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English 5BCharacteristics of
British RomanticPoetry
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What does Romantic mean?
The word romanticfirst became current in 18th-century English and originally meant romance-like, that is, resembling the strange, fanciful,
mythical character of medieval romances. Theword came to be associated with interest in theMiddle Ages, the emerging taste for wildscenery, ruins and other sublime locations, atendency reflected in the increasing emphasis inaesthetic theory on the sublime as opposed tothe beautiful.
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Romanticism
In Europe, Romanticism flourished in England,Germany, and France
It elevated the individual, the passions, and theinner life, embracing a more dramatic, personal,and emotional style--even to the point ofmelancholic emotion
Romanticism followed a period we call the
Enlightenment. During the 18th century, in areaction against Enlightenment ideas, feelingbegan to be considered more important thanreason, both in literature and in ethics
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What was the Enlightenment?
A broad intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly Britain, France andGermany, characterized by a rejection ofsuperstition and mystery and an optimismconcerning the power of human reasoning andscientific endeavor. It is also referred to as The
Age of Reason. It was both within and against
Enlightenment thought that Romanticism can besaid to have been conceived.
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What is Neoclassicism?
An 18th-century artistic movement, associated
with the Enlightenment, drawing on classical
models and emphasizing reason, harmony, andrestraint. Literally, new classicism, it marked a
renewed interest in the literary and artistic
theories of ancient Greece and Rome and an
attempt to reformulate them for contemporarysociety.
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German Precursors
Sturm und Drang, conventionally
translated as "Storm and Stress, was a
proto-Romantic movement in Germanliterature and music
It took place from the late 1760s through
the early 1780s
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Sturm und Drang
Individual subjectivity, and, in particular,
extremes of emotion were given free
expression in reaction to the perceivedconstraints of rationalism imposed by the
Enlightenment and associated aesthetic
movements
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German Romanticism
German Romanticism was the dominantmovement of the late 18th and early 19thcenturies in the philosophy, art, and culture of
German-speaking countries It developed relatively late compared to its
English counterpart, coinciding in its early yearswith the movement known as German
Classicism or Weimar Classicism, which itopposed
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German Romanticism
The early German romantics tried to create anew synthesis of art, philosophy, and science,looking to the Middle Ages as a simpler, more
integrated period. Later German Romanticism emphasized the
tension between the everyday world and theseemingly irrational and supernatural projections
of creative genius.
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German Romanticism: Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) said
that classical meant health, and romantic
meant illness Goethe was one of the key figures of German
literature and the movement of Weimar
Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries; this movement coincides with theEnlightenment and Romanticism
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German Romanticism: Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther(1774) is a novelthat was the first popular success of Goethe. Itwas very important in establishing the image ofthe introspective, self-pitying, melancholicRomantic hero
It is about a sensitive and intelligent young manwho is tormented by his own intellectualspeculations and love for a girl who is engagedto someone else
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German Romanticism: Goethe
Ultimately, Werther shoots himself The novel was credited with causing a wave of
suicides among young romantics throughoutEurope
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German Romantic Composers
Carl Maria von Weber Franz Schubert
Robert Schumann Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Franz Liszt Johannes Brahms Richard Wagner Ludwig van Beethoven
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French Romanticism
French literature from the first half of the 19th
century was dominated by Romanticism
English and German influences were importantin defining the interests of the French Romantics
They include Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott,
Lord Byron, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller
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English and German influences on French
Romanticism encouraged interests in. . . The historical novel
The Medieval Romance
Traditional myths Nationalism
The "roman noir" (Gothic novel)
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English and German influences on French
Romanticism encouraged interests in. . . Lyricism
Sentimentalism
Descriptions of the natural world The common man
Exoticism and orientalism
The myth of the romantic hero
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Impact and Authors (France)
The effect of the romantic movement wouldcontinue to be felt in the latter half of the centuryin wildly diverse literary developments, such asrealism, symbolism, and the so-called fin desicle decadent movement
Authors of prose, poetry, and drama includeVictor Hugo; Alexandre Dumas, pre; Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand; Alphonse deLamartine; Grard de Nerval; Charles Nodier;
Alfred de Musset; Thophile Gautier; and Alfredde Vigny
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What is the sublime?
