Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition

In Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Anne Janowitz asks scholars to reconsider the role and place of communitarian poetics in both the development of romanticism proper and its role in the formation of a working class poetics of chartism and beyond. Janowitz argues convincingly that communitarian poetics were central to the development of romanticism. Tracing twin veins of identity creation--both through an individual's relations and reactions to nature and also through an individual's relations and connections to a community--Janowitz sees the lyric "as a theatre of engagement for competing and alternate versions of political, and cultural identity" (7-8). Romanticism sprang forth from the engagement of Enlightenment liberal economics with agrarian custom, of customary culture with that of "free wage labour" (6). For Janowitz, romantic poets such as William Wordsworth drew on and imbued their works with strong communitarian strains, merging literate and oral poetic traditions in much the same way as the early urban radical poets and the later Chartist poets.

A central problem for romantic writers was the creation of identity. They struggled with how identity is created and maintained. Did one find identity through individual communion with nature or through one's community? The canonical view of romanticism is that writers such as Wordsworth and his later contemporaries solved this problem by asserting a highly individualistic view of identity, but Janowitz argues that this view reveals as much about the interpreters of romanticism as it does about the romantics themselves. In short, she sees the literate establishment taking up and co-opting the romantic project to blend the lyric (literate) and the balladic (oral) and, by doing so, jettisoning or eliding the balladic aspects of romantic poetry. Contemporary and modern critics of romanticism have, like John Stuart Mill, "extracted" the individualist, lyric, and aesthetic aspects of romanticism at the expense of the communitarian (67). Janowitz contends that this debate between voluntaristic individualism and community-based identity is central to the romantic project. Janowitz traces an alternate path of influence, one that sees politically and socially marginalized poets and groups recovering the balladic side of romantic lyric poetry by drawing on its communitarian strains which she finds more often associated with Burns than with Wordsworth (67).

Yet Janowitz notes that these other poets and thinkers, including the early urban radicals Thomas Spence and George Dyer in the 1790s and early 1800s, as well as the Chartist poets Allen Davenport, Thomas Cooper, and Ernest Jones of the 1830s and 1840s, did not ignore the romantic question of identity. Rather they struggled to incorporate romantic ideas of the individual with those of collective struggle and unity. Political poets such as Spence and Dyer saw nature not as the wellspring of individual identity, but as the source of collective identity and traditional collective rights. For Spence, the individual gains identity through his connections and contacts with the collective. Janowitz traces this strain of identity creation from Spence's work in the 1790s and early 1800s through to the Chartist poets of the mid-nineteenth century.

It is this aspect of Janowitz's work that is perhaps most fruitful to scholars of the late romantic and early Victorian periods. By teasing out the roles agrarian and rural images have in early urban radical poetry and later Chartist poetry, we can begin to see such poetry not as nostalgic yearnings but as important working class assertions of collective identity and rights. That is, agrarian and rural images draw on a tradition of community rights rooted in pre-industrial concepts of collective ownership of the land and the community's labor. From these communitarian roots springs a poetics which "attempts to repossess identity by making claims for lyric poetry as a possibility for collective, embedded experience," (8) one that embraces the social and community connections rather than being an "abstraction of [the] self from a social dialectic" (5). In her discussion of such figures as W. J. Linton and William Morris, Janowitz reminds us that Chartist and later socialist poets did not merely hope to create identity out of communitarian philosophy but rather hoped for a "blending [of] voluntaristic individualism shorn of liberal economics with communitarian aspirations stripped of socialist politics" (196). While these words originate with Linton, they clearly sum up Janowitz's thoughts with regard to the Chartist and socialist poets of the mid-century. Not surprisingly, Janowitz sees Linton as the epitome of the working class or marginal poet working within the romantic tradition. While all such poets to some extent hoped to blend the voluntaristic individualism of liberalism with a communitarian individual identity, Linton was able to close the circle--to create an identity that balances the individual and the community. In her closing remarks on Morris, Janowitz reminds readers of the historical work that is central to much romantic writing, "to make the past part of the present, and thus available for the future" (232). This aim applies both to individual pasts and collective pasts.

Yet Janowitz does not merely call for romantic scholars to explore a new subgenre of the field. Rather, she hopes her project will help scholars "to notice once again what is so powerful about romanticism, and why we cannot stop using the term, even when dispersing its characteristics" or when we can not agree on its definition (5). Janowitz's work should be of interest not only to scholars and critics of the romantic period but also to Victorianists and those interested in the development and articulation of a working class poetics and identity. Her work continues the reappraisal of the oft-contested term "romanticism." Without questioning the importance or influence of romanticism, Janowitz does explore the many influences on romantic poetics, looking beyond the canon to find a line of descent in working class lyrics and ballads that flowered throughout the 1790s and into the 1840s. The work of such poets as Allen Davenport, Thomas Cooper, and Ernest Jones served as "Labour's Laureates" (159). Poets who "translate the expressive capability of indivdualist subjectivity into the shapes of the collective experience" (182). Jones in particular strived in such ballads as "Men of England" to "build a place for [individual] consciousness within … collectivity" (166). As Jones matures as both a poet and a political thinker, Janowitz sees him increasingly drawing "on the expressivity of romantic landscape imagery" to express a "sublime activity against oppression" (182), such as seen in his poem "The Factory Town," first published in the 1847 edition of The Labourer, the literary supplement to the Northern Star: Fear ye not your master's power Men are strong when men unite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And the winds with anthems singing Cleaving clouds, and splitting seas, Seeming unto the People singing: 'Break your chains as we do these!' (qtd. in Janowitz 182)

In tracing this descent Janowitz gives us a better understanding not only of working class poetics but also of canonical romanticism itself. Her work reminds us that the work of poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Shelley grew not solely out of or in reaction to Enlightenment reason and literate traditions but that it very much grew out of an attempt to reconcile oral and communitarian traditions with those of Enlightenment rationality and concepts of individuality. Finally, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition reminds us of the challenge that romanticism posed to the print culture of its time. From this challenge arose the poetry and prose that still continue to challenge, interest, and influence us today.