Lyrical ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge or the birth of a new literary movement during the Industrial Revolution

Résumé du document

Industrialism, expansion, profit, production and individualism were the feelings which took place during the period of the Industrial Revolution in England. People in Great Britain were led by the streams of progress, but the modernizations in technology had some important consequences on people: especially on the simplest kind of people, poorer people, those who lived in the country. While bourgeoisie and gentry only wanted to make profits and getting richer; while new classes of people were created, like merchants and tradesmen; farmers and country workers knew radical life transformations. Such changes induced a new form of literature, created by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This new movement in poetry, called Romanticism, was illustrated, at the time, by the collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads. An analysis will be made to determine in what extends this new genre in art was representing some specificities of Great Britain in the beginning of the nineteenth century. We are going to see in a first part that the topics of Romantic poetry were focusing on very simple people and very simple subjects.

Extraits

[...] Wordsworth believed that children were able to have a very close relationship with nature, a relation that adults could not have. The poet also believed that nature could be a parent or a teacher for children. It was clearly expressed in the poem "The Foster-Mother's Tale", where a baby, who was found in nature, did is own education through nature and never get any instruction that could have acknowledged him in the civilized world. The boy was in harmony with nature and the fact that he whistled "as he were a bird himself" expresses the perfect relation that the boy had with his natural teacher. [...]

[...] The main subject of the poem is also culpability, and for Wordsworth and Coleridge, the essence of poetry was to find in the most simple subject and poetic syntax. Which was something very unusual at the time, and created the beginning of a new form of art and literature : the Romanticism, a new kind of concept which focused on emotion, nature, freedom and personal introspection. The true story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill also questioned people about laws and their necessity and about relations between people. [...]

[...] A collection of poems in which people had to search their real natural origins. These origins were to find in what people did not respect, in things that were in the lower part of the Great Chain of Being, in nature. It was clear that such ideas were not shared by everybody, especially people who were in the upper part of the social ladder. This is why Wordsworth and Coleridge also criticized industrialism and progress in Great Britain, and the new ways of life that human beings were dealing with. [...]

[...] What was very striking in Lyrical Ballads, is how the subjects of the poems were chosen. All the poems were dealing with the simplest people that could live in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Moreover, a revolution in poetry writing took place with the use of everyday language. This was unusual, and as Wordsworth said in the Preface of the edition of Lyrical Ballads published in 1800, some readers would think that simple language was not appropriated for the art of poetry, and that ordinary life was not suited for an art as noble as poetry. [...]

[...] The tale narrates how depressed simple people could be, when they are in front of such problems like contradiction and feelings linked with the mind. The reader is led to feel such state of mind, like wandering with apprehension and sadness, in search of a lost relative. Readers are invited to share such emotions as culpability, but through the eye of country inhabitants, it was Wordsworth and Coleridge way to open people's mind to spirituality. They were able to show that delight of the spirit could have been reached by everyday emotions and by everyday language. [...]