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Romantic Poetry Presentation
AP Literature
The Romantic Movement… brief overview http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rakesh_Ramubhai_Patel
The Romantic Movement was a revolt against the Enlightenment and its focus on rational and scientific thought.
The characteristics of Romantic literature involved an emphasis on passion, emotion, spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, and nature.
Throughout the 19th century, romantic poetry, in particular, became the most significant work of the period.
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats are the notable British Romantic poets.
Nature, religious fervor, emotional response to beauty, and Ancient Greek aesthetics, are some of the common themes in their work.
Note that each Romantic poet had his own style and emphasized different aspects. That’s where you come in with your research.
BRIEF notes about each Romantic
Poet….
William Wordsworth http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/296
Wordsworth's mother died
when he was eight--this
experience shapes much of his
later work. Not long after, his
father died, leaving him and his
four siblings orphans.
Wordsworth's poetry centers
around the interest and
sympathy for the life, troubles
and speech of the "common
man".
Wordsworth was influenced by his wanderings and his
preoccupation with nature and man’s obsession with materialism.
He was friendly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth's most famous work is The Prelude. The poem,
revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet
and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry.
Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life,
the poem was published posthumously.
Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in
England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions.
Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847,
Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William
Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his
wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.
George Gordon, Lord Byron http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lord-byron
The most flamboyant and
notorious of the major
Romantics, George Gordon, Lord
Byron, was also the most
fashionable poet of his day.
He created an immensely popular
Romantic hero (known as the
Byronic Hero)—defiant,
melancholy, haunted by secret
guilt—for which, to many, he
seemed the model.
Byron is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic
revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshipper
of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and
freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of
original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his
works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life
to the Greek war of independence.
His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative,
ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional
poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous
correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets,
blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose.
In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for
freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the
Western mind and heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/samuel-taylor-coleridge
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/292
Samuel Taylor Coleridge published The Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth in 1798, an event later seen as the beginning of the Romantic movement in England.
Coleridge held imagination to be the vital force behind poetry, and distinguished among different kinds of imagination in his long prose work Biographia Literaria.
Coleridge is probably most noted for the haunting
imagery of his poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
and “Kubla Khan”.
He was influenced by Plato's Republic, and co-
constructed a vision of pantisocracy (equal government
by all).
Coleridge suffered from financial problems, and later ill
health. He became addicted to opium (evident in much of
his poetry), and lived off of financial donations and
grants until he died.
William Blake http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-blake
In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake "neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself 'a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth."
Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of men.
Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing.
Poet, painter, and engraver, Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men.
Blake’s two famous volumes of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience show "the two Contrary States of the Human Soul." (Blake)
Blake had a unique religious, spiritual viewpoint based on a visionary idea, freedom, and individualism, and he had radical political views.
Percy Bysshe Shelley http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/179
As the eldest son, Shelley stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather's considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament.
He attended Eton College and Oxford University.
Shelley had heretical and atheistic opinions.
Shelley eloped and married, only to later elope and marry Mary Shelley (who wrote Frankenstein).
Shelley was influenced by Godwin (Mary Shelley’s
father) and his freethinking Socialist philosophy.
Shelley was also a good friend of Byron’s.
He traveled and lived in various Italian cities throughout
his life.
His poetry emphasizes individualism, freedom, nature,
and the importance of the subjective imagination.
John Keats http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/66
Keats lost both his parents at a young age.
He was a licensed apothecary, but never practiced as one; instead, he dedicated himself to writing poetry.
Keats’ poetry focuses on mortality, the beauty of nature, and includes many myths and allusions to Greek mythology and aesthetics.
Keats contracted tuberculosis and died at only twenty-
five years old.
Because he was ill for a time before he died, many of his
poems address his awareness of death, the importance of
beauty and God, and frequently reference mythology and
the ancients.