Virgil and Wordsworth the Poetry of Romanticism

Abstract

Every creative age in history, since Greek times, has held some belief on the nature and purpose of poetry, and the results have varied from song for the joy of singing to verse as a medium for the propagation of Communist propaganda. The short and splendid flower of Greek lyric in Sappho and Alc-man, the Homeric epic, Greek drama, Alexandrian pastoral, the love lyrics of Catullus, the imperial self-consciousness of Virgil, and the indignant satires of Juvenal, all these reflect some deep-rooted conviction of the true form and purpose of the poet's craft. Some people have thought of poetry as an ‘accomplishment’ like those of a polished young Victorian lady who had learnt deportment and a repertoire of sentimental drawing-room songs. Others, perhaps more profoundly, conceive of poetry as the hidden elixir of a mind aware of life, the reaction of a feeling, thinking person to the world of nature, human life, and the vast concourse of ‘rebel powers that thee array’. These reactions, being concerned with the significance and enchantment of what the poet sees, can only find adequate expression in words so ordered and grouped in a significant form as to transfuse into the reader something of the poet's vision and emotion, 'to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer’.