This document provides an overview of Romanticism between 1760-1850. Some key points:
- Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment and emphasized nature, emotion, imagination, and the individual.
- Major influences included the French and American revolutions which challenged authority. The Industrial Revolution also transformed society.
- Romantic poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge celebrated nature and the imagination over reason. Their works explored themes of social injustice, the role of the individual, and humanity's connection to nature.
- Common formats included the lyric, ballad, and poems that incorporated exotic settings and medieval influences to capture mystery and the sublime in nature.
2. Romanticism 1760-1850. These years are very approximate.
Eras don’t really end. They continue and intertwine and reappear…we can
identify Enlightenment, Neoclassical, Romantic, Modern and Post Modern values
in our world today.
• Before we look at the Romantic Era, let’s look at the period of
time leading up to it
• Let’s first look at the 18th century 17001800
1700-1800 The Eighteenth The Enlightenment; Neoclassical Period;
Century The Augustan Age…Age of Reason Alexander Pope,
Jonathan Swift,
Samuel Johnson
1785-1830 Romanticism The Age of Revolution
William Wordsworth,
S.T. Coleridge, Jane Austen,
the Brontës
1830-1901 Victorian Early, Middle and Late Victorian
Period Charles Dickens, George Eliot,
Robert Browning,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1901-1960 Modern Period The Edwardian Era
(1901-1910); G.M. Hopkins,
The Georgian Era
H.G. Wells, James Joyce,
(1910-1914)
D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot
3. Enlightenment 1650 [an approximate date]
1700-1800: This century is given different titles including;
1. Neo classical age [as writers and artists looked to the writing of the ancient
classical world of Greece & Rome as models for their work
• 2.The Augustan age 3. Age of reason 4. Age of Satire
• Mechanical view of the world. The clock becomes a metaphor for the universe.
God created the ‘mechanism’, wound it up and let it be
• Newton and other scientists saw it as their Quest to discover the mystery of this
‘machine’, the universe
• The importance of authority…be it government, classical authority…religious
authority…the sciences…mathematics. While Neo-classicists tended to reject the
‘superstition’ of religion and its lack of reason and logic, many saw the institution
important for order
• The notion of progress through science and mathematics
4. • “order, logic, restraint, accuracy, correctness, restraint, decorum, and so
on, which would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or
reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals.”
Neoclassicism
• “ To a certain extent Neoclassicism represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant,
and enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and possessed of
an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual growth. Neoclassical theorists, by contrast,
saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited. They
replaced the Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention and experimentation,
and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on restraint, on common sense,
and on religious, political, economic and philosophical conservatism. They maintained that
man himself was the most appropriate subject of art, and saw art itself as essentially
pragmatic — as valuable because it was somehow useful — and as something which was
properly intellectual rather than emotional.” Neoclassicism
• Hobbes’ Leviathan
• “The fading away of Neoclassicism may have appeared to represent the last flicker of the
Enlightenment, but artistic movements never really die: many of the primary aesthetic tenets
of Neoclassicism, in fact have reappeared in the twentieth century — in, for example, the
poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot — as manifestations of a reaction against Romanticism
itself: Eliot saw Neo-classicism as emphasising poetic form and conscious craftsmanship, and
Romanticism as a poetics of personal emotion and "inspiration," and pointedly preferred the
former.” Neoclassicism
5. Characteristics of Neoclassical literature
• Reason, controlled emotion, sophistication…detachment
• Witty and clever
• Philosophical
• Satirical [attacks on other writers, politicians, society, injustice
etc. A Modest Proposal
• Mock Heroic
• Rigid structure of rhyming couplets
AWAKE, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us, and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan; Pope extract ‘An essay on Man’
12. Romanticism
• Rousseau [1712 – 2 July 1778)
• Age of Revolution
• French Revolution 1789…storming of The Bastille
- Challenge to authority…political…The divine right of kings and
absolute authority….challenge to religious authorities
- Old feudal systems breaking down…rise of an underclass
- Republicanism
- American War of Independence 1775
13. England
• Industrial revolution.
• Child Labour
• Deepening distrust of some aspects of science
• An agrarian country becomes an Industrial one
• Rapid Urbanisation…dreadful social conditions
• William Blake
• Revolution in Verse
14. LONDON
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
Analysis
15. Holy Thursday
’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
O what a multitude they seem’d these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive angel from your door
Analysis
16. Nature
• Reaction…urbanisation…industrialisation…imprisonment
• Cities unnatural, unhealthy ‘hellish’ places
• Spiritual & emotional engagement
• The point of interaction between the human and divine
• Evidence of the divine at work
• Therapeutic…healing …
• Solitude
Individualism
• Elevation of the status of the individual
• Freedom of the individual…free from shackles…
• The potential of the individual
• Sense of idealism
17. Imagination
• IIMA Reason
• The Romantic did not reject reason but elevated the status of the
imagination
• Great creative faculty. We process our experience, ponder on these
experiences and come to certain conclusions…liberating force
• The imagination allows us to travel into the past and future
• It allows us to explore other worlds both real and imagined
• It allows us to consider alternative ways of thinking, other forms of society
• It can take us into the world of fantasy and horror - The Gothic e.g.