Often associated with huge, overpowering
natural phenomena like mountains, waterfalls,
turbulent seas, and thunderstorms, thedelightful terror inspired by sublime visions was
supposed both to remind viewers of their own
insignificance in the face of nature and divinity
and to inspire them with a sense oftranscendence.
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How did the sublime relate to the beautiful?
Mere beauty was thought by the Romantics to
be inferior to the concept of the sublime. The
British writer and statesman Edmund Burke, whowas interested in categorizing aesthetic
responses, identified beauty with delicacy and
harmony, and he identified the sublime with
vastness, obscurity, and a capacity to inspireterror.
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The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen
Philippe Jacques De Loutherbourg
Caspar Da id Friedrich
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Caspar David Friedrich
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
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What shaped Romanticism?
At the turn of the century, fired by ideas ofpersonal and political liberty and of the energyand sublimity of the natural world, artists, writers,and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of
18th-century convention. Although thephilosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau (France)and William Godwin (England) had great
influence, the French Revolution and itsaftermath had the strongest impact.
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What shaped Romanticism?
In England, initial support for the French
Revolution was primarily utopian and idealistic
When the French failed to live up toexpectations, most English intellectuals
renounced the Revolution
However, the Romantic vision had taken forms
other than the political, and these continued to
develop
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Romanticism emphasized. . .
Individualism Creativity Revolutionary political ideas The use of the imagination over reason Reverence for nature Mystery
Transcendence Synthesis Universality
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The beginnings of Romantic Poetry
In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), WilliamWordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridgepresented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic:
poetry should express, in genuine language,experience as filtered through personal emotionand imagination; the truest experience was to befound in nature. The concept of the sublimestrengthened this turn to nature; in wild country
sides, the power of the sublime could be feltmost immediately.
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The beginnings of Romantic Poetry
In search of sublime moments, romantic poetswrote about the marvelous and supernatural, theexotic, and the medieval. But they also foundbeauty in the lives of simple rural people andaspects of the everyday world. Anotherimportant subject of the Romantics was memory.Wordsworths romanticism and originality is most
evident in his lengthy autobiographical poem,The Prelude (180550).
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British Romantic poets tend to. . .
Emphasize individual expression, not imitation
and obedience to formal rules, in art
Emphasize the concrete, the sensuous, and theparticular in poetry
Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole
Valorize engagement with or return to nature as
the regenerator of imagination and guide for all
that is best in humankind
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British Romantic poets tend to. . .
Emphasize the emotional, or passionate,element in human beings
Reject the neoclassical emphasis on decorum,
restraint, imitation of general nature, andprevious poets
Are obsessed with originality and authority:they must create a system, or be enslav'd by
another mans (Blake)
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British Romantic poets tend to. . .
Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole May replace the neatly rounded poem with a
fragment; to complete a poem is to kill it, todestroy its growth as an organic, living entity(Nature is profoundly an engine of process; itnever finishes anything)
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British Romantic poets tend to. . .
Defy the moral codes of ordinary society Believe that poetry does not so much delight and
teach (neoclassical requirements) as help the
reader undergo a poetic/spiritual experience Attempt to forge a secular scripture, to overcome
fallen or alienated language Favor the lyric over other types of poem (when a
Romantic poet writes an ode, he or she refersto a state of mind, not so much to the poeticgenre)
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Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehendedinspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadowswhich futurity casts upon the present; the words
which express what they understand not; thetrumpets which sing to battle, and feel not whatthey inspire; the influence which is moved not,but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world. Shelley (from A Defnceof Poetry)
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Who were the British Romantic poets?
