In Our Time - The Romantics

Episode Date: October 12, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideals, exponents and legacy of Romanticism. In the space of a few years around the start of the nineteenth century the Romantic period gave us: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, two Shelleys, Keats, De Quincey, Carlyle, Byron, Scott… the list goes on and on. And the poems: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Ode to a Nightingale, Tintern Abbey, Ozymandias, Don Juan… they make up some of the best known and most enjoyed works of literature in the English language. How do we explain what seems to be an extraordinary explosion of talent? Were the Romantics really a movement with their own philosphy and ideals? And when its adherents often died so tragically young, and its poems often seem so steeped in nostalgia and so wrapped in the transcendental, is Romanticism really good for you in a modern world? With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English, University of Liverpool; Rosemary Ashton, Professor of English, University College London; Nicholas Roe, Professor of English, University of St Andrews.

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, in the space of a few years around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the romantic period gave us Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, two shellies, Keats, De Quincey, De Quincey, Carlyle, Byron, Scott.

The list goes on and on. And the poems, The Rhyme of the ancient. ancient mariner, o'et to a nightingale, Tintan Abbey, Osamand Dias, Don Juren, they make up some of the best-known and most enjoyed works of literature in the English language. How do we explain what seems to be a quite extraordinary explosion of talent? Were the Romantics really a movement with their own philosophy and ideals, and are they still an influence? With me to discuss the culture of the Romantics is Jonathan Bait,

Professor of English at University of Liverpool, an author recently of the genius of Shakespeare, and even more recently of Song of the Earth, and Rosemary Ashton, Coleridge's biographer and Professor of English at University College London, and also with us is Nicholas Rowe, author of John Keats and The Culture of Dissent and Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. Jonathan, Jonathan Bade, to start with, we can think of many attitudes associated with romanticism, nature over culture, freedom, over constraint, creative genius, over common sense. But do you think romanticism can be defined as a philosophy?

Do you think it has a coherence? I think romanticism begins with strong feeling rather than rational thought. In many ways, it's a reaction against the rationalism in philosophy, which dominated the 18th century. So in that sense, it's almost a kind of anti-philosophy. But that said, it does have major philosophical roots, which I think we can see unify a lot of the different romantic writers. For me, the key philosophical influence would be the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His idea, his famous idea, that man is born free but is everywhere in China.

and his idea of the idea of a return to nature. And it seems to me, thinking about nature, thinking about society, those things do provide a kind of philosophical program. Just to talk rather pedantically, did they read Rousseau, these romantics? When you say the influence of, we're talking about a direct influence, they read the stuff, they knew it he was saying, they agreed with it and incorporated it in their thinking. They did, and it was also the case that Rousseau's ideas had a very wide influence in England. So, for instance, a figure like William Godwin, who most of the major romantics knew, he was married to Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist,

and was, of course, the father of Mary Shelley. Godwin was in many ways a kind of English Russo. So there were lots of different routes by which Russo's ideas were disseminated. Can we just say a little more, another paragraph or so about Russo, the idea of born in a state of nature, the idea that any step towards civilisation was an alienation from what we really could be?

That's right. Rousseau wrote a very famous essay called a discourse on the origin of inequality among men, which was partly an attack on the inequalities of the ancient regime in France. Of course, Rousseau was one of the intellectual fathers of the French Revolution in 1789. But in that essay, Rousseau developed his idea of the noble savage, the idea that we are innately good, but it's the process of institutionalisation, acculturation, that leads to all the evils of society. And you see that as the root of romanticism?

In many ways, yes, because there's a romantic fascination, for instance, with childhood. And for Russo, the child is still in the state of nature. And that idealisation of childhood that you see in Wordsworth's poetry about his childhood in the lakes or in the work of John Clare, one of the other great romantics, a marvellous poet of childhood. It's a very Russo-esque idea. Rosemary Ashton, at the end of the 18th century, Britain seems to be completely in the grip of empiricism.

and Hume and Locke were immensely influential. How did the romantics address that? How did their first attempts address it? Were they seen as really rather waspish and small fry? I don't think that's the case. I think that empiricism, the tradition of philosophy by which you argue from sense experience, from the things that we experience in the world,

to abstract ideas, which had a long history going back, I suppose, as far as Aristotle, but was the prevalent philosophical movement in Britain in the 18th century. That actually fits in with what Jonathan was saying about Rousseau's privileging of the noble savage or of childhood because what Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, took from their reading of the empiricists, which they did do in spite of Wordsworth often saying that he didn't read books and that he wanted to take you out into nature, because you'd learn more in nature than you would from reading books.

