Explore the Relationship Between Literature and Politics In the Work of Romantic Authors.

Wordsworth’s pathetic representation of a once successful man now with only one lamb left, his livelihood gone, no longer able to provide for himself or his family contradicts his associate William Godwin’s argument that ‘property was the cause of every vice and the source of all the wretchedness, of the poor’.  Wordsworth did not see property as the root of all evil but rather he blamed the unjust laws that created poverty and hardship rather than alleviating it.

A later poem by Wordsworth, London 1802, voices his continuing disillusionment with the government.  The poem, a sonnet, reveals how Wordsworth was greatly influenced by Milton.  He regarded Milton as a political visionary and referred to him not only in this poem but also in other poems.  In the poem Wordsworth speaks of  England’s past as being ‘heroic’ whereas now it is ‘stagnant’, it needs someone like Milton, (a radical republican who spoke out against the tyranny of Charles I) to challenge the system:

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour,

                                   England hath need of thee!

Perhaps he regards himself as a new Milton, as he argues through the poem that writers have a duty to speak out, to be a social and political conscience.

Even though Wordsworth’s political views in his youth were radical and his poetry criticised the government of the time, he was not as politically motivated as those he associated with, for example, ‘William Godwin, John Thelwall, George Dyer, Daniel Eaten, Joseph Johnson, Thomas Cooper, and in France, Antoine-Joseph Gorsas’.

He was appalled by the increasing terror in France and when in 1821 he was accused of betraying France ‘ he asserted ‘You have been deluded by places and persons, while I have stuck to principles.  I abandoned France and her rulers when they abandoned Liberty, gave themselves up to tyranny, and endeavoured to enslave the world’’.

Politically, he was with increasing age and success becoming more conservative in his views.  ‘His gradual recognition by the great and the good of London literary society since the publication of Lyrical Ballads had seen a progressive blunting of the cutting edge of his political radicalism’.  Wordsworth was to become part of the establishment, accepting the job of Distributor for Stamps in Westmoorland, and by 1843 becoming Poet Laureate.  It was this that made him a figure of derision to second generation poets such as Byron and Shelley, who though they admired his early poetry regarded him as a traitor.

Byron, eighteen years Wordsworth’s junior, showed signs of radicalism from an early age.  In his late teens he led ‘a rebellion against the new headmaster’ at Harrow whilst he was a pupil there.  When he took his seat in the House of Lords he made an extremely controversial maiden speech ‘on behalf of the stocking weavers of Nottingham (the Luddites)’ who were opposed to mechanisation, believing that its use led to unemployment and who organised machine breaking.  Byron spoke out ‘against a vicious piece of legislation by the government, which proposed the death penalty as punishment for frame-breaking’.  Surprisingly Shelley is recorded as being unsympathetic to their cause and dismissed the Luddite riots by stating that ‘‘hunger is the only excitement of our English riotings’ which are ‘devoid of principle and method’.  Assuming the rebellion possessed no spirituality at all, but was only a kind of mindless response, he expressed a typically intellectual bias against both workers and ‘hunger’, as though having intense bodily needs disqualified one’s self from being rational’.

As well as speaking on political issues in the House of Lords, Byron satirised ‘political opponents and the political situation in general in his poetry’.  Byron’s most scathing attack on society was in the Dedication to his epic poem Don Juan which berated the Lake poets, especially Robert Southey for becoming traitors to their former radicalism:

Although ’tis true that you have turned out a Tory at

    Last.

Byron insults Wordsworth’s The Excursion by suggesting that only when under the influence of the dog star will it ‘appear to be poetry’ and that the over long Excursion is only poetry by Wordsworth’s ‘assertion’.  He refers to his dislike of the Lake poets, who he regarded as selling out because they turned their backs on the radical views of their youth, ‘I hate your poets, so read none of those’.  Although Byron attacks Wordsworth he was, through Shelley, influenced by Wordsworth’s poetry.  His poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred both ‘betray Wordsworth’s influences’.  For example, the celebration of ‘Maternal Nature’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, this ‘enthusiastic admiration of nature, and a sensibility to her influences’ was pure Wordsworth.

