Romanticism:
A Basic Definition
• A style in the fine arts and literature that emphasizes
• Passion over reason •Imagination and intuition over logic
• Full expression of the emotions and spontaneous action over restraint and order
• In these ways, romanticism contrasts with classicism
• Romantic tendencies are found throughout literary history
• But the Romantic Movement refers to the period from late 18th century to mid-19th century
Romanticism Neoclassicism
Emphasis on Imagination Emphasis on Intellect
Free Play of Emotions and Passions Restraint and Obsession with Reason Proximity
to the everyday life of common man Remoteness or aloofness from everyday life
Inspiration sought from country life and nature Incidents from urban life prevailed Primarily
Subjective Primarily Objective Turned to Medieval Age for inspiration Turned to Classical writers
for inspiration.
Medieval Romances
• Medieval romance flourished in the 12th century when clerks, working for aristocratic patrons,
began to write for a leisured and refined society. Like the courtly lyric, romance was thus a vehicle of
a new aristocratic culture which was based in France, and spread to other parts of western Europe.
• Features of medieval romances (which influenced the Romantic movement):
• Stories based on legendary material
• Themes of courtly love and seduction
• Fantasy and imaginative freedom
• Secular portrayals of history, politics, or everyday life.
Romantic Revival
• The 18th century in both England and Germany saw a strong reaction against the rationalistic
canons of French classicism.
• This reaction drew upon the romantic material that had survived from medieval times.
• Hence it is called “Romantic Revival”
• Precursors of Romanticism
• Herder, Schiller, Goethe
• Gothic novelists
• Transitional poets
• Walter Scott
Qualities of Romanticism
• Romanticism saw a shift
•from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination
•from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and natural
• a shift from public, impersonal poetry to subjective poetry
•from concern with the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite.
Freedom and uninhibited self expression
“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of
things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion
and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all
time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it
is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in
which to move his wings.”
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth.
In revolt against literary conventions
• Keats (1795-1821) –“ If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come
at all.”
• Lines were often enjambed, loose, with a free use of caesura and other spontaneous breaks in
patterns.
“. . . spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me – . . .”
The Prelude, Wordsworth.
Strong, original, authentic feeling
• Wordsworth – Poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, resulting from
“emotions recollected in tranquility.”
• Hazlitt – Poetry is the language of imagination and the passions.
• Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind
man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In
hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even
into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration.
Individualism
• The Poet
• As prophet, seer and legislator
•In the age of American and French revolutions, when moral, religious and psychic systems of
control had collapsed, the social responsibility of the poet is emphasized
• The Romantic Hero
• A solitary dreamer, even an outlaw, who turns away from the society, one who is plagued by guilt
and remorse •In revolt against social conventions
• Examples
• Byronic hero
• Manfred in Otranto
• Beethoven: After his death, Beethoven became a mythic figure, one immortalized by his music
as the tragic genius, and Romantic revolutionary and hero.
The Poet as Prophet
• From Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and
sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unweakened Earth The trumpet of a
prophecy!
• From Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating
hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew
hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Idealization of Rural Living
“I met a little Cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head. She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad: Her eyes
were fair, and very fair; —Her beauty made me glad.” “We are Seven”, Wordsworth
Romanticism and Society
• The belief that people are naturally good and have been corrupted by institutions of civilization
•Influence of Rousseau, idealization of the noble savage
• Opposition to political tyranny
•Inspiration of the American and French revolutions
• The common man gains voice and greater freedom
• Suffrage, abolitionist and other socialist movements
• Educational theory and practice were reformed
•Influenced by Rousseau
An Organic View of Poetry
• Poets began to regard a poem as an organic whole to be described in terms of a biological
organism (and not as a craftsman’s rendering of previous material described in mechanistic terms)
• Coleridge, drawing on German philosophy, was the first to emphasize the organic nature of art.
• Recognition of a unique universe created by an individual poem.
