ROMANTICISM

ROMANTICISMDefinitionMain CharacteristicsMain Figures

William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Definitions

Romanticism

DefinitionRomanticism was a broad intellectual and

artistic disposition that arose toward the end of the 18th century and reached its zenith during the early decades of the 19th century.

DefinitionIn general, this period can best be seen as

one in which the major upheavals such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, along with the growth of nationalism, impelled the bourgeois classes toward political, economic, cultural, and ideological hegemony.

DefinitionIt was in the fields of philosophy and

literature that Romanticism – as a broad response to Enlightenment, neoclassical, and French revolutionary ideals – initially took root.

Main Characteristics:

Romanticism

Main Characteristics:The ideals of Romanticism included:

1. an intense focus on human subjectivity and its expression.

2. an exaltation of nature, which was seen as a vast repository of symbols.

3. an exaltation of childhood and spontaneity.4. an exaltation of primitive forms of society.5. an exaltation of human passion and emotion.6. an exaltation of the poet.7. an exaltation of the sublime8. an exaltation of imagination as a more

comprehensive and inclusive faculty than reason.

Main Characteristics:The Romantics often insisted on artistic

autonomy and attempted to free art from moralistic and utilitarian constraints.

Main Characteristics:Perhaps the most fundamental trait of all

Romanticism was its shift of emphasis away from classical objectivity toward subjectivity: human perception playing an active role rather than merely receiving impressions passively from the outside world.

Main Characteristics:In general, the Romantics exalted the status

of the poet, as a genius whose originality was based on his ability to discern connections among apparently discrepant phenomena and to elevate human perception toward a comprehensive, unifying vision.

Main Characteristics:The most crucial human faculty for such

integration was the imagination, which most Romantics saw as a unifying power, one which could harmonize the other strata of human perception such as sensation and reason.

Irony rose in status from a mere rhetorical device to an entire way of looking at the world, becoming, in the guise of Romantic irony, an index of a broad philosophic vision. Irony effectively entails a failed search for meaning and unity.

Main Figures:

Romanticism

Main Figures: William Wordsworth

Romanticism

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)The English movement reached its most

mature expression in the work of William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth’s devotion to nature was lifelong; from first to last, he viewed himself as a follower of nature; he saw nature as embodying a universal spirit.

The most elemental factor in Wordsworth’s return to nature was imagination

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)Wordsworth’s most important contribution to

literary criticism, the celebrated and controversial Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This collection of poems was published jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798; Wordsworth added his preface to the 1800 edition.

Wordsworth’s primary concern is with the language of poetry. He states that the poems in this volume are “experiments,” written chiefly to discover “how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure”.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)In what is perhaps the most striking and

important passage of the Preface, Wordsworth states that the central aim of the poems in Lyrical Ballads was: “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspects.”

Main Figures: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Romanticism

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) is his

most significant literary-critical work. Some critics have praised the insight and originality of this work, viewing Coleridge as the first English critic to build literary criticism on a philosophical foundation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)Coleridge offers his best-known definitions of

imagination. He makes his famous suggestion that fancy and imagination, contrary to widespread belief, are “two distinct and widely different faculties”: they are not “two names with one meaning, or . . . the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living

Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.FANCY is a mode of Memory emancipated from

the order of time and space.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)Coleridge views the imagination as a faculty

which unites what we receive through our senses with the concepts of our understanding; but he goes further in viewing imagination as a power which “completes” and enlivens the understanding so that the understanding itself becomes a more comprehensive and intuitive (rather than merely discursive) faculty.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)Coleridge insists that the language of poetry

is essentially different from that of prose. He acknowledges that poetry is formed from the same elements as prose; the difference lies in the different combination of these elements and the difference of purpose.