PROMETHEUS RISING:

THE BACKGROUNDS OF ROMANTIC POETRY

The European Revolution and the English response to it cast a shadow over the political context
of English Romantic poetry. The England of Wordsworth's and Blake's childhood was a nation
that had gone a century without experiencing its one significant upheaval, the Puritan
movement. The replay of the revolution carried out by Parisians among Londoners was the most
significant political event that did not occur in early nineteenth-century England. The largest
English contribution to world literature since the Renaissance—the astonishing phenomenon of
six major poets emerging in only two generations—came instead from the ferment that failed to
produce a national regeneration.

No Marxist critic has comprehensively researched English Romantic literature. The Romantic
period marked the end of an older, pastoral England and the birth of a new England. However,
this study would only provide supposition. Blake was born in 1757, and Wordsworth was born in
1770, during a time when England was still predominantly farmland. When Blake died in 1827,
England was essentially an industrial society. By 1850, when Wordsworth died, England had
become the appropriate topic for Marxist economic analysis, as outlined in Das Kapital.

England's power structure shifted from an established aristocracy with large estates and an
upper middle class of London merchants to a more diverse grouping that included both groups
and a new class of industrialists. England's common people were no longer limited to peasants
and city artisans, but also included a large and struggling industrial working class. During the late
18th century, the growing class faced two foreign revolutions that were not similar to those seen
in modern Europe.

In Blake's symbolism, the American Revolution was more significant than the French Revolution,
even though it may appear insignificant today. The French Revolution, a modern societal
upheaval, greatly influenced Romantic poetry, as shown in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.

For the most of Blake and Wordsworth's careers, the English government was focused on either
continental conflict or suppressing internal disagreements. Blake's poem "Songs of Experience"
depicts London in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a city where traditional English liberties
such as free press, speech, petition, and assembly were often denied. The British ruling class
repressed rebellions in a society already rattled by war and unstable economic cycles, similar to
how the French social order was overturned.
Tom Paine, who fled to France and nearly lost his life, and William Godwin, a prominent English
theorist of social revolution, were among those who spoke out against the repression. Despite
his silence throughout the English counterterror, Godwin's philosophic materialism influenced
early Wordsworth and Shelley, though both poets later diverged from him.

Godwin's materialist vision reflected a recognition that traditional ways of thinking were fading
along with the society that shaped them. When Blake was eight years old, the steam engine was
perfected, and the hammer and forge, which represented prophetic labour in his poetry, were
replaced by their antagonists in the furnaces and mills of another England. In the year of
Wordworth's birth, Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village celebrates the decline of open,
pastoral England into isolated farm holdings and wandering labourers due to enclosure. Pope
used the word "nature" to refer to the abundance of God's blessings around him. Wordsworth's
portrayal of nature as a stark contrast to our own creations is rooted in societal dislocation.

The economic and social transformations in England caused tremendous misery, surpassing even
the Black Death of the 14th century. Blake's prophetic poetry expresses Biblical outrage in
response to the French conflicts, which are representative of modern wars undertaken by
capitalistic countries. Profits for the manufacturing classes led to inflation and food shortages for
the masses. Victory over Napoleon brought economic depression, unemployment, hunger, and
class unrest, as is typical of a capitalist society during peacetime.

The lack of organised protests led to public meetings, rioting, and frame-breaking, which
involved destroying machinery to end technological unemployment. The government made
frame-breaking punishable by death. In August 1819, the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester
marked the peak of popular discontent and government cruelty. Mounted troops charged a
peaceful protest for parliamentary reform, murdering and harming many unarmed participants.
England was on the verge of revolution, but due to a lack of strong leaders, the chance passed.
In 1832, parliament backed down and passed the first Reform Act, preventing a revolution and
establishing the Victorian compromise. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century,
idealists in England witnessed a new political spirit that died in its infancy. The great English
writers of the period reacted to stagnating situations by withdrawing, either inside or externally.
Blake and Wordsworth used internal movement to develop a new type of poetry called the
modern poetry.

The term "Romantic" was coined by Victorian literary historians to describe the literary period
surrounding the French Revolution, Napoleonic wars, and the Castlereagh and Metternich era.
Since then, the term has meant not only the art of that historical period, both in England and on
the Continent, is considered ageless and repetitive. It is often associated with certain periods. In
opposed to classical or neoclassical art. The term "romance" refers to a literary form that
straddles the line between myth and reality. In the middle of the 18th century, "romantic"
became an adjective meaning wild or strange or picturesque, and was applied more to painting
and to scenery than to poetry. In contrast to the classicism of Pope, Swift, and Johnson, mid-
eighteenth-century literature referred to itself as "the Sublime" and "sensibility." No Romantic
poet described his own or his contemporaries' poetry as "Romantic." All that the six prominent
poets thought they shared was what William Hazlitt referred to as "the Spirit of the Age." In the
semi-apocalyptic dawn of the French Revolution, it appeared that a new world was possible—
that existence would never be the same again.

