The ministry of higher and secondary special education of uzbekistan

1.2 English romantic poetry

Ode is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. There are two distinctive features of the ode: it uses heightened, impassioned language; and addresses some object. The ode may speak to objects (an urn), creatures (a skylark, a nightingale), and presences or powers (beauty, autumn, the west wind). The speaker first invokes the object and then creates a relationship with it, either through praise or prayer.

Unlike the early 18th century authors, who looked outwards to society for general truths to communicate to common readers, Romantic writers looked inwards to their soul and imagination to find private truths for special readers.
The poet was considered to be a supremely individual creator, who gave freedom to his creative spirit. In 1759 Edward Young published Conjectures on Original Composition, where he introduced the idea of organic, as opposed to mechanical, nature of composition.
Coleridge wrote: “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials, not their own.” Keats wrote: “If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”.
The idea of poetry as a series of strictly defined rules diminished the figure of a poet to a skilled craftsman. In the beginning of the 19th century it was rejected in favour of the idea that creative process is regulated by the laws of its own nature.
In 1798 William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) published the Lyrical Ballads. The book became a landmark in English literature, indicating the beginning of a new era. The preface, written by Wordsworth for the second edition (1800), is often considered to be a manifesto for the Romantic movement. In it Wordsworth stated that:
• the poet’s imagination can reveal the inner truth of ordinary things, to which the mind is habitually blind;
• poetry is not simply the unrestrained, spontaneous expression of emotions. It takes its origin “from emotion recollected in tranquility”. The initial emotion is recalled and reproduced in the poet’s mind, and when it has been processed through thought, the creative act of composing begins;
• the poet is a man speaking to men “ ”; he uses his special gift to show other men the essence of things.
The six of the most important Romantic poets were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Content
Although many of these poets were conscious of a new “spirit of the age”, they didn’t refer themselves to a movement as a unity of purpose and aim. Only towards the middle of the 19th century they were conveniently grouped together under the term “Romantic” on the basis of some common features: imagination, individualism, irrationalism, childhood, escapism, nature, etc.
Romantic poets attached much importance to the role of the imagination in the creative processes. They believed the imagination was an ability of the mind to apprehend a kind of truth and reality which lay beyond sensory impressions, reason and rational intellect. The imagination is an almost divine activity through which a poet gets the access to the supernatural order of things. He recreates and reinterprets the world becoming a prophet to all men.
This new, subjective vision of reality went hand in hand with a much stronger emphasis on individual thought and feeling. Poetry became more introspective and meditative. Autobiographical element and first person point of view, which for many years had been unpopular, became very common and most appropriate fot the expression of emotions and feelings.
Some of the Romantics lived in isolation and believed that poetry should be created in solitude. In this they anticipated the idea of the artist as a non-conformist. This feeling of alienation later was shared by many writers of the modernist age.
Together with the new emphasis on imagination, Romantic poets turned their attention to the irrational aspects of human life – the subconscious, the mysterious and the supernatural. As a result poetry became more symbolic and metaphorical.