Romanticism

As its name suggests, the Romantic Age brought a more dating, individual, and imaginative approach to both literature and life.

The individual, rather than society, was at the center of the Romantic vision.

The Romantic writers tended to be optimists who believed in the possibility of progress and social and human reform.

The Romantic writers tended to believe that eighteenth-century dedication to common sense and experience, reasonableness, and tradition, though in many ways admirable, had resulted in a limitation of vision, an inability to transcend the has facts of the real world to glimpse and ideal one.

For a time, almost every important British writer responded warmly to the cry of the French for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

Whereas the writers of the Age of Reason tended to regard evil as a basic part of human nature, the Romantic writers generally saw humanity as naturally good, but corrupted by society and its institutions of religion, education, and government.

The industrial revolution took place in England from 1750 – 1850.

The forms of romanticism were so many and varied, in some instances embracing contradictory values, that it is difficult to speak of the movement as a whole.

Perhaps the safest thing to say is that romanticism represented an attempt to rediscover the mystery and wonder of the world, an attempt to go beyond ordinary reality into the deeper, less obvious, and more elusive levels of individual human existence.

For most of the Romantic poets, nature was the principal source of inspiration, spiritual truth, and enlightenment.

Poets of the Romantic Age focused on the ordinary person and common life in order to affirm the worth and dignity of all human beings.

People longed for literature that dealt with the elemental themes of courage and valor, hatred and revenge, love and death.

Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge may be regarded as the first generation of Romantic poets, writing most of their major works from 1786 to 1805.

Byron, Shelley, and Keats are the second generation, producing their major works between 1810 to 1824.

Overall, the literature of the Romantic Age has about it a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, a deep personal earnestness, a sensuous delight in both the common and exotic things of this world, a blend of intensely felt joy and dejection, a yearning for ideal states of being, and a probing interest in mysterious and mystical experience.

In 1793 revolutionary France declared war on England. From that point until 1815, with no more that a brief respite, England and France were engage in the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon Bonaparte – a brilliant young Corsican, one of the most successful military strategists the world has ever known, and originally a champion of the French Revolution – gained control of France and became emperor in 1804.

The Industrial Revolution has begun in the 1760’s, and certainly by the end of the Romantic Age its effects had produced drastic social and economic changes.

Scientific achievements in the areas of geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy flourished during the Romantic Age.

In sum, the Romantic Age in England saw excruciating living conditions as well as the possibility for relief and improvement.

The strength of the common working people and the promise of freedom from oppression were keenly felt by the Romantic poets.

The literary movement called Romanticism represented a renewal of the emphasis on human emotions, which had existed before the 1700’s and that had never totally died out.

The Romantic Age in English literature begins in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the product of a great creative collaboration between the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

With respect to poetic form, they advocated using natural, ordinary speech over the formal, stylized diction of the 1700’s.

Drama did not flourish during the Romantic Age

Still, some of the leading Romantic poets wrote so-called closet drama, poetic drama to be read rather than produced.

The gothic novel became increasingly popular during the Romantic Age.

Perhaps the most famous gothic novel published during this time was Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The basic idea in Romanticism is that reason cannot explain everything.

Romanticism holds that pure logic is insufficient to answer all questions.

Romantics tended to think that everything has its own value, an “inner genius.”