Heidi Thomson
Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
Abstract:
‘Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters’ argues for
the importance of reading and interpreting
Romantic poetry for a better life in the
twenty-first century. The more literate and
articulate we are, the better our chances for
survival as citizens and inhabitants of the earth.
Studying Romantic poetry can improve our
empathy and resilience, our sense of
categorization and understanding, our ability to
accommodate uncertainty, and our powers of
decision-making. Examples of Romantic poetry
are drawn from the works of Wordsworth
(‘We Are Seven’ and ‘The Intimations Ode’)
and Keats (‘On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer’, ‘To John Hamilton Reynolds’, ‘This
Living Hand’), emphasizing the role of
memory, the imagination, and interactive
dynamics within their texts. The essay
concludes by emphasizing the importance of
the Humanities in the University curriculum.
Keywords: Romantic poetry, William
Wordsworth, John Keats, Lyrical Ballads,
Poems in Two Volumes, The Prelude,
Humanities
This essay was originally presented as my
Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand, on the
evening of 16 October 2018.
Good evening everybody, goede avond, tēnā
koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora koutou katoa.
Romanticism 26.1 (2020): 38–49
DOI: 10.3366/rom.2020.0446
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/rom
Thank you for making the effort to be here.
Thank you Vice-Chancellor for your kind
words of introduction. I am grateful to be here,
grateful that Victoria University of Wellington
was willing to take a chance on employing an
immigrant from a non-English speaking
background for a lectureship in its English
Department. And yes, of course, after almost
three decades in Wellington I still get the
question: but where are you really from? And
recently a New Zealand customs officer asked
me what I taught at University and followed up
with ‘you don’t sound English’. I know, I don’t,
and I never will, but even from a multi-lingual,
un-English-accent perspective I do love English
literature, especially Romantic poetry, and it’s
been a privilege to share my passion and my
knowledge with so many students over the
decades. I started my career at Victoria when
the use of email was in its infancy, and the
world wide web didn’t even exist. So regardless
of how much things have changed, the visibility
of human greatness and stupidity has increased
exponentially through the internet. And no
matter how publicly and permanently visible
and audible the record of human vanity now is,
it is also incredibly transient in our
consciousness. As The Guardian tells us, ‘skim
reading’ is the new normal.1 Digital-based
modes of reading are altering how we think and
feel. To some extent my lecture is a plea for
slow and deep reading of beautiful texts in
order to make them part of ourselves so as to
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
understand others more. I still prescribe a print
textbook for my Romantic Literature course
because I know that it puts us, as a group, in the
lecture theatre or tutorial room, much more on
the same page. I encourage my students to read
with a pencil, to write in the margins, to make a
text their own materially and mentally. I want
their books to be a tangible reminder of
themselves, of who they were when they read
the book, not just something that has
evaporated ‘in the Cloud’. The sense of
ownership over the material book extends to an
enhanced ownership of the words they engage
with. So, here’s to the books which have
become a record of our lives, annotated,
coffee-stained, a bit smelly, and entirely,
raggedly, part of ourselves.
I was surprised how stressful preparation for
this lecture was, and I know that it has
something to do with the lack of a
subject-specific context: a Romanticism course,
or conference about Wordsworth or Keats. So I
told myself that my task for this brief hour was
to share my love of words and to argue for the
relevance of words in and beyond the
Humanities. The Humanities refer to what it
means to be human, and in that sense all our
learning is associated with the Humanities. It is
certainly a grave mistake to delegate the
Humanities to a separate holding pen as an
outdated, decorative notion. A monolithic
understanding of the Humanities fosters
segregation within the academy and society at
large, a system in which one group is defined
as inferior to another, a system which fosters
suspicion of any learning which cannot be
quantified in narrowly vocational terms.
The Humanities reflect on and question the
record of human behaviour. The Humanities
are not just about ‘critical thinking’. Any
branch of learning is about critical thinking;
nobody attends University to specialize in
uncritical thinking. What we want is not
just critical thinking, but transformative
thinking.
39
The Humanities examine the record of
critical thinking and creative expression in
order to figure out what it tells us about our
current situation and what our understanding
could mean for the future. Words distinguish
us as human beings; they unite and divide us.
‘Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but
names will never break me’ is totally wrong of
course. Names and words are sticks and stones,
just as much as they signal understanding,
support, and solutions. The more imaginative,
articulate, and literate we are, the better our
chances for our survival as citizens and
creatures on this earth. The Humanities should
be part of every degree, of every major in the
University. I believe that studying Romantic
poetry can reframe and improve our
decision-making, that it teaches us about
empathy, categorization, autonomy,
uncertainty, and resilience.
My choice of Wordsworth and Keats as my
exemplary poets is personal; they are the poets
I resort to in gladness and in sorrow, and they
were taught to me by the great Keats scholar
and editor Jack Stillinger at the University of
Illinois. I know that Wordsworth and Keats are
‘dead white males’, but in a field that it is still
male dominated, this evening you have chosen,
at least, to listen to a foreign woman talking
about English ‘dead white males’.
If there is an argument to this lecture it is
this: when reading poetry, first of all, distrust
binary thinking – it pushes you in a corner –
and, secondly, pay more attention to interaction
