Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“By romantic poems,” wrote Thomas Arnold in 1862, “we mean, poems in which heroic subjects are epically treated, after the manner of the old romances of chivalry” (1862: 285). Almost all the poets that we think of as Romantic wrote such poems – Coleridge's “Christabel,” Wordsworth's The White Doe of Rylstone , Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt , Shelley's Laon and Cythna – Scott collected and edited old romances, and Southey translated them. But after 1862 the term Romantic changed its meaning. It came to refer to a literary movement that began in England on or before 1798, when Lyrical Ballads was published, and ended in 1824, when Byron died, or shortly afterwards, and it was not a movement that seemed to those who first defined it helpfully characterized by a taste for old romances. The romance was removed from Romanticism, and one of the effects was to obscure the links that connected the poets of the early nineteenth century with their successors – the Brownings, the Rossettis, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne, and Tennyson – all of whom wrote major poems in which “heroic subjects are epically treated, after the manner of the old romances of chivalry.” The Victorian interest in romance was strengthened by the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848; its chief members were John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, ... log in or subscribe to read full text