Intro to The Romantic Period Essay Example for Free

Intro to The sentimentalist Period EssayAt the turn of the century, fired by ideas of face-to-face and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artificeists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the industrial plant of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the french Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest pertain of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and angelist, and when the cut failed to live up to expectations, just about English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the amatory vision had taken forms other than political, and these puddle apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in lit periodry hi account statement, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual rhyme should express, in genuine oral communication, experience as filtered through pers onal emotion and imagination the truest experience was to be prepare in reputation.The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to reputation, because in wild rural areasides the power of the sublime could be felt most(prenominal) immediately. Wordsworths romanticism is probably most richly effected in his great autobiographical numbers, The Prelude (180550). In search of sublime mos, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also plunge beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets accept John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keatss great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in run-in of great power and beauty.Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought to a greater extent than essential fixs and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (182 0). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, positionly the rebellious, irreverent, eroti promisey inclined dupe Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817).William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollst hotshotcraft, wrote run aground breakout books on kind-hearted, and womens, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literarycriticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas doubting Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwoods Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. -A lthough the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her move around defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated benevolent descents within the stage setting of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. other(a) novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter n whizd for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics.The amorous periodThe nature of love storyAs a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the starting decades of the 19th, Romantic is indispensable but also a little lead in that respect was no self-styled Romantic movement at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegels Vienna lectures of 180809 was a clear distinction established between theor ganic, shaping qualities of Romantic art and the mechanical character of Classicism. many of the ages foremost writers apprehension that something newfound was happening in the worlds affairs, nevertheless. William Blakes affirmation in 1793 that a new nirvana is begun was matched a generation latishr by Percy Bysshe Shelleys The worlds great age begins anew. These, these volition give the world another heart, / And other pulses, wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh arche lawsuits came to the fore in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was invention ext closinged to every range of human endeavour.As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable distinction of the poetry of the time is the new role of individualist thought and personal shadeing. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to appraise the worldwide, to see the poet as a spokesman of fraternity addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of truth, the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blakes marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynoldss Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit. The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject motion the industrial plant of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.The emphasis on feelingseen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burnswas in some ship canal a continuation of the precedent cult of sensibility and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his come as having known no phrase but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive p articular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as feeling itself, employing thought only as the susceptible of its utterance. It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new magnificence was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge sawthe imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine seminal force that made the poet a god resembling being.Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as invention, imagination and judgement, but Blake wrote One baron alone makes a Poet Imagination, the Divine Vision. The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the whole snips of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the tykelike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized reason. Rousseaus sentimental intent of the noble savage was very much invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Drydens or that the type was adumbrated in the poor Indian of Popes An Essay on Man. A further score of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form if poetry essential be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the yeasty imagination.Wordsworth advised a young poet, You feel strongly trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the resilient principle that actuates it. This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of genres, each with its own lingual decorum and it le d to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing.Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or gaudy and inane, and totally unsuited to the convention of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworths own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change the conciliatory diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.PoetryBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGEUseful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets thems elves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to expresstheir feelings. Their concern was quite to change the intellectual clime of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early phylogenesis of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which experience had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 178485) he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for successor encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous level(p)t. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (179093) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the self-confidence of analytic reason in contemporary thought.As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be documentaryized in his time, he regenerate his efforts to revise his contemporaries view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive range of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizens rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished disseminated multiple sclerosis Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (180408) and Jerusalem (180420). Here, unsounded using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution.Wordsworth, who lived in France in 179192 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the ruth of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar (both to form part of the later Excursion) the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the westof England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothys immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 17981803, published 1897), and by Coleridges imaginative and wondering(a) genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, continued with poems displaying joyousness in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative Lines Written a Few Miles preceding(prenominal) Tintern Abbey, Wordsworths attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the family relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem address to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (179899 in two books 1804 in five books 1805 in 13 books revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child fostered also by beauty and by fear by an upbringing in sublime surroundings.The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes oft of the work of memory, a t heme explored as well in the Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of other(a) Childhood. In poems such as Michael and The Brothers, by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the poignance and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridges poetic festering during these years paralleled Wordsworths. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in The Eolian Harp (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as Religious Musings and The helping of Nations. Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind.Poems such as This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, The Nightingale, and Frost at Midnight (now sometimes called the communion poems but collected by Coleridge himself as Meditative Poems in Blank Verse) combine sensitive descriptions of nature w ith subtlety of psychological comment. Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in a kind of Reverie, represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also secondhand in the supernaturalism of The Ancient Mariner and the unfinishedChristabel. After his visit to Ger umpteen an(prenominal) in 179899, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche this attention bore yield in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. Dejection An Ode (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworths sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his shaping spirit of Imagination. The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause.The death in 1805 of his br other John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been automatic to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugalas Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridges periodical The Friend (180910) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleons first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society. The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moralistic and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the adven t in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the humanities. Coleridges lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel Kubla Khan A Vision The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as the most impressive vocaliser of his age (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.No other period in English literature displays more motley in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the ordinal and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. love affair, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticisms exposition.In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to ultramodern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Ro mantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. Melancholy was quite the cant for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance ones creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a answer against the Enlightenment mode of thinking.Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. give thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The rejoinder of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connecter with medievalism and mythology. The tales of exponent Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formallevel, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the expression and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable.The high-flown language of the previous generations poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to coffer verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. S ome criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation.He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something immaculately fender and altogether misunderstoo d by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections.Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, fewer of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely boffowork, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifica lly the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworths poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects.There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New E ngland Transcendental Movement.The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an approving brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect get the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists operative during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and He rman Melville, were crafting densely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism.However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his ownbrilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their follow-up of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melvilles literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that unavoidable close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melvilles writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns m ore than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficially, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and supra the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human.Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the aberration of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitmans voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitmans brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style to verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century.Walt Whitman got his starting as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitmans democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of strange beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings get him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of theoriginal masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poes theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American literature was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of clue and imagination.The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthornes deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even t he grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hesters daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthornes particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism.His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the condemnation that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of existence was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a persons consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like Young Goodman Brown, neither t he reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never only disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface.Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems oflife in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more flagrant kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.