After the Renaissance--a period of exploration and expansiveness--came a reaction in the direction of order and restraint.

Generally speaking, this reaction developed in France in the mid-seventeenth century and in England thirty years later; and it dominated European literature until the last part of the eighteenth century.

Romanticism Began in Germany and quickly spread throughout Europe, affecting the literature, music, art and philosophy of the age.

Term coined by German writer Friedrich Schlegel

The term ROMANTIC comes from the word ROMANCE, which refers to a medieval heroic narrative centered on a heroic individual and incorporated elements of the exotic and mysterious.

Romanticism celebrated emotion over reason, nature over human artifice, ordinary people over aristocrats, and spontaneity and freedom over decorum and control.

An emphasis on the individual and a growing reverence for the power of the creative imagination.

In British poetry, the writer’s ability to feel and experience life intensely was valued, and many poems and novels explored the passionate struggles and internal turmoil of the individual.

The shift toward these new sentiments led to political uprisings throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

This time period saw the birth of freedom and equality and terrible bloodshed.

The French Revolution“Liberty Leading the People”

The true beginning of the Romantic Era came in 1798 with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Lyric poem ~ a highly musical type of poetry that expresses the emotions of the speaker.

The tone tends to be personal and meditative.

Ex: Sonnet, Ode, Ballad, Elegy, and Dramatic Monologue

Ballad ~ a poem that tells a story and typically is written in four-line stanzas. Most ballads have a regular rhythm and rhyme scheme and feature a refrain, or repetition of lines.

Ex: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ode ~ a lyric poem on a serious theme, usually with varying line lengths and complex stanzas.

Ex: “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sonnet ~ a fourteen-line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, that follows one of several different rhyme schemes.

The English, Elizabethan, or Shakespearean sonnet is divided into four parts: three quatrains and a final couplet.

Sonnet 18By William ShakespeareShall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Allegory ~ a work in which characters, events, or setting symbolize, or represent, something else.

Ex: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” by William Blake

THE TYGER (from Songs of Experience)By William Blake (1794)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Voice ~ the narrative voice had become self-consciously liberated and self-aware, the speaker seeking emotional intimacy with the reader.

Dialect ~ the Romantic poets rejected the artificial language of eighteenth-century literature, preferring syntax that sounded more like natural speech.

Diction ~ the author’s word choice. Ex: In William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” the tone is colloqial.