What does Romantic mean?

The word Romantic first became current in 18th-century English and originally meant romance-like, that is, resembling the strange, fanciful, mythical character of medieval romances. The word came to be associated with interest in the Middle Ages, the emerging taste for wild scenery, ruins and other sublime locations, a tendency reflected in the increasing emphasis in aesthetic theory on the sublime as opposed to the beautiful. Romanticism In Europe, Romanticism flourished in England, Germany, and France It elevated the individual, the passions, and the inner life, embracing a more dramatic, personal, and emotional style--even to the point of melancholic emotion Romanticism followed a period we call the Enlightenment. During the 18th century, in a reaction against Enlightenment ideas, feeling began to be considered more important than reason, both in literature and in ethics. What was the Enlightenment? A broad intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly Britain, France and Germany, characterized by a rejection of superstition and mystery and an optimism concerning the power of human reasoning and scientific endeavor. It is also referred to as The Age of Reason. It was both within and against Enlightenment thought that Romanticism can be said to have been conceived. What is Neoclassicism? An 18th-century artistic movement, associated with the Enlightenment, drawing on classical models and emphasizing reason, harmony, and restraint. Literally, new classicism, it marked a renewed interest in the literary and artistic theories of ancient Greece and Rome and an attempt to reformulate them for contemporary society. British Romanticism The Romantic period in British Literature (roughly 1780-1832) stands between and connects the Enlightenments promotion of commerce, reason, and liberty and the Victorian experience of industrialization and empire. Romanticism in both artistic production and cultural reception elevated aesthetic practice to an almost divine activity, a realm wherein the individual might forge his or her very self as an ethical, political, and creative being.

A key concept in Romanticism is the sublime While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the sublime is majestic, wild, and sometimes savage. Viewers are moved and often made happy by the beautiful, but they are overwhelmed, awe-struck, and sometimes terrified by the sublime. What is the sublime? Often associated with huge, overpowering natural phenomena like mountains, waterfalls, turbulent seas, and thunderstorms, the delightful terror inspired by sublime visions was supposed both to remind viewers of their own insignificance in the face of nature and divinity and to inspire them with a sense of transcendence. How did the sublime relate to the beautiful? Mere beauty was thought by the Romantics to be inferior to the concept of the sublime. The British writer and statesman Edmund Burke, who was interested in categorizing aesthetic responses, identified beauty with delicacy and harmony, and he identified the sublime with vastness, obscurity, and a capacity to inspire terror. What shaped Romanticism? At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists, writers, and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau (France) and William Godwin (England) had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact. What shaped Romanticism? In England, initial support for the French Revolution was primarily utopian and idealistic When the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution However, the Romantic vision had taken forms other than the political, and these continued to develop. Romanticism emphasized. . . Individualism Creativity Revolutionary political ideas The use of the imagination over reason

Reverence for nature Mystery Transcendence Synthesis Universality The beginnings of Romantic Poetry In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the sublime strengthened this turn to nature; in wild country sides, the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. The beginnings of Romantic Poetry In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. Another important subject of the Romantics was memory. Wordsworths romanticism and originality is most evident in his lengthy autobiographical poem, The Prelude (180550) British Romantic poets tend to. . . Show exuberance and optimism--at times revolutionary optimism--about the prospects for changing the individual and society Explore divisions within the human psyche (between self and others and self and nature) Strive after the infinite, not after limited perfection Emphasize individual expression, not imitation and obedience to formal rules, in art. Emphasize the concrete, the sensuous, and the particular in poetry. Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole. Valorize engagement with or return to nature as the regenerator of imagination and guide for all that is best in humankind.

See the poet as the rock of defense for human nature (Wordsworth); the poet has the power reunite a fragmented self and society. Stress creative imagination as the source of art; the mind at least partially creates what we call the world. Cultivate theories of poetic genius. Revere and explore the subjective nature of memory. Emphasize the emotional, or passionate, element in human beings. Reject the neoclassical emphasis on decorum, restraint, imitation of general nature, and previous poets. Are obsessed with originality and authority: they must create a system, or be enslaved by another mans (Blake). Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole. May replace the neatly rounded poem with a fragment; to complete a poem is to kill it, to destroy its growth as an organic, living entity (Nature is profoundly an engine of process; it never finishes anything). Defy the moral codes of ordinary society. Believe that poetry does not so much delight and teach (neoclassical requirements) as help the reader undergo a poetic/spiritual experience. Attempt to forge a secular scripture, to overcome fallen or alienated language. Favor the lyric over other types of poem (when a Romantic poet writes an ode, he or she refers to a state of mind, not so much to the poetic genre). Poets are the hierophants of an un-apprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Shelley (from A Defense of Poetry) Who were the British Romantic poets? There were many men and women we can categorize as British Romantic poets Today, we tend to focus on a canon of six British Romantic Poets These six were not all particularly popular in their own time, however. Other men and women whose names are largely forgotten were much more popular

The canon of British Romantic poets: William Blake (1757-1827) William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) John Keats (1795-1821) William Blake (1757-1827) A printmaker and painter as well as a poet Relatively unknown during his own time Considered a madman by some A mystic and a visionary A believer in racial and sexual equality A critic of conventional religion William Wordsworth (1770-1850) With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads Revolutionary as a young man Was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death. Wordsworths Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, he discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Poet, critic, philosopher. With William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets Best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work, Biographia Literaria Attacked for political radicalism Coleridge was influenced by the philosopher William Godwin Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Godwins daughter, recalled hiding behind the sofa as a child to hear Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) An idealist and advocate for social justice A strong skeptic A notorious and denigrated figure in his life (he was a political radical, and he abandoned his pregnant wife and his child) The idol of the next two or three generations of poets Famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron His writing significantly influenced the American Revolution John Keats (1795-1821) His work was critical attacked in the periodicals of the day His posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson was immense His poetry is characterized by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of negative capability, are almost as famous today as his poetry. Salient features of Victorian poetry Salient features of Modern Poetry

"[v]ery interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion--violence;

a good deal of obscurity on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness: an extremely personal style--refine your singularities; lack of restraint--all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, antipublic--he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive--the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more less associational structure of dramatic monologue."

Formal characteristics Open Form Free verse Discontinuous narrative Juxtaposition Intertextuality Classical allusions Borrowings from other cultures and languages Unconventional use of metaphor Metanarrative Fragmentation Multiple narrative points of view (parallax) Thematic characteristics Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future Disillusionment Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology Product of the metropolis, of cities and urban scapes Stream of consciousness Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century