• Decorum and rules become irrelevant
• Rather than ‘delight’ the reader or ‘imitate’ nature, the objective of poetry the reflection of the
experiences of the author.
What lead to the Romantic Revival
“Discovery” of Shakespeare
• Following the Licensing Act of 1737
• Shakespeare was a romantic in temperament
• Revival of Folk Traditions
• Fairy tale and folklore themes appeared in painting, literature, music
• Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
• Translation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from German (1823)
• Orientalism in literature and art
• Oriental Tales: Johnson’s Rasselas, Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, Beckford’s Vathek
• Translations from Sanskrit and Persian, made by Indologist William Jones (Shakuntala in 1789) Dec
2024 Batch What lead to the Romantic Revival?
• Biblical, mythical and mystical literature
• William Blake’s apocalyptic poetry
• Macpherson’s Ossianic poems
• Influence of Rousseau (1712-78)
• Explored in his fiction the agonies of frustrated love
• Exalted the “noble savage”
• Man is born with the potential for goodness
• This was in opposition to Thomas Hobbes
• The phrase “noble savage” first appears in Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada – Almanzor, a
Spanish Muslim who is actually a Christian prince refers to himself as a “noble savage”
• Exhorted poets to “return to nature”
• French Revolution
• With its ideals of “liberty, equality, fraternity”
• Edmund Burke’s “sublimity of terror”
• The sublime as something that could provoke terror in the audience
• Terror and pain are the strongest of emotions.
• Burke believed there was an inherent "pleasure" in this sublimity of terror.
• Anything that is great, infinite or obscure could be an object of terror and the sublime, for there
was an element of the unknown about them
• Macabre and Gothic elements in paintings
• Gothic Romances
• Transitional Poetry
• Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Transitional Poetry
• The Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope valued order, clarity, poetic diction, logic, refinement,
and decorum. Theirs was an age of rationalism, wit, and satire
• This contrasts greatly with the ideal of Romanticism, which was an artistic revolt against the
conventions of the fashionable formal, civilised, and refined Neoclassicism of the eighteenth
century.
• 18th century poets like William Blake, Thomas Gray, and Robert Burns employed classical forms
and romantic themes
• They are the precursors of romanticism.
John Dyer (1699-1757)
• Poet and successful artist
• Like other contemporaries, applied elevated poetic language to rustic or familiar themes • “The
Fleece”
• About care and shearing of sheep etc
• Grongar Hill
• Best-known work
• Describes a country landscape – the valley of the River Towy in Dyfed
• Anticipates some of the spirit of Romanticism
Graveyard Poets
• Not a formal school
• A common term for 18th century poets (especially in the 1740s-50s) who found inspiration in
graveyards and contemplated on mortality
• Gloomy meditation in verse was fashionable at this time
• Poems set in graveyards with yew trees
• Contributed to the melancholy side of Romanticism
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
• The second most important poet of the 18th century, after the dominant Alexander Pope
• Despite his great talent, Gray wrote only a small body of poetry which he published rather
reluctantly
• There was a reclusiveness and timidity that characterized his whole life, partly due to his frail
health and homosexuality
• Of the many children born to his parents, only Thomas survived infancy, and was deeply attached
to his mother
Early Works
• In 1742, Gray sent Richard West his “Ode on the Spring”, shortly before the latter’s death due to
tuberculosis
• Gray was translating Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding at this time
• At his mother’s house in Stoke Poges, Gray wrote Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, Hymn to
Adversity, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College and the unfinished Hymn to Ignorance
• In 1743, he graduated in law and became reconciled with Walpole the following year
• In 1747, when Walpole’s cat died, he sent him Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a
Bowl of Gold Fishes
Three Early Poems
• Sonnet on the Death of Richard West
• On the death of his friend
• Hymn to Adversity
• Spenserian allegory
• Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
• Recalls his schooldays as a time of great happiness
• Ends with the lines “No more; where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise” (Gray is not
promoting ignorance, but reflecting nostalgically on a time when he was allowed to be ignorant, his
youth)
Gray’s Elegy
• Gray became famous for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard published in 1751, which he
had sent to Walpole the previous year
• Written in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire in 1750
• Spirit of late 18th century sentimentalism
• Dr. Johnson praised the Elegy (but was not appreciative of Gray)
• In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader. . . The "Churchyard"
abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom
returns an echo.”
