Download Romanticism and Romantic Poetry Timeframe of Romantic Poetry

Romanticism and Romantic
Poetry
Timeframe of Romantic Poetry
• First work of Romantic poetry - Lyrical
Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
William Wordsworth in 1798
• Traditionally ends with death of Sir
Walter Scott in 1832
• Some consider poetry produced in
Victorian and even Modern eras to be
“Romantic”
Major features of Romantic
Poetry
• Freely imaginative idealizing fiction
• imagination and emotion
• particular as opposed to general or universal
experience
• value of the individual - link to French
revolution
• freedom rather than authority
Major features continued
• Optimistic sense of renewal
• Interest in the language and lives of common
people
• love for unspoiled natural world
• revitalized interest in medieval subjects and
settings
Historical context
• Prosperity and confidence in
1700’s
• American and French
revolutions
• Covered Europe, though
shortest in Germany.
• disappointment in bitter and
violent ends - Napoleon
• Industrial Revolution
• dirty, unorganized cities emerge
• huge class shift
Difference in Neoclassicism and
Romantic Poetry
• Neoclassicism
– General Definition: mid-17th century movement, both
progressive and traditional in its goal of rivaling the era
of Augustus, which valued order, harmony, reason, and
logic.
• Romanticism
– General Definition: late 18th and early 19th century
movement, a reaction to the Age of Reason in its
understanding of human happiness and the means to
achieve it, which valued sentiments of the heart,
powerful emotions, and sensory experience.
Difference in Neoclassicism and
Romantic Poetry
• Neoclassicism
– Respect for Convention: belief that man had
agreed on certain, fixed ways of writing across
the centuries. Rules for pastoral poetry, satire,
and the epic were respectfully followed.
• Romanticism
– Revolution: skepticism about existing laws,
political structures, manners, and other
conventions. Writers experimented, mixing
various art forms.
Difference in Neoclassicism and
Romantic Poetry
• Neoclassicism
– Objectivism: belief that humans are rational animals,
composed of a central, identifiable human nature and
that all people could relate to the ideas, emotions, and
expression of their writing.
• Romanticism
– Subjectivism: each writer occupied with his own unique
response to the world, with an inward focus on his
individual emotional history.
Difference in Neoclassicism and
Romantic Poetry
•
Neoclassicism
– Rationalism: confidence in the human power of reason to achieve progress
and make sense/order out of the universe. Scientific discoveries abounded,
new political theories and more just forms of government developed, and
more reasonable monarchs ruled during the Enlightenment.
•
Romanticism
– Emotionalism: deep and self-conscious interest in emotions and
imagination. Writers deified the heroic extremes of feeling, encouraging
readers to trust their emotions/intuitions over rational thought. The
imagination was thought to be the most valuable of all human faculties.
First generation of English
Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth
and Coleridge
• Men meet at Cambridge
• publish Lyrical Ballads in 1798
• seeks to abandon formal
language of 1700’s
• balance between poet’s
influence and “real language”
• balance between commonplace
and supernatural
First generation of English
Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth
and Coleridge
• Apparent contradictions seek to reveal what Wordsworth calls
“the essential passions of the heart” and what Coleridge calls
“our inward nature”
• natural and commonplace, supernatural and romantic all
contribute to basic operation of human mind and emotions
Second generation: Byron,
Shelley, Keats
• All have tragically short
lives
• Byron and Shelley both
aristocrats, well educated,
leave England under
pressure, see themselves as
outcasts
• Byron popular, while Shelley
misunderstood
• Keats produces poetry at 24,
dies at 25
The Romantic Poets (The Big 6)
 Percy Byssche Shelley
 Lord Byron (George
Gordon)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 William Wordsworth
 John Keats
 William Blake
William Blake
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-blake
• In his Life of William Blake (1863)
Alexander Gilchrist warned his
readers that Blake "neither wrote nor
drew for the many, hardly for
work'y-day men at all, rather for
children and angels; himself 'a divine
child,' whose playthings were sun,
moon, and stars, the heavens and the
earth."
• Yet Blake himself believed that his
writings were of national importance
and that they could be understood by
a majority of men.
• Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and
worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time
of great social and political change that profoundly
influenced his writing.
• Poet, painter, and engraver, Blake worked to bring
about a change both in the social order and in the
minds of men.
• Blake’s two famous volumes of poems, Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience show "the two
Contrary States of the Human Soul." (Blake)
• Blake had a unique religious, spiritual viewpoint
based on a visionary idea, freedom, and
individualism, and he had radical political views.
William Wordsworth
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/296
• Wordsworth's mother died
when he was eight--this
experience shapes much of his
later work. Not long after, his
father died, leaving him and
his four siblings orphans.
• Wordsworth's poetry centers
around the interest and
sympathy for the life, troubles
and speech of the "common
man".
• Wordsworth was influenced by his wanderings and his
preoccupation with nature and man’s obsession with materialism.
• He was friendly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• Wordsworth's most famous work is The Prelude. The poem,
revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet
and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry.
• Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life,
the poem was published posthumously.
• Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in
England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions.
• Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847,
Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William
Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his
wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/179
• As the eldest son, Shelley stood in line to
inherit not only his grandfather's
considerable estate but also a seat in
Parliament.
• He attended Eton College and Oxford
University.
• Shelley had heretical and atheistic
opinions.
• Shelley eloped and married, only to later
elope and marry Mary Shelley (who
wrote Frankenstein).
• Shelley was influenced by Godwin (Mary Shelley’s
father) and his freethinking Socialist philosophy.
• Shelley was also a good friend of Byron’s.
• He traveled and lived in various Italian cities
throughout his life.
• His poetry emphasizes individualism, freedom,
nature, and the importance of the subjective
imagination.
John Keats
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/66
• Keats lost both his parents at
a young age.
• He was a licensed apothecary,
but never practiced as one;
instead, he dedicated himself
to writing poetry.
• Keats’ poetry focuses on
mortality, the beauty of
nature, and includes many
myths and allusions to Greek
mythology and aesthetics.
• Keats contracted tuberculosis and died at only
twenty-five years old.
• Because he was ill for a time before he died, many of
his poems address his awareness of death, the
importance of beauty and God, and frequently
reference mythology and the ancients.
George Gordon, Lord Byron
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lord-byron
• The most flamboyant and
notorious of the major
Romantics, George Gordon,
Lord Byron, was also the most
fashionable poet of his day.
• He created an immensely
popular Romantic hero (known
as the Byronic Hero)—defiant,
melancholy, haunted by secret
guilt—for which, to many, he
seemed the model.
• Byron is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic
revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshipper
of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and
freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of
original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his
works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life
to the Greek war of independence.
• His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative,
ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional
poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous
correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets,
blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose.
• In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for
freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the
Western mind and heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/samuel-taylor-coleridge
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/292
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
published The Lyrical Ballads
with William Wordsworth in
1798, an event later seen as the
beginning of the Romantic
movement in England.
• Coleridge held imagination to be
the vital force behind poetry, and
distinguished among different
kinds of imagination in his long
prose work Biographia Literaria.
• Coleridge is probably most noted for the haunting
imagery of his poems “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”.
• He was influenced by Plato's Republic, and coconstructed a vision of pantisocracy (equal
government by all).
• Coleridge suffered from financial problems, and later
ill health. He became addicted to opium (evident in
much of his poetry), and lived off of financial
donations and grants until he died.