Book Review - The Romantic Imagination by Maurice Bowra

 The Romantic Imagination by C.M. Bowra

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 (first published 1950)     ISBN 0192810065

In a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking essays (originally lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1948-9), Maurice Bowra skilfully dissects the great Romantic poets, showing us how in their view "the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things."

Bowra focusses on the major poets of the era - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - and also the "fellow travellers" who shared some of the thinking of the major poets, but either could not surrender fully to the imagination (Byron, Christina Rosetti), or surrendered to it too fully (Swinburne, Poe), or could only work with the thinking in a limited way (Dante Gabriel Rosetti).

Bowra shows how these poets succeeded, and where they failed, and links those successes and failures back to the driving ethos behind Romanticism. While the Romantics opened new vistas for poetry to explore, by turning their backs on the Augustan and Elizabethan tradition, Bowra explains that the Romantics had no tradition to fall back on when inspiration failed; "for tradition enables a poet to conserve his powers, to recruit his strength from other quarters when he is not able to do everything from his own resources. It even helps him to exert himself in fields for which he is not ideally suited, but in which none the less he may be able to win noteworthy successes. The Romantics relied on what was most unlike others in themselves, on their own peculiarly individual gifts. The result was that, by too much concentration on them, they exhausted these gifts fand had nothing to put in their place."

In his essay on Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Bowra explains this process as it worked through this poem and Wordsworth's life, and how Wordsworth came to terms with the waning of his inspiration, in a way that Coleridge could not. In both men poetry waned, but only Coleridge stopped writing. I think Bowra sees these two as the peak of true Romanticism, most able to successfully commit their "philosophy" to poetry that could readily be understood.

Blake, and to some extent Swinburne and Poe, struggled on that front as they used their own personal idea of the "supernal" in their poetry, and thus made it harder for the reader to understand what they were trying to say. They also moved away from using ordinary everyday scenes and words which was key for Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and their poetry suffers because of it. 

Poe and Swinburne in particular, in their strivings for tonality and musicality, could stray too far from meaning.. It's probable that Swinburne would have agreed with Walter Pater's maxim that "All art aspires constantly to the position of music", even though it was written well into the Victorian era. However, this idea is fundamentally flawed: poetry is an art (and a craft) that deals with words, and words convey meaning. No matter how "musically" words are grouped together, if they fail to convey meaning, a poem has failed. This was often a trap for Swinburne (and for God-knows how many poets that have come after him).

Bowra's essay on Christina Rosetti was for me the most powerful. It brings together his theories, showing how while Rosetti was a wonderful poet, she was not a Romantic because she cleaved to traditional religion rather than a self-created spirituality. She longed for God and fought her worldly desires for love. These strains are all worked out in her verse, and because she does have a focus for her "unseen order of things" her poetry doesn't fall into the trap of say, Poe's work, which too often falls into the "un-nameable" or "un-knowable" other.

I suppose the question for me is do I agree with Bowra's views as expressed in this book? I think, for the majority of them, the answer is yes, especially when he discusses Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. His essay on Blake is interesting, and requires more thought from me. The essay that opened my eyes the most was the one concerning Christina Rosetti - I will go back to her work with a new outlook and respect.

If you like the works of the Romantics, but feel that you need a bit of a scaffold on which to build a greater understanding of their achievement, I can highly recommend this book - well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell