology in which he recognised Barron's greatness, the sense that Barron as a writer on behalf of freedom was a figure like no other.

Robert, if you want to add to that? Well, it's kind of curious that when Hazlitt finishes, the one person, the only one poet he can rescue in the spirit of the age, is actually Wordsworth, who is abused for eight years before that. And the odd thing is that even he never really had the wordsworth that we have, because he never had the prelude, which is really the great work. So it's an awful lot of postponed works from these romantics, which we know about, and they didn't.

All right. Well, Hazett, I think, probably resented, Shelley and Byron because again he was of a different class and talked about Byron being an aristocrat of his imagination and Shelley having a fever in his blood and a maggot in his brain. But as I say I think it was probably a sort of resentment on his part. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Jonathan Bait.

Jennifer Wallace and Robert Woof. Next week we'll be talking about hysteria. much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.uk forward slash radio 4.