Romantic Poetry

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16 at the time and celebrated the event soon afterwards in ‘Destruction of the Bastille’. Soon followed in successive events was Britain’s war with France beginning in 1793, The Reign of Terror in 1793-4 and Napoleon’s coup in 1799.

The impact for the first generation after the Industrial revolution was depressing, terrifying and intoxicating to a scarcely bearable degree. Eg: Manchester changing from an overgrown village of 27000 people with no cotton mills in 1773 to a town of 95000 people with more than 50 mills in 1802. This monstrous change, quite unprecedented in human history included responses such as those of the Luddites who fought to defend a traditional livelihood and culture by smashing the machines that were used to impoverish them during 1811-1816.
The Industrial Revolution meant for the very first time a great mass of people no longer suffered through a life of brute labour just to avoid starving, to a life of consistent natural ...

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But Romantic poets do sometimes speak directly about those events such as Blake’s poem The French Revolution.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution it seemed, as Wordsworth’s lines have it:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven....

“A tempestuous wind was felt blowing through the old bonehead of Europe. The intellectuals of the day were ardent supporters of the revolution, fired with new, noble visions. Despotism seemed to have floundered, the slave trade was abolished, and yet at home no social change seemed to be forthcoming, and abroad the war with France, after a lapse, took up again. The new air seemed to be ...

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