Frankenstein…and Dark Romanticism of writers like Poe
18. Characteristics of Romantic Poetry…revolutionary because;
• The individual is at the centre of the poem recounting their first hand
personal experience
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw …
• The status of the common person is elevated and recognised. Blake wrote
about orphans, child labourers, prostitutes…
• Their verse was political in its condemnation of inequality, industrialisation
and urbanisation
• The poem was a product of the imagination and was in itself an
imaginative journey
• The best Romantic poetry combined reason and emotion
• Recognised the importance of intuition
• Celebrated the importance of nature as a source of spiritual solace and
fulfilment…drew on nature for it dominant imagery…lauded the wonder
and mystique of the natural world
19. • Simplicity of the language in contrast to the complex allusive [many allusions]
language of the neo-classicists. ..sometimes conversational in style
Frost at Midnight It is midnight in the countryside in the middle of
winter. The persona personifies nature and is in
awe of the magic of the frost forming. He speaks
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
of nature as a mysterious force performing its
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry ‘secret ministry’ as if it were a ritual of immense
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. religious significance. For the Romantics, Nature
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, was their source of spiritual sustenance. We can
Have left me to that solitude, which suits tell from the exclamatory language how much the
persona delights in this moment as they describe
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
the sights and sounds of the natural world.
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. Everyone is asleep and he welcomes this
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs ‘solitude’ and ‘extreme silentness’ as he holds his
And vexes meditation with its strange sleeping child. His imagination takes him out
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, beyond the walls of the cottage and he imagines
the landscape he knows so well from his daytime
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
walks. The physical world will now stimulate
With all the numberless goings-on of life, deeper reflection about his childhood and how
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame his son’s upbringing will differ. Typically the poem
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; begins at a particular moment in time and place
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, and this moment of solitude leads to deep
consideration, speculation and realisations…
20. For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
He was sent to a city boarding school
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
as child and likens both school and
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags the city to being imprisoned
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, …’pent ‘mid cloisters dim’.
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores He could only see the stars and sky
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear through the high windows.
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Leaving the past he now imagines
Of that eternal language, which thy God what sort of future his child will have
Utters, who from eternity doth teach growing up in the natural world being
Himself in all, and all things in himself. guided and moulded by that “Great
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Universal Teacher’- nature.
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Nature is where the child will
experience a sense of the divine.
21. • Originality…unlike the Neo classicist who modelled their work on past masters. Our notion of
originality today comes from the Romantics
• Tended to celebrate the potential in humankind…and urge us to ‘seize the day’ in making the
most of our life in this world…to rebel against whatever shackles are holding us back
• Could also despair of the reality of the human condition. Late Romantic poetry became trite
and sentimental and quite shallow in its description of the role of nature. The best Romantic
poetry could, like Keats below, capture the extraordinary beauty of nature while exploring
the confronting reality of our existence…
To Autumn [3rd stanza] john Keats
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? In the poem To Autumn, Keats in the first
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— stanza describes the beauty of the
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, countryside in Autumn. This leads in the
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; second and third stanza to deeper
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn speculation about life and the human
Among the river sallows, borne aloft condition. Autumn takes on a symbolic
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; significance…of time passing, transience,
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; old age, approaching death. These
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft themes are reinforced by the time of day
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; ‘soft-dying day’. The questions create a
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. mood of doubt and uncertainty.
The Gnats are described as making a ‘wailful’ sound which reinforces this idea of mourning the passing
of time. Ultimately there is a realisation that Winter has its ‘music too’ and we must accept the reality of
life
22. • Some Favoured formats included the
lyric and the ballad; a form traditionally
belonging to the ordinary peasant class
…a more rustic form of song Unlike the polished sophisticated
e.g. The Rime of The Ancient Mariner. language of the Neo classicists,
Coleridge in this ballad, employs an
archaic style of language in keeping
with the content of the poem which
The Rime of The Ancient Mariner tells a very strange story of this sailor
It is an ancient Mariner, who recounts his crime and
And he stoppeth one of three. subsequent divine punishment.
'By thy long beard and glittering eye,
His sea trip took him deep into the
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Antarctic, a fearful exotic , exciting
place in the minds of the
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, Romantics…where one could
And I am next of kin; experience The Sublime in Nature…a
The guests are met, the feast is set: mixture of terror & awe
May'st hear the merry din
23. • While the Romantics treasured the natural world around them, they were
also enchanted by the exotic …other worlds…other times [We have
already seen this in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner]
• The Romantics sometime harked back to the Middle Ages i.e. pre-
Enlightenment. They longed for the sense of mystery, magic and
superstition of that time…elements that the science and reason had
sought to extinguish. They weren’t anti science or reason but argued that
there is so much more to human existence
• Le Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats is one such ballad ….or listen
• Coleridge creates an extraordinary world in his poem Kubla Khan
