This document provides an overview of 19th century literary criticism focusing on Romanticism. It discusses the shift from 18th to 19th century views, highlighting increased emphasis on intuition over reason. Romanticism is introduced as celebrating spontaneity, imagination, and nature. William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley are then summarized. For Wordsworth, poetry derives from powerful feelings recollected, and focuses on common life in everyday language. He redefines the poet's role. Shelley embraces Plato's ideals and sees poetry as accessing spiritual truth through imagination, with poets guiding readers to transcendental realities.

1. Literary Criticism
Dr. Abdel-Fattah Adel
Class (7)

2. Class (7) Items
•19th Centuries Critics
➢Romanticism
• William Wordsworth
• Percy Bysshe Shelley

3. 1. Realize the importance of the critic in literary
theory and criticism.
2. Explain the main ideas of the critic.
3. Discuss some ideas of the critic.
4. Explore the application of the critic’s ideas to
literature.
5. Relate the critic’s ideas to critical practice.
6. Criticize the critic’s ideas and critical practice.
7. Describe the main features of the Romantic
Critical Ideals.
Class (7)
Objectives
By the end of this part, you will be able to:

4. Class (7)
Questions
1. What was the shift that marked the 19th century and what were
its causes?
2. Write abut Romanticism and the main features of the Romantic
Critical Ideals.
3. How important is Wordsworth in literary criticism and theory?
4. How did Wordsworth redefine poetry?
5. How did Wordsworth explain the subject matter and language
of poetry?
6. What are the elements of the Romanticism in Wordsworth’s
critical writings ?
7. What was the contribution of Wordsworth to literary criticism
and theory?
8. How important is Shelly in literary criticism and theory?
9. What are the elements of the Romanticism in Shelly’s critical
writings ?
10. What was the contribution of Shelly to literary criticism and
theory?

5. The Shift of the 19th Century
• Reasons of the shift: -
Several major political rebellions, among them the
American and French Revolutions,
Extreme social upheavals (Industrialization and
urbanization).
Prominent changes in philosophical thought.

6. The Shift of the 19th Century
A paradigmatic shift occurred in how people viewed the world.
18th Century 19th Century
• Valued order and reason • Emphasized intuition as a proper guide to truth
• Likened the world to a great machine, with
all its parts operating harmoniously
• The world was perceived as a living organism that
was always growing and eternally becoming
• The city housed the centers of art and
literature and set the standards of good taste
• Saw rural places as fundamental, as the setting in
which a person could discover the inner self
• Valuing the empirical and rationalistic
methodologies
• Truth could be attained by tapping into the core of our
humanity or our transcendental natures, best sought
in our original or natural setting

7. Romanticism
Romanticism (c. 1798–1832) is a
major literary and artistic movement
that reacted against the restraint and
universalism of the Enlightenment.
The Romantics celebrated
spontaneity, imagination,
subjectivity, and the purity of nature.

8. William Wordsworth
(1770-1850)

9. Read and
Answer
P. 34-36
What are the main
points about William
Wordsworth?

10. Importance
• In 1798 Wordsworth Published Lyrical
Ballads with Samuel T. Coleridge.
• Lyrical Ballads was a collection of poems
that heralded the beginning of British
romanticism.
• Lyrical Ballads ushered in the Romantic age
in English literature.
• Lyrical Ballads shifted the focus of both
literary theory and criticism.
• Wordsworth espouses a new vision of poetry
and the beginnings of a radical change in
literary theory.

11. Poetry: Redefinition
• Wordsworth redefines poetry itself:
"For all good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings [taking] its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility"
• Unlike Sidney, Dante, and Pope, who decree that poetry should be
restrained, controlled, and reasoned, Wordsworth now highlights
poetry's emotional quality.
• Although Wordsworth does not abandon reason and disciplined
thought, for him, the effective use of a passion-filled imagination
becomes the central characteristic of poetry.
• Poetry is unlike biology or one of the other sciences because it
deals not with something that can be dissected or broken down into
its constituent parts, but primarily with the imagination and
feelings. Intuition, not reason, reigns.

12. Poetry: Subject Matter
• Wordsworth explained his purpose,
"to choose incidents and situations from common life,
and [. . .] describe them in language really used by
[people] in situations [. . .] the manner in which we
associate ideas in a state of excitement.“
• Like Aristotle, Sidney, and Pope, Wordsworth concerns
himself with the elements and subject matter of literature but
changes the emphasis: Common men and women people his
poetry, not kings, queens, and aristocrats, because in
"humble and rustic life, the poet finds that the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak
a plainer and more emphatic language."

13. Poetry: Language
• Unlike Pope and his predecessors, Wordsworth chooses
"language really used by [people]"- everyday
speech, not the inflated poetic diction of heroic
couplets, complicated rhyme schemes, and
dense figures of speech placed in the mouths of
the typical eighteenth-century character.
• Wordsworth's rustics, such as Michael and Luke in his
poetic narrative "Michael," speak in the simple, everyday
diction of their trade.

