The Transition in Poetry

The following table is meant to convey a rough idea of the drift of poetry toward Romanticism. In the table the lateral position of the title of a work gives an approximate estimate of its approach to the Romantic ideal. Such an estimate, especially in the case of the transitional poems, cannot be determined absolutely, and need not be taken as final. The table, nevertheless, reveals not only the steady drift, but also the manner in which the different stages of development overlap.

Date Classical Transitional Romantic

1730 The Dunciad The Seasons

Epistle to Arbuthnot

1740 London

Night Thoughts

1750 Vanity of Human Wishes Collins’s Odes The Castle of Indolence

Gray’s Elegy

1760

Ossian

The Traveller

1770 Chatterton’s poems

The Deserted Village

1780

The Village

The Task Burns’s poems

1790 Blake’s poems