It is difficult for any of us to recall the intensity of that moment now, no matter how far back we
go in history. There is no analogy for a universal mental shock that initially promised release
from negative past experiences. The Russian Revolution cannot be compared to the French
Revolution since it occurred during a time when the globe was already in conflict. The French
Revolution was a groundbreaking ideological shift that both terrified opponents and inspired
supporters.

To fully understand the link between the Revolution and English Romantic literature, consider
the case of critic William Hazlitt, who maintained his faith in the Revolution and Napoleon even
after other literary figures had turned reactionary or died young. Hazlitt, who lived and died as a
Jacobin, exemplified English Romanticism through his history, career, personality, and
psychology, while Rousseau embodied the French kind.

Hazlitt, like other English Romantic writers, had a religious foundation rooted in Protestant
dissent, which stemmed from the Left Wing of England's Puritan movement. This is a crucial
aspect regarding English Romantic poetry and English poetry in general, which has often been
overlooked by current critics. The English Romantics' poetry is religious and follows the
Protestant tradition, even if it has been transformed by humanism or naturalism. Calvin and
Luther would have been horrified by this.T. S. Eliot and his followers criticised the radical
Protestant or displaced Protestant heritage that dominated English poetry. The New Criticism
criticised poets who were Puritans or Protestant individualists who attempted to create their
own religions via poetry. This Protestant group includes Spenser and Milton, the Romantics and
Victorians, and Hardy and Lawrence. The New Criticism favoured poets were Catholics or High
Church Anglicans, like Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Hopkins, and Hopkins in the
Victorian period, as well as Eliot and Auden. There are two main traditions of English poetry,
which differ not just in aesthetics but also in religion and politics, as noted by literary critics. The
core line is Protestant, radical, and Miltonic-Romantic, whereas the other is Catholic,
conservative, and professes to be classical. The French Revolution and its consequences have
divided French culture, with some accepting it and others resisting it. English culture has been
divided between those who supported and opposed the Puritan theological upheaval of the late
16th and 17th centuries. T. S. Eliot's criticism of English poetry is characterised by a desire to
disclose hidden truths, which underpins all of his conclusions. Hazlitt's criticism, like Eliot's,
reflects a Protestant dissenter's mentality, resulting in judgements that are still relevant today.

English culture has been divided between those who supported and opposed the Puritan
theological upheaval of the late 16th and 17th centuries. Though I oversimplify, I seek conflict. T.
S. Eliot's criticism of English poetry is characterised by a desire to disclose hidden truths, which
underpins all of his conclusions. Hazlitt's criticism, like Eliot's, reflects a Protestant dissenter's
mentality, resulting in judgements that are still relevant today.
English religious dissent emphasised intellectual and spiritual independence, the right to private
moral judgement, the inner light within each soul as the sole means of reading Scripture, and
the elimination of intermediaries between individuals and God. Many students learnt to study
Milton through C. S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost, which portrays the Protestant poem as an
Anglo-Catholic treatise. To fully understand Romantic poetry, it is recommended to reread Book
I of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost. This allows for a mature assessment of
the spiritual content of the poems. Milton's poem opens with an invocation to the Muse, which
he converts into a summoning of the Holy Spirit of God, who prefers the straight and pure heart
over all temples. The speaker rejects all temples and instead offers his own pure and honest
heart as the true dwelling place of God's creative Word. The energy that created our universe is
the same energy that inspires Protestant poets. Spenser's Book I of his poem is a Calvinist
metaphor that contrasts a Puritan knight-errant with a corrupt salvation system. The spirit of
Hazlitt, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats is a direct descendant of the Spenserian and
Miltonic spirit, which seeks its own redemption outside of the hierarchy of grace. The spiritual
nakedness of Hazlitt, Blake, and others is a more extreme version of Milton's English
nonconformist temperament, which led to him becoming a church with one believer, a political
party of one, and ultimately a nation unto himself. Dissenters in England did not achieve legal
equality in religion and education until 1828. In 1818, Hazlitt praised his coreligionists and
sectaries as embodying "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion," as Edmund Burke had described. The nonconformists, as Hazlitt put it, "are the
steadiest supporters of [England's] liberties and laws, they are checks and barriers against the
insidious or avowed expansions of arbitrary power: and they are depositaries of the love of
truth." From the Restoration in 1660 to the abolition of the Test Acts in 1828, religious
individualism, sometimes known as dissent, was consistently opposed to the Establishment. The
evangelical revival attempted to take over the Church of England, prompting the Oxford
Movement led by Newman and his allies to counteract it.