In the dedication to Don Juan, Byron compares Southey to Milton, Milton did not condemn Charles I and then condone Charles II, whereas Southey had ‘hated George III (in his radical youth) but had praised his son (the Prince Regent)’, ‘He did not loathe the sire to laud the son’.  The poem also brands George III and the Prince Regent as tyrants due to their misuse of power and labels Viscount Castlereagh, who ‘had been responsible for imprisoning the leaders of the United Irish Rebellion’ as an ‘intellectual eunuch’.

The poem, which was not published until after Byron’s death was written to shock its audience.  Its reference to cannibalism appeared to some as sacrilegious as it was after eating Pedrillo, who is licensed to carry out religious rites, it is those ‘who have dined on Pedrillo who go insane, implying that religious belief is a type of madness’.

Byron unlike some of his contemporaries did not limit his political activity to poetry.  Byron told his friends that ‘poetry should only occupy the idle’ while he preferred ‘the talents of action’.  ‘Later he grew to see more self-consciously the power of literature ‘not as an end, but as a means, to obtain that influence over men’s minds which is power in itself and in its consequences’’.  His political principles were also channelled through action, while in Italy he allowed the revolutionary Carbonari to store arms in his cellar.  His choice of action is also shown by his death in 1824 when he caught a chill and died from fever while fighting for Greek independence.

Like Byron, Shelley also developed a taste for radical politics at school.  He was expelled from Oxford because he refused to answer questions concerning a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism which questioned the existence of God.  At one time Shelley was mistakenly viewed as no more than a disciple of William Godwin, whose political ideas he supposedly translated into poetry’.  In reality Shelley adapted ‘Godwin’s anarchist philosophy to meet the requirements of new political problems and to accommodate his own political insights’.

Shelley also regarded Wordsworth as ‘a traitor to his earlier radicalism’ but he too was greatly influenced by Wordsworth’s poetry, ‘Wordsworth had been the principal poetical inspiration behind Alastor’, a poem which describes the river journey of the central character towards the sea but who ‘is also engaged on another kind of journey towards the origins and longings of the human imagination’.  Shelley though he greatly admired Wordsworth’s early work also resented the later change in his political outlook and it was his feelings of betrayal that motivated him to write the poem To Wordsworth.  The poem describes Wordsworth as a poet of loss and change, which refers to Wordsworth’s loss of his former radical views and his change to conservative views.  Shelley’s use of the first person, ‘I’ and ‘mine’ make the loss more personal to him, he even says that though Wordsworth has felt the loss it is a loss that ‘I alone deplore’.  ‘Thou wert as a lone star’ is a reference to Milton and to Wordsworth’s poem London 1802 in which Wordsworth sees himself like Milton speaking out against injustice.  Perhaps Shelley is suggesting that Wordsworth did become like Milton, a poet who spoke out and challenged the system.  But he uses the ironic phrase ‘In honoured poverty’ to highlight his belief that Wordsworth sold out, he choose security over conscience and for four hundred pounds a year joined the enemy.  The poem reads like an obituary for Wordsworth, ‘thou leavest me to grieve’, yet it is Wordsworth who outlives Shelley by many years.

Shelley’s political views are strongly expressed in a poem that he wrote after he heard news of an event on the outskirts of Manchester.  Shelley’s reaction to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, during which at least 11 people were killed and 421 were injured when mounted dragoons attacked unarmed men, women and children who were attending a public meeting, was in contrast to his response to the Luddite riots.  ‘He told his publisher, Charles Ollier, that ‘ the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins.  I wait anxiously to hear how the country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers’’.  The massacre inspired Shelley to write one of his greatest works The Mask of Anarchy.

