Differences
in social classes distinguished the lives of everyone during the Romantic
period. One of the revolutionary aspects of romantic poetry was that it began
to be written in normal, everyday language, and that the subject matter began
to glorify peasant life, and a return to nature. Although the vast majority of
the poets we studied in this course belonged to the middle or upper classes and
were educated at a university, most of the subject matter they wrote about
included rural life and observations about nature. Even though the working
classes are represented in the works by poets in both the upper and lower
classes, the ways in which the working class is represented changes depending
on which class the poet himself (or herself) belonged to. These differences are seen greatly in the
works of John Clare, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and in the works of
female poets, who represented an entirely different class-of women, such as
Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith.
John
Clare, who was known as “the peasant poet”, was one of the few poets who
belonged to the working class. John Clare was destroyed by critics during his
time because of his poor education and “lack of intellect”. However, Clare was
able to describe nature in a beautiful, poignant way that only someone who is
very familiar with working and living outside could. Clare describes the
peasants and people of the working classes in a very different way than Wordsworth
or Byron. In Recollections after a Ramble,
Clare describes a walk in which he encounters various peasants and gypsies. His
descriptions are not as personal as Wordsworth’s in The Thorn or Animal
Tranquility and Decay, but rather simple descriptions that glaze over the
individual and see the peasants as another part of the landscape that he sees
while walking. His description isn’t sympathetic, nor is it critical. Clare is
simply describing events from his normal, everyday life. Unlike other romantic
poets, Clare wasn’t in the countryside by choice. He had very little to no
chance of upward mobility in class. Clare isn’t just an observer of the country
and of rural life, but very much a part of it. When he describes rural scenes,
he includes his own childhood memories and experiences in this way of
life-something that is missing from the poets who looked at rural life from the
outside. And, although Clare’s grammar and lack of punctuation and horrible spelling
was highly criticized during his own time, I believe it lends an air of
authenticity to his poetry and brings the culture in his poems to life. Unlike
many other romantic poets (Wordsworth comes to mind), Clare didn’t see humanity
and nature as two separate entities. Yes, sometimes man disrupted nature, but
there’s still a closer relationship to nature in general in his poetry. He didn’t
describe civilization as trying to take over nature, because his peasants were
so closely connected to nature and worked with and in nature, instead of trying
to take it over with cities and factories.
Many
of Wordsworth’s poems include peasant characters and he, along with Coleridge,
was known for writing in regular language. This was extremely revolutionary,
because previously poetry was always written in a “high” language, rather than
in the common language. Robert Mayo claims that Lyrical Ballads “was 'original' in various respects (as reviewers
said it was), and that it was to be a leavening force of extraordinary power in
the years to come.” (Mayo 106) Wordsworth displays a very sympathetic view of
the peasant class, although his poetry is always from the standpoint of an observer,
so he remains detached from this class, even though they feature in to a lot of
his poems. Wordsworth explains the reason he and Coleridge decided to include
rural life into so many of their poems in his preface to the 1800 version of Lyrical Ballads: “The principal object
then which I proposed to myself in these poems was to make the incidents of
common life interesting by tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature…Low
and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their
maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic
language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of
greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated;
because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and
from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended;
and are more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men
are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” (Wordsworth
174) Wordsworth clearly, and rightly, did not think of himself as one of the
peasantry, but he did believe that there were things to be learned from their
speech and way of life. Unlike Clare, Wordsworth’s poems are more emotional,
and focus on human relationships and social issues more. In The Thorn, we are introduced to a peasant
woman, Martha Ray, who was jilted and unmarried and who visits the grave of her
baby every day and is avoided, but gossiped about, by the entire town-who
speculate that she may have killed her own baby. If this poem had been set in
an upper class society would it have reached out to so many people and been so
moving and poignant? Wordsworth seems generally sympathetic to the lower
classes the rural connection to nature, but he still speaks of society
(presumably the society of upper and middle classes and of cities) as being
dreary and hectic. This is seen in many of his poems, but especially in Lines written a few miles above Tintern
