The Poet’s Sense of Role — 1: the Romantic Predicament

Abstract

Alienation brought about a further shift in literary contents. To be divorced from the political, military and societal dimensions of human experience (as the poet at the end of the eighteenth century largely was) rendered still more of the traditional materials of literature unavailable to the poet of good faith: it was left to the second-rate poet to write patriotic odes, celebrate the state and hymn martial valour. Shakespeare, Homer, and the folk-epics, all show that there was nothing intrinsically malign, ignoble or absurd in these things. Yet now they join traditional religious belief as contents unusable for the modern poet. The poet loses, moreover, his sense of being able to ‘speak for’ all men as the quasi-familial sense of social unity has perished along with social evolution. The poet has now to ‘express’ that sense of isolation which, in greater or less degree, forms part of all men’s social experience in the new world.