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THE ROMANTICS

Romanticism – What is it?

The term “Romanticism” does not mean

pathetic love poems or badly-written semi-

erotic 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.

The six most well-known English Romantic poets are, in order of birth and with an example of their work:

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.

William Blake’s “Ancient of Days”

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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.

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

Lord Byron c.1816, by Henry Harlow

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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 COMMENTS

The Age of Enlightenment

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 Description of Characteristic

Interest in the common man and childhood 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.

Strong senses, emotions, and feelings 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.”

Awe of nature 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.

Celebration of the individual Romantics often elevated the achievements of the misunderstood, heroic individual outcast.

Importance of imagination Romantics legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority.

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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