than to an individual subject position. In other
words, it’s never simple and the whole picture
is more interesting than what one voice tells
you. I believe that those critical thinking skills
will benefit you in any other situation as well.
They may sound straightforward, but the lure
of either/or, ‘like or don’t like’ scenarios and
the drowning insistence of one voice within an
echo chamber are powerful forces to contend
with, forces which, I believe, we need to resist
in order to live in a better world
40 Romanticism
The 1946 painting of ‘The Daffodils’ by New
Zealand painter Sam Cairncross (1913–1976)
was the first purchase out of the art fund of the
Staff Common Room, and the beginning of the
art collection, here at Victoria University of
Wellington (see frontispiece to this issue). It
reminded me of William Wordsworth’s once
famous poem ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’. In
this painting the daffodils are not fluttering and
dancing in the breeze; in fact they’re rather
haphazardly jammed into a jar, with one stray
bluebell admitting defeat and a few long strands
of leaves on the table. Wordsworth’s poem, by
contrast, evokes a massed display of wild
daffodils, and, as Richard Gravil puts it, ‘is
immortalized on many a refrigerator magnet
and coffee mug’.2 Children across the British
Empire, regardless of whether they had ever
seen a daffodil, let alone a host of them, had to
memorize it. I want to refer to this poem here
for a particular quality that does not feature on
the coffee mugs but which makes Romantic
poetry matter: it draws attention to the
complicated relationship between perceiving
something and what happens afterwards. It
evokes the process of the imagination and how
that process finds its way into words.
Poetry often hinges upon a moment of
return, what Wordsworth in one of his prefaces
called ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. That
emotion is not necessarily in itself tranquil and
nor is the recollection entirely purposeful or
self-directed. In the ‘Daffodils’ poem
Wordsworth creates both the spectacle of the
flowers and the recognition that at the moment
of perception he does not fully realize the rich
impact of the experience. Later, at rest, by
himself, remembering the daffodils becomes a
form of revisitation: ‘they flash upon that
inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude’.
That unexpected gift fills his heart with
pleasure and rouses it to a dance with the
daffodils – an experience that prompted the
poem. The body knows something before the
mind fully grasps it, before we can articulate it;
what the poet formalizes is the pleasure of
processed experience. Knowledge, feeling, and
being coalesce in the poem which produces, in
Wallace Stevens’s words from Notes toward a
Supreme Fiction: ‘the strong exhilaration / Of
what we feel from what we think, of thought /
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came, /
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power’.3 The
reading process mirrors the creative process: an
expectant state of preparedness, a jolt of
recognition, a making sense of something that
you perceive and create at the same
time.
In ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer’ John Keats records the excitement of
being immersed in a great translation of Homer
and resorts to the following image to express
the wonder of his receptively-creative response:
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies /
When a new planet swims into his ken’.4
Keats’s simile makes the discovery of the new
planet sound serendipitous, with the planet
effortlessly swimming into the ken, the view, of
the astronomer. Instead of the astronomer
discovering the planet, we have the planet
revealing itself to the astronomer by swimming
‘into his ken’. But a great moment of
‘discovery’ usually comes at the end of a long
process, which includes the patient, persistent
effort of the astronomer. The encounter would
not have happened if the astronomer had not
been, actively so, a watcher of the skies: the
revelation of the planet depends on the
watchfulness of the astronomer whose skillful
experience enables him to see the planet for
what it is. In the case of the poet’s encounter
with Chapman’s Homer, the poet-speaker has
already done a lot of reading, a lot of travelling
in the realms of gold which ‘bards in fealty to
Apollo hold’ (Keats, 34). This previous reading
experience has prepared the poet-speaker for a
productive, stimulating encounter with
Homer’s text in the translation of George
Chapman. The recognition of Homer’s ‘pure
serene’ in Chapman’s translation depends upon
a combination of experienced recognition and
open-minded perception.
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
In 1947, the same year that Cairncross’s
Daffodils was bought by the Staff Common
Room, Eric McCormick (1906–1995), the
author of a wonderful biography about Keats’s
friend Charles Armitage Brown, reviewed a
Festschrift in honour of Thomas Alexander
Hunter (1876–1953) in Landfall.5 Hunter,
whose name applies to the building we’re in,
was the first professor of psychology in
New Zealand; he was Vice-Chancellor of the
University of New Zealand (1929–1947) and
Principal of Victoria University College
(1938–1951). In the opening paragraph of
his review McCormick sketches caricature
types of the four constituent colleges of
the University of New Zealand. Praising
Victoria’s practical emphasis on reason
and its pursuit of the social sciences, he also
indicates that the ‘finer sensibilities . . . have
atrophied through disuse’ (213). In order
to develop those ‘finer sensibilities’
he suggests a cure: ‘We prescribe a course of
Wordsworth’ (213).
The sustaining value of reading
Wordsworth’s poetry continues to this day if
the course evaluations of the Romantic
Literature course are anything to go by.
Students often note that, to their surprise,
reading Wordsworth helps them to cope with
life at University and beyond. This is not
new – this recognition started during
Wordsworth’s lifetime, and this brings me to
the title of my lecture: why Romantic poetry
still matters. The title of my lecture is derived
from Philip Davis’s Why Victorian Literature
Still Matters, a book which was recommended
to me by Professor Damien Wilkins.6
I read Davis’s book with great interest, and
you should read it too. Davis argues for the
relevance of Victorian novels for contemporary
society. ‘Do not read’, Davis tells us, ‘as if what
