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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.