Poetry

I just finished reading the Romantic section in my English literature book. It was really a wonderful section to read, and I'm really excited to get into the next section, the Victorian age, though I'll be surprised if I enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed the Romantic writers. The Romantic style of writing tried to move away from the stiff formality of their predecessors and write poetry in a more natural manner. Indeed, nature itself was a main focus of inspiration. There's nary a poem written between 1795 to 1830 that does not contain some mention of nature. Nature seems to have a special way of grounding a person. It seems to help remind one of what's most important in life, what priorities should be foremost. Life seems to attach itself to us, weighing us down. We are subjected daily to the mundane rigors of surviving. Work, school, keeping house, the exchange of money. These are necessary to merely living in the world, never mind being comfortable. How easy it is to forget who we are, to forget the reason for our existence. We are not born to merely exist; we do not live only to survive. We are born to experience happiness, to feel joy. I think that's what I loved about this past study; Romantic poets wrote in a way that made me feel acutely happy, through the way they defined emotions. I think that these writers did this by stripping away formality to reveal emotion in a purer form. Wordsworth says that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", I believe that he is right. Of course Romantics wrote extensively of feelings that could be defined as negative. Grief, anger, pain, loneliness, sorrow, etc. are experienced daily by humans. Suffering is as a part of life as breathing. If one were to stop breathing, they would cease to live. So it is with hardships, if one ceases to suffer, they cease to really live. This is because without suffering, there is no happiness. Like a man who does not realize he is healthy until he succumbs to illness, we must feel the opposition. Pleasure is insipid when we never feel pain; without anger as a complement, we cannot feel love. Emotions, all of them, remind us of our mortality, and our purpose. To be truly happy, to experience true joy, as is our reason for life, we must experience opposite emotions. The poets whose work I have been reading define such emotions. They have a gift to lay bare their feelings and present them in a way that they become more than just feelings; they become pure emotion. So, although life in general is mundane, and hard, and full of suffering; our everyday drudgery serves to lift us to fulfillment. Our tendency to focus on suffering causes us to forget to feel fulfilled. We trudge through day after day, never casting a thought to the emotions that complement our travails. We need to learn to really feel these emotions, to isolate and define them within ourselves. Then we will truly be able to taste and savor the joy, pleasure, and true happiness that living brings.