you read is merely past: it only distances
you’(Davis, 1). Davis emphasizes the
connections between readers and Victorian
novels, and he celebrates what he calls the
‘questioning bafflement’ we find expressed in
41
great novels. The novel exists, as he puts it,
‘when human beings are unsure of how life
itself fits together’ (Davis, 5). George Eliot, he
writes, is interested ‘in the recurring moment
of change, . . . , the difficulty of readjustment in
that shift of gear or focus that is never once and
for all’ (Davis, 29). Romantic poetry is not all
that different in its focus: the ‘recurring
moment of change’ and ‘the difficulty of
readjustment’ are fundamental challenges in
human life. Finding stability of sorts while
being in an ongoing state of transience sums up
life as we know it. Romantic lyric poetry in
particular often arrests, for the reader, a baffling
moment of brilliant significance. As Jonathan
Culler writes in Theory of the Lyric: ‘Fiction is
about what happened next; lyric is about what
happens now’.7 Great lyric poetry performs
magic of a kind: it does what we can’t really
do with our lives; it arrests the moment, a
state of feeling, in a beautiful form, for us to
examine.
Even though Philip Davis’s book is about
Victorian novels, he invokes Wordsworth for
the transformative effect he had on the
philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).
Mill’s breakdown has become one of the
famous anecdotes in defence of reading poetry.
Philip Davis, Mary Warnock in her classic work
on Imagination, and more recently Helen
Small in her book about The Value of the
Humanities (Oxford, 2013), among others, all
emphasize Mill’s predicament when he realized
that, even if he could bring about all the
positive social change he was destined to do,
this would not only leave him with nothing to
do, but it would also not make him happy.
Little John Stuart Mill had been homeschooled
by his Utilitarian philosopher-father James
Mill: by the age of 14 he had the dubious
quantifiable ‘advantage of a quarter of a
century’ over his contemporaries.8 Life for him
had been one extended exam, ticking the boxes,
totting up the excellences, having no real clue
what it all really amounted to. Burn-out was
inevitable. In his Autobiography Mill records
42 Romanticism
the realization that ‘to know that a feeling
would make me happy if I had it, did not give
me the feeling’ (J. S. Mill, 97).
He resorted, not immediately but ultimately,
to Wordsworth for a lasting cure, and not just
for the dancing daffodils along the shore of
Ullswater. He writes: ‘But Wordsworth would
never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of
natural scenery. [. . . ] What made
Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of
mind, was that they expressed, not mere
outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of
thought coloured by feeling, under the
excitement of beauty. [. . . ] In them I seemed to
draw from a source of inward joy, of
sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which
could be shared in by all human beings’ (J. S.
Mill, 104). There was also this: ‘I needed to be
made to feel that there was real, permanent
happiness in tranquil contemplation.
Wordsworth taught me this, not only without
turning away from, but with a greatly increased
interest in the common feelings and common
destiny of human beings’ (J. S. Mill, 104).
Mill’s references to ‘states of feeling’,
‘thought coloured by feeling, under the
excitement of beauty’, and an ‘increased
interest in the common [that is, shared] feelings
and common destiny of human beings’ are key
notions to consider. For Mill, reading
Wordsworth’s poetry made him feel better and,
importantly, it brought him closer, in
compassionate understanding, to others. The
former notion, self-affirmation, has become
over time the more dominant defining idea of
Romanticism, at the cost, I would argue, of the
latter: the connection with others. This is not
the moment to give you a survey of British
Romanticism; there are plenty of textbooks
which can do that for you.
Briefly, in Britain the period was
characterized by revolutionary events which
put extraordinary pressures on individuals
within society. The dates of demarcation differ,
but roughly we are dealing with the 1780–1830
period, a period punctuated by moments of
often violent change on socio-economic and
political levels. Some argue for 1776, the
Declaration of Independence of America, as a
start. Some consider 1789, the French
Revolution, as a defining moment. Britain was
pretty much at war non-stop with France from
1793 until 1815, with the defeat of Napoleon at
the Battle of Waterloo. The economic and social
upheaval, not to mention political unrest,
triggered by years of warfare, produced a
landscape populated by dispossessed people:
maimed and traumatized war veterans,
destitute widows, and orphaned children.
Globally this was an era of British
empire-building, with developments in
cartography, navigation instruments, and
shipbuilding leading to voyages further afield.
Exploration also led to more expansive
exploitation; slavery and the slave trade were
fiercely contested, major humanitarian issues.
Within Britain the development of steam power
and its implementation in various industries
radically changed people’s employment,
accommodation, and overall life style. Many
flocked to the city for work, particularly in the
wake of the agricultural enclosures. London and
other trading and manufacturing cities grew
exponentially in population. The madness of
King George, immortalized by Alan Bennett’s
play, led to the Regency between 1811 and
1820. The Reform Bill of 1832 finally signalled
modest parliamentary reform, with more
people getting the vote. Most importantly for
literature and education, various developments
in technology and industry revolutionized the
production of, access to, and distribution of
printed materials: the periodical press and
circulating libraries were booming. The
acceleration of production and distribution
of print was an interesting foreshadowing
of our own socially-mediated times, with
Wordsworth already deploring that the ‘rapid
communication of intelligence satisfies’
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
‘the craving for extraordinary incident’.9 You
wonder what he would have made of Twitter
and Instagram.
Poetry, unlike now, was a very popular
medium for expressing anything, from current