Dissent began as a protest against clerical rule, but later became an embrace of civic and
religious freedom. Milton’s literary writings are based on the Protestant theology of “Christian
Liberty,” which maintains that every regenerated man has the right, under the New Law of the
Gospel, to be free of all ecclesiastical constraints. Following the Stuart Restoration, Milton
focused on discovering the Paradise within each individual, believing that Christian Liberty still
had this potential. After the Restoration, Protestant individualism focused on defending English
natural liberties. After Milton, interior impulses were mostly absent from poetry until the
Miltonic rebirth of the 1740’s. During the late 18th century, the radical division of the Whig party,
led by Charles James Fox, partially secularised the movement. In religion, these values were
embodied by George Fox and the Quakers, and in Romanticism, by Richard Price and Joseph
Priestley, two prominent nonconformist theologians of the late 18th century. Price and Priestley
led a radical Unitarian movement for church and state change, gaining backing from young
Coleridge and Wordsworth who were dissatisfied with 18th-century culture and institutions.

Dissenters celebrated the fall of the Bastille in France. On November 4, 1789, Richard Price
presented a sermon welcoming the Revolution in the name of English nonconformist heritage
from Cromwell and Milton. This speech prompted Edmund Burke to write Reflections on the
Revolution in France. Coleridge and Wordsworth later became Tories and followed Burke’s
teachings. As young men, they aligned with Priestley and Godwin in their opposition to Burke
and support for the French Revolution. In response to Bishop Watson’s sermon “The Wisdom
and Goodness of God in Having Made Both Rich and Poor,” Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet titled
“A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” in which he urged the Bishop and Burke to consider the daily
struggles of the English working class, including “the scourge of labour, of cold, of hunger.”
Coleridge’s involvement in establishing English conservatism and Anglicanism throughout the
Victorian period was paradoxical given his age. Coleridge imitated Priestley’s sermon from 1794,
which interpreted the French Revolution as the first stage of the apocalypse, the final judgement
predicted in St. John’s Revelation. Coleridge’s poem Religious Musings, composed between 1794
and 1796, depicted the Revolution as a violent transition to a thousand years of calm, followed
by Christ’s return to judge all nations. Wordsworth’s Recluse and Prelude, Blake’s Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, and poems on the French and American Revolutions all use the same
apocalyptic rhetoric. A decade later, the apocalyptic impulse shifts from the contemporary
reality of Metternich and his colleagues to the ideal world of Shelley’s lyrical drama, Prometheus
Unbound.

Romantic poetry stands apart from English poetry created after the Renaissance due to its
apocalyptic longings, which reflect a distinctly Protestant mindset. It is not a criticism of
Restoration and Augustan poets to view man as a limited being in a setting of reason, nature,
and society, limiting his horizons and preventing major changes in his ordinary hopes. Poets
wielded great influence in criticising man’s arrogance and desire to avoid the truths of life. Even
those without a conservative, classical, or Catholic disposition can see this as a source of pride if
they consider history. Restoration literature and its Augustan successors, including neoclassicists
such as Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift, as well as Samuel Johnson, were a reaction to
England’s turbulent period of civil war, religious conflict, and a shift in philosophical and
scientific perspectives. Cromwell and Milton’s reign marked the end of the Elizabethan era of the
Renaissance and Reformation. However, from a traditional perspective, it was a period of
rebellion and sectarianism caused by spiritual pride, civil and ecclesiastical arrogance, and
disobedience. Pope, Swift, and Johnson opposed all innovations, dissent, and radical positions in
ethics, politics, metaphysics, and art. Swift and Johnson’s objection to the harmful overwhelming
imagination is heavily influenced by the Augustan fear of lunacy. Swift, in his later years, went
insane, while Johnson came dangerously close. The poets of the Sensitivity era (1740-1770)
attempted to return to Milton’s intellectual and aesthetic daring, resulting in life experiences
that echoed Johnson’s warnings.

Chatterton committed himself at the age of seventeen, while Cowper, Collins, Christopher
Smart, and others spent years in asylums for the insane, followed by Romantic poet John Clare.
Other poets, such as Grey and Burns, experienced intense depression or social estrangement.

These generations were haunted by the fear of psychic energy and the belief that poets who
indulged in their imaginations would die in life.

The mid-eighteenth-century fear of creative lunacy, known as “perilous balance” by one critic,
remains unresolved. It is important to avoid judging what we do not comprehend. It’s important
to explore this phenomenon when studying William Blake, a poet who was once thought to be
insane by some of his contemporaries and is still regarded as such by those today who should
know better.
Blake’s early work, Mad Song in Poetical Sketches, explores the satirical theme of intellectual
madness leading to spiritual disorder. Blake’s critique of eighteenth-century creative madness in
The Book of Urizen remains unmatched, despite its intellectual satirical nature. In contrast to
Johnson’s fear of imagination, the Romantic apocalyptic optimism relies on imagination.
Romantic poetic philosophy revolves around the expansive and diverse concept of imagination.