Gray’s Elegy: A Summary
• Begins with a contemplation of the landscape
• Moves to a consideration of the ‘short and simple annals of the poor’
• Moral ideas arise from this consideration
• Poet then muses upon human potential and mortality
• Presents the prospect of the poet’s own death; Art (this poem) might offer a durable memorial
against time
• Deep personal feelings involved
The Pindaric Odes
• “The Progress of Poesy”
• Subtitled “A Pindaric Ode”
• “The Bard”
William Collins (1721-1759)
• Among the transitional poets, Collins was second only to Gray in influence
• The son of a poor hatter, William Collins went to London after his Oxford education, determined
on a literary career
•In London, he befriended James Thomson, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick
• When he was 17 and still at college, he completed the Persian Eclogues (1742, revised as Oriental
Eclogues)
• Was a lifelong friend of the poet Joseph Warton (1722-1800)
William Cowper (1731-1800)
• An important forerunner of Romantic poetry who wrote about evening life and scenes of English
country life
• Melancholy and devout man, retired to rustic seclusion
• Sensitive and disappointed in life
• Tone of morbidity and tragedy in poetry
• Had a landscape painter’s eye
• Tremendous popularity in the Romantic period owed to his fervent advocacy of religious and
humanitarian ideals, including his support of the anti-slavery movement
• Coleridge called him “the best modern poet”
• Robert Southey wrote the monumental Life and Works of Cowper (1837)
Major Works
• The Progress of Error and other poems, including eight satires. These were published in 1782
under the title Poems by William Cowper
• In 1781, wrote his most substantial work, The Task, a long poem in six books and nearly five
thousand lines. The Diverting History of John Gilpin was also included in this volume.
The Castaway
• Advocates liberty, brotherhood of man • Powerfully detailed description of a sailor washed
overboard and left alone in the midst of the ocean to swim vainly for an hour before drowning • Its
last lines are continually quoted by Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, a novel much concerned with
human loneliness.
James Macpherson (1736-1796)
• Scottish poet, literary collector, politician and “translator” of Ossianic poems
• After completing his education from Edinburgh University, Macpherson met the Scottish writer
John Home, the author of the blank verse tragedy Douglas. Macpherson recited some Gaelic verses
and also showed Home manuscripts of Gaelic poetry, supposed to have been picked up in the
Scottish Highlands and the Western Isles
William Blake (1757-1827)
• Poet and painter; son of a successful London hosier and Dissenter influenced by the Swedish
religious philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg
• Blake never went to school and was educated at home by his mother
• Read widely in literature and languages
• At the age of 14, was apprenticed to an antiquarian engraver, where he was influenced by Gothic
art, and his fascination with the nude began
• Nudity is associated with classical art, and was appropriate in the late 18th century
• Nudity / sexuality was an expression of his views on life and the times Dec 2024 Batch Dec 2024
Batch Early Career
• Having married Catherine Boucher, Blake lived in Leicester Fields, where their neighbours included
the wife of the artist Hogarth, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose art epitomized neoclassicism, which
Blake rejected
• Poetical Sketches was published by Blake’s friends in 1783
• In 1789, he published Songs of Innocence, the gentlest of his volumes of lyrics
• The Book of Thel illustrates his early mysticism
• Tiriel, written 1788-89, was the first of his elaborately symbolic writing
Innocence and Experience
• Songs of Innocence (1789) initiated his series of “Illuminated Books” incorporating the
identification of ideas with symbols which could be translated into visual images.