Nevertheless, they did read these books by Locke Hume, David Hartley, Observations on Man, where associationism was important, where childhood was actually privileged. If you watched how children reacted physically, Coleridge writes about his son Hartley, named after the philosopher Hartley, if you watch children flying about in the wind, you could learn something about direct sensations and then build up on that towards adulthood. And so in fact, there is a kind of connection there

from the philosophy in Britain to the more revolutionary philosophy of Rousseau. Yes, well, you're saying a kind of connection. I suspect you're sort of, well, I know, you're sort of several miles down the path further than the rest of us because you've studied this in very great detail. There is in an overall general sense,

is there not, you're going to tell me, going back to what Jonathan Bates said, and a feeling that our antics did oppose what had been going on, did break with the philosophical past. You've given the join much more emphasis than I would have thought. Yes. I thought the break was more than emphatic than the join.

Well, there is a break, and the break comes through Coleridge specifically, and through Coleridge's reading of German philosophy, because the break comes with Kant, who broke very spectacularly with Hume and the whole empirical tradition. The problem, in a sense, for romantic poetry, is that that break comes, and it's the influence on British, culture through Coleridge comes rather after

some of the best of the romantic poetry, the lyrical ballads, for example, in the 1790s. So there is a break and there is and Coleridge becomes extremely important in the theory of literature. I think you have to think here perhaps in terms of practice doing one thing and literary theory doing another. And the literary theory certainly comes through Coleridge, who's the only romantic who has a claim to be a theorist at all, I think. I'm coming on to that.

I want to just establish a platform first. Nicholas Rowe, we see generally the first way of romanticism as being epitomized in this country by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s, particularly with the lyrical ballads. But how much was the movement characterized by those two poets? Are we right to think that those two poets between them almost wholly characterised the romantic movement, particularly in this country? Well, 1798 is the key year here. over the two centuries since Wordsworth and Codridge published their little book,

anonymously in Bristol, the lyrical ballads in 1798, the developing reception of that book during the 19th century, and particularly Matthew Arnold's influence in promoting Wordsworth's shorter poems in his influential selection of, I think it's 1878 all thereabouts, has given lyrical ballads a significance, far greater than any of the many other publications at the time. And of course, in the background of the Wordsworth Coelridge Circle in the West Country, many of the lyrical ballads being written in Bristol and down at Netherstowie by the Conte

Kontak Hills, there's also Robert Southie, who's an extremely influential figure at the time and moving in the same circles, literary and political, as Coleridge in Bristol from about 1795 onwards. There's also a figure that I'm particularly interested in John Thelwell, who was the leading English Jacobin of the day, a poet of note, and also with an interest in advanced science. Yeah, but what I'm asking is, when this came out in 1798, was this a minor earthquake, nobody killed, or was there a feeling that something important had happened?

How long before there was a feeling that something important had happened in literature? Well, the book was well received in a small circle of friends and people who were in the know, literary circles in Bristol and in London, I guess as well in Cambridge, where Coleridge would have been well known after studying there as an undergraduate. I think the Southie, of course, notoriously reviewed the book extremely badly and irritated both Wordsworth and Coleridge for doing so. The actual reputation of the book starts to climb, once the new century has passed

and one of the first advocates of lyrical ballads would have been Thomas de Quincey who travels to Grassmeer, I think, around about 1805 to see the poet who would so, Wordsworth, who had so impressed him. It's from about then onwards, I would say. Can we go back to what we began to speak about with Rosemary Ashton, the idea of what romanticism,

how it fits into cultural philosophy. The dominating person in that century, again speaking generally, would be Newton. And everyone would go back to the Great Newton, his idea of using abstract thought to reconfigure the way people saw the world. Now, is there a sense, Jonathan Bate, in which romanticism is taking Newton on? I mean, he is taken on literally in some of the poems, isn't he? That's right. A key figure here who fits slightly uneasily with Wordsworth and Cedridge is William Blake. who was a London poet as opposed to a country poet. But Blake was passionately committed to the imagination

