ENGLISH LITERATURE

ROMANTICISM

Karla Dayanna - Lucineide Araújo - Renan Cerveira

 ROMANTICISM IN EUROPE

• In Germany is called  "Sturm und Drang", so "passion

and feeling".
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
• In France Romanticism was developed later than in
other countries.
• In England, Romanticism was preceded by a period
called Pre-Romanticism, while Romanticism was
divided into 2 different periods: 1st and 2nd
generation.
 Pre-Romanticism

• Poetry in Pre-Romanticism had 3 main ideas:

1. Introspection: where the poet reveals inner feelings
and emotions
2. Sensibility: where the poet in particular shows the
passions created by love
3. Love for nature: where the poet is alone in the
countryside showing his feelings in contact with
nature.
 There are 3 kinds of poetry
1. Poetry of nature
Came from the poetry of Elizabethan period. The
main concept was the love of nature.
2. Graveyard school
Where the main concepts were introspection and
sorrow for the death of someone. There is also na
interest for life after death, coffins and corpses.
3. Gothic poetry (medievalism)
There is an interest for the past and for supernatural
events. The past is more attractive.
 ROMANTICISM

• Romantic period goes from the second half of the

XVIII century to the first half of the XIX century, so
from George III to Queen Victoria.

• Historical events:
French Revolution
Industrial Revolution
Agricultural Revolution
For literature, Romanticism was just opposite of the
Enlighment:

ENLIGHTENMENT ROMANTICISM

-there is a static vision of the world  -there is a dynamic vision of the world
 
-there is conservatism  -there is a revolution 

-there is rationality  -there are sentiments or feelings 

-there is uniformity of ideas  -there is diversity of ideas 

- the most important subjects are - the most important subjects are
physic and maths  biology and, later, genetics. 
The first Generation of Romantic
Poets

• William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel

Taylor Coleridge
• The most important concept is nature (Pantheism)
• “Sublime”: Freedom in expression feelings.
 The Second Generation of
Romantic Poets

• George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John

Keats.

• Refusal of real world

• Sometimes use of drugs.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

(1792- 1822)
 Author’s life

• Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a

wealthy Sussex family
• He was influenced by William Godwin
“The Necessity of Atheism”
• He married Godwin’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft,
the author of Frankestein
• Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English
Romantic poets (which also included John Keats and
the infamous Lord Byron)
• Shelley drowned while sailing in a
storm off the Italian coast. He was not
yet thirty years old

• Because he died young like the other

artists of that movement, Shelley has
attained iconic status as the
representative tragic Romantic artists
 AnalYsIs
“Ode to the west wind” by Percy B. Shelley

O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, (A)

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead (B)
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, (A)
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, (B)
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, (C)
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed (B)
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, (C)
Each like a corpse within its grave, until (D)
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow (C)
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (D)
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) (E)
With living hues and odours plain and hill: (D)

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; (E)

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear! (E)
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!
Thou For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

40 Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!
 If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O, uncontroulable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
• Figures of speech

Metaphor
Simile
Allusion
• Form

Five stanzas – four three line stanzas and a two-line

couplet;
Iambic pentameter;
Terza rima;
Rhymes – ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, EE.
 Shelley’s style
• The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are
largely the same themes that defined Romanticism,
especially among the younger English poets of
Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political
liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination.
• Shelley’s intense feelings about beauty and
expression are documented in poems such as “Ode to
the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he
invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his
relationship to his art.
• Shelley was able to believe that
poetry makes people and society
better; his poetry is suffused with this
kind of inspired moral optimism,
which he hoped would affect his
readers sensuously, spiritually, and
morally, all at the same time.
 Major themes

• The Power of Nature: Shelley discusses the power of

both seen and unseen nature throughout his entire
canon.

• Atheism: The theme of a godless universe cannot be

separated from Shelley’s continuous reference to the
inspiration he received from Nature.
• Oppression/Injustice/Tyranny/Power:
Although Shelley expresses it in many
different ways, the idea of a majority
being unjustly ruled by an oppressive
few (with sometimes the few being
unjustly persecuted by the many) is
perhaps the most common theme in
Shelley’s work.

• Revolution/Mutation/Change/Cycle:
Given Shelley's general discontent, it is
no surprise to see Shelley frequently
considering the theme of “change.”
• Inspiration: Shelley never stopped
believing in the changes that could
end all oppression in this world (in the
Western world in particular).

• Narcissism/Vanity/Self: Arguments
can be made for either side of the
coin: On the one hand, Shelley can be
viewed as a selfish and adulterous
lover, an absentee father, and a
disloyal countryman. On the other
hand, he is a bard devoted to altruistic
goals and especially freedom.
• Immortality vs. Mortality: Shelley
did not really challenge the
apparently scientific proof of
mortality, but he did struggle with
the notion of death in spirit.
Thank you!!