The Romantics - Nature (BBC documentary)

I'm going to take you on a journey into the human imagination back to a time when the values and ideas and dreams of the modern world were born 200 years ago monarchy was falling to the power of people's revolutions industry and commerce were becoming the driving forces of existence and advances in science were changing the way life itself was understood artists all over the world were inspired by these times of dramatic change in Britain a group of poets and novelists pioneered an alternative way of living and of looking at the world among them were William Wordsworth Mary Shelley and William Blake the enduring power of their writing haunts us to this day and inspires our still with visions of nature this is the story of man's escape from the shackles of Commerce and Industry to the freedom of nature at a time when the world was becoming increasingly mechanized the romantic sort and intense relationship with the natural world in so doing they would revolutionize our perception of life itself in the 18th century Britain was being devoured by the voracious demands of urbanization towns were turning into cities this was the age of Industry and of manufacture the pulse of life was becoming less human the rhythms of nature and the body were being overtaken by an imposed system of synchronized time public clocks were dictating the daily lives and activities of people the cities were engulfing everything like huge machines of trade industry and living they were forcing order and discipline into the lives of their inhabitants the home the school and the workplace were run according to clock time and in obedience to strict rules of human conduct in the midst of this great new metropolis lived a small boy who dreamed of a very different world one day in July 1765 he walked from Soho in London to the fields of Peckham Roy just beyond the city lying on the grass staring up at the light filtering through the trees he experienced a vision he saw the trees filled with angelic beings their bright wings be spangling every vowel like stars to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in a God the boy's name was William Blake throughout his life he never forgot his childhood vision he always believed that it was a glimpse of an eternal world far from the hollows of the city the romantics believed that spontaneous childhood visions were the source of adult inspiration a child allowed to play and dream would become an imaginative adult but childhood itself was being destroyed by the Industrial Age a new workforce was emerging boys are between four and seven were sold into labor by their parents and sent to clean the city's chimneys many suffocated and most became deformed William Blake was touched by the wretched lives of these children he began to write simple lines that express the yearning for their Redemption as Tom's are sleeping he had such a sight the thousands of sweepers dick Joe Ned and Jack all of them locked up in coffins a boy then come by an angel who had a pride to king they opened the coffins set them all free then down a green plane leaping laughing they run and wash it in a river and shine in the Sun Blake's short rhymes about children became a collection of illuminated poems entitled songs of innocence they were inspired by the childhood years he spent with his young brother Robert sound the flute now is mute first alight day and night life way you would have joy little girl sweetener [ __ ] does crack music flower than heavens high bow the silent delight sit little boy full of joy little girl sweet is noon copters chrome suit every man every face appraise his distress press choose a human form divine love mercy pity peace ease but in February 1787 Blake's own innocence was shattered when Robert was struck by an illness in the upstairs room of their house at 28 Odin Street Blake sat with him for two weeks hardly sleeping watching his brother's health decline at the last solemn moment of Roberts life Blake saw his spirit rise from his body and ascend through the ceiling Blake recollected that the spirit had been clapping its hands for joy it was one of many visions of infinity that Blake would have throughout his life Robert had joined the Angels and the spirits of the chimney sweeps in a joyful eternity but Blake himself would be obliged to find joy in the human world after Robert's death Blake moved over the river to the leafy outskirts of London he lived in Hercules Road in Lambeth a place where he tried to build himself a new life free from the corruption of the city but one morning he looked from his window and was horrified it was a sight that intensely angered Blake he demanded that the boy be set free instantly it seemed intolerable to him that any child any man should be subjected to such miseries the image was at odds with everything Blake believed about the spiritual purity of childhood his anger entered his poetry he began to write a bleak companion to his Songs of Innocence songs of experience in these poems there would be no redemption for the children the weeping child could not be heard the weeping parents wept in vain they'd stripped into his little shirt and bound him in an iron chain and burned him in a holy place where many had been burned before the weeping parents wept in vain are such things done on Albion Shore Blake feared for the future lives of England's children his was one of the first voices raised to warn against the destructive potential of the Industrial Revolution it turns that which is soul and life into a mill machine blake foresaw a world where people would be engaged in endless toil their lives disfigured by the laws of the factory and the industrial system he imagined seeing the world through their eyes they told me that I had five senses to close me up then close my brain into a narrow circle one Kamal one joy one desire one curse on wait for measure on the 10 one job just a short walk from Blake's house in Lambeth by the Thames where now stands an office building stood Albion mill it was the first factory in London designed to produce some six thousand bushels of flour each week for Blake the repetitive production lines of these huge new mills cast human identity into uniform molds endlessly repeatable spirituality and imagination were denied or forgotten Blake