and against the idea that the reason and a mathematical way of looking at the world was the best way of explaining the nature of human life. So in many of Blake's poems, we find great tirades against what he saw as a kind of unholy trinity of Newton and the empirical philosophy of bacon and of Descartes. Yes. The idea of being, a Newton being replaced by someone else, as you said earlier, Rosemary Oshner, I could talk a bit more about it now, was brought in most forcefully by Coleridge

with the wordswurst. He went to Germany in 1797. He fell in love with German philosophy and the language. And as it were, abandoned ship, which is rather useful for the ancient mariner, as a poet, to become a literary philosopher, a biographer of ideas, much underappreciated. and undervaluated in his time, although much raided in his time. Now, can you tell us why, what attracted Coleridge to Kant so powerfully and what he brought to the table from Kant?

Yes. What Kant did was to take the empirical philosophy, which worked, if you like, if you think about philosophy as being a study of the relationship between the mind and nature or the self and the universe, the eye, the it, there are various terms that you can use the subject, the object. What empiricism does is start the discussion from the point of view of the universe, nature, sense experience, the things that one can see, touch, feel, and try to move up to general and abstract ideas, ideas which finally end in the attempt to prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul.

So in this respect, philosophy and religion are rather close allied. And the problem with empiricism was that David Hume and, particular, had taken empiricism so far towards a kind of skepticism that he had said, there is no way in which I can prove that we have a faculty, a reasoning faculty, which will make out of what begins a sense experience and individual experiences, there's no way in which I can make, we can make an abstract idea such as the existence of God. And so Hume drew the conclusion that he found himself reached, which was to become an atheist. And that was part of the problem. That complicates the question

of what's attractive in philosophy and what's not. If philosophy, empirical philosophy, seems to lead towards atheism, then that's a problem. And that was a problem for Kant, as it also was for Coleridge. The allied problem is that in that scheme of things, it's very

attractive, actually. It's attractive for poetry. That you should privilege the senses. It was clearly poetry is a sensuous activity. It's not verse shouldn't philosophize. You know, We don't like poetry, which is just philosophized verse, or verse philosophy. So it's very attractive for poetry, and the privileging of the senses is very attractive.

But when you're thinking about the faculties of the mind, you've got a problem because, A, you've got the religious problem, how do you get hold of ideas of God? We've got to get to Kant. Well, Kant did, actually. This is what Kant did. Sorry. What Kant did was to take Hume and say, look, Hume has taken the, has taken as, has taken. taken a feature from under philosophy, and we've got to do something about it. But it's no use going back to the old dogmatic idealism, which assumed the existence of God,

and then argued from there, from the existence of God to everyday phenomena, because you can't make an assumption. You have to try and prove it. This is what hume had shown, and hum matured you couldn't prove it. So Kant came around and tried to bridge the gap between that old, what he called, dogmatic idealism, assuming innate reason and the existence of God, and immortality of the soul, bridge the gap between that and the empiricism which Hume had taken to its logical conclusion of skepticism

that we can't actually have these ideas. But did he say in, I'm being very, very crude here, but did he say what we see and what we bring in from our senses, the empiricism is of course extraordinarily important but inside us is an intuition which transforms it into something else. So it's the combination of the two

which results in the knowledge that we have and that wonderful phrase of Coleridge is, imagination is the link between man and the world. Is that what Coleridge brought back from Canada? That is what Corridge brought back from Can. Nicholas Rowe, how did that influence the English poetic scene at the time? Well, I would say that there's a kind of midway here between the kind of empiricism that Rosemary's been talking about

and the later position of Kant, and that's the philosophical materialism, which was associated with Joseph's, of priestly and the Unitarian scientific tradition, that is that the material world, physical matter, may actually be inspired or energized by the presence of God. This allowed two possible outcomes. You could either move towards a pantheist position in which the whole of nature was thought to be the expression of a divine presence, or you could do without God altogether, and you would be left with a kind of energized materialism.

