The French Revolution and Nature
Consider the historical development of the French Revolution and its aftermath over the course of the 1790s and its impact on British poets.
The French Revolution was born out of an age of extraordinary triumph where man decided to fight for the rights of his kind. It was described by Thomas Paine as a period in “which everything may be looked for” (The Rights of Man 168) and attained. “Man” was readily developing into an idealistic concept that had the capability to accomplish things that had only previously been matters of thought. However this glorious Revolution soon showed signs of weakness and was eventually marked a failure by the Jacobin “Reign of Terror”, resulting in William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge facing profound disillusionment with man.
This essay explores the way in which these poets turned their loyalties to Nature, viewing her as the true superior that could achieve in her society what man could not in his. It begins by addressing how the poets perceived mankind at the dawn of the Revolution by looking into aspects of Wordsworth’s Prelude and Coleridge’s poem “France: An Ode”. The essay then goes on to expose the poets’ transformed attitudes as the Revolution progressively worsened by analysing the way in which Wordsworth and Coleridge perceive Nature in relation to man in “Lines Written in Early Spring” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.
The early days of the French Revolution were lit up with the promise of a Utopian state that would be built on man’s individual rights and freedoms. Wordsworth reveals this heightened atmosphere by declaring in the Prelude that “great change wandered in perfect faith” (IX, 308). Man had absolute faith in his own kind to transform this ideal into a reality and therefore conceived him as a Messiah with the divine capability to achieve anything he set out to. This perception of man is further reinforced by the poet in the Prelude when he alludes to his dinner with the revolutionaries and states that
The French Revolution was born out of an age of extraordinary triumph where man decided to fight for the rights of his kind. It was described by Thomas Paine as a period in “which everything may be looked for” (The Rights of Man 168) and attained. “Man” was readily developing into an idealistic concept that had the capability to accomplish things that had only previously been matters of thought. However this glorious Revolution soon showed signs of weakness and was eventually marked a failure by the Jacobin “Reign of Terror”, resulting in William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge facing profound disillusionment with man.
This essay explores the way in which these poets turned their loyalties to Nature, viewing her as the true superior that could achieve in her society what man could not in his. It begins by addressing how the poets perceived mankind at the dawn of the Revolution by looking into aspects of Wordsworth’s Prelude and Coleridge’s poem “France: An Ode”. The essay then goes on to expose the poets’ transformed attitudes as the Revolution progressively worsened by analysing the way in which Wordsworth and Coleridge perceive Nature in relation to man in “Lines Written in Early Spring” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.
The early days of the French Revolution were lit up with the promise of a Utopian state that would be built on man’s individual rights and freedoms. Wordsworth reveals this heightened atmosphere by declaring in the Prelude that “great change wandered in perfect faith” (IX, 308). Man had absolute faith in his own kind to transform this ideal into a reality and therefore conceived him as a Messiah with the divine capability to achieve anything he set out to. This perception of man is further reinforced by the poet in the Prelude when he alludes to his dinner with the revolutionaries and states that
Cited: Abrams, Meyer. A Correspondent Breeze. London: W.W Norton & Company Inc, 1984 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “France: An Ode.” Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006 Day, Aiden. Romanticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 “Ivy on Trees and a Ground Cover Weed.” The Royal Horticultural Society Online. The Royal Horticultural Society, 2011 Paine, Thomas. The Rights of Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Print. Thompson, Edward Press, 1997. Print. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1805. Project Gutenberg, 2007. Web. 14 Oct 2011.