4 - Romantics and the Bible

Summary

Forerunners and the influence of the KJB

‘Nunc est bibendum’ or ‘eat, drink and be merry’

Blake, perhaps, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats — these are the central figures of English romantic poetry. As far as their religious views are concerned they are as diverse a group as one could wish to find — profound and indifferent, orthodox and unorthodox, Christian and non-Christian — yet they share a biblical upbringing in a time when a favourable literary opinion of the KJB had become established. They are the first major literary group to have this in common, so it is of particular interest to see how they responded to the Bible, whether it influenced their work, and whether this heritage produced an attitude to the Bible that, in spite of their religious variety, was more or less shared by them all.

Two other factors of interest to us lie behind their work: a few of their predecessors had already moved towards new ways of writing poetry that had some indebtedness to the KJB (from our point of view, Blake belongs with these poets rather than with the romantics: he is the central pre-romantic poet of the Bible). Less obviously significant but still relevant is a somewht new way of quoting the Bible which has its origins in both the alehouses and the classics (‘nunc est bibendum’).