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1.2. Early Romantics and Later Romantics are witnessed in the features of that period
The basic point, perhaps, is that there is a very distinctive difference between such "Early Romantics" and "Later Romantics," even though the earlier poets certainly influence the later and deal in part with similar issues. Another highly relevant development in eighteenth-century studies in recent years has been the growing recognition of the importance of sentiment and sensibility in the period, and the readiness to take this development more on its own terms and see it less through the eyes of its opponents and satirists [see ch. 9, "Poetry, Sentiment, and Sensibility"]. Northrop Frye's essay "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility" (1956) was an important harbinger of this approach, and it also suggested a different label for the poetry of this transitional age. Frye's terminology has the advantages of linking the poetry of the period with the prose and of seeing it as equally distinct from both what precedes and what follows. Wordsworth, for example, is as clearly writing in reaction against some aspects of sensibility, just as he is also opposed to polite classicism. His own attitudes toward both nature and the poor are self-consciously differentiated from the cult of sensibility, although it certainly influenced him.
Yet "sensibility" seems too broad a term to cover the work of so many different poets. Frye intends to apply it to the later eighteenth century, and there is certainly a link between humanitarian interests and sensibility at that time as well as a special interest in female poetry of sensibility, as in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and the poetry of Helen Maria Williams. Marlon Ross has seen this "feminising" of literary culture as characteristic of the whole later period (Ross 1989). The poets of the 1740s likewise cultivate a new emotionalism, but the attempt to revive a poetry of sublimity and passion, as in Collins's "The Passions. An Ode for Music," is rather different from sensibility, even though in practice the two may overlap ("He gave to Misery all he had, a tear," writes Gray in the Elegy [l. 123]). The rather rhetorical Christian passion of the Night Thoughts is different from sensibility, and so, certainly, is Smart's Christian enthusiasm. Cowper's Christian feeling, on the other hand, does seem to overlap with what we might consider sensibility.
So perhaps there is no entirely appropriate term or category for this mid- to later eighteenth-century poetry. Every such candidate, as we have seen, runs the danger of lumping together very different poets and very different eras. In the 1740s, a group of poets sharing similar concerns - notably Gray, Collins, the Warton brothers - struck out in new directions (although it is easy to exaggerate their originality), and their new aspirations were backed up by criticism and scholarly endeavors. Poets of the later century seem more isolated figures, although naturally enough influenced by the poets who precede them, both the Augustans and the new poets of the 1740s. Some of these later poets go further in directions already indicated by their predecessors: in the imitation and development of earlier British sources, for example, which takes radical form in the case of Chatterton and Macpherson, or in the cultivation of subjective emotion. As Marshall Brown has shown, this foregrounding of subjective consciousness and the subjective self is the primary and distinctive achievement of this poetry of the later eighteenth century, and this is to be found in the apparently more conservative Oliver Goldsmith as well as in the more obviously "Pre-Romantic" Cowper .³
The problematics of the subjective self also appear to coalesce with one theme that these later poets do have strikingly in common with Gray and Collins: the self-image and role of the poet. Gray's "The Bard" and "The Progress of Poesy," and Collins's "Ode on the Poetical Character," evoke and yet at the same time disclaim the status of an inspired prophetic poet. It has been pointed out that, like Gray in "The Bard," the later poets seem to be able to claim that mantle only through acquiring the voice of a past poet - Ossian or Thomas Rowley, for example. Smart once again is different here, although he may not at first seem so. In assimilating his voice to that of the prophet-poet King David, Smart makes use of Christian typology in which the believer actually becomes that which is imaged.
It is perhaps better, then, simply to speak of mid-eighteenth-century poets and later eighteenth-century poets, since there is no one obvious generic term that serves at the same time both to differentiate and yet link the two, let alone avoid overgeneralizing about the individual poets in either broad chronological category. It is much the same with the relationship of either or both with Romanticism. These poets show different levels of awareness of and engagement with many of the broad and complex, and now increasingly controversial, elements usually seen as part of the definition of Romanticism. They are also differentiated from them in other respects. Their styles, for example, often retain an allusive, and hence rather elaborate, classicism. The aspiration to the sublime in their work may involve gestures toward a more traditional high style than is usual with either the Augustans or the Romantics. For Gray, the "language of the age is never the language of poetry" (letter to Richard West, 1742, in Gray 1971: vol. 1, 192). As with the Augustans, however, even when these poets write more plainly, a certain elite politeness may remain, and there is some degree either of condescension or of self-conscious sentimentality when they deal with lower-class subjects. Each of these poets has a subtly different sense of nature, of the imagination, and of the interrelationship between the two. None, however, sees nature either as divine in and of itself or alternatively as being brought forth in all its glory by the human creative imagination.
Robert Burns and William Blake are late eighteenth-century poets themselves, and they are much influenced by their predecessors and contemporaries, but their work nevertheless constitutes a radical difference. As we have seen, poets in the eighteenth century felt an increasing desire for spontaneity and genuineness of emotion in a sophisticated society; but Schiller makes a brilliant distinction between what he calls naive (i.e. genuinely primitive and thus authentic) literature and the sentimental or self-conscious mode (1795, cited in McGann 1996: 119—20). Both Burns and Blake speak out of a different class perspective from most of their predecessors and yet with no feeling whatsoever of inferiority. Both Burns's popular poems and Blake's Songs mark a deep inversion of traditional norms in this respect, and show that genuine simplicity still remains an option. Blake, of course, an "Early Romantic" in the fullest sense, goes much further in creating, as Wallace Jackson has indicated (1978: 89—121), a radical mythic structure that is able to link the visionary with the ordinary, to bring the transcendent back together again with the real and the human. Wordsworth's myth of nature achieves a similar purpose. Only Smart, among the poets discussed earlier in the chapter, with his remarkably realized re-presentation of a more orthodox Christianity, was able to bring about anything quite like this.⁴