There were many men and women we can
categorize as British Romantic poets
Today, we tend to focus on a canon of sixBritish Romantic Poets
These six were not all particularly popular in their
own time, however
Other men and women whose names are largely
forgotten were much more popular
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The canon of British Romantic poets:
William Blake (1757-1827) William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) John Keats (1795-1821)
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William Blake (1757-1827)
A printmaker and painter as well as a poet Relatively unknown during his own time Considered a madman by some
A mystic and a visionary A believer in racial and sexual equality A critic of conventional religion
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Blake's "A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows"
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Blakes illustration for his poem The Grave
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Blakes illustration for his poem London
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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped launch
the Romantic Age in English literature with their
1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads Revolutionary as a young man
Was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his
death
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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Wordsworths Preface to the Lyrical Ballads isconsidered a central work of Romantic literarytheory.
In it, he discusses what he sees as the elementsof a new type of poetry, one based on the "reallanguage of men" and which avoids the poeticdiction of much eighteenth-century poetry.
Wordsworth also gives his famous definition ofpoetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerfulfeelings from emotions recollected in tranquility."
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What is a Poet? . . .
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true,endowed with more lively sensibility, moreenthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
knowledge of human nature, and a morecomprehensive soul, than are supposed to becommon among mankind; a man pleased withhis own passions and volitions, and who rejoicesmore than other men in the spirit of life that is in
him; delighting to contemplate similar volitionsand passions as manifested in the goings-on ofthe Universe, and habitually impelled to createthem where he does not find them.
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. . . poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility: the emotion iscontemplated till, by a species of reaction, the
tranquility 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. . . .
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. . .In this mood successful composition
generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it
is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind,and in whatever degree, from various causes, is
qualified by various pleasures, so that in
describing any passions whatsoever, which are
voluntarily described, the mind will, upon thewhole, be in a state of enjoyment. (from the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads)
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Poet, critic, philosopher With William Wordsworth, one of the founders of
the Romantic Movement in England and one ofthe Lake Poets
Best known for his poems The Rime of theAncient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as
his major prose work, Biographia Literaria Attacked for political radicalism
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-
1834) Coleridge was influenced by the philosopher
William Godwin
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Godwins daughter,recalled hiding behind the sofa as a child to hearColeridge recite The Rime of the AncientMariner
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Mary Godwin eventually became Mary Shelley,
wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley
She mentions The Rime of the Ancient Marinertwice in her novel Frankenstein
Some of the descriptions in the novel echo the
poem indirectly
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Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Lady Caroline Lamb called him mad, bad, anddangerous to know
Of the six poets, he was the only best sellerduring his lifetime, mainly because he was a
celebrity He was famous for his sexual attractiveness,
charisma, extravagant living, numerous andscandalous love affairs, debts, separation from
his wife, and allegations of incest and what wasthen called sodomy He was a national hero to the Greeks because
he fought in their War of Independence
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George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron
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Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Byron falls into the period of Romantic poetry,
but much of his work looks back to the satiric
tradition of Pope and Dryden. In Canto III of DonJuan, he expresses his detestation for poets
such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who
disappointed the younger generation of
Romantic poets.
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Rebellion Exile
An unsavory and hidden past Arrogance Overconfidence Lack of foresight Self-destruction
In short, a man much like Lord Byron himself.
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Byron trivia:
His mother and his daughter were both
mathematicians
His daughter, Ada Lovelace, collaborated
with Charles Babbage on the analytical
engine, a predecessor of modern
computers
Though famous for his good looks and sex
appeal, he had a club foot
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
An idealist and advocate for social justice A strong skeptic A notorious and denigrated figure in his life (he
was a political radical, and he abandoned hispregnant wife and his child)
The idol of the next two or three generations ofpoets
Famous for his association with John Keats andLord Byron
His writing significantly influenced the AmericanRevolution
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Negative Capability
In a letter he wrote in December of 1817, Keats
stated, . . . it struck me, what quality went to
form a Man of Achievement especially in
literature & which Shakespeare possessed soenormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is
when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching
after fact & reason.
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Important Terms
The Enlightenment
Neoclassicism
Romanticism
Sublime
Utopian
Fin de sicle
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Important Terms
Sturm and Drang
Gothic
Byronic
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