13/03/2024
Romanticism is a literary movement that originated in Britain in the 1780s. It continued until the 1830s. The related literary movement of American Romanticism came later, thriving from the 1820s to the 1860s. British Romanticism went through, broadly speaking, two generations of poets who had their own approaches to the genre. The first generation consisted primarily of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, while the second generation was spearheaded by Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron.
Despite its name, Romantic literature is not primarily focused on romantic love. Instead, it has a wide variety of characteristics, with romantic love playing only a relatively small part. All of the major Romanticism characteristics come together to address certain fundamental themes. While Classicism was focused on structure, order, and formal perfection, Romanticism dealt with emotion, individual experience and the natural world.
The Romantics were fascinated by transcendent emotional experiences like love, grief, and death. They were also interested in the interplay between the beautiful and the sublime. The following characteristics of Romantic literature can be found in many poems and even some novels by the British Romantic writers.
The natural world was of immense importance to the Romantics. It was a lens through which they could understand themselves and it was a source of endless wonder. Many Romantic works explored the natural world, often using an almost worshipful tone. Metaphors about nature are found even in the earliest Romantic works, like Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". Often, the Romantics wrote about such overwhelming emotional experiences that the natural world was the only thing big enough to serve as a canvas to express them.
Not all descriptions of nature were positive, however. Sometimes, the Romantics used the natural world to explore themes of doom, death, and corruption. A great example of this darker side of the natural world can be found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'' which describes the adventures of a sailor who survives a storm at sea. The following is an excerpt that demonstrates the prevalence of the natural world throughout the poem:
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
This is one of Coleridge's most famous poems and it is where the idea of an albatross around one's neck comes from.
The Romantics were interested in individual experiences of the world as opposed to the search for objective truth or reality. While individualism was something that all of the Romantics prized, it is clear in the work of none so much as William Blake. Blake was an eccentric with unique religious beliefs that made their way into his poetry. He was also an artist who illustrated many of his own poems. In his book of prose, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake included his own religious beliefs in the form of poetry that sounds like biblical prophecy. An excerpt showing his individual approach is as follows. It is entitled ''The Proverbs of Hell.''
In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plough.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.
The text is based on the Book of Proverbs and is sometimes mocking in tone, as Blake also included his revolutionary political beliefs in the work.
British Romanticism was a literary movement that lasted from approximately 1780 until the 1830s. The movement was largely a response to and a rejection of the tenets of Classicism, an earlier literary movement. Romanticism had a number of characteristics that set it apart from other literary movements and from Classicism in particular. It was a style of writing that was concerned with emotion and subjective experiences. Romantic poet William Wordsworth described poetry as ''the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.'' The Romantics made frequent use of literary devices like personification and pathetic fallacy, as in ''Ozymandias'' by Percy Shelley.
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In the final decades of the 18th century, literature in England was stuck in a rut. For much of the previous century, classicism, which was a witty, ornate style influenced heavily by the work of ancient Greece and Rome, dominated English literature. This form produced masterpieces like Alexander Pope's hilarious ''The R**e of the Lock.'' At its worst, classicism could be dreadfully boring. Bound by tradition and elaborate rules, it was often only accessible to an elite able to understand the witty wordplay and classical references.
By the final decades of the 18th century, a new literary and artistic movement was afoot. Romanticism was a literary movement that began in Germany and migrated across Europe. Romanticism was largely a reaction against the strictures of classicism. It prized nature over the industrialized city, emotion over reason, and the individual over institutions like church and state. Writers associated with Romanticism, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats, didn't see themselves as a unified school of poetry. Later critics lumped them together as the English Romantics due to similarities across their bodies of work.
By the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution had come to England. Cities like London were full of dirty factories that spit black smoke into the air day and night. The cities were overcrowded and filled with garbage. No wonder the Romantics sought refuge in nature!
This love of nature is indicated in the poems that make up Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge first published in 1797. Wordsworth's ''Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey'' is a classic Romantic poem about finding spiritual renewal in nature. The following lines describe the poet's finding solace in a return to nature:
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
Despite common themes, the Romantics never fully agreed on anything. This tension can be seen in Lyrical Ballads itself. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge loved nature, though he saw it as a darker and more uncontrollable force, something to be feared and respected. His most famous poem, ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'' tells a terrifying story of a sailor's experiences at sea.
In his influential preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined poetry as ''the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,'' which is an apt description of Romantic poetry. Rejecting the witty wordplay and self-conscious nature of classicism, Romantics embraced powerful emotion.
Perhaps the greatest example of the role of emotion in Romantic poetry is the work of John Keats. Keats' most famous poems, such as ''To Autumn'' and ''Ode on a Grecian Urn'' are full of the poet's emotional reactions to the world around him. In ''To Autumn,'' the focus is the changing seasons, while in ''Ode on a Grecian Urn,'' it is an ancient work of Greek pottery. Keats' own spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling can be seen in this ecstatic final stanza from ''Ode on a Grecian Urn:''
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
