Re-Looking into the Romantic Skylark

In his 1924 essay, Arthur Lovejoy speaks about the discriminations of approaches within “romanticism” and prefers to use the term in plural. Two major romantic poets Wordsworth and Shelley wrote poems on the same subject, e.g., the flight of a skylark but based it on two different thought dynamics that offer individuality to their poems. This paper offers a comparative analysis of the two poems To a Skylark by Shelley and To the Skylark by Wordsworth in order to show the diversity and difference that “romanticism” offers.

In “On the Discriminations of Romanticism” Arthur O. Lovejoy speaks about the fallacy of homogenizing the concept of romanticism: “we should learn to use the word Romanticism in plural…the discrimination of the Romanticism which I have in mind is not solely or chiefly a division upon lines of nationality or language. What is needed is that any study of the subject should begin with a recognition of a prima facie plurality of Romanticisms, of possibly quite distinct thought complexes, a number of which may appear in one country” (p.235-36). For Lovejoy the discrimination is not just national or linguistic but in the plurality of thought complexes engendering from the same socio-political-cultural-geographical space. The distinctiveness of the thought dynamics that characterizes the works of the British romantic poets of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century proves this position of Lovejoy in various ways.

In this paper, I will try to stretch Lovejoy’s proposition a little further and show how the two major romantic poets, Wordsworth and Shelly, embody two different thought complexes in two of their poems having almost the same title and addressing the same subject; that is, their distincti...

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