One of the things that you've touched on now, which is very interesting, is that the romantics, as a group of people, many of them, were fascinated, not only fascinated by science, but knew a great deal about it. I mean, Coleridge did experiments. Shelley was very interested in science. Words was extremely interested in geology, and so it goes. Yes. And certainly a poem like Religious Musings,

which Coleridge places at the conclusion of his first collection of poems in 1796, is effectively imagined science. It's a kind of amalgam of progressive. politics, radical science, experiments with electricity and unitarian religion. It's a remarkable poem, kind of fusion of poetry and advanced theoretical science at the time. I want to move on to another section of this conversation, but just to put it and round this off. Rosemarachin, one of the things about Coleridge and the German philosophers and writers is how moved he was emotionally as well as intellectually. after he read Schiller's play The Robbers, he said,

it convulsed my heart. What was it, that combination was very powerful, wasn't it, intellectual and the emotional? Can you speak to that from a moment or two? Yes, it was. Schiller's play, the Robbers, de Roiber is the play at issue here, and co-reged it as a student

and wrote to his friend, Saoet, past 1 o'clock in the morning, who's this convulsive of the heart? Why have we ever called Milton Sublime? To some extent, we have to feed into the mix here late night, youth, excitement, possibly a little laudanum, it's a kind of feverish response,

but the response is basically to Schiller's response in that play, that youthful play, to the notion of freedom. And it's all really tied up with revolution. The French Revolution was a few years old when Schiller wrote the play, and Schiller like everybody, every other young man, young person on the planet, was enthused by the French Revolution. But also, the German connection is slightly different here

because in Germany what you had was a whole cultural renaissance, a whole revolution against what was seen to be a kind of French yoke, a cultural yoke. Famously, Frederick the Great of Prussia, wouldn't have Germans spoken at his court because it was too barbaric. There was no hinterland. You had to speak French, and of course he brought Voltaire as his court philosopher or jester, depending on how you look at it. And so Schiller was one of those, a group of young Germans, who on all fronts, critical, philosophical, political, literary,

were trying to burst asunder chains and this fits very well with Rousseau whom we talked about earlier and the French Revolution. That's what Schiller stood for, kind of freedom. There's a fascinating circulation, isn't there? Because the English Romantics had a big influence on the French and the German and the Germans on the English. That triangle is a sort of triangle turns into a circle at that stage,

doesn't it? Jonathan Bait, obviously the French Revolution shook Europe and changed it great, and words were sure this was at that dawn to be alive. This was in that dawn to be alive. Can you give us some idea of the influence of the French Revolution on the politics of the romantic poets? Yes, I mean, when Wordsworth was an undergraduate, he set out on his sort of European tour, as undergraduates always do. It didn't have an interrail pass in those days, so he went on a walking tour. And he and a undergraduate friend of...

He didn't really walk, isn't it, because peasants walked. A gentleman went in carriages, exactly. That choice in itself is political to walk. But he and his friend Robert Jones, they set off, and they walked into the... French Revolution. And it was quite extraordinary for him. It really was like a new dawn. So then in the early 1790s, the early phase of Wordsworth and Coleridge's career, there's a sense in which their whole outlook on life and their poetry are animated by the revolution. But then, of course, came the terror, came the expansion of France, a kind of new imperialism that eventually would lead to Napoleon.

For much of this period, we need to remember England was at war with. France, and Wordsworth and Coverage were very patriotic figures, and their love of the landscape was then bound up with the love of England, and that led to a reaction against the French revolution. So there's a great question among scholars and readers of the romantic poets of whether the relationship between the love of nature, the return to nature, on the one hand, and the radical politics on the other, whether that's a kind of symbiosis or a contradiction. Some people would say that when Wordsworth and Coleridge retreat to the Lake District, this is a sign of their rejection of radical politics.

