French Revolution (1789) - The effects of the French Revolution on English Romantic Poetry

The effects of the French Revolution

English Romantic Poetry

The effects of the French Revolution on English Romantic Poetry

Answer: Each literally revolution is born in the womb of a political evolution. The Elizabethan humanism, for example, is an outcome of the Renaissance whereas the Victorian materialism and the 20^th century absurd existentialism result from the scientism of Darwin and the two World Wars respectively.

Similarly the 19^th century romanticism in British poetry is a by-product of the French Revolution in France in 1789. The effects of the French Revolution on the English romantic poets may be discussed in two different ways – the Doctrinaire of Rousseau and the military phase, the age of Napoleon.

The French Revolution was a direct effect of the powerful ideas propagated by Rousseau and carried on successfully by Voltaire, Turgot, Reynal and other social philosophers. These philosophers were also revolutionary social thinkers and they particularly Rousseau violently stirred up the thoughts of the French people to such an extent as to persuade them to a violent political revolution. [According to Rousseau, men were no longer good because they had left the association of uncontaminated nature. Both men and the age became, he thought, sick artificially luxurious. Besides, politics enable the despots to safeguard themselves. It always increases the difference between the rulers and the ruled.]

Democratic in thought Rousseau, therefore, announced the slogans of ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’. This slogan, thus, not merely aroused sufficient enthusiasm in the young generation for crusading against political monopoly, but influenced Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge to a great extent. It is to be noted that Rousseau’s intellectual influence came upon Shelley through Godwin. The enthusiasm for the Revolution as the very place of hope and happiness is well heard in Wordsworth’s poem:

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven.”

The note of humanism found in the romantic poems in general, the longing for liberty which the poems of Blake record and the violent zeal for the revolutionary spirit poetised by Shelley are all the harvest of the French Revolution.

The French Revolution, however, was not without its evil. Just as the lofty ideals of the revolution are found to provide stimulus to romantic poetry, so also its excesses have a reaction in another way. The reign of terror, let loose by the vengeful revolutionaries and the emergence of Napoleon as a tyrannical enemy to all free people, is found to have reflected on the romantic poets. The revolution seemed to them to be a melancholy dream. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were thoroughly disillusioned of the prospect of the revolution and could not but express their regret. This note of regret echoes in the lines of Coleridge’s Ode of France: “O France that mockest Heaven….to betray.” But Shelley was optimistic and standing on the debris of destruction longed for a golden Millennium after the reconstruction: O wind/ If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” [Ode to the West Wind]

The waves of the French Revolution, thus, washed away the psychic shores of the romantic poets who were expecting to explore an idyllic existence in their works. But these waves not merely dashed against the British shore, but spread throughout the world, thereby directing the course of the world literature.

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👉 Middle English Alliterative Poetry

👉 Middle English Allegorical Poetry