The Age of Romantics

Romanticism

Romanticism has very little to do with things

popularly thought of as "romantic," although love
may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art.

Rather, it is an international artistic and

philosophical movement that redefined the
fundamental ways in which people in Western
cultures thought about themselves and about
their world.
Romanticism
In literature and the visual arts, a style that
emphasizes the imagination, emotions, and
creativity of the individual artist.

Romanticism also refers specifically to late-

18th- and early-19th-century European culture,
as contrasted with 18th-century classicism.
 Romanticism in literature began to emerge in
the Augustan period, as early as 1726 (when
James Thomson began ‘The Seasons’,
1726–30).
Inspired by the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and by
contemporary social change and revolution (American and
French), Romanticism emerged as a reaction to 18th-century
values, asserting
• emotion and intuition over rationalism,
• the importance of the individual over social conformity,
• and the exploration of natural and psychic wildernesses
over classical restraint.
 The movement, in both literature and art, was
a reaction against classical constraints of
style and theme. As the 18th century
progressed, classicism seemed less and less
satisfactory as an expression of the
increasing dilemmas faced by society.

 In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic

social and political norms of the Age of
Enlightenment and a reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature.
 The Industrial Revolution was beginning to transform
the traditional ways of life, particularly in the country, and
poverty and exploitation were increasing in towns and
cities.

There was also a reaction against universal religious belief,

as a result of scientific experimentation.

In this context, Romanticism replaced tightly controlled

classical certainties with images of ideal, and often
dangerous, natural beauty and grandeur.
The chaos of nature became an analogy for human
emotions and experiences. The key issues were that
emotion and intuition, rather than logic, ruled man, and
that the individual was more important than the society he
or she lived in.
Major Themes of Romantic Art and Literature
include
 a love of atmospheric landscapes; nostalgia
for the past, particularly the Gothic;
 a love of the primitive, including folk traditions;

 cult of the individual hero figure, often an artist

or political revolutionary;
 romantic passion;

 mysticism; and

 a fascination with death.

 The Romantic movement developed the idea
of the absolute originality and artistic
inspiration by the individual genius, which
performs a "creation from nothingness;"
 In literature, Romanticism is represented by
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord
Byron, and Walter Scott in Britain;
 Victor Hugo, Alfonse de Lamartine,
George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas père in
France;
 Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt
Whitman in the US reflects the influence of
Romanticism.
 Goethe and Schiller in Germany,
 Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.
 Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a
position as the supreme faculty of the mind.
This contrasted distinctly with the traditional
arguments for the supremacy of reason.

The Romantics tended to define and to present

the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or
creative power, the approximate human
equivalent of the creative powers of nature or
even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than
passive power, with many functions.
 Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all
art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that
helps humans to constitute reality, Uniting both
reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the
paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"),
imagination is extolled as the ultimate
synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile
differences and opposites in the world of
appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a
central ideal for the Romantics. Finally,
imagination is inextricably bound up with the other
two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the
faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a
system of symbols.
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics.
As suggested above, it was often presented as
itself a work of art, constructed by a divine
imagination, in emblematic language.
--nature as a healing power,
--nature as a source of subject and image,
--nature as a refuge from the artificial
constructs of civilization, including artificial
language
--nature as an organically unified whole.
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with
the above concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the
imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis
on the importance of intuition, instincts, and
feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater
attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement
to purely logical reason.

Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as

"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"
marks a turning point in literary history.
The Romantics asserted the
importance of the individual, the
unique, even the eccentric.

In style, the Romantics preferred

boldness, free experimentation and
they promoted the conception of the
artist as "inspired" creator .
 artists often turned for their symbols to domestic
rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and
older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the
ballad, to contemporary country folk who used
"the language of commen men," not an artificial
"poetic diction," and to children (for the first time
presented as individuals, and often idealized as
sources of greater wisdom than adults).
 Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday
subjects, various forms of the exotic in time
and/or place also gained favor. Often, both the
everyday and the exotic appeared together in
paradoxical combinations.
Poetry

On the whole, literary romantics found poetry the

most powerful medium of the Romantic
movement.

In search of sublime moments, romantic poets

wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the
exotic, and the medieval. But they also found
beauty in the lives of simple rural people and
aspects of the everyday world.
Early Romantics
The early Romantics witnessed a time of great revolution. This
was the time of the French Revolution and the onset of
industrialisation. After the storming of the Bastille the
revolutionary spirit spread all over Europe and gave rise to
Romanticism.
The spirit of the Romantic period is evidenced in the poetry of
early romantics such as
William Blake,
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
 Each Romantic poets tended to have their
own individual views on Nature and the
benevolence of Nature is explored differently
in the poetry of the early Romantics.
 William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Experience
For William Blake nature in its glorious state
epitomised the state of innocence. It provided
a clear vision of how life should be and
showed the way for children and adults to
behave.
Blooming nature, flowers, lambs and
shepherds illustrate the Songs of Innocence.
By contrast, the Songs of Experience are
characterised by dark forests, sick flowers,
and destroyed gardens.
 For Blake nature symbolises harmony, the
primitive view of the world, which has not
been overlaid by the restrictions of civilised
“reason” and oppression.
The natural bond with nature for Blake is the symbol
of humans’ invisible nature, their Imagination, which
is the manifestation of God himself in the human
soul.
 William Wordsworth's ‘The Prelude’
(published in 1850, after his death) contrasts
his childhood in the unspoiled countryside
with the changes since, and portrays nature
as a godlike force.

 For Wordsworth Nature’s inspiration provides

sufficient subject matter in itself, and it is a
stimulus for the poet to engage in the most
individualistic of human activity, that of
thinking.
 The work of English poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge frequently takes as its theme the
healing power of natural beauty.
 The Second Generation of Romantic Poets
included
John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
Lord Byron.
 The most influential works of the Romantic
movement is the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a
collaboration between the poets Wordsworth and
Coleridge.
 The theme of death is also a major one, either in
imagination or reality. English poet John Keats's
‘Ode to Autumn’ (1819), written two years before his
own early death, confronts this issue in a positive
way.
 The extremes of a literature suddenly freed
from 18th-century restrictions are well
demonstrated by the open defiance of
Christian belief and morality.
 English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of
God as the ‘enemy’, and not the preserver, of
mankind in his long poem ‘Promethus
Unbound’ (1820).
 Byron developed the ‘anti-hero’ (an immoral
and destructive character) in his long poem
‘Don Juan’ (1819–24).
 Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic
hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He
has been continually identified with his own
characters, particularly the rebellious,
irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron
invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist
irony.
 Another type of anti-hero is the individual
who asserts his own desires without regard
for the good of society. Such a character is
found in Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancient
Mariner’ (1797–8), in which, after bringing a
curse upon himself and his fellow sailors by
killing an albatross without any reason, he
ends the poem wandering the earth.
Prose
The rejection of modern society led to a fashion for
historical, and particularly medieval, stories. Good
examples are Ivanhoe (1819) and other works by Scottish
writer Sir Walter Scott.
The influence of the medieval continued throughout the
19th century, particularly among the artists of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The gothic novel combined many romantic elements,
including wild and dreadful landscapes were popular.

Novels such as Frankenstein (1818), by English writer

Mary Shelley, shows increasing suspicion of scientific
experimentation as opposed to the ‘natural’ way of life.
 Although the great novelist Jane Austen
wrote during the romantic era, her work defies
classification. With insight, grace, and irony she
delineated human relationships within the
context of English country life.

 Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and

romantic, made the genre of the historical novel
widely popular.