ABSTRACT
Within the lifetime of Wordsworth and Coleridge a new generation of poets, linked by their fortunes, and to some extent by their poetic ideals, was to grow up, to write and to die. Yet Byron, Shelley and Keats do form a distinct generation, and mark a new phase of the English poetic tradition, for their work did not begin to appear until the great period of their predecessors was past. Byron was the eldest of them, and his juvenile poems came out in 1807, the year which we usually take to mark the beginning of Wordsworth’s poetic decline. Only ten years after the Wordsworthian dawn, indeed; but already the historical picture was looking very different. Byron and his contemporaries were too young ever to have seen the revolution in its pristine glory; they had never seen France standing on the top of golden hours and human nature seeming born again; they grew up into a world in which England seemed to be permanently at war with France, in which the reaction against revolutionary ideals was in full swing; and their early maturity saw political reaction victorious all over Europe. All were liberals, Byron and Shelley by conviction, Keats mainly by association; and they lived in a world where liberals were generally on the defensive and not infrequently in prison. Wordsworth and Coleridge had taken part in a great movement of the spirit at a time when all the forces of nature seemed to be on its side. The possibility that their way of life might coincide with the way the world was going was, therefore, perfectly real to them. Their long search for balance and order seemed a possible quest; indeed, in the end it succeeded, though in a region far removed from that of their original expectations. To the poets who grew up to the Europe of Castlereagh and Metternich opposition seemed the inevitable attitude; revolt, both social and personal, for Byron and Shelley; mere non-co-operation for Keats. Thus, curiously enough, it is the older men, 98Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose work leads naturally into the next age—The Excursion and Aids to Reflection are footpaths to the cultivated Victorian countryside—while their juniors die unreconciled in the romantic solitudes of their choice.