events to personal lyrical outpourings.
Wordsworth claims in his 1802 Preface that the
task of the poet is to ‘bind together by passion
and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth and
over all time’ (Lyrical Ballads, 753). You don’t
hear many poets claiming that kind of thing
now. In a newspaper, then consisting of 16
columns of text, it was not unusual to have up
to two columns filled with poetry. The need to
go public with private preoccupations is not
new. Poetry was social and political
commentary, and personal effusion. The force
of poetry as a political and cultural weapon was
tremendous, and we should bear in mind that
these revolutionary times were also
extraordinarily repressive and reactionary, with
the establishment fearing the loss of obedience
and reverence for its power.
Underlying much of what was happening
pointed to a re-assessment of individual rights,
and one’s individual position within various
groups. The Declaration of Independence of the
United States of America; The Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man; Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman all
aspired to emancipate groups of people by
insisting on the individuality of the members of
those groups. Remember that for Mill,
Wordsworth’s emphasis on tranquil
contemplation, an individual experience, is
connected with an ‘increased interest in
common feelings and the common destiny of
human beings’. In other words, you find
yourself in order to connect with others, not for
mere self-gratification.
This focus on the individual can lead to an
over-emphasis on self-sufficiency, to the
exclusion of interactive dimensions, as the
43
norm of existence. Yet, contrary to the
emphasis of much Romantic criticism, the
subjectivity of a speaker within a lyric poem is
not necessarily the sole subject of the poem.
Many Romantic poems, particularly those I’m
interested in, are about people trying to figure
out for themselves where they stand with
respect to others. And under ‘others’ one could
even include earlier or different versions of
themselves.
My own research has been primarily driven
by a curiosity in the formal, poetic portrayal of
interactive dynamics. I believe that awareness
of forms of interaction is more than ever
necessary if we are to go beyond expressing
partisan choices through the ‘like’ button (or its
equivalent) on social media. On a number of
occasions in my work I have referred to Charles
Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity: ‘Modern culture has
developed conceptions of individualism which
picture the human person as, at least
potentially, finding his or her own bearings
within, declaring independence from the webs
of interlocution which have originally formed
him/her, or at least neutralizing them. It’s as
though the dimension of interlocution were of
significance only for the genesis of
individuality, like the training wheels of
nursery school, to be left behind and to play no
part in the finished person’.10 I have found the
idea of ‘webs of interlocution’ particularly
useful to talk about interactive dynamics within
Romantic poems. It sidesteps the critical
insistence on monolithic individuality and it
pays attention to what is actually happening in
the poem.
The most fundamental sadness we find
portrayed in poetry is the failure to connect, the
absence of shared, reciprocated experiences, for
instance in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Left Upon a
Seat in a Yew-Tree’ or Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’
ode. The pain which Wordsworth’s sonnet
‘Surprised by Joy’ registers is more acute
because it not only refers to the worst pang of
44 Romanticism
sorrow, the death of the Wordsworth’s
daughter Catherine at the age of 4, and the
memory of that moment, but also to the
incompleteness of joy that can no longer be
shared; it refers to the permanent rupture of
that strand of interlocution. Wordsworth never
underestimates how self-obsessed we are in our
communications, failing to listen to others,
filtering everything through our own
perspectives. One of the funnier instances of
this is his ballad ‘We Are Seven’ in which the
adult speaker interrogates an eight-year old girl
(Lyrical Ballads, 73–5). The authoritarian,
literal-minded adult speaker turns the
conversation into a battle of wills, and the
humour of the poem lies in the matter-of-fact
responses of the girl who refuses to
accommodate the speaker’s worldview into
hers.
The speaker starts off with an explicit
question: ‘Sister and brothers, little Maid, /
How many may you be?’ (Lyrical Ballads, 74,
ll. 13–4). The girl answers: ‘How many? seven
in all’ (Lyrical Ballads, 74, l. 15). To the next
question ‘And where are they, I pray you tell?’
(Lyrical Ballads, 74, l. 17). she replies:
Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother,
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.
(Lyrical Ballads, 74, ll. 18–24)
The adult speaker corrects the girl: ‘If two are in
the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five’
(Lyrical Ballads, 74, ll. 35–6). The girl doesn’t
buy it: she sits by their graves in the graveyard,
that’s where she plays, that’s where she
sometimes eats; they may be buried, but
they’re her brother and sister, so they are
included in her count. It’s a no-brainer: after
all, the adult had started off his question with
‘Sister and brothers, how many may you be?’ If
anything, her two dead siblings are more
present to her than the ones at Conway or at
sea. The adult doesn’t get it: he keeps harping
on about death and heaven:
But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
(Lyrical Ballads, 75, ll. 65–9)
I love this poem and I always find myself
rooting for the little girl and laughing at the
pompous adult. Of course, the
numerically-minded grownup categorises the
siblings in terms of the individualistic ‘alive’ or
‘dead’ binary model. You would be surprised
how many critical accounts fail to see the
humour of this exchange at cross-purposes,
simply because they assume that the
subjectivity of the adult speaker is the measure
by which to read the poem. Those accounts
emphasize that the little girl does not
understand mortality. Of course she does
(albeit not in the same way as the adult), but
she was asked about her siblings, and as far as
she is concerned, dead or alive, she includes
them in her count.
As Cordelia finds out in King Lear, not
giving her father the adulating answer he craves