The poem ‘begins with vicious satire, depicting the ministers of Lord Liverpool’s government riding the horses which trample the crowd’.  As in Byron’s Don Juan Viscount Castlereagh is satirised:

                                              I met Murder on the way –

He had a mask like Castlereagh.

‘Shelley would have been aware of Byron’s stanzas’ in Don Juan which also attacked Castlereagh.  Shelley libels Eldon and Sidmouth by using similes to associate Eldon with Fraud and Sidmouth with hypocrisy.  Sidmouth was also a target for Shelley as ‘he was distinguished for having applauded the Peterloo Massacre in the House of Commons’.  In the poem Shelley personifies ‘Anarchy’ riding on a white horse; ‘in Shelley’s distinctive usage ‘anarchy’ means the breakdown of order due to bad or corrupt government'.

The last stanza:

 Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number;

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen -

    Ye are many, they are few.

appears to be encouraging the poor to act, it seems to be Shelley advocating revolution, or is it a ‘proposal for massive nonviolent resistence’?  It is more likely to be not a call to arms but a call for ‘passive, non-violent demonstration’, a statement that ‘the many would not need to resort to violence, and the few would not dare’.

According to Shelley ‘power itself is no more than a mask’ behind which rulers and monarchs can create oppression.  Shelley’s political allegory reveals ‘the true nature of social reality’, the reality of a government that murders its own people. Although Shelley sent the poem five weeks after the massacre to ‘Leigh Hunt for publication in his journal, The Examiner’, ‘Hunt realising how dangerous this could be for Shelley did not publish it.  The poem was eventually published in 1932 after Shelley’s death.

A poem, which combines Shelley’s political views and his feelings of disappointment yet admiration for Wordsworth, is England in 1819.  The title of the poem is similar to Wordsworth’s London 1802, and they are both sonnets.  The title suggests that it is a response to London 1802, perhaps Shelley is saying that seventeen years later nothing has changed, not only London but all of England is in need of political change.  The poem condemns the then King, George III, as ‘old, mad, blind, despised, and dying’.  The King and his offspring are like leeches sucking life from the people, ‘leech-like to their fainting country cling’.  The poem refers to the Peterloo Massacre; ‘A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field’.  The army which kills the people also kills liberty, destroying their own freedom in the process.  Like Wordsworth’s poem this poem looks to a dead saviour.  In the poem London 1802 Wordsworth calls upon Milton, that ‘England hath need of thee!’ while Shelley in this poem speaks of:

graves from which a glorious phantom may

                                   Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

The fact that Shelley uses the same form and a very similar title shows the great influence that Wordsworth had on his poetry but may also be Shelley drawing attention to the fact that Wordworth who had seventeen years before used this very form to criticise the political laws in England, was now supporting them.

Like Byron, Shelley died prematurely when he was drowned in a boating accident, while Wordsworth though older, outlived both of them.  With age Wordsworth grew

more conservative and this caused him to be despised by Byron and Shelley.  They neither grew old nor more conservative, they died young and still idealistic, strong in their beliefs.

Today we view writers of the Romantic period as part of the same group but this is not how they saw themselves.  There were many differences between Romantic writers and much antagonism between some of the first and second generation writers.  They did though share one thing in common, their place in a turbulent world.  Through their work they expressed their political views, using their writing as a means of drawing attention to the injustices within society. Even though Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey later turned their backs on their earlier political views they had at one time been as idealistic as the second generation poets.  They too had hoped that their poetry could influence the world and create a more equal society.

Dawson, P.M.S. The Unacknowledged Legislator Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Dawson, P.M.S. Poetry in an Age of Revolution Offprint no. 28653.

Gardiner, Alan. The Poetry of William Wordsworth London: Penguin Books, 1990.

McGann, J.J. Byron and the Force of Circumstances Offprint no 28774.

Scrivener, M.H. Radical Shelley New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Williams, John. William Wordsworth A Literary Life London: MacMillan Press 1996.

Wu, Duncan (ed.). Romanticism an Anthology Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

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