Comparison of Romantic Poets Regarding Their Description of Arts in Their Poetry

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seldom from the uproar I retired

Into a silent bay” (446-448).

Coleridge had a great interest in colourful and luminar imagery. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he used words like “ice as green as emerald”, “fog-smoke white”, “yellow locks” and“white as leprosy”. Keats was inspired by the charm of Greek Art sculptures. The Ode on Grecian Urn contains a series of sensuous pictures of passionate men and gods chasing recultant maidens, the flute players playing ecstatic music, the fair youth trying to kiss his beloved and the ecstasy of the passion of love and youth is beautifully depicted;

“More happy love! More happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

For ever panting, and for ever young.” (27-29)

In Ode to Nightingale, Keats expresses his passionate desire for some Provencal wine from the fountain of the Muses;

“O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene” (11-16).

Equally, Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind, drew clear and vivid imagery like ‘dead leaves’, ‘yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red’ and‘The Aeolian Harp’, ‘The West Wind’ etc. By using such imagery, he shows his desire for the revival of the Golden Age, his radical thoughts, “his rhapsodic and declamatory tendencies” according to Mary Shelley.

Musicality and Lyricism was another aspect that defined Romanticism. Wordsworth’s Prelude and Tintern Abbey showed a specific kind of melancholic music which is “still, sad music of humanity” (Byron). H.D. Trill regards Coleridge “as a singer”. He shares a deep love for music. The second part of Kubla Khan described a damsel playing on a dulcimer which is itself a piece of exquisite music. This depiction shows that Coleridge was in favour of loud and long music. In Ode to Nightingale, Keats’s love for music can be seen because his heart aches and his body is benumbed as he hears the song of nightingale.

By the above mentioned deep and thorough analysis of poetry of the famous Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley shows that their phenomenon and tilt regarding landscape, architecture, imagery and musicality illustrates the spirit of Romanticism and also their love for art.