• Songs of Experience appeared in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs
of Innocence and of Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
• The poems in this volume contrasted the world of pastoral innocence and childhood (meek virtues
of the Lamb) with the world of adult corruption and repression (the dark forces of energy in the
Tyger)
Blake as a radical
• Blake’s dislike of human authority and radical sympathies led to his friendships with William
Godwin and Thomas Paine, and also reflected in his writings about religion, French revolution, etc
during this period
• He sympathized with the revolution, and disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of
institutionalized religion, and of the institution of marriage in its conventional legal and social form
• His unorthodox religious views derived partly from Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whom
he also criticized, and are particularly evident in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Attention
to detail Dec 2024 Batch The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) • Blake’s principal prose work,
which appeared in 1790 along with his engravings
• Written in imitation of biblical prophecy
• Expression of Blake's intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs
• Title is an ironic reference to Swedenborg’s Latin book on afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758)
• Cites and criticizes Swedenborg several times in the book
• The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Inferno and
Milton's Paradise Lost Dec 2024 Batch Lambeth Books
• Songs of Experience
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• Visions of the Daughters of Albion
• America, a Prophecy
• The First Book of Urizen Dec 2024 Batch “Prophetic Books”
• The Prophetic Books are a series of lengthy, interrelated poetic works drawing upon Blake’s
personal mythology (mythopoeia)
• Important Prophetic Books:
• Milton: A Poem in Two Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men (1804-1810)
• The most famous part of his poem is when Milton returns to earth and in the person of the living
poet, corrects the spiritual error glorified in Paradise Lost
• The preface to Milton includes the famous short poem “Jerusalem”
• The last and the longest of the Prophetic Books is the epic Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant
Albion (1804-1820) • A complex account of Albion (Man) torn between the forces of imagination and
the forces of natural religion Dec 2024 Batch Blake’s Personal Mythology
• In The Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Blake introduced the figures of his personal
mythology
• Urizen, symbol of restrictive morality, appearing in America: A Prophecy (1793) • Orc, the arch-
rebel
• Along with the ideas of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, these symbols are developed in Europe
and The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los and The Song of Los
• Urizen has been expelled from the abode of the immortals and has taken possession of man • Los
is the champion of light, and the lord of time, but is held in bondage
• Orc is the symbol of anarchy, opposed to Urizen Dec 2024 Batch Blake’s Personal Mythology
• The whole sequence is an inversion of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Blake denounced for justifying
the evil committed by man.
• Blake’s criticism of Christianity is strongest in Europe and The Song of Los
• The Four Zoas appeared in 1797.
• Albion is the primeval universal man whose fall and division results in the Four Zoas. Albion also
represents Britain. The Four Zoas are:
• Urizen (reason)
• Urthonah (spirit)
• Luvah (passion)
• Tharmas (body) Urizen (reason) Luvah (passion) Tharmas (body) Urthonah (spirit) Dec 2024 Batch
Blake’s Last Works
• In 1803, after an unsuccessful association with the patron William Hayley, Blake settled down in
London for the rest of his life
• Here he finished his Prophetic Books
• The Ghost of Abel is a minute poetic drama of 70 lines, that questions the views of Byron in 1821
• Auguries of Innocence (written 1803)
• Contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption
• The Everlasting Gospel
• Presents Jesus not as the traditional messianic figure but as a supremely creative being, above
dogma, logic and even morality Dec 2024 Batch Blake: An Assessment
• Blake deliberately wrote in the style of the Hebrew prophets and apocalyptic writers. Like
medieval craftsmen, Blake designed, engraved and produced his own works.
• He was a mixture of extremes in both thought and work, profound as well as naïve
• His vision of the contradictory forces beneath the appearance of human civilization mirrors the
intense political turmoil of Europe and the New World in this period.
• His interest in legend and antiquity was revived in the Romantics’ rediscovery of the past,
especially the Gothic and the medieval
• Features of poems: lyricism, democratic sentiment, love of nature & simple life, childhood, home,
apocalyptic vision
