Gray

The word ‘romantic’ has so many meanings, and they are so ill distinguished from each other that one is sometimes tempted to feel that it is hardly worth using it at all. ¹ However, in practice it is difficult to get along without it, and we may begin by using it in its least ambiguous sense, as it is used in the title of this book, as a mere chronological label, to describe the imaginative literature of the early part of the last century. It is not hard to see where the label ought to be tied: in fact a new conception of poetry does come into being towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the poets who were to work it out were all either dead or past their creative period by 1825. In fact, too, the label is more than chronological; it does more than point to a certain group of writers; it can also legitimately connote something about their work, some things that they really had in common in spite of very different life-histories and personal characters. In the first place, the major poetry of this period is all written under the influence of the new secular, liberal conception of man and his destiny that had sprung from the French Revolution and the French eighteenth-century thought that had preceded it. I avoid saying inspired by the French Revolution, for that would suggest that the poetry is predominantly political and social, which it is not: and it would fail to suggest what is certainly true, that a reaction against the revolutionary ideal is almost as important as the revolutionary ideal itself. Secondly, the scepticism about existing society engendered by the revolutionary ferment impels the more imaginative minds into a new communion with nature. When the world of man is harsh and repugnant, in need of violent reform, yet so often, it appears, irreformable, the poet is apt to seek consolation in the world of nature which does not need reforming: at first natura naturata, the lovely texture of the 8visible world; then natura naturans, the informing principle within it: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things—