I actually take a slightly different view on this, that what Wordsworth came to decide was that the idea of a kind of politics that are true to nature can't be enacted on a national or a global scale because of the constraining forces of institutions. And so he returned to the Lake District where he found these small-scale communities, communities. The yeoman farmer, exactly. And he saw a kind of democracy in that rural society, which became his ideal. Sorry, I was just going to say it's also true, isn't it, that the rather poor reception on the whole of lyrical ballads in 1798 is partly due to the fact that

Werswain's since it's a rather democratic document. It's full of attention to vagrants and discharged soldiers and forsaken women and the poor, the outcasts in society. that time of war with France. It's fairly, it is rather a democratic document, but at that point, of course, Britain was turning away, was becoming reactionary and turning away from French revolutionary ideas. So to some extent, Wordsworth and Coleridge were tarred with the brush, the Jacobin brush, after they'd moved away from it. Yes, Nicholas Strode's often, the common idea is that the radicalism of the early Coleridge and Wordsworth fitted neatly with their ideas on nature and the senses. And this was a, this was a good fit, this was a good little

a combination, as it were, a good, big combination. But when they changed and turned against the French Revolution, it somehow not only harmed them, it certainly harmed their reputation, but it also harmed their poetry. That's been the orthodoxy, hasn't it? When they went right wing, they went bad. Now, what's your view on that?

Well, there's certainly a change in Wordsworth's poetry from after 18085, and arguably Coleridge as a poet, he's still very productive, but his great years as a poet, arguably

come to an end round about 1802 with the letter to Sarah Hutchinson and dejection and ode. But for writers in the so-called second generation of the Romantics and I'm thinking in particular of Keats here, a poem like the excursion

was one of the wonders of the age. He was greatly impressed by it. 1814, yes. Keats and others in his circle as well being tremendously impressed by it, even though it's announced Wordsworth's Toryism and was dedicated to the Earl of Lonsdale, the local Tory grandee, I think. Whose ancestor had completely ruined Wordsworth's father?

Exactly, yes, and was one of the motives for him writing his Republican pamphlet in 1793. There's a complete turnaround there. There's so much to say about this, but there's a quick digression. It's always seemed to me to be rather unfair to attack Wordsworth and Colerich for turning against a French Revolution when the French Revolution itself turned against its own ideas, its own ideals, it is to say. I mean, I think that fair enough to turn against them when they're sort of executing 1,400, guillotting, 1,400 people a day. Robespier was a big problem for them,

because both Coleridge and Southie in 1794, following the death of Robespier, July 1794, write a play, the fall of Robespier, Southie commenting that he was a great bad man. The problem that Robespier represented for both of them was that, in many respects, he was true to the archer. ideals of 1789 and everything that he was doing in Paris and throughout France between 1793 and 4 was intended to preserve the best aspects of the revolution.

But certainly this thing away from the revolution and in the scorn of the next way of the Romantics, particularly Shelley and Byron, although in Byron, of course, there's a great deal of snobbery towards Wordsworth and towards the ideas that Wordsworth and Coleridge were promulbigating. But what I'd like to ask now, Jonathan Bait, is one of the great things about the lyrical balance, in retrospect, is that adopting, or trying to adopt it, some of the poems the language of ordinary men and show that you don't have to wear fine clothes to have deep feelings and so on. We're at a time

then in the early 19th century of the Peterloo Massacres up to the Great Reform Act. Have you been able to trace ways in which the ideas of romanticism, the ideas in the minds of these men and their readers, actually affected, really did affect the politics of the time. Is there a connection there? Or do we see them running in parallel

and make rather playful connections? I think there is a very direct connection which comes with the development of radical literary journalism in that period between the end of the wars against France, between Waterloo and the Peterloo massacre of 1819 and through to the Reform Bill, where a number of younger romantic writers who have been very influenced by words at Earth and Coderidge

but are writing in the medium of prose are really engaging with public debate and thinking particularly of William Haslett and Lee Hunt Hazlitt was a wonderful, wonderful writer for me, the best prose writer in the English language. He met Wordsworth and Kedare in 1798. He wrote a lovely essay about it called My First Acquaintance with Poets where he describes his discovery of lyrical ballads

as being like a new dawn, a sort of literary equivalent of the French Revolution. But then in later years, although he came to scorn the later politics of Wordsworth and Kowlerich, Haslitt was carrying forwards their kind of politics of feeling in the realm of journalism and his essays and those of Lee Hunt do seem to me to play a major role

in the political discourse of that later period. Would you agree with that, Rosebush? Yes, I would, and I think that here the politics and the aesthetics, if you like, do mix and mingle quite well. And certainly Hazlitt is a very important figure, much influenced by Coleridge, against whom he often... Coleridge is a very easy target.