refer to Satan as the Miller of eternity in one of his poems Satan's father congratulate his son on his evil creations Oh Satan my youngest born to mortals thy mill semen everything Blake expressed his fury in words that have become the most familiar lines of English poetry and did those feet in ancient time walk about England's mountain's Green and was the holy Lamb of God on England's Pleasant pastures see William Blake's most famous lines are now sung as Jerusalem an unofficial national anthem but they were written as a poem of radical protest against the corruption of industry and commerce a manifesto for the Romantic poets qualified by the darkness descending upon England and did that countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded Hills I was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic Mills one evening in March 1791 Albion mill caught fire Blake would have seen the flames rising above the city and he might have rejoiced with the Millers who celebrated on blackfyres bridge the factory was destroyed and remained the blackened and empty shell until its demolition in 1809 Blake passed it every time he walked into the city a symbol of hope in an increasingly mechanized world anyone who has ever yearned for a simple life free from the constraints of modern society owes a debt to William Blake the work of William Blake was not well known to the other Romantic poets but one of them reacted to the Industrial Revolution in the same way he escaped the city in order to preserve the innocence of his child one day in the autumn of 1796 a young poet called samuel taylor coleridge was rushing home from birmingham to bristol he had received unexpected news of the premature birth of his son and he wrote a poem about his feelings of anticipation his instinctive emotions could be those of any modern father I mean before the eternal sire I brought the unquiet silence of confused thought and shapeless feelings my all well met heart trembled and vacant tears stream down my face this emotional response of a father to the birth of his child might seem unexceptional today but for the time these were Radical sentiments you on becoming a parent colleges life completely changed he gave up his job as a traveling preacher and moved away from the city to begin a rustic scheme of life here in the quanto pills in doing so he was to redefine the notion of parenthood and return the child to nature I am anxious that my children should be bred up from the earliest infancy in the simplicity of peasants their food drink and habits completely rustic the time Coleridge spent here in Somerset was the happiest in his life as a child he was sent away to school in London and detested the experience he wanted his son to be schooled by nature you 1:40 night in 1798 he wrote to his son in celebration of the new romantic vision of childhood I was reared in the great city Penta meant cloisters dim but thou my babe shalt wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags of ancient mountains so shalt thou see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language yeah for the Romantic poets childhood was inseparable from nature they believed that our earliest lives are the source of our humanity one friend of Coleridge had experienced nature from his earliest years he grew up in the Lake District and was profoundly influenced by the power of its landscape on a clear night in the early 1780s a young boy was returning home from school along the shores of Al's water a moment of madness or inspiration prompted him to steal a boat and row out onto the lake this experience would define the course of his life the young boy was called William Wordsworth years later the memory of this childhood experience was an inspiration for one of his greatest poems and dipped my or into the silent lake and as I rose upon the stroke my boat went heaving through the water like a swan when from behind that craggy steep a huge cliff as if with voluntary power instinct operate his head the Lake District was the place where Wordsworth always felt most at home but it was also the place where his childhood happiness had been shattered his mother died when he was only seven and his beloved sister Dorothy had been sent away to live with relatives and then when Wordsworth was 13 his father lost his way on the Lakeland Fells and was forced to spend the night there exposed to the elements when he came home he fell ill and died a few days later as the young Wordsworth sat alone in the boat on Al's water he too was at the mercy of nature I struck and struck again growing still in stature the huge cliff rows on between me and the stars and still with measured motion like a living thing strode after me with trembling hands like two and through this island water stole my way back to the Calvinist and military Wordsworth's terror had a profound impact on his imagination for him this strange experience literally brought nature to life huge a mighty forms that do not live like living men moved slowly through my mind by day and were the trouble of my dreams in the absence of parents Wordsworth was being educated by the natural forces all around him at the age of 20 he traveled to the Alps this was not a journey to a specific place this expedition had quite a different goal instead Wordsworth was searching for an emotion his youthful imagination craved solitude danger an overwhelming experience by the standards of his time his was a strange and even incomprehensible journey Wordsworth traveled across some of the most perilous terrain in the world one slip might have brought destruction but he felt alive one night he found himself in exactly the same conditions that had killed his father but for Wordsworth the experience of being trapped in the mountains in the dark was also one of all and fashion the cry of unknown birds the mountains more by darkness visible and their own size than any outward light the breathless wilderness of clouds the clock that told with unintelligible voice the widely parted hours the noise of streams and sometimes rustling motions nigh at hand which did not leave us free from personal fear the further he traveled through the Alps the closer he came to the source of his inspiration throughout the journey he wrote letters to his sister dear Dorothy my spirits have been kept in a perpetual hurry of delight by the almost uninterrupted succession of beautiful objects which have passed before my eyes the immeasurable height of woods decayed never to be decayed the stationary blasts of waterfalls and everywhere along the hollow rent wins for ting wins bewildered and for long the torrents shooting from the clear blue sky you Wordsworth was beginning to recognize that the natural world was something more than a retreat from private pain and disappointment it was the power at the heart of his imagination the romantic imagination it could render him small and insignificant yet it could also connect him with eternity I held unconscious intercourse with beauty all his creation when Wordsworth returned to England he was reunited with his sister Dorothy they were rarely ever separated again in 1798 they went on a walking tour of the Y Valley there they visited Tintern Abbey two words with the abbe was a reminder of a more harmonious pre-industrial past it was a place of spirits of exultant experience and of inspiration the a be consumed by nature was a powerful romantic metaphor nature was ultimately greater the man the ruined building in its beautiful setting was an image both of serenity and of desolation the romantics were half in love with ruins they were the symbols of ancient time forgotten and decayed the cast their shadows over the new mechanical world of the Industrial Revolution for Wordsworth this was a moment out of time it allowed him to look back upon the course of his life and grasp the evolution of his relationship with nature the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion the tall rock the mountain and the deep blooming wood their colours and their forms to me within an appetite a feeling and alive his response was central to the romantic view of the world that endures to this day I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth but hearing often times the still sad music of humanity Wordsworth experienced something with which many of us can now identify in our modern pilgrimages to nature I have felt a presence that disturbed me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting summers the romantics were the first to express a yearning for the sublime in nature we have been searching for the same sublime ever since the way we relish a sunset is a learned experience one we learned from the romantics the feeling that Wordsworth expresses is beyond rational understanding it is a feeling of the sublime of all the grandeur and divinity in the natural world it is a state of being that transcends the mundane and mechanical world in which we live for the romantics it represented the longing to be free but the sublime was more than just the beauty of a sunset it was about war and terror the natural world was a dangerous place without convention society or God the sublime is manned lost in the immensity of nature the key to the sublime was the ability to lose yourself the experience of having no horizons no sense of confinement on a summer's day at the turn of the 19th century a young boy named John Claire set out from the Northamptonshire village of help stone to walk to the end of the world Claire was the son of an agricultural laborer he was in love with the freedom that the natural world afforded him so he set off determined to experience everything the world had to offer to the worlds and I thought I'd go and no other brink just people down to see the mighty deaths below he was missing for a day and an evening his parents were afraid that he had been killed the whole village began the search for him but the boy was oblivious as if entranced by his own dreams of freedom of course to wonder where I've got what I've got the under son seemed to rise another way the very world's end Samir so back I turn for very fear with eager haste and wonderstruck this unit is my adrenix Mel till home Claire grew up to be a poet this village and the countryside around it were his inspiration he lived here and from the age of 13 worked in the Bluebell in next door it was a good place I treated me more like a son than a servant I believe I might say that this place was the nursery for my rhymes you can imagine what he was laughing John Kerr dies I can't hear you know when you really Claire wrote poems here about the things he knew best his childhood and the beauty of the open countryside the landscape stretching view that opens wide with dribbling Brooks and rivers wider floods the hills and vales and darksome low renin woods with grains of varied hues and grasses pied all these with hundreds more far-off and near approach my sight and pleas to such access that language fails the pleasure to Express but the countryside he knew and loved was about to be transformed in the latter half of the 18th and in the early 19th century a series of enclosure Act was passed by Parliament in order to maximize the profit derived from the earth the common land was fenced off for agricultural views the English countryside was being exploited for the sake of ever-expanding commerce in 1809 a parliamentary Act was passed in closing all the lands of John Claire's immediate neighbourhood as the fields were enclosed William Blake's prophetic vision of the Industrial Revolution had reached the natural world itself creating barriers to freedom that still exists John Clare could no longer wander to the ends of the earth he found himself confined in the very place that he had once felt most free and it sent him spiraling into madness cross freeway an old round oaks narrow lane with its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again and closer like a Bonaparte that not a thing remain it leveled every bush and tree and leveled every hill and hung the miles for traitors daughter Brooke is running still it runs a naked brook cold and chill John Claire spent the last 24 years of his life enclosed within the walls of a lunatic asylum his doctor noted that his insanity was preceded by years addicted to poetical posing he was a true if neglected romantic his poetry describes an England where the freedom of nature had been curtailed by the forces of profit and progress with the enclosure acts freedom and the ability to experience the true power of nature seemed to have been all but eliminated then on the 12th of April 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia blew apart this was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history beauty and Worf combined with the eruption a million and a half tons of dust were ejected into the upper atmosphere the vegetation or nearby islands perished and 92 thousand people would die as a direct consequence tempura's volcanic cloud lowered global temperatures by as much as 3 degrees centigrade a year after the eruption the temperature in the northern hemisphere plummeted during the summer months 1816 was known as the year without a summer one young poet saw the darkness as the bringer of apocalypse I had a dream which was not all a dream the bright sun was extinguish'd and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space rayless and pathless and the icy earth swung blind and blackening and moonless air Lorne came and went and came and brought midday and men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation the world was void the populace and the powerful was a lump seasonless hopeless treeless manless lifeless a lump of death a chaos of hard clay the rivers lakes and oceans all Stood Still and nothing stirred within their silent with the explosion of Tambora It was as if nature had retaliated against all those who had tried to tame predict or influence it the Industrial Revolution and the remorseless advance of Science and Technology that accompanied it were brought into question the year without a summer was to change the course of art and of science the fear of darkness the fear of nature going awry aroused a new generation of young Romantic poets their work presented awful visions of the natural world and would condemn those who believed that they could control nature this new generation of romantics would meet at the home of Lord Byron the villa Diodati on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva these poets were rebelling against the earlier generation of romantics who seem to have become conservative and we actually Byron even referred to Wordsworth as turtle and called his poetry puerile and namby-pamby I must think less wildly I have thought too long and darkly until my brain became a whirling gulf of fantasy and flame during that dark summer at the villa Diodati the thunderstorms were the only source of natural light the guests rarely left the house this would be the setting for the creation of one of the most original novels in the English language among Aaron's guests was a young woman named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin lover of his friend the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley this 18 year old was the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin throughout her life she had been surrounded by intellectuals and radical ideas many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener they talked to the principles of life and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered perhaps a corpse would be reanimated perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured brought together and endured with like a warm when Mary went to bed that night she could not sleep as a young girl she had heard tales of experiments with electricity it was a force that had always enchanted them she had a nightmarish vision I swore to shut eyes but acute mental vision I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life the result of Mary's dream was the greatest of all horror stories written in English Frankenstein this fable of a young Genovese student obsessed with the principles of occult science and the making of new life is a great hymn to the romantic ideal with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light I saw the dull yellow I've the creature open it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated it's lingers the creature spurned by the world roams the vast Mer de Glace in the Vale of sham Oni just like his romantic forebearers there he confronts his maker hateful day when I received life that curse at creator why did you form a monster so hideous that even you done for me and disgust God in pity made man beautiful and alluring after his own image but my form is a filthy type of yours more horrid even from the very resemblance Satan had his companions fellow Devils to admire and Garage him but I am solitary and abhorred Frankenstein is a prophecy that science might be misused by those who wish to alter or tamper with nature the novel's frightful horror is the dark reflection of the romantic sublime its message was simple yet powerful respect and revere nature if it has the power to destroy you science alone is not enough it is a warning many people are repeating to this day everyone who seeks peace by a river upon a mountain or upon a beach is heir to the romantics a beneficiary of their visionary imagination anyone who looks upon nature and thinks about man's place within it owes a profound debt to the romantics for when they looked at nature they were also looking into their souls man himself contained all the terrors and secrets of the sublime another episode of this program airs next week on TV Oh find out more about some of the poets and poems featured in this series with a free booklet from the Open University to order call Oh 8 7 oh 900 oh 3 double 1 here more of the romantics poetry at BBC code dot UK forward slash romantics

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Id: liVQ21KZfOI

Length: 58min 6sec (3486 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 05 2014

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[u/Qwill2]

Peter Ackroyd summons the ghosts of the Romantics to tell the story of man's escape from the shackles of industry and commerce to the freedom of nature.

As the Industrial Revolution took hold of Britain during the late 18th Century, the Romantics embraced nature in search of sublime experience. But this was much more than just a walk in the country; it was a groundbreaking endeavour to understand what it means to be human. They forged poetry of radical protest against a dark world that was descending upon Britain. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a prophecy that science might be used to corrupt nature, a warning people are still preaching to this day.

The words of the Romantics are brought to life by Dudley Sutton, David Threlfall and Cara Horgan.