to his horrific question, ‘Which of you shall we
say doth love us most?’ (I.i.51), can be deadly.11
Wordsworth’s and Keats’s poems are full of
tricky questions, along with speakers who don’t
really listen or who don’t pay attention to their
interlocutors. In Keats’s poem ‘Lamia’ Lycius is
sidetracked from his lover Lamia by the sound
of a trumpet which ‘left a thought, a buzzing in
his head’ (Keats, 352, l. 29). Lamia notices
Lycius’ distraction and realizes that ‘but a
moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell’
(Keats, 352, l. 39). Their subsequent parallel
exchange is cast in a loving couplet, but signals
the beginning of the end nevertheless because
rational thought has entered their passion:
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
‘Why do you sigh, fair creature?’ whispered he:
‘Why do you think?’ return’d she tenderly:
(Keats, 352, ll. 40–41)
In Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and
Independence’ the speaker questions an old
man, who gathers leeches used in medicine for
a meagre living. ‘What occupation do you there
pursue? / This is a lonely place for one like
you’, the speaker intones before not really
listening to the old man’s answer.12 Seeking
reassurance for himself he rephrases the
question in much more existential terms: ‘How
is it that you live, and what is it you do?’ (P2V,
128, l. 126). The difference between these two
questions usually produces some good class
discussion: how we form and articulate a
question goes a long way towards shaping the
answers we get.
The questioning bafflement Davis associated
with Victorian novels is very prominent in
Wordsworth’s famous poem: ‘Ode: Intimations
of Immortality’ which he wrote between 1802
and 1804 (P2V, 269–77). It is a poem about the
realization of loss and how to accommodate
loss. He starts off simply: ‘The things which I
have seen I now can see no more’
(P2V, 271, l. 9). But what he means is not so
much that he can’t see things anymore, but that
he feels differently about what he sees: what he
sees ‘speak[s] of something that is gone’
(P2V, 272, l. 53). Adult vision, this poem tells
us, is inherently associated with loss. The
question that he formulates is not so much one
of loss of vision but of an emotional association
with that vision: ‘Whither is fled the visionary
gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the
dream?’ (P2V, 272, ll. 56–7). The passionate
intensity of childhood has gone, faded ‘into the
light of common day’ (P2V, 273, l. 76). The
poem does many things, but like the sonnet I
referred to earlier, ‘Surprised by Joy’, it refers
to the raw emotion of ‘joy’, the awareness of
positive vitality, as the trigger for a connection
with a younger, earlier self. What is great about
45
this poem is that it does not celebrate
sentimental, mawkish nostalgia for the brighter
days of childhood. Wordsworth has a
remarkably unsentimental view of childhood.
The sensation of joy is a trigger, but it does not
make up for the loss of the visionary gleam:
nothing does, but there is something that
accommodates it: ‘obstinate questionings / Of
sense and outward things’ (P2V, 275, ll. 144–5),
our questioning bafflement, our ongoing
curiosity, our desire to find out, both about
ourselves and the world in which we live
through the lens of compassionate sympathy:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
(P2V, 276–7, ll. 180–9)
The enduring idea of ‘primal sympathy’
includes an idea of community which for
Wordsworth is located in the actual world we
inhabit, as he puts it in Book 10 of the 1805
Prelude: ‘Not in Utopia – subterraneous fields, /
Or some secreted island, heaven knows where –
/ But in the very world which is the world / Of
all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We
find our happiness, or not at all’.13 The
parameters of a finite world and of our
mortality are counterbalanced by
Wordsworth’s belief in the enduring power of
the imagination (our only salvation?) which he
associates with hope. Hope is an act of courage,
volition, work and effort for Wordsworth – not
so much a random gift as an ongoing work of
engagement:
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude – and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
46 Romanticism
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
(1805 Prelude, Book 6, 216, ll. 538–42)
I particularly like that last line: ‘something
evermore about to be’, carrying all the promise
into the realm of the unknown, leaving the
human characteristics behind into something
larger, always about to happen. The future is
already part of our imaginative vision even if it
has not been substantiated yet. There is a
connection in these lines with the ‘new planet’
swimming into the astronomer’s ken in Keats’s
sonnet.
Wordsworth was both a model and a
warning for John Keats (1795–1821). The critic
William Hazlitt, who did have an axe to grind,
pointed out that Wordsworth, notably smug
and surrounded by adoring women, was in
serious danger of becoming the ‘god of his own
idolatry’ and he had a point.14 Keats could sense
that egotism as well, and he wondered in a
letter whether Wordsworth had ‘extended
vision or a circumscribed grandeur’.15 What
endears Keats to my students is the candid
display of himself as a work in progress. He’s
making up his mind about his major – medicine
or poetry – and guess what his family wants
him to do. He’s feeling awkward around
women. He’s worried about being too short.
He’s not too embarrassed about being
embarrassed, and he writes about it. They can
sense his emotional intelligence and his loyal
kindness to his brothers, sisters, and friends.
They know that he will die too soon, too young.
Keats’s remarkable development as a poet
throughout his short life is expressed in his
letters: he figures out his ideas in dialogue with
his friends. Not only does Keats pay attention
to what his corresponding friends have to say,
he is also exquisitely attuned to their mental or
emotional state, and his responses reflect a
compassionate understanding of their
psychology. Keats’s sympathy with his
correspondents resonates throughout in the
development of poetic ideas which are evocative
rather than prescriptive. This makes him very
different from poets who write manifestoes or
prefaces, like Wordsworth.
Letters are a form of social interaction, and
Keats fully understood this. Separated from his
brothers and sister by long distances, Keats
could not resort to email, Whatsapp, or
