Romanticism arose in the late 18th century as a response to Enlightenment ideals. It valued human subjectivity, emotion, nature, imagination and the sublime. Two of its main figures were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth found inspiration in nature and the imagination. His Lyrical Ballads used everyday language. Coleridge distinguished imagination from fancy and viewed imagination as a power that completes understanding. Both poets emphasized the difference between poetic and prose language.

2.  Definition
 Main Characteristics
 Main Figures
 William Wordsworth
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

3. Romanticism

4.  Romanticism was a broad intellectual and artistic
disposition that arose toward the end of the 18th
century and reached its zenith during the early
decades of the 19th century.

5.  In general, this period can best be seen as one in which
the major upheavals such as the French
Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the
revolutions of 1830 and 1848, along with the growth of
nationalism, impelled the bourgeois classes toward
political, economic, cultural, and ideological
hegemony.

6.  It was in the fields of philosophy and literature that
Romanticism – as a broad response to
Enlightenment, neoclassical, and French
revolutionary ideals – initially took root.

7. Romanticism

8.  The ideals of Romanticism included:
1. an intense focus on human subjectivity and its expression.
2. an exaltation of nature, which was seen as a vast repository
of symbols.
3. an exaltation of childhood and spontaneity.
4. an exaltation of primitive forms of society.
5. an exaltation of human passion and emotion.
6. an exaltation of the poet.
7. an exaltation of the sublime
8. an exaltation of imagination as a more comprehensive and
inclusive faculty than reason.

9.  The Romantics often insisted on artistic autonomy and
attempted to free art from moralistic and utilitarian
constraints.

10.  Perhaps the most fundamental trait of all
Romanticism was its shift of emphasis away from
classical objectivity toward subjectivity: human
perception playing an active role rather than merely
receiving impressions passively from the outside
world.

11.  In general, the Romantics exalted the status of the
poet, as a genius whose originality was based on his
ability to discern connections among apparently
discrepant phenomena and to elevate human
perception toward a comprehensive, unifying vision.

12.  The most crucial human faculty for such integration
was the imagination, which most Romantics saw as a
unifying power, one which could harmonize the other
strata of human perception such as sensation and
reason.
 Irony rose in status from a mere rhetorical device to an
entire way of looking at the world, becoming, in the
guise of Romantic irony, an index of a broad
philosophic vision. Irony effectively entails a failed
search for meaning and unity.

13. Romanticism

14. Romanticism

15.  The English movement reached its most mature
expression in the work of William Wordsworth.
 Wordsworth’s devotion to nature was lifelong; from
first to last, he viewed himself as a follower of nature;
he saw nature as embodying a universal spirit.
 The most elemental factor in Wordsworth’s return to
nature was imagination

16.  Wordsworth’s most important contribution to literary
criticism, the celebrated and controversial Preface to
Lyrical Ballads. This collection of poems was published
jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798;
Wordsworth added his preface to the 1800 edition.
 Wordsworth’s primary concern is with the language of
poetry. He states that the poems in this volume are
“experiments,” written chiefly to discover “how far the
language of conversation in the middle and lower
classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic
pleasure”.

17.  In what is perhaps the most striking and important
passage of the Preface, Wordsworth states that the
central aim of the poems in Lyrical Ballads was: “to
choose incidents and situations from common
life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far
as was possible in a selection of language really used by
men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a
certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary
things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspects.”

18. Romanticism

19.  Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) is his most
significant literary-critical work. Some critics have
praised the insight and originality of this
work, viewing Coleridge as the first English critic to
build literary criticism on a philosophical foundation.

20.  Coleridge offers his best-known definitions of
imagination. He makes his famous suggestion that
fancy and imagination, contrary to widespread
belief, are “two distinct and widely different faculties”:
they are not “two names with one meaning, or . . . the
lower and higher degree of one and the same power.
 The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living
Power and prime Agent of all human Perception.
 FANCY is a mode of Memory emancipated from the
order of time and space.

21.  Coleridge views the imagination as a faculty which
unites what we receive through our senses with the
concepts of our understanding; but he goes further in
viewing imagination as a power which “completes” and
enlivens the understanding so that the understanding
itself becomes a more comprehensive and intuitive
(rather than merely discursive) faculty.

22.  Coleridge insists that the language of poetry is
essentially different from that of prose. He
acknowledges that poetry is formed from the same
elements as prose; the difference lies in the different
combination of these elements and the difference of
purpose.