Aesthetics In Romantic Poetry

ABSTRACT:

The paper extensively studies the philosophy of art and aesthetics with reference to the Romantics’ Poetry. The paper aims at exploring the English Romantics’ rapturous refuge of imaginative experience for the creation of Plato’s inspired ideal world and their flight away from stark reality. The paper unravels the ways in which Romantic poetry, especially, of William Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, bears marks of prevalent socio-politico condition. The study scrutinizes the tug of war between the Romantic aesthetics of “art for art’s sake” with its God-like dreamland of imagination and the Romantics’ pragmatic political ethos which causes the split. Consequently, the gnawing gap is created in the Romantic soul where both the world of

Their creative imagination transcended them into the realm of a world, beyond that of their material existence. This heightened sense of imagination was then re-created in their poetry to make it available to the common man. To name a few poems, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Kahn’ are examples of this experience where the poets envisioned an ideal world. C.M Bowra wrote in ‘The Romantic Imagination’, that the Romantic poets ‘saw that the power of poetry is strongest when the creative impulse works untrammeled, and… this happened when they shaped fleeting visions into concrete forms and pursued wild thoughts until they captured and mastered them’ (1950). Within these imaginative experiences, the Romantics also envisioned their idea of political idealism. Adian Day quotes M.H Abrams, who writes that the Romantic poets ‘were all centrally political and social poets.’ (1996) Influenced by the French Revolution, the poets envisioned a humanistic society, where the interests of man would reign important. Through their aesthetic creation of this political idealism, the Romantic poets forwarded their political aspirations that they desired to see materialized in the real world.

The poetry of William Wordsworth, one of the first Romantic poets, can be seen as spiritually aesthetic. It is through this spiritual quality that Wordsworth forwarded his political idealism. Wordsworth, through his poetry invoked his readers to allow ‘nature (to) be your teacher’. He believed that nature was the only true teacher of man, and thus encouraged mankind to come into close association with nature and to allow it to fill them up with