Romanticism and Mid-Nineteenth Century Despair – An Invigorating Discussion in the Light of Poetic Utopias and Anti-Utopias

Abstract

The word “utopia” denotes “a place which does not exist”. On the contrary anti -utopia depicts a social setting which is juxtaposed to utopian idealism. In this paper we would attempt to redefine the Romantic imagination of Wordsworth and Coleridge as poetic utopia and the Victorian despair in Mathew Arnold’s poem as anti-utopia. We would consider Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Mathew Arnold’s Dover Beach in our discussion. In Tintern Abbey, the poet is in search for the moments of insight, and understanding which, he believed; only nature could give. He believes in truth of his own senses and imagination and he describes moments in which he perceives mystical and transcendental truths. Coleridge in Kubla Khan presents an exotic landscape which has often been interpreted as symbolizing the movement of the creative imagination. On the contrary when we discuss the poem Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold, we observe how the poet discusses love, faith and desolation and concludes the poem with a vision of the world more completely negative than in the previous two centuries. The main contention of the paper is to make a discussion in the light of romantic aestheticism and Victorian disillusionment.The research aims to establish the discussion that critiques the idealism of early romanticism with the dichotomy and ambiguity of mid-nineteenth century through the relevant documentation of utopian and anti-utopian ideals in literary creations.