The neoclassic theory of poetry evolved from the ancient mimetic theory, which saw poetry as
an imitation of human activities. This differed from Romantic poetic philosophy. Today, it’s
customary to talk of an artist’s or poet’s “creative” ability, but it’s important to remember that
the term “creative” in this sense is a far cry from the original concept of art being imitation.
According to M. H. Abrams, a colourless or lifeless metaphor or stock phrase is the remnant of a
figure of speech that was once innovative, alive, and potentially blasphemous because it
associated the poet with God in his unique and distinguishing function. The aesthetic metaphor
has a long history and has never been associated with heresy. Precursory references to the
metaphor can be found in first-century Christian writings and second-century Greek aesthetics.
In the third century, Plotinus, the creator of Neoplatonism, plainly uses the metaphor. The
Neoplatonists of the Florentine Academy expanded the metaphor into a philosophy during the
Italian Renaissance. Scaliger, a critic, stated that the poet “maketh a new Nature and so maketh
himself as it were a new God.”

Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetrie cites Scaliger as the source for a similar claim. George
Puttenham, a contemporary of Sidney, believed that the term “create” in Sidney’s Apologies
represented the orthodox belief that God created the universe from nothing. If poets, in the
words of Puttenham, “be able to devise and make all these things of themselves, without any
subject or veritie,” he said, “they be (by manner of speech) as creating gods.”

This brief history may give the impression that Sidney and his contemporaries had a Romantic
conception of imagination. However, the relative flatness of intellectual history can create such
illusions. Sidney abandons the aesthetic metaphor of creation in favour of a description of
poetry as imitation, stating that the actuality of the poet’s role is more visible. Sidney’s shift
from theological to customary metaphors of art as a reflection of nature distinguishes
Romanticism from its Renaissance predecessors.

Prior to the Romantics, literature and the arts were considered educational and culturally
significant, but their meanings were primarily influenced by theology, philosophy, and history.
Poems often contained embellished truths that might be readily applied in religious or moral
contexts. The Romantics, including Blake, Shelley, and Keats, argued that poetry is more unique
and intellectually strong than theology or moral philosophy.

Some critics, including Irving Babbitt, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and the “New” American academic
critics of recent decades, have criticised Romantic self-exaltation as mere megalomania. The
Romantic claim is more than just an assertion; it’s a metaphysic, a theory of history, and a vision
for a more human life, as described by Blake. According to Northrop Frye, even in the dissenting
Protestant perspective, civilizational traditions were considered to have been established by
God. According to Frye, during the early 19th century, radical Protestant writing reflected the
idea that much of civilization was based on human institutions, albeit with some uncertainty. It
can be found in Unitarians Price and Priestley, as well as William Godwin’s philosophy.

He began as a Dissenter and then evolved into a unique combination of idealistic anarchism and
materialistic humanism. In Blake it appears this is a new myth that tells the story of how humans
became who they are now and how they can return to their original form. Blake’s belief that all
deities exist in the human breast implies that all knowledge traditions are also human. Blake
believed that all deities exist in the human breast, implying that all knowledge traditions are also
human. Therefore, poetry was considered the most human and comprehensive kind of
knowledge.

Milton, the originator of this idea, would have rejected it since he believed it led to self-idolatry,
a Satanic practice. During the Romantic period, famous poets aimed to outperform Milton while
simultaneously refreshing their worldview. To transcend Milton, it’s necessary to humanise his
vision, similar to how Calvinist Protestantism evolved into extreme opposition in the late 18 th
century. Blake, the early Wordsworths, Shelley, and Keats hoped that poetry could either
liberate or make them see their fallen condition as a mere illusion that they could overcome.
Blake’s Milton, the hero of a brief epic, strives to shed rotted ideas and become more human.
Yeats’ poetry, influenced by Romanticism, expresses the idea that thought is a garment and the
soul is a bride that cannot be hidden under rubbish and tinsel.

Wordsworth’s vision emphasises the importance of simple and common words to save us. The
line “the simple produce of the common day” expresses human happiness and reminds us that
our lives are renewed by allowing the mundane. Wallace Stevens’ poetry, which is both true and
pertinent to our time, renews our view.

Romanticism opposed to supernatural religion the natural passion that Wallace Stevens has so
eloquently expressed:

_The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is

Too difficult to tell from despair._

Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley all aimed to discover the ultimate purpose of human life.
These poets have come closest to answering the question.

Wallace Stevens, following in their footsteps, argues that the creation of multiple selves and
sensuous worlds is a result of the metaphysical changes that occur simply by living in our
surroundings.