ROMANTICISM

The Romantic Age is the period in which new ideas and attitudes arose in reaction to the dominant
18th-century ideals of order, calm, harmony, balance, rationality.
Enlightened trends

Emphasised reason and judgement.

Focused on society as a whole.

Followed authority.

Interested in science and technology.

Romantic trends

Emphasised imagination and emotion.

Valued individuals.

Looked for freedom.

Represented common people.

Interested in the supernatural.

English Romanticism consisted of a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical
reason. It was influenced by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution.
The Romantics:

expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions;

placed the individual at the centre of art;

argued that poetry should be free from all rules.

The Romantics main themes:

Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being.

Use of creative imagination.

Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect.

A new view of the artist as an individual creator.

Fascination with the irrational, the past, the mysterious, the exotic.

The Romantic nature:

Opposed to reason.

A substitute for traditional religion.

A vehicle for self-consciousness.

A source of sensations.

A provocation to a state of imagination and vision.

An expressive language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human
feelings and the self.
The Romantic imagination:

A creative power superior to reason.

Shaped the poets fleeting visions into concrete forms.

A dynamic, active, rather than passive power.

Allows human beings to read nature as a system of symbols.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few
years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. In 1798, they
published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.
The second generation of Romantic poets includes Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats
Wordsworth considered NATURE a source of joy, inspiration and knowledge, a mother and a moral
guide
Coleridge considered NATURE a universal force, the representation of Gods will and love
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS (1799-1815)
In the Napoleonic era:

the British navy dominated the sea;

the French army dominated the European continent;

the great hero of the British navy was Admiral Horatio Nelson. He defeated the FrenchSpanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain in 1805.

The total defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium where the British troops,
commanded by Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.
Their consequences
1. the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and Malta as
strategic interest;
2. enormous financial costs;
3. Britain was on the verge of starvation, bankruptcy and evolution.
4. The period which covered the end of the Napoleonic Wars (181120) was called the
Regency, since the Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted as monarch during the
illness of his father George III (17601820).
WILLIAM WORTHWORTH

In 1791 he travelled to Revolutionary France and was fascinated by the Republican

movement.

In 1795 he developed a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he
collaborated in the 1797-1799 period to write Lyrical Ballads.

Main works: Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800). This edition contains the famous
Preface, the Manifesto of English Romanticism. The Prelude (1850).

In his poems:

Man and nature are inseparable.

Pantheistic view of nature: nature is the seat of the spirit of the universe.

Nature comforts man in sorrow, it is a source of joy and pleasure, it teaches man to love, to
act in a moral way.

Wordsworth exploited the sensibility of the eye and ear to perceive the beauty of nature.

He believed that the moral character develops during childhood

The sensations caused by physical experience lead to simple thoughts.

Memory is a major force in the process of growth

The poet as a teacher He shows men how to understand their feelings and improve their
moral being. He draws attention to the ordinary things of life where the deepest emotions are
to be found. He almost always used blank verse and proved skilful at verse forms such as
sonnets, odes, ballads and lyrics.

Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical

poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times.

The poem Daffodils shows the importance of experiencing Nature as a necessary step
towards the comprehension of the sense of life. The personification of Nature and the
presence of the poet (the use of I-me-my) give the idea of how man can give a meaning to
his life only discovering his place in the harmonic order of Nature. The guide who can
experience is the poet himself, who, through Imagination, perceives Nature and recollects
his feelings producing the poetic composition. The first few lines of the poem portrays the
speakers initial emotion. I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high oer vales and
hills, the speaker is described as a cloud, lonely, aimless, and cruising quickly and lightly
through vales and hills. A vision of the daffodils moved him to a state of being
connected to something, as the poet wrote, When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of
golden daffodils. The peace and harmony of the dancing daffodils replaced his feeling of
loneliness; he is no longer a lonely cloud. Imagery is the essence of all forms of poetry.
This is a poem rich in visual imagery used to convey his appreciation of nature. Right from
the beginning the speaker metaphorically compares himself to the clouds, creating a sense of
isolation from the rest of the world. Using the colour reference in host of golden daffodils
enables Wordsworth to alter the mood of the poem to a more a cheerful one. These features
make the poem lively and more active

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals. After the disillusionment with the French
Revolution, he planned a utopian commune-like society, Pantisocracy, in Pennsylvania. This project
came to an end.

Main works: 1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first poem of the collection Lyrical
Ballads, 1816 the dreamlike poem Kubla Khan, composed under the influence of opium,
1817 Biographia Literaria, a classic text of literary criticism and autobiography

Coleridges poetry:

Content Supernatural characters

Aim To give them a semblance of truth

Style Archaic language rich in sound devices

Main interest The creative power of imagination

Coleridges imagination: It is divided into primary (Creative, original, used

unconsciously.Human individual power to produce images.The power to give chaos a
certain order) and secondary (Poetic faculty, which not only gives shape and order to a given
world, but builds new worlds)Fancy (A kind of logical faculty: the mechanical ability the
poet has to use devices, like metaphors and alliteration, in poetry in order to blend various
ingredients into beautiful images)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: The story of a mariner who commits an act against nature by
killing an albatross. At the beginning of the poem the stops a wedding guest: he cannot choose
but hear a sad, mysterious story about the burden of the mariners guilt. The mariner expiates
his sin by travelling around and telling the people he meets his story to teach them love and
respect to natures creatures.
WILLIAM BLAKE
He was deeply aware of the great political and social issues of his age. A political freethinker, he
supported the French Revolution and remained a radical throughout his life. He explored the
timeless struggle between the role of law and reason and the powers of love and imagination. He
used symbols as part of a deliberate attempt to avoid any kind of realism. As artist he studied the
works of Raphael and Michelangelo. Blake wrote some prophetic books (The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America and Europe). These books express Blakes
own personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs.
Blake believed in the reality of a spiritual world but he thought that Christianity was responsible
for the fragmentation of consciousness and the dualism characterising mans life. So he had a vision
made up of complementary opposites (Good and evil, male and female, reason and imagination,
cruelty and kindness) Blake considered imagination as the means through which man can know the
world. He did not believe in mans rationality.

Songs of Innocence is written in the pastoral mode with simple imagery. It deals with childhood as
the symbol of innocence. Songs of Experience is more complex and pessimistic.
The poems pair those of Songs of Innocence. The world of innocence is full of joy and happiness,
while the world of experience is full of cruelty and injustice. The child becomes the object of
Blakes poetry because he is closer than the adult to the original state of harmony with nature.
London:

Theme: the causes of mans lack of freedom.

Key images: The mind-forgd manacles; three victims: the chimney-sweeper, the soldier
and the prostitute.

Devices:
-

Repetitions: (in) every and mark(s).

Metaphors: blackening contrasts with appals (makes pale).

Hyperbole: runs down in palace walls.