14. Poetry: Role of the Poet
• The poet is no longer the preserver of civilized values or proper
taste, but
"he is a man speaking to men: a man. . . endowed with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a
greater knowledge of human nature and a more
comprehensive soul than are supposed' to be common among
mankind."
• Wordsworth's poet
"has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing
what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and
feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his
own mind, arise in him without immediate external
excitement."
• Such a poet need no longer follow a prescribed set of rules because
this artist may now freely express his or her own individualism,
valuing and writing about feelings that are peculiarly the artist’s.
• Wordsworth's new kind of poet crafts a poem by internalizing a
scene, circumstance, or happening and "recollects" that occasion with
its accompanying emotions at a later time when the artist can shape the
remembrance into words.

15. Poetry: Role of the Reader
• Wordsworth writes,
"I have one request to make of my reader, which is, that in judging
these poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and
not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of
others.“
• Wordsworth desires his readers to rely on their own feelings and
their own imaginations as they grapple with the same emotions the
poet felt when he first saw and then later "recollected in tranquility"
the subject or circumstances of the poem itself.
• Through poetry the poet and the reader share such emotions.

16. Influence
• This subjective experience of sharing emotions leads Wordsworth
away from the preceding centuries' mimetic and rhetorical theories
of criticism and toward a new development in literary theory: the
expressive school, which emphasizes the individuality of the artist
and the reader's privilege to share in this individuality.
• By expressing such individuality and valuing the emotions and the
imagination as legitimate concerns in poetry, Wordsworth lays the
foundation for English Romanticism and broadens the scope of
literary criticism and theory for both the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.

17. Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822)

18. Read and
Answer
P. 37-38
What are the main
points about Percy
Bysshe Shelley?

19. Importance
• One of the strongest and most vocal voices of British
Romanticism.
• Shelley produced some of the best known Romantic poems
"Ozymandias" (1817), "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), and
"Adonais" (1821), to name a few—and a pivotal text of literary
criticism.
• A Defence of Poetry (1821), written in response to a
whimsical attack on Romantic poetry by Thomas Love Peacock
(1785-1866).

20. Shelly and Plato
• Shelley is the greatest devotee of Plato, embracing Plato's beliefs and establishing
himself as the voice of Neoplatonism in British Romanticism.
• Shelley adopts and adapts Plato's concept of the Ideal Forms, the belief that all
things around us are merely representations or shadows of Truth, of the Ideal
world, and of spiritual reality—what Plato names The One.
• Shelley blends Plato's concept of spiritual reality with his own understanding,
asserting that poetry is by far the best way to gain access to the Forms and to
ultimate Truth.
• Disavowing Neoclassicism's allegiance to order and reason, Shelley emphasizes the
individual and the imagination.
• For Shelley, Plato's Forms intertwine with the Romantic ideal of the imagination.
• In his poetic craft, poetry is less concerned with reason and rationality and more
concerned about the spiritual and the transcendental.

21. Poetry
• Shelley redefining poetry as
"the expression of the imagination." For him, "poetry
is . . . that from which all spring, and that which
adorns all; and that which if blighted, denies the fruit
and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the
nourishment and succession of the scions of the tree of
life."
• Poetry is not only an outstanding art form, but a teacher
and a guide to Truth, one embodied in nature and the
individual, not in science or reason or philosophy.
• The imagination and the emotions, not didactic
structural elements, become center stage in interpreting
a text

22. Poet
• Shelley believes that philosophy and history stem from poetry,
with poetry occupying a superior place to these disciplines.
• Poets, the crafters of poetry, are found in all walks of life:
architects, painters, musicians, teachers, and lawmakers.
• If true to their craft, poets will lead people toward Truth—the
Truth of the spiritual nature of ultimate reality and of Plato's
The One—opening the minds of their readers to the unseen
beauty all around them.
• For Shelley, there is nothing more sacred and perfect than poetry.
• In his creative theory, the poet is the greatest among all the
various kinds of artists because the poet alone can see the
future in the present and, as Shelley notes, "participates in the
eternal, the infinite, and the one," becoming more than just an
ordinary person.

23. Influence
• His passion for both the poet and poetry and
their role in the world as teacher and prophet
who can lead us to ultimate Truth represents
a paradigmatic shift in thought from the Age
of Reason or Neoclassicism to British
Romanticism, a new direction in literary
criticism that profoundly affects literary
theory and criticism to this, our present age.

25. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)
BY Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’
What are the elements of the
Romantic critical ideals in this poem?

26. Class (7)
Questions
1. What was the shift that marked the 19th century and what were
its causes?
2. Write abut Romanticism and the main features of the Romantic
Critical Ideals.
3. How important is Wordsworth in literary criticism and theory?
4. How did Wordsworth redefine poetry?
5. How did Wordsworth explain the subject matter and language
of poetry?
6. What are the elements of the Romanticism in Wordsworth’s
critical writings ?
7. What was the contribution of Wordsworth to literary criticism
and theory?
8. How important is Shelly in literary criticism and theory?
9. What are the elements of the Romanticism in Shelly’s critical
writings ?
10. What was the contribution of Shelly to literary criticism and
theory?