the age of romanticism -...
TRANSCRIPT
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)