You wrote a devastating remark about Coleridge when he first met him, which must have been slightly... Which one are you thinking of? There are plenty in hasn't. What does it say? To chime his face is, but his nose the...

The nose is the index of the will. The rudder of his face, the index of his will was small, poor, weak, nothing like what he has done. Yes, that's right. And that's, of course, with the benefit of hindsight.

But, yes, it's true. But he was also overwhelmed. I mean, he writes, too, about having been overwhelmed by Coleridge. Both revolutionary enthusiasm and poeticism. I mean, Coleridge struck everyone

from Dorritus. the Wordsworth when she first saw him as he jumped over a gate in Somerset to come and visit his fellow poet Wordsworth. They saw him as the type of the ideal poet. She quoted from midsummer night's eye in a fine frenzy rolling. That was Coleridge. And he did strike everyone in that way, although he also struck them as obscure and all the other obfuscating things that we know about him. I'm just trying to see what connections we can make between the poetry and the reality. Well, poetry is reality.

No letters about that, please. And we're just trying to get a move on. Nicholas Rowe, they say that in the lyrical ballads that many of their poems were experiments. Yes. Can you give us an idea of what they hoped to achieve by their experiments and whether they did achieve? Well, it was an experiment to, certainly in the 1798 collection,

the original lyrical ballads, was to use selection of language which they thought was actually used by people in conversation. I think they actually specify the middle classes of society. but the idea was to have in that respect a more or less democratic idiom for poetry. Now you could see that as being in some ways continuous with the ideas of Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and other pamphleteers earlier in the 1790s. But in another sense, it's a way of radicalising feeling, I think,

and getting in touch with the essential passions of the human heart. That was what they were setting out to do to provide, a way of writing which would convey feeling directly, more directly perhaps than the ornate language, the more decorative, elaborate language of poetry, which, as they saw it, had been typical of poetry up to that point. And to use one word about classical poetry, the Pope, those would be what they were against?

Well, not necessarily, no. It was to try and write a poetry, a form of poetry, which had been, I suppose, best represented for them. Their great pattern was, I think, William Lyle Bowles, whose sonnets appeared in 1789, the year of the fall of the Bastille. And what Bowles offered them was a way of writing about landscape, about nature, which also carried poetry into the heart of the speaker or the observer. It was a way of mobilising feeling.

But Melvin's absolutely right about the reaction against Pope. I mean, Haslitt famously said that Pope took a rocking horse and mistook it for a muse, that the regularity of Pope's rhyming couplets were not what strong imagination was all about. Yes, it's part of this some cult of genius, which genius has a sort of, the flashing eye, the floating hair,

as the poet in Kubla Khan is described, breaking the rules, going beyond the bounds. It's a way of writing in which the feeling defines the form of the poetry, isn't it? And when Coleridge in 1796, writes, it publishes a series of poems which he calls effusions. He describes them as sonnets which have overflowed the limit of 14 lines, and it's as it were carried along by the pressure of feeling. Their obsession with Shakespeare is crucial with this.

Shakespeare broke the classical rules, and that's why he was their great model. The whole idea of Shakespeare as the quintessential poetic genius, the genius of Shakespeare. It's the romantics to whom we owe that idea. Can we take one or two of the poems, start with Tintan Abbey, What does that say, what does that contain which takes the argument forward,

the poetic argument, philosophical argument, the political argument, Jonathan Bates? Yeah, for me, Tintanabe, is the absolutely crucial poem. In it we see a sort of poetic version of that Kantian idea of an interplay between the mind and nature, whereas with rights of how we half perceive and half create the world around us. It also has at its core an idea, of a sort of animating spirit in nature. The word that is sometimes used is pantheism, although Wordsworth himself rejected the claim

that he was a pantheist. But the idea that somehow you are most human and you feel most strongly when you are integrated with nature, that seems to me to have all sorts of ramifications right through to our own day. Would you like to read a few lines from? I mean, I've got a dozen lines here from Tintanavich.

