1789 - 1832

The Romantic period only lasts about forty years from 1789 to
the Reform Act 1832.
It is sometimes called the Age of Revolution: American
Revolution of 1776
The spirit of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ of the French
revolution made it a time of hope and change.
Society was changing, became industrial rather than
agricultural
The new middle class became powerful
There were moves towards voting reform and greater
democarcy.
Yet, change was slow, there was a lot of suffering, soldiers were
unemployed.
The worst was the Waterloo Massacre in 1819
Romantic writing is mostly poetry
William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Colleridge are figures of the Romantic.
In Romantic, the heart controls the head.
For Romantics, reason and the intellect were dangerous.
The individual spirit rather than an ordered society became
important.
The government did not like this spirit
Many writer went abroad because their spirit was too
dangerous
Romantic spirit was limited to a few poets, but they
changed the face of literarture forever.
Ideas are on the contrast between life and death,
completeness and incompleteness, and between
permanence ad impermanence.
His poetic style and ideas contrast with the order and
control of the Augustan world.
His best known collection of poetry are Songs of
Innocence and Experience and London
In the first poem, the lamb is the symbol of innocence, the
tiger is the symbol of mystery. The poem is complex
symbolic.
In London, he shows a contrast between a world of nature
and childhood innocence and a world of social control. He
shows the danger of industrial society in which individuals
were lost.
For Blake, London is a city in which the mind of everyone is
in chain and all individuals are imprisoned.
His poetry looks inward rather than outward.
He wrote ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’
which shows the hope and future in his poem ‘The
Prelude’
He is the main character of his poems.
In The Prelude, we read how an individual
thoughts and feelings are formed, in which the
individual searches for personal understanding.
In Daffodils, he relates his past to his present
He believes that adults can learn from children,
‘child is the father of the man’.
Together with Colleridge, Wordsworth compose
Lyrical Ballads
He wrote frequently about nature and ordinary
people.
He wanted to show that ‘men and women who do
not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’.
He also see the importance of human memory
which allows us to keep our understanding of the
world fresh and alive.
I wandered lonely as a cloud The waves beside them danced; but they
That floats on high o'er vales and hills, Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
When all at once I saw a crowd, A poet could not but be gay,
A host, of golden daffodils; In such a jocund company:
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. What wealth the show to me had
brought:
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way, For oft, when on my couch I lie
They stretched in never-ending line In vacant or in pensive mood,
Along the margin of a bay: They flash upon that inward eye
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Which is the bliss of solitude;
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
He, and Wordsworth are responsible for Lyrical Ballads.
Yet, they are very different poets.
Wordsworth poetry are more on day-to-day, ordinary
world; Coleridge’s poetry is more about the extraordinary
and supernatural world.
There are four poems by Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, but
his best-known is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Kubla Khan is a poem about the creative imagination
which is, for Coleridge, the most powerful of all human
senses.
Christabel is another poem about a journey which is not
completed, but it tells a serach for fuller meaning and
understanding
Although the second generations were not born at the
time of the french revolution, their poetic concerns are
similar with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Died at the age of 25, he was one of the most
important romantic poets and the symbol for the
Romantic movement
Wordsworth and Coleridge were important influences
on his poetry and ideas.
His works are Isabella, Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes
and La Belle Dame Sans Merci with mytic, classical or
medieval backgrounds.
Like Coleridge, he was interested in the irrational,
mysterious and supernatural world of the distant past.
The main themes are the serach for lasting beauty and
happiness and for permanent meanings in a world
where everything fades and dies.
In Ode on a Grecian Urn, he showed that art and
artistic creation can make thing permanent and poetry
can keep human feelings and ideas alive forever in the
words of the poem.
Deeply felt the death of Keats and wrote it in his poem
Adonais in 1821
Shelly’s poems are more political and capture deep
personal esperiences.
Queen Mab attacks the religion and moral of the age.
The Necessity of Atheism states that we cannot prove that
God exists
The Mask of Anarchy tells about the future revolution of
the working classes after the Peterloo massacre in 1819.
His essay The Defense of Poetry states that poetry can
reform the world.
One of the most influential and the most typical
Romantic poets.
His picture of romantic hero was influential
Childe Harold and Manfred are both heroes with
passionate feelings who rebel against the society, who
want to experience what is forbidden and who seem go
beyond good and evil
Don Juan tells about a hero who struggles to find
meaning ad who fught for justice.
Nature is the major concern of romantic
Romantic period was also a time in which prose writing
developed rapidly.
Some of the most prominent prose writers are Jane Austen,
Fanny Burney, Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliff, Clara Reeve
and Marry Shelley
Frakenstein by Marry Shelley in 1818 shows extraordinary
world of a monster
Jane Austen is known for her interest on the moral, social
and psychological behavior of her characters. She writes
mainly about young heroines as they grow up and search
for personal happiness. Some of her works are Pride and
Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Emma, the Mansfield
Park, and Sense and Sensibility
He writes about history, revolution, social change and
characters from all levels of society.
His early novels are Waverley, The Bride of
Lammermoor
He uses historical characters and facts to re-create the issue
of the power, politic and change from a historical period
and make them relevant to the great issue of his own time.
He made novel the most popular literary form in the 19th
and 20th century.
As Shakespeare, he defined clear unchanging values in a
world of rapid changes and created a exciting plots and
characters who live in memory.
He was one of the most popular and best-selling author.