Instagram, modern modes of communication
that enable knee-jerk responses. His friend
Charles Lamb wrote to Barron Field in Sydney:
‘It is no easy effort to set about a
correspondence at our distance. The weary
world of waters between us oppresses the
imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a
scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is
a sort of presumption to expect that one’s
thoughts should live so far’.16 Writing a good,
thoughtful, sympathetic letter requires a
stretch of the imagination. Keats thought of
his correspondence as a ‘willful and dramatic
exercise of our Minds towards each other’
(KL, ii.209). We can learn something from
Keats’s consideration of others: some of his
most poetic insights, about the ‘poetical
character’, about ‘negative capability’, happen
in the context of specifically responding to
his friends’ frames of mind. Keats forges his
ideas through interactive language. I discussed
elsewhere that T. S. Eliot’s notion that ‘the fine
things [in Keats’s letters] come in
unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown
out, but between trifle and trifle’ is not quite
convincing.17 Instead, I argued that the
‘accumulation of trifles, sometimes in
successive letters, constitutes, even
substantiates the “fine thing”. These are not so
much “unexpected” as cumulative results of
various threads which have been developing
throughout a period of correspondence, as, for
instance, the four letters to Benjamin Bailey of
October and November 1817 which culminate
in an explosion of spectacularly “fine things”
about poetic genius, sensation, imagination, and
happiness, demonstrate’.18
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
Sometimes his letters were poems, and my
favourite is his epistle of 25 March 1818 to John
Hamilton Reynolds, who was sick, and which
he wrote ‘in hopes of cheering you through a
Minute or two’ (KL, i. 263). It contains these
lines, telling us how difficult it is to fully grasp
something, how frustrating it is not to be able
to fully inhabit a moment of beauty or
happiness:
Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
Or is it that imagination brought
Beyond its proper bound, yet still confined,–
Lost in a sort of purgatory blind,
Cannot refer to any standard law
Of either earth or heaven? – It is a flaw
In happiness to see beyond our bourn –
It forces us in summer skies to mourn:
It spoils the singing of the nightingale.
(Keats, 181–2, ll. 76–85)
Keats, more so than any of the other Romantic
poets, knew about the vulnerability of the
human body. He had seen them on the
dissection slabs as a medical student in Guy’s
Hospital, where he had also assisted the sick
and dying as a Dresser. He had nursed his
mother and his brother through their final
illnesses, and by 1818 he himself was plagued
by ominously persistent sore throats. The long
summer of 1819 was so productive and
concentrated that it almost arrests the moment
and what was to come, but not quite. In the
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he enviously addresses
the nightingale for its obliviousness to human
suffering; he wants to forget ‘What thou
among the leaves hast never known, / The
weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where
men sit and hear each other groan’ (Keats, 280,
ll. 22–4). Notice that, typically for Keats’s
sympathetic awareness, the suffering isn’t just
about the groaning itself but about hearing
others groan.
Keats’s sympathetic concern for others is
connected with his extraordinary awareness of
47
poetry as a visceral moment encapsulating an
interactive process. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in this uncanny fragment, most
likely written in 1819 but not published until
1848:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of
blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is –
I hold it towards you.
(Keats, 384)
This short poem is quite a performance: it is
framed by the moment of ‘now’ in which the
speaker extends this warm, living hand to you,
the reader. But this living hand frames a story
about the speaker’s potential death: if he were
cold and in the grave this would haunt you,
reader, to such an extent that you would give
your own life in order to make his blood flow
again. That and that only would assuage your
guilt. At the end you’re not quite sure whether
you should shake the hand that’s extended to
you. But you know that you’ve been reading an
extraordinary lyric poem.
So why would we want to read all these
Romantic poems in the context of a University
course? Do they lead to a job? What’s the use of
them? When I started off as an academic in the
Humanities the critical battles focused on the
canon: what texts can or should we teach? Now
the problem is more along the lines of whether
the Humanities, literature, the arts, should
have a place in the University at all. In our era
of soundbites, the questions are short and the
answers are supposed to be even shorter.
What’s the use? ‘The use’ is a very dangerous
phrase because it suggests the need for a
straightforward, monolithic, single answer.
Remember my distrust of binary thinking?
48 Romanticism
I can’t give an answer along the lines of: the use
of a pump is to blow up a tyre.
But I could say this, invoking three graduates
from the English Programme here at Victoria:
Keith Conway, Deputy Ambassador at the New
Zealand Embassy in Vietnam, writes to me
from Hanoi that his MA in English Literature
about William Blake’s epic Jerusalem was the
best grounding he could have had for a career at
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He
writes: ‘What do I value most about my degree?
The first is interdisciplinary thinking. My
day-to-day job is incredibly diverse requiring
me to analyse and draw connections between
different concepts and frameworks, from trade
negotiations (e.g. the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Agreement) and international maritime law
(e.g. South China Sea disputes), through to
coming to grips with the conceptual
underpinnings of a unitary Marxist-Leninist
one-party socialist system! A Romantic Studies
degree, where you analyse diverse historical,
political, cultural, literary, and philosophical
ideas shaping a text, equipped me with the skills
to think broadly, creatively, and critically which
I still use today. The second key skill I learnt
was how to write well and persuasively. A
diplomat’s job in a lot of ways is very similar to