Abbey, where rural homes seem to be connected to nature “these pastoral
farms/Green to the very door; and the wreathes of smoke/Sent up, in silence,
from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem,/Of vagrant
dwellers in the houseless woods,/Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his
fire/The hermit sits alone.” (Wordsworth 143) Scott McEarthon questions
Wordsworth’s motives and claims that, instead of opening up the genre of poetry
to include peasants and to break class boundaries, he was taking over their territory:
“Although we are accustomed to thinking of Wordsworth as breaching the fortress
of elite literature, it is important to consider that he also breached the
implicit class boundaries of literature in the other direction. In
appropriating lowly rustic voices and literary forms, he could be seen as
invading the class-specific territory from which they derived their tenuous
(and perhaps only) artistic authority.” (McEarthon 4)
Although
Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith didn’t necessarily focus on the peasantry in their
sonnets, they did promote another class of people who struggled, were often
overlooked, and who often had even fewer rights than slaves-women. In the act
of writing and publishing poetry alone, they were promoting the rights of
women, especially during a time in which most women, like most of the people of
the lower classes, weren’t educated. Anne Finch was one of the first women to
publish a collection of poetry. Charlotte Smith and Anne Finch had a great
influence on the works of many other well-known poets, including Sir Walter
Scott, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge. Charlotte Smith supported her
family with the money she made from her poetry. Both women were very political
in their poetry-especially Smith in The
Emigrants and Beachy Head. Carol
Barash claims that when Anne Finch became popular again, mostly due to
Wordsworth’s admiration of her, she was seen as apolitical and the political
origins of her poetry were forgotten: “Finch represented in her own time-and
represents in ours-the archetypal Augustan woman poet. And the problems which troubled
Wordsworth-was Finch a Jacobite? Why did she write so much and so often about
the female community?-get to the heart of Finch’s construction of herself as a
public poet. Wordsworth needed to delete the reference to the Countess of
Salisbury from “A Nocturnal Reverie” not merely because women’s community
frightened him, but because he seems to have sensed the ways in which these
recurrent references to female community figure in Finch’s writing for something
more.” (Barash 329) The males of this period-even the ones who may have
sympathized with the lower working classes still seemed to be very
uncomfortable with women and their political views and poetry.
The
art of the Romantic period was influenced by this movement in poetry and
focused on landscapes as well. Ruins of massive architectural works (such as
Tintern Abbey) were featured in many of these paintings, drawings and etchings.
In his series of 5 paintings The Course
of Empire (1833-36), Thomas Cole takes the viewer through 5 stages of
civilization: the Savage State, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, The Consummation
of Empire, The Destruction, and Desolation. The two images I chose to show are
the pastoral state and Desolation. The pastoral state is the romantic ideal.
Nature is the primary feature of the painting, and the human activity is
minimal and all the people appear to be peasants- a man is plowing in the
distance, an old man is writing on the ground with a stick, a young man and
woman are dancing, a shepherd tends to his flock, and a woman watches her
children at play. This scene mirrors the pastoral images Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Clare, and the other Romantic poets feature in their poetry. In the other two
paintings, Consummation and Destruction we see civilization reach
its peak. Human activity destroys and tramples on nature and eventually
progress destroys humanity itself. In Desolation,
nature takes over the ruins of the city and the monuments that have been
erected, and humans are nowhere to be seen. We once again discover that nature
always triumphs over human progress. Cole chose to quote Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage when
explaining his series:
“There
is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis
but the same rehearsal of the past.
First
Freedom and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth,
vice, corruption—barbarism at last.
And
History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath
but one page”
Sources:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1343511?uid=3739920&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101552093207
http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/william_wordsworth_2004_9.pdf
To see Thomas Cole's paintings closer, go here
Barash, Carol. "The Political Origins of Anne Finch's Poetry" http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817855
Susan, J. W. (2000). Charlotte smith's emigrants: Forging connections at the borders of a female tradition. The Huntington Library Quarterly, 63(4), 509-VII. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/215267023?accountid=7113
Mayo, Robert (1972). 'The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads (1954)'
[PMLA 69 (1954), 486-522]. Reprinted in A. R. Jones and W. Tydeman
(eds), Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 79-126.
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