Radical Poetry1. The

Romantics

Romantic Movement: Beginnings

• Romantic Poetry was born out of the Romantic Movement in Europe during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.

The movement was a reaction against the birth of industrialization, which created more urban environments, and the philosophical movement “The Enlightenment,” which promoted “reason” as the solution to humankind’s problems.

• Above all, however,

it was the impact of the French Revolution which gave the period its most distinctive and urgent concerns. Following the Revolution itself, which began in 1789, Britain was at war with France on continental Europe for nearly twenty years while massive repression of political dissent was implemented at home.

• Against this background much of the major writing of the period, associated with the term Romantic, takes place between 1789 (when the French Revolution began) and 1824 and can be seen as a response to changing political and social conditions in one respect or another.

"Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling." - Baudelaire

Core beliefs:Strong Feeling

Though from its title Romantic Poetry may seem to be about love, it is instead simply about strong feeling or emotion, especially in regards to nature. Romantic poets believed that the best tool they had for understanding the world was not science, but subjective experience.

The Common Man:• The Romantic movement marked a

shift the use of language. Attempting to express the "language of the common man," Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets focused on employing poetic language for a wider audience.

• In Shelley's "Defense of Poetry," he contends that poets are the "creators of language" and that the poet's job is to refresh language for their society.

Originality:• The Romantic movement emphasized the

creative expression of the individual and the need to find and formulate new forms of expression.

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's” - William Blake

• To the Romantics, the moment of creation was the most important in poetic expression and could not be repeated once it passed. Because of this new emphasis, poems that were not complete were nonetheless included in a poet's body of work.

The “Noble Savage”• The term "noble savage"

expresses a romantic concept of humankind as unencumbered by civilization; the natural essence of the unfettered person. Since the concept embodies the idea that without the bounds of civilization, man is essentially good, the basis for the idea of the "noble savage" lies in the doctrine of the natural goodness of man

PantheismMany romantic poets reference

the god-like power inherent in nature. This is often depicted as a spiritual force.

“And I have felta presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woods,And mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth . . . “[Tintern Abbey, 93-105 (1798)]

The Sublime:The quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

Poetic Philosophy• “ I have said that poetry is

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

• William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads