romanticism

Romanticism

The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form."

Index

Definition

Against

Features

Artist

Children

Nature

Daffodils

Wordworth

W.Blake

London

Thankfulness

link - video to watch

This period is generally mapped from the first political and poetic tremors of the 1780s to the 1832 Reform Act. Sparkled by revolutions in the United States (1776 - against Britain's power over the colonies) and France (1789 - against the Ancién Regime), the Romantic period coincides with the societal transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of liberal movements.

01

Neoclassicism

Romantic poetry

01

01

models and rules

models and rules

broke free form them

strictly followed

02

02

language and syntax

language and syntax

romantic poetry

Title here

vivid language, simple syntax

artificial language

03

03

imagery

imagery

vehicle of inner perception

decorative function

literary movement in England during the late 17th century and the 18th century, which tried to revive the artistic ideals of classical Greece and Rome. Neoclassicism was characterized by emotional restraint, order, logic, technical precision, balance, elegance of diction, an emphasis of form over content, clarity, dignity, and decorum. Its appeals were to the intellect rather than to the emotions, and it prized wit over imagination

Attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuryThe term Romanticism:

• comes from the literary genre of the Medieval Romance dealing with chivalrous love and values;
• was introduced later on to define this artistic movement

definition

Romanticism as reaction to:

• Enlightenment and 18th-century rationalism
• materialism and progress
• industrialization
• urbanization
• capitalism and consumerism

CIVILISATION IS WHAT HAS MADE US SICK...

Comparison

Romanticism

Enlightment

1. is about Reason
2. Emphasis on Human nature
3. is about men trying to understand and triumph over nature
4. Forward looking - it values progress, thinking of where they were going and the gain

1. is about Passion/emotions
2. Emphasis on Nature
3. Nature over men: it steps back and looks at the power of nature over men
4. backward looking - what they've lost, trying to retain as much as possible of the past

5 I's of Romanticism- Intuition (feelings, emotions winning over reason; something we're born with) -Imagination or fancy (typical of children) -Innocence (typical of children, born innately good) -Inner experience and individualism (looking inside ourselves and being true to ourselves) -Inspiration (being in contact with nature) and idealism

5 I's

01

02

appreciation of the beauties of nature

general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect+ power of the irrational over human fragile minds

features

05

an emphasis on subjectivity

04

03

an obsessive interest in folk culture and the mysterious; the nostalgia for the medieval era

an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to spiritual truth

THE CULT OF THE EXOTIC and THE MEDIEVALcontrast with the filthy present reality ↓↓↓ far away both in space and in time ↓↓↓ rediscovery of the art and popular traditions of the Middle Ages (‘Gothic vogue’); new taste for ruins; interest in what was wild, supernatural, magical, frightening

exotic

Childhood: Age of Innocence

• The child was admired because he was:

• naive
• pure, seed of creativity
• unspoilt by civilisation
• uncorrupted (natural goodness) and unschooled
• sensitive and spontaneous

ser to God

Romantic poets believed the child had access to a unique worldview...he is closer to nature and is endowed with a greater imagination which adults have neglected because of their busy lives

Imagination was owned only by CHILDREN and VISIONARY POETS The poet seen as a prophet - his role was to denounce social evils through poetry

poet

Artist

a new view of the artist as a sensitive, supremely individual creator, whose spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures

Author

• Landscape of the mind, mirror of the poet's mood
• means to convey moral truths
• vehicle for self-consciousness: nature allows people to discover what they truly are
• source of joy, comfort and relief from city life
• real living being
• sublime

NATURE

Representative literary form

the lyric poem, spoken in first-person (the lyric I) often identified with the poet, caught between passion and reason, finding correspondences in natural surroundings for the introspective workings of heart and mind.

the lyric I

Poetry

He described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotions recollected in tranquillity"

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry.

Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. He lost his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13, so he was sent off by guardian uncles to a grammar school

Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.

He received an excellent education in classics, literature and mathematics, but the chief advantage to him there was the chance to enjoy the boyhood pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors.

Writing

Stimulated by Coleridge and his sister, W. started to write short lyrical poems whose main subject was nature.

W. Wordsworth

Samuel T. Coleridge

These poems appeared in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

Nature

for W. nature can help , arouse in people strong emotions and inspire and nurture the imagination in contrast with the culture and the society of his time that are degenerating, corrupting and repressing people by creating a kind of emotional blindness

• nature as opposed to the city • nature as source of joy • nature as a sort of goddess who comforts the man and teaches to love

+ info

Daffodils

The poem was inspired by an event on 15 April 1802, in which Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a "long belt" of daffodils. Written some time between 1804 and 1807., it was first published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes, and a revised version was published in 1815.

nature lyric poem

W. Blake

• English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary
• W. Blake is the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets
• Famous for his illuminated books: he invented a printing method which combined his artistry and what he wrote

London

The poem describes a walk through London, which is presented as a pained, oppressive, and impoverished city in which all the speaker can find is misery. It places particular emphasis on the sounds of London, with cries coming from men, women, and children throughout the poem. The poem is in part a response to the Industrial Revolution, but more than anything is a fierce critique of humankind's failure to build a society based on love, joy, freedom, and communion with God.

Lyric poem about London in the 18th century

Examples

• Batman
• Milton's Satan
• Frankenstein
• Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre
• Jim Morrison
• Amy Wineouse

the Romantic hero

definition

Romantic heroes like poets have been somehow rejected by society or are otherwise non-conventional in their ideas and ways of life

Characteristics

- self-centered - innocent - ambitious - isolated - a loser who is in truth deeply noble

• introspective
• moody, rebel, arrogant
• attractive
• intuitive
• rejected social norms/non conformist

+ info

Thank you!