The Natural and Innocent Grandeur of the Romantics and Its Degraded Image in the Victorian Period

Abstract

This paper wants to show how concept of Nature and Innocence are diversely depicted in the Romantic and the Victorian poetry. It seems like when the age moves to more modern age, the romantics’ appreciation on the nature and the innocence are degraded or seen negatively. I want to show the changing and underline the speculative reason for such changing. The poems will be read with close reading technique but the focus is on the image and ideas of the innocence and nature only. Historical background, precisely literary history, will also accompany the reading process. The romantics will be presented through Wordsworth and Blake because those two romantic exponents give the clearest image of the natural and innocent grandeur. The exponents from the successive period are picked up randomly but most will be those which are well known in common English literature class, such as Arnold, Hopkins, Hardi, Yeats, and others. Some of the findings are: in the romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, children’s innocence are seen as pure or sinless, but in the Victorian such as Yeats and Hopkin, children are seen as inexperience, not understand the world clearly. In the romantic the nature are spiritual, but with the advance of scientific age, the nature (woods, ocean, etc) becomes more physical, an object of knowledge. In the perspectives of science, human being, including children are part of the object of knowledge. In the eyes of knowledge, children are usually considered less knowledgeable.