Transitional Poets Essay

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Write a note on the precursors of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was an age of great prose. Its poetry is based on reason and correctness. It banished nature and sentiment from poetry. But there were some poets who showed certain tendencies that anticipate the romantic poetry The poets of this transition - the most prominent among them are Thomson, Cowper, Collins and Gray - had a strange duality. They belonged to their age by their conscious allegiance to the present but their faces were turned to the future by their inner urge and instinct. They inducted sentiment in place of intellect; they went out of the ball-rooms, boudoirs and parlours of the aristocrats to be face with Nature: they sought new interests in old English ballads, Celtic or Welsh legends, in Gothic art, in contemplating on the ruins of the past and so on. They revived the lyric and elegy. They wrote mainly in the heroic couplet, but many of them revived Miltonic blank verse and Spenserian stanza. To come to the individual poets of this transition, James Thomson was not a great poet but historically his position is very important. His two considerable poems are the The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence. He is undoubtedly a poet of imagination, his love of nature is ardent. The Seasons is a descriptive poem dealing with-natural scenes in different seasons. It is written in blank verse. It is charged with didacticism in the Popian manner; its vocabulary is pompous and frigid. But in his feeling for the sights and sounds of the country side, Thomson may be called the first precursor of romantic poetry. The Castle of Indolence, written in Spenserian imitation and stanza represents the atmosphere of the lotus-land to which world weary souls may seek shelter. It is Spenserian m spirit and style. In it Thomson has succeeded in recapturing much of Spenser's rich,
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