that of a journalist – gather up information
from your sources, do desk research, use your
judgement to weigh up alternative perspectives,
then create a compelling story for your reader
(whether it’s a Minister, or a desk officer back
in Wellington)’. Dr Saskia Voorendt who
worked for the New Zealand Qualifications
Authority tells me that her degree trained her
to write clearly and helped her in a job that
required both the analysis and synthesis of
large amounts of information. Former student
Max Rashbrooke has just a couple of weeks ago
launched his new book about Government for
the Public Good (Wellington, 2018), and tells
me that the connection between the Romantic
poets and his current work as a journalist is
their intensity of vision, ‘the way that those
poets tried to make us “see” and register things,
natural wonder and social outrages, more
carefully’, important because, as Max tells me,
because ‘my work . . . is about trying to get
people to see things, like poverty, they would
rather avoid’. And an added bonus, he says, is
the pleasure that Romantic poetry has given
him as a reader since he has left Victoria
University. Figuring out poetry can also lead to
becoming the Merton Professor of English
Language and Literature at the University of
Oxford and writing a book about The Value of
the Humanities as our former student Helen
Small has done.
Of course, there is much more to it. The
point I am making is that there is never a direct
connection between learning something and
doing it for a job. Yet, this is how a lot of
educational advertising works now: sound
vocational; do this course, get this job. You can
take all the courses you like about journalism,
but if you can’t read, interpret, think, write,
and edit, you won’t be a journalist.
Every poem we read is an experiment
in figuring out how words connect, make sense,
and transform; this usually can’t be articulated
in a list of bullet points. Ideally every University
major should have a Humanities component,
because regardless of quantifiable progress
and our pursuits of occupations, we still need to
figure out ‘how to live’ and how to communicate
with others on this seriously endangered
earth. Martha Nussbaum has pointed out
that the correlation between economic growth
and improvements in health and education is
very poor.19 Making more is not going to make
it better for everyone. She does not suggest that
science and social science should be abandoned
at all; she focuses on what is endangered
if the Humanities are undermined: ‘the ability
to think critically; the ability to transcend
local loyalties and to approach world problems
as a “citizen of the world”; and finally,
the ability to imagine sympathetically the
predicament of another person’ (Nussbaum, 7).
 Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters
Victoria alumna Helen Small claims
that the Humanities have public value because
‘they do a distinctive kind of work, preserve
and extend distinctive kinds of understanding
(broadly, qualitative understanding
of the meaning making process of the culture),
and possess a distinctive relation to the idea
of knowledge as being inextricable from human
subjectivity’.20 To this I would add: distinctive,
yes, but entirely, compatibly necessary, for any
branch of learning. Reading Romantic poetry
fits in with this kind of work. We should all
do it.
Notes
1. Maryanne Wolf, ‘Skim reading is the New
Normal’, The Guardian, 25 August 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-
maryanne-wolf
2. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, ‘Prelude: Of
“Daffodils” (1802–1815) and “Yew Trees”
(1804–1836), Poems of Imagination’, in The
Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, eds.
Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford,
2018), 18.
3. Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction’, in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and
Prose, eds Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson
(New York, 1997), 329–52, 331.
4. John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger
(Cambridge MA, 2003), 34. Hereafter Keats.
5. E. H. McCormick, ‘The University and the
Community’, Landfall, 1.3 (September 1947),
213–18.
6. Philip Davis, Why Victorian Literature Still
Matters (Chichester, 2008).
7. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge
MA, 2015), 226.
8. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart
Mill (New York, 1924), 21. Hereafter J. S. Mill.
49
9. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other
Poems, 1797–1800, eds James Butler and Karen
Green (Ithaca and London, 1992), 746. Hereafter
Lyrical Ballads.
10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making
of the Modern Identity (Cambridge MA, 1989),
36.
11. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear,
in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,
eds Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and
William Montgomery (Oxford, 205), 1153–84,
1155.
12. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes,
and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis
(Ithaca and London, 1983), 123–9. Hereafter P2V.
13. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805,
1850, eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams,
Stephen Gill (New York and London, 1979), X.
723–7. Hereafter 1805 Prelude.
14. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, in The Spirit
of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits (London,
1825), 189–206, 206.
15. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder
Edward Rollins (2 vols, Cambridge MA, 1958),
i. 280. Hereafter KL.
16. The Portable Charles Lamb, ed. John Mason
Brown (Harmondsworth, 1980), 491.
17. T. S. Eliot, ‘Shelley and Keats’, in The Use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933),
87–102, 100.
18. Heidi Thomson, ‘Keats’s Letters: “A Wilful and
Dramatic Exercise of Our Minds Towards Each
Other”’, The Keats-Shelley Review, 25.2 (2011),
160–74, 170.
19. Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why
Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton,
2010), 15.
20. Helen Small, ‘Conclusion: On Public Value’ in The
Value of the Humanities (Oxford, 2013), Oxford
Scholarship Online, Date Accessed 10 Apr. 2019,
< http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683864.001.0001/
acprof-9780199683864-chapter-7 > .
 Your short guide to the EUP Journals
Blog http://euppublishingblog.com/

