The Romantics and the Wonder of Childhood

Nov 5, 2024
2 min read

Updated: 44 minutes ago

A central theme for the Romantics was that children experience the world differently than adults. Seems obvious, right? Kids are new to everything, so of course they’re care-free and open. They don’t know yet which parts of the world they’re supposed to ignore.

Gustav Klimt Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912)

And that’s exactly what the Romantics were getting at. They worried about how that beautiful wonder of childhood could get crowded out by habit. And to keep it from happening, they turned to art and nature. Not because they wanted to escape the real world, but because they wanted to recover a way of seeing that adults leave behind.

And you can hear that longing throughout their work. Especially with Wordsworth. He mourns the fading of childhood wonder. Shelley celebrates its joy. Blake reminds us how vulnerable it is. And then Coleridge takes the argument one step further. He says that imagination is part of perception itself.

Caspar David Friedrich - Eule am Grabe 1837

William Wordsworth

In "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" Wordsworth realizes that the child-like sense of wonder would never fully return, but he can still find meaning in the world around him.

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

Percy Bysshe Shelley

For Shelley The Skylark echoed the pure and innocent joy of childhood that adults struggled to hold onto.

Marc Chagall The Poet with the Birds, 1911

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.".

William Blake

In the "The Chimney Sweeper", Blake’s childhood innocence wasn’t sentimental. It was fragile, and something the world could easily crush.

"And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

While Wordsworth is telling us “Don't lose wonder.” Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, went even deeper. He is saying the world is enchanted whether you notice it or not.

"The primary imagination ... is the living power and prime agent of all human perception."

In other words, imagination isn’t separate from reality. It’s one of the ways we experience it.

The theme for all these Romantics is the same: hang on to wonder. The mystery never left. We just learned to ignore it.