THE ROMANTICS
Romanticism – What is it?
The term “Romanticism” does not mean
pathetic love poems or badly-written semierotic love stories. In its time it was a wild
revolutionary movement, an explosion of
imagination, emotion and radical political
activity. The new generation of romantic poets
and artists rebelled against their parents’
boring conventional view of the world as
something rational and pragmatic. They
wanted individual freedom, even sexual
freedom; they hated how the new industrial
revolution and the consequent urban
expansion were destroying nature; initially
they looked hopefully at the revolutionary
movements in France and America, but were
soon disappointed.
It is important to remember that Romanticism
includes not only poetry, but also prose, art,
music, architecture, education, politics –
indeed most areas of life. Here we will be
concentrating on English Romantic poetry.
William Blake’s “Ancient of Days”
The six most well-known English Romantic poets are, in order of birth and with an example of their
work:
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William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Wordsworth – The Prelude
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Rime of the Ancient Mariner
George Gordon, Lord Byron – Don Juan "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Prometheus Unbound "Adonais" "Ode to the West Wind"
"Ozymandias"
John Keats – Great Odes "Hyperion" "Endymion"
Here is an adapted article from Wikipedia about Romanticism. Read it and make notes at the end of
this text about the words marked in bold.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe at the end
of the 18th century to approximately 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also
a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
against a purely rationalist, scientific view of the world and of nature. Its effect on politics was
considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with
liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably
more significant.
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The Romantic Movement saw strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience,
placing emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe—especially related to
untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something
noble and made spontaneity a positive characteristic. Romanticism rejected the rational and
Classicist ideal models and looked further back in history to the Middle Ages and it looked to
elements of art and narrative considered to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape the
confines of population growth, urban expanse and industrialism. It also included the exotic,
unfamiliar, and distant, emphasising the power of the imagination to create visions and to escape
common reality.
Basic characteristics
The Romantics considered that free expression of the feelings of the artist was of the first
importance. This idea is summed up by the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich
that "the artist's feeling is his law". To William Wordsworth poetry should be "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings". In order to truly express these feelings, the content of the art must
come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules
dictating what a work should consist of. So, originality was absolutely essential. The concept of the
genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of "creation
from nothingness", is key to Romanticism. In addition, romanticism placed special emphasis on the
aesthetic experience and in particular, focused on such sensations like awe, trepidation, horror, and
terror. This meant a revival of Gothic literature with its exotic settings, monsters, ghosts and
supernatural storylines, the most famous of which are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and later, Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Also, in the Romantic Movement folk art became something to be respected and
ancient customs became noble and desirable. It was an expression of wanting to return to a more
natural time.
“The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich
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Finally, Romanticism also had a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature, particularly in
the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the
usually very social art of the Enlightenment, the Romantics did not trust the human world, and
tended to believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.
Romanticism in English Literature: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know” – description of Lord Byron.
In English literature, the group of poets now considered the key figures of the Romantic Movement
includes William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the much older William
Blake. The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads,
with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the
movement. The majority of the poems were by
Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the
poor in his native Lake District, or the poet's feelings
about nature, which were to be more fully
developed in his long poem The Prelude, never
published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the
volume was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner which showed the Gothic side of English
Romanticism and the exotic settings that many
works included. In the period when they were
writing, the Lake Poets were widely regarded as a
marginal group of radicals, though they were
supported by some established critics.
Lord Byron c.1816, by Henry Harlow
In contrast, Lord Byron and the great Scottish
novelist and poet Walter Scott achieved enormous
fame and influence throughout Europe with works
exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings; Goethe called Byron
"undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long
narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poem Marmion in
1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past. Byron, the most well-known of the Romantic poets,
had equal success with the first part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish
tales", all in the form of long poems, drawing from his Grand Tour which had reached Ottoman
Europe, and orientalising the themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different
variations of the "Byronic hero", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile was
effectively inventing the historical novel, beginning in 1814 with Waverley, set in the 1745 Jacobite
Rising, which was an enormous and highly profitable success, followed by over 20 further Waverley
Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to the Crusades that he had researched to a
degree that was new in literature.
In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism, and
the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the
French Revolution, whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as
elsewhere in Europe, a shock to the movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish identity and
history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist. Several spent much time abroad, and a famous stay on
Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein by
Shelley's wife-to-be Marry Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William
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Polidori. The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland and Thomas Moore, from Ireland but based in London
or elsewhere reflected in different ways their countries and the Romantic interest in folk literature,
but neither had a fully Romantic approach to life or their work.
Though they have modern critical champions, Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced
in the form of the many operas that continued to be based on them over the following decades,
such as Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s I puritani (both 1835). Byron is now most
highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally unromantic prose writings, especially his letters,
and his unfinished satire Don Juan. Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely-publicised personal life
appeared to match his work and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when helping the Greek War
of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic end, establishing his legend.
Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost 70) in 1827, and Coleridge
largely ceased to write in the 1820s. Wordsworth was by 1820 respectable and highly-regarded,
holding a government job, but wrote relatively little. In the discussion of English literature, the
Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier,
although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed to Romantic values.
The most significant novelist in English during the peak Romantic period, other than Walter Scott,
was Jane Austen, whose essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her Romantic
contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and social rules, though critics have detected
tremors under the surface of some works, especially Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817).
But around the mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the Yorkshire-based Brontë family
appeared, in particular Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which were both
published in 1847.
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The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis
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CONCEPTS FROM THE TEXT
TERM
The Age of Enlightenment
COMMENTS
Rationalism
Nationalism in the 19th Century
Aesthetic
Awe
Translation:
Awesome/Awful:
Untamed
Translation:
The Classicist ideal
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The imagination
The Lake District
Gothic (and Romanticism)
The Grand Tour
Characteristics of Romanticism – A Summary
Romantic Characteristic
Interest in the common man and childhood
Description of Characteristic
Romantics believed in the natural goodness of humans
which is hindered by the urban life of civilization. They
believed that the savage is noble, childhood is good and
the emotions inspired by both beliefs causes the heart
to soar.
Romantics believed that knowledge is gained through
intuition rather than deduction. This is best summed up
by Wordsworth who stated that “all good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
Romantics stressed the awe of nature in art and
language and the experience of the sublime through a
connection with nature. Romantics rejected the
rationalization of nature by the previous thinkers of the
Enlightenment period.
Romantics often elevated the achievements of the
misunderstood, heroic individual outcast.
Romantics legitimized the individual imagination as a
critical authority.
Strong senses, emotions, and feelings
Awe of nature
Celebration of the individual
Importance of imagination
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Lord Byron – “She Walks in Beauty”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfoWMHTpw0A
She Walks in Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
BBC web page – information about Peter Ackroyd’s documentary “The Romantics”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/
BBC Documentary: Episode 1 “The Romantics – Liberty”, narrated by Peter Ackroyd (1 hour long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLwRXlSgiSQ
BBC Documentary: Episode 2 “The Romantics – Nature”, narrated by Peter Ackroyd (1 hour long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVQ21KZfOI
BBC Documentary: Episode 3 “The Romantics – Eternity”, narrated by Peter Ackroyd (1 hour long)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yJTDR_OP5M
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New Romantics – 1980s pop genre:
Boy George sings his hit “Karma Chameleon”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw
Adam and the Ants – “Prince Charming”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p__WmyAE3g
Roxy Music – “Let’s Stick Together”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQa_u0dSDRE
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