Background

Romanticism is the name given to a dominant movement in literature and the other arts – particularly
music and painting – in the period from the 1770s to the mid-nineteenth century:

 It is regarded as having transformed artistic styles and practices

 Like many other terms applied to movements in the arts, the word covers a wide and varied
range of artists and practices
 It is a retrospective term, applied by later literary, art and musical historians. None of the
artists we refer to as Romantics would have so described themselves
 It was a European phenomenon, particularly powerful in Britain, France and Germany, but
also affecting countries such as Italy, Spain and Poland. There was also, to some extent, an
American version of the movement.

Reaction to earlier age

Like many other literary movements, it developed in reaction to the dominant style of the
preceding period:

 The eighteenth century is often described by literary historians as the Augustan Age
because it sought to emulate the culture of the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus (27
BCE – 14 CE)
 Classical standards of order, harmony, proportion and objectivity were preferred – the
period saw a revival of interest in classical architecture, for instance
 In literature, Greek and Roman authors were taken as models and many eighteenth
century writers either translated or produced imitations of poetry in classical forms
 In its early years, Romanticism was associated with radical and revolutionary political
ideologies, again in reaction against the generally conservative mood of European society.

Main features
Central features of Romanticism include:

 An emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity

 The importance of self-expression and individual feeling. Romantic poetry is one of the
heart and the emotions, exploring the ‘truth of the imagination' rather than scientific truth. The
‘I' voice is central; it is the poet's perceptions and feelings that matter.
 An almost religious response to nature. They were concerned that Nature should not just
be seen scientifically but as a living force, either made by a Creator, or as in some way divine,
to be neglected at humankind's peril. Some of them were no longer Christian in their beliefs.
Shelley was an atheist, and for a while Wordsworth was a pantheist (the belief that god is in
everything). Much of their poetry celebrated the beauty of nature, or protested the ugliness of
the growing industrialization of the century: the machines, factories, slum conditions, pollution
and so on.
 A capacity for wonder and consequently a reverence for the freshness and innocence of
the vision of childhood.
 Emphasis on the imagination as a positive and creative faculty
 An interest in ‘primitive' forms of art – for instance in the work of early poets (bards), in
ancient ballads and folksongs. Some of the Romantics turned back to past times to find
inspiration, either to the medieval period, or to Greek and Roman mythology.
 An interest in and concern for the outcasts of society: tramps, beggars, obsessive
characters and the poor and disregarded are especially evident in Romantic poetry
 An idea of the poet as a visionary figure, with an important role to play as prophet (in both
political and religious terms).

Who were the Romantics?

Some authors have been regarded as pre-Romantic:

 William Blake (1757-1827) a visionary poet who was also an artist and engraver, with a
particular interest in childhood and a strong hatred of mechanical reason and industrialization;
 Robert Burns (1759-1796) who worked as a ploughman and farm labourer but who had
received a good education and was interested in early Scots ballads and folk-song;
 Walter Scott (1771-1832), another Scot, who developed his interest in old tales of the Border
and early European poetry into a career as poet and novelist.

The first generation of Romantics is also known as the Lake Poets because of their attachment to
the Lake District in the north-west of England:

 William Wordsworth (1770-1850) who came from the Lake District and was the leading poet
of the group, whose work was especially associated with the centrality of the self and the love
of nature;
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was Wordsworth's closest colleague and collaborator,
a powerful intellectual whose work was often influenced by contemporary ideas about science
and philosophy;
 Robert Southey (1774-1843), a prolific writer of poetry and prose who settled in the Lake
District and became Poet Laureate in 1813; his work was later mocked by Byron;
 Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was a poet but is best-known for his essays and literary criticism;
a Londoner, he was especially close to Coleridge;
 Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) the youngest member of the group, best known as an
essayist and critic, who wrote a series of memories of the Lake Poets.

The second generation of Romantic poets included:

 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824);

 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the leading poets;
 John Keats (1795-1821) was a London poet, especially known for his odes and sonnets and
for his letters, which contain many reflections on poetry and the work of the imagination.

The poets named so far are those who, for many years, dominated the Romantic canon – that group
of writers whose works were most commonly republished, read, anthologised, written about and
taught in schools, colleges and universities.
More recently, however, a revised Romantic canon has begun to emerge, which lays more
emphasis on women, working-class and politically radical writers of the period:

 Work by these writers can be found in two anthologies, both with useful introductions
discussing the justification for extending the canon in this way:
o Duncan Wu. Romanticism: an Anthology. 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005;
o Jerome J. McGann. The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993.

ROMANTIC THEORY & CRITICISM

Introduction:

Much before William Wordsworth started writing, the early Romantic poets

like James Thomson (1700-48),Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74),Thomas Chatterton

(1752-70),Thomas Gray (1716-71),William Collins-59),William Cowper (1731-

1800),George Crabbe (1754-1832),Robert Burns (1759-95), and William Blake

(1757-1827) deviated from the neo-classic insistence on rules. Wordsworth is

perhaps the only romantic poet who made his poetic experiences the locus of his

critical discourse. Unlike Coleridge, he was not a theorist. Instead he unraveled

before us the workings of the mind of the poet, and therefore, Wordsworth’s

literary criticism ceases to be criticism in its most literal sense. It comes out as the

matrix where the poet’s mind generates emotions and feelings with that much of

intensity and passion required for transmitting them into poetic experience which

forms the basis of poetic composition. From this perspective, Wordsworth’s

Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 can be seen as a poetic

"manifesto," or “statement of revolutionary aims.”

It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the

Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the

romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and

German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the

Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads

by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by

Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter

Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts,

Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the

nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in

some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended

chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the

poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of

Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's

writings throughout Europe.

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the

"age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French

(1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social

 traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial

Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which

quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry

(and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts

have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period.

Romanticism:

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an

artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the

end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period

from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a

revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of

Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was

embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major

impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics

was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was

associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the growth of

nationalism was probably more significant.

The movement validated intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic

experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and

terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity

of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities: both new aesthetic categories. It

elevated folk art and ancient custom to a noble status, made spontaneity a

desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a natural

epistemology of human activities, as conditioned by nature in the form of

language and customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and

Classicist ideal models to raise a revived medievalism and elements of art and

narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape the

confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism. Romanticism

 embraced the exotic, the unfamiliar, and the distant in modes more authentic than

Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to

escape.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang

movement, which prized intuition and emotion over the rationalism of the

Enlightenment, the events of and ideologies that led to the French Revolution

planted the seeds from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment

sprouted. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on

Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities. Indeed, in the

second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polar opposite to

Romanticism. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of 'heroic'

individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples, it maintained, would raise

the quality of society. It also vouched for the individual imagination as a critical

authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a

strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the

representation of its ideas.

The Term:

The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European

languages, such as romance and Romanesque, has a complicated history, but by

the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in English and romantique in French

were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural phenomena such as

views and sunsets, in a sense close to modern English usage but without the

implied sexual element. The application of the term to literature first became

common in Germany, where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August

and Friedrich, began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the

1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating.

Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), "I seek and find the

romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry,

in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word

itself are derived." In both French and German the closeness of the adjective to

roman, meaning the fairly new literary form of the novel, had some effect on the

sense of the word in those languages. The use of the word did not become general

very quickly, and was probably spread more widely in France by its persistent use

by Madame de Staël in her De L'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in

Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the

"romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps

slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a

great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were

not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years

ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name,

and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a

decree condemning it in literature.