Shall I just read them? I think you should read them perhaps in the Cumbrian dialect of Wordsworth himself. I know I did it at a time. where you, I can't do it, not on this problem. You have to, you have to, it's got to be early in the morning to do that. This, but this is what we're talking about, I think, for the rest of the programme. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,

but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chastened and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things

all objects of all thought and rolls through all things that's what you're talking about exactly so and see how that it's in the mind of man but it's also in all the forms of nature what's your reaction to that yes there's a constant interaction between the two. There was a debate going on between Wordsworth and Coleridge,

although Wordsworth stays rather aloof from it, because Wordsworth really, you might say, is a naturally philosophical poet. You can tell from what you've just read. There's a kind of philosophy implied, but he's not versifying philosophy in any way, and he's not a regular philosopher. And all his philosophy comes, as it were,

through chats, talks with Coleridge, I think. But Coleridge rather goes more towards the idea of what he worries more. about what kind of interchange there is. Where the impulse starts, does the impulse start in the world, or does it start in the mind? I'll come to close to one second, but just to finish on this Wordsworthian idea that Jonathan Bates started to talk about

with relation to the lyrical ballads. In that sense, in the sense of what Wordsworth is taking on, even in the few lines that I've read and the way Jonathan was talking, does that constitute a massive hinge, as it were, in the history of English poetry? It certainly does, and it's been... Tintan Abbey has famously been described

as the first modern poet, I think it was Harold Bloom who described it as such, a poem in which the universe is centred upon the self and the poet's feeling self becomes the measure of all creation. I think the poem is most significant for me, not as a kind of hinge, to use the same metaphor, away from politics, but for what he says earlier on about how remembered pleasure

can influence, as I think he says, acts of kindness and of love. In other words, that this experience of nature, can influence the way in which people behave for the good and for kindness there. I think we have to understand it not in the kind of diluted modern sense, but human kindness and common humanity. And in that sense, I'd say that Tintanabby is very much in touch with the earlier ideals that Wordsworth had sympathy with,

associated with France. And that takes us back to the sort of radical idea of Russo, the state of nature. And those very simple lines of words with one impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man. of moral evil and of good, and all the sages can. It's an extraordinary radical statement, isn't it? Absolutely, because this would bypass the whole of learning. Yes, and the 18th century was so much a period where man was mastering nature,

where the city, the process of the development of cultural institutions and political institutions was seen as the great enlightened thing which set man apart from the animals. And yet now there's a turn back. saying, let's go back, back to the woods, back to nature. Rosemary Ashner, back to Coleridge now, because he turned to philosophy in his biographia literaria, which were people were, I think your word was,

when I read your book, ungrateful for it at the time, but did raid it and plunder it, and since then has become more and more recognised as a great work of the imagination. Coleridge is enormous legacy to us. Can you just give us one or two indicators of the influence it did have in what it was and which influence consisted.

Yes, it's an impossible book in lots of ways because it gives a very obscure journey through his philosophical thinking, which was a lengthy story, and rather obscurely done. And that was very much how it was first received by the scoffers like Hazlitt and others. And Byron writes in Don Juan in 1819

about Coleridge, explaining metaphysics to the nation. I wish he would explain his explanation. and that was the initial view. But of course, being Coleridge, he went through that difficult bit of his philosophy and came out at the other end with what he calls a theory of the imagination and what he then puts into practice

as practical criticism, particularly on Shakespeare, and also on Wordsworth, whom he thinks the greatest poet of his generation. And actually practical criticism, which we now use in the universities as a term and as an action. I mean, this is what we do.

We teach students. to practically criticise poetry on the page. Coleridge coined that in biography, literaria. So what he does is he both gives us a kind of theory of the imagination, which treats it as an active power, blending, fusing. He uses all those kinds of words, reconciling opposites. A lot of this he gets from German philosophy and German estheticians, but that doesn't matter because what he's doing is bringing it all together.

