characteristics of british romantic poetry rev

7/31/2019 Characteristics of British Romantic Poetry Rev

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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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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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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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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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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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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
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/George_Gordon_Byron2.jpg


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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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