A forum for discussions relating to

Edinburgh University Press Journals

1. The primary goal of the EUP Journals Blog

To aid discovery of authors, articles, research, multimedia and reviews published in Journals, and as a
consequence contribute to increasing traffic, usage and citations of journal content.

2. Audience
Blog posts are written for an educated, popular and academic audience within EUP Journals’ publishing fields.

3. Content criteria - your ideas for posts

We prioritize posts that will feature highly in search rankings, that are shareable and that will drive readers to
your article on the EUP site.

4. Word count, style, and formatting

• Flexible length, however typical posts range 70-600 words.
• Related images and media files are encouraged.
• No heavy restrictions to the style or format of the post, but it should best reflect the content and topic
discussed.

5. Linking policy
• Links to external blogs and websites that are related to the author, subject matter and to EUP publishing
fields are encouraged, e.g.to related blog posts

6. Submit your post

Submit to ruth.allison@eup.ed.ac.uk

If you’d like to be a regular contributor, then we can set you up as an author so you can create, edit, publish,
and delete your own posts, as well as upload files and images.

7. Republishing/repurposing
Posts may be re-used and re-purposed on other websites and blogs, but a minimum 2 week waiting period is
suggested, and an acknowledgement and link to the original post on the EUP blog is requested.

8. Items to accompany post

• A short biography (ideally 25 words or less, but up to 40 words)
• A photo/headshot image of the author(s) if possible.
• Any relevant, thematic images or accompanying media (podcasts, video, graphics and photographs),
provided copyright and permission to republish has been obtained.
• Files should be high resolution and a maximum of 1GB
• Permitted file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx, key, mp3, m4a,
wav, ogg, zip, ogv, mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, 3gp, 3g2.