The Age of Romanticism

A diverse intellectual & cultural movement

A reaction against 18th century Classicism

Instead of reason & discipline, Romanticism embraced emotion, freedom, & imagination

The individual & the subjective experience

Trusted intuition, emotion, & feelings as guides to truth

General Observations

Beginnings

Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

Swiss by birth, adopted England as his home

numerous strange, allegorical paintings

Beginnings

In addition to Fuseli, other precursors to Romanticism were Goethe, especially Sorrows of Young Werther & the English poet/artist William Blake (see later slides)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, usually associated with the Enlightenment, is sometimes seen as a transitional figure to Romantic thought

British Romantic Poetry

William Blake (1757-1827)

Individual imagination & the poetic vision

The imagination could awaken human sensibilities

Fierce critic of industrial society

Songs of Innocence (1789) & Songs of Experience (1794) are reactions to the horrors of industrialism, esp. its treatment of children

William Blake (1757-1827)

Prisons are built

with stones of Law,

Brothels are built

with bricks of

Religion

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPERWhen my mother died I was very young,And my father sold me while yet my tongueCould scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

And so he was quiet, and that very night,As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they runAnd wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,And got with our bags and our brushes to work.Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) & Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Nature is humanity's most trusted teacher

Compassion & feeling bind all men together

Poetry: emulate common speech of the people

Robert Frost was more successful at this than either Wordsworth or Coleridge, by the way

What though the radiance which was once so brightBe now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behindWilliam Wordsworth ~ “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,Whether the summer clothe the general earthWith greenness, or the redbreast sit and singBetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branchOf mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatchSmokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fallHeard only in the trances of the blast,Or if the secret ministry of frostShall hang them up in silent icicles,Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~ “Frost At Midnight”

Wordworth & Coleridge

Wordsworth’s early poetry among his best:

Besides his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, also:

“Tintern Abbey” (Suttle le Grand loves this one)

“Surprised by Joy” (a title C.S. Lewis later used)

Coleridge:

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (spooky)

“Kubla Khan” (also spooky)

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Poetry: the “lava of imagination”

An aristocrat who rebelled against conformity & social restrictions

His Romanticism inseparable from his liberal politics

Don Juan, “She Walks in Beauty”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Defined romantic heroism & the cult of individual audacity

A “poet’s poet”

John Keats (1795-1821)

Possibly the most gifted of the English Romantics

Died at 25, tuberculosis

“Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Ode To A Nightingale,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

Women Writers & Romanticism

Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851)

Daughter of William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft

Fascinated by contemporary scientific developments

Luigi Galvani & Galvinism

associated electricity with the “spark of life” after experiments with frogs’ legs

Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)

A twisted creation myth

Individual genius gone wrong

Most popular British novel for at least 30 years

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

George Sand (1804-1876)

Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin

Best known by her pen name, George Sand

Spent her life defying convention & rebelling against middle-class moral values

Took numerous lovers, including the composer Frederic Chopin

“Gothic” novels

So-called Gothic novels were born during this period

The Castle of Otranto— 1764, Horace Walpole

Varney the Vampire— 1845-47, J. M. Rymer

Wagner the Wehr-Wolf— 1847, G.W.M. Reynolds

In the U.S., Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)

Tell Tale Heart, Black Cat, etc.

Romantic Painting

British Painting

John Constable (1776-1837)

“It is the soul that sees”

Emphasized the artist's individual technique

British Painting

J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)

Intensely subjective, personal, & imaginative

Experimented with brush strokes & color

What appear to be bizarre color choices & hazy imprecision may instead be realistic: the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 did cause spectacular sunsets and strange atmospheric phenomena

French Painting

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

New ways of visualizing the world

Pointed to early 20th century modernism

American Painting

The young United States was looking to the Old World for artistic leadership

Most artists trained or studied in Europe

American responses to “Nature” both intensified & tempered by the challenge of taming a real wilderness

Hudson River School

Not really a “school” or unified movement

Group of artists lumped together due to similarities in style & subject matter

Strong focus on landscapes, often large canvases

Major figures include Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederick Church, & Thomas Moran

Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits 1849

Frederick Church, Twilight in the Wilderness

Frederick Church, Niagara (detail) 1857

Thomas Moran, Arizona Sunset

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Dealt sympathetically with the experience of the common people

Nôtre Dame de Paris (1831) & Les Misérables (1862)

Romantic Literature

The Romantic Uniqueness of Cultures

Johann von Herder (1744-1803)

Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History

Civilization arises out of the Volk (common people) not elites

The Volkgeist — spirit or genius of the people

The Brothers Grimm

Pioneer linguists & philologists

Collected, collated & edited folktales all over the German states

Published them as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-1815)

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Walter Scott’s poems & historical novels helped define Romantic view of history

Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798)

Brought back the Rosetta stone

Establishment of the Egyptian Institute

Orientalism

Orientalism

Fascination with medieval history & religion (especially the Crusades)

Looking for the roots of Christianity

A fascination with ethnography & new regions

The “oriental renaissance”

Defining Europe by looked at the Orient

Orientalism

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

Bildungsroman full of yearnings & restless love

In later life Goethe backed away from the excesses of Romanticism & sought a revival of Classicism

Goethe & Beethoven

Faust (1790)

Faust sells his soul to the devil in return for eternal youth & universal knowledge

Faust portrayed as Romantic seeker, redeemed by the purity of Margaret’s love

Mephistopheles a more interesting character

Goethe & Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

A Classicist & Romantic

Rough, boorish, but a genius

Began losing his hearing as a young man

Glorified nature & triumph of the individual against the odds

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Raised music to an art form at the center of the Romantic movement

Major works: nine symphonies, five piano concertos, 32 piano sonatas, one opera, hundreds of other works

Died during a violent thunderstorm

His funeral in Vienna drew some 50,000

Summary

Romanticism a major— although not organized or consistent— movement in art, literature, & music

A reaction against Enlightenment values of balance, restraint, & reason

Romanticism celebrated Nature, emotions, subjectivity, the odd, eccentric, individualism (esp. individual struggle against the odds)