And with his own rather myriad-mindedness, he is putting it together and giving it to later thinkers in the 19th century and again in the 20th. There is this, finally, for the final section of the programme, I'd like to look at the darker side of romanticism, perhaps even, use a jargon word, the downside of it. You referred to Don Juan. What is a blind discovery it was to make the universe universal egotism, he wrote. Now, that Nicholas Rowe actually has been condemned,

Who is it? It was Babit, wasn't it? Irving Babbitt, who said in 19... He condemned the Romantic Movement as an irresponsible pilgrimage in the void and so on. Can you give us some idea of what has been considered the dark effects, the negative effects of romanticism? There's a famous pair of lines in Wordsworth's poem, Resolution and Independence. We poets in our youth begin in gladness, but thereof cometh in the end, despondency and madness.

I think he was thinking there of Chatterton, famously suicide, committed suicide with arsenics in 1770, the year of Wordsworth's birth, probably also more recently Robert Burns, who died in 1796, so that for all the poetry which celebrates imaginative exultation, there is very much a demonic underside, perhaps best represented in poems like La Belle Dame Saint-Mercie, keeps his poem from 1818, I think, but also again in the book of 1818, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English opium eater, which is divided between the pleasures of opium, the wonderful release and reverie which opium induces when de Quincey first starts taking the drug,

and then the dreadful depths into which he sinks in the section called the pains of opium. depths below depths? That is one part of the answer, but another part might be, I'm asking you, Jonathan Bait, is have the ideas of romanticism resulted in notions of the superiority of spontaneity, the idea of doing your own thing, the notion of anything to do with control and structure is bad, because nature is superior, that sort of thing.

Do you think it has drifted into the general consciousness in a way which has not necessarily been, well, let's use a terrible word, helpful. Well, it was certainly the case in the 1960s that a lot of sort of hippies and dropouts got very keen on the psychedelic, on Blake, on sort of romantic ideas of doing your own thing. But I think the serious answer to that question in terms of cultural history is that if you take romantic ideas such as the return to nature, the reject of rationalism, the rejection of institutions,

If you take those too far, what you get towards is a very dark vision which we see particularly in Germany, and in many ways you can trace a line from romanticism through Wagner and Nietzsche on to some of the ideas of the Third Reich. Freedom as anarchy, in fact, or going beyond all bounds, including moral limits and bounds. But that's an extreme case, I think you'd have to say. And certainly I don't think the romantics, as we talk of them, can be blamed. for that. Don't you think? I mean, aren't there the seeds there? I mean, look at the way you referred to Coleridge calling his son Hartley after a philosopher. Now, the way that Coleridge brought up his son Hartley was terrible. And the things he did to that boy in the name of

ideas, I don't think it was emphasised as much as it could have been by Richard Holmes in his otherwise excellent book. I'm using when you dipped him in icy water to see how to you just, you're hurting my head. I mean, the way he kept questioning him and forcing him to be in a state of nature. So in the sense, I think Jonathan's progression, although it is one strand, is not necessarily to be under under value. I think that's true. I think Coleridge didn't intend to do any forcing. Far from it. He talks of letting Hartley come to books when he wants to come to books. I just using that as a metaphor, but don't you think in the Coleridgeian ideas, that there is a sort of let loose what may as long as it is for the natural force,

which somehow will morally take care of itself, but it very often doesn't. For the good, if you get. Yes. Actually, though when you think about it, Cooridge is the poet of the nightmare vision of what Nick was talking about a moment ago in the ancient mariner. There's a terrific kind of fear,

the imagination which might bring forward terrible visions, and he is really the poet of that kind of romantic vision. And along with the idea of a romantic education under the influence of nature, there's the competing idea which the Wedgwood brothers put forward,

that children should be shut up in a room and deprived of all sensory stimulation and educated solely on rational principles and oddly enough they thought of Coleridge as a possible tutor for that school. But if we end where we began with the return to nature, surely there's a positive side of that which is that the romantics can provide us

with a kind of model for a more integrated and responsible relationship between humankind and its environment which is of great need to us today. But at the same time, negative idea of that would be a sort of atavistic rejection of all the benefits of modernity and of science a return to the dark ages. Well, thank you very much, Jonathan Bait, Rosemary Ashton and Nicholas Rowe. I enjoy that an awful lot. I hope you did. Next week, I'll be discussing

the laws of nature with Mark Buchanan, Nancy Cartwright and Frank Close. Thanks 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.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.