The document discusses the key ideas and figures of the Romanticism movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It emerged as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and emphasized nature, emotion, imagination, and the supernatural over science and reason. Major Romantic writers included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley. Their works focused on themes of individualism, childhood innocence, and a reverence for nature.

1. Ms. Mengouchi

2. Sensibility
Innocence
Imagination
Inspiration
Individuality
Idealism
Intuition
Nature
Freedom from
tradition

3.  Denis Diderot: « The future is built on reason », « man
is born to think for himself »
 His works were banned by the government.
 Jean Jacques Rousseau: favoured feeling over thought,
« to feel is to exist », we feel before we start thinking
about things.
 American revolution inspired new ideas of equality
and liberty in Europe

4.  Both (Diderot and Rousseau) believed that control
and authority are repressive and thought that man
needs freedom.
 Rousseau: Man was born free and everywhere he is in
chains
 Civilized man is born and dies a slave
 Man is innately good, but science is wicked and
civilization is harmful and all cultures are corrupt
 Called for the end of civilization « Nature never
deceives us, it is we who deceive ourselves »

5.  FRENCH REVOLUTION: Political upheaval in
France inspired dreams of liberty.
 1793 Louis XVI is executed by the Guillotine
 French Revolution inspired ideas of freedom
and liberty to the British

6.  Romanticism revolted against Industry, commerce,
rationality, science, the new technology-oriented
world.
 Revolted against the repressive organized lifestyle of
the modern world.
 Revolution against authority and hierarchy

7.  There are two Generations:
 First Generation Romantics: William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 They are known as the Lake poets because they originate
from Lake District
They were against change, wanted a return to poetry,
imagination and legend. (Nostalgia for the past) They
wanted a return to the magical and Mysterious.

8.  The Second Generation Romantics:
John Keats, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron
 They defied the standards of society, revolted against and
transgressed the laws.
 Sought to give meaning to life
 They were self-sufficient and individualistic
 Their poetry was self regarding and subjective.
 They were envoloped in passion and emotion, incorporating so
much more intuitive thought, the supernatural, the exotic.
 Sought satisfaction and made it unreachable.

9.  German literary figure, one of the fathers
of Romanticism.
 1774 The Sorrows of Young Wherther
 A love story between Wherther, a poet,
and Charlotte, a married beautiful woman.
 The book encouraged society to prefer love
over class, lineage, and money.
 In Romanticism it is noble to follow one’s
heart

10.  Imagination is the source of art
 Sought freedom: he thought
the system enslaved him.
 Chose poetry and painting to
express his uncommon ideas.
 Life is a prison, FREE will and
imagination are locked out of
imposed systems
 Blake was influenced by the
ideals and ambitions of the
French and American
Revolutions.

11.  Blake and Wordsworth had a grief for children who
had to work
 Blake wrote The Chimney Sweeper
 Spontaneous childhood visions are the source of adult
Inspiration
 1726 Rousseau: there is wisdom in little children,
spontaneity, while adults are repressive (like reason)
 Industrialization Vs Child innocence
 There is human nature in child innocence, and
rational corruption in adult discipline
 Innocence is a source of creativity and genius

12.  Revolution promised freedom for
the future of humanity: « Human
nature seems born again »
 The dream of a new world is broken
by the turn of events in France
 Conflict between France and
Britain.
 Wordsworth became wanderer in
search of peace.
 Landscape restored his faith in
human nature.

13.  Poetry about human
passions
 Celebrated nature
(daffodils, oak trees,
rivers, butterflies…)
 Hated anything
mechanical and
industrial
 Preferred simplicity and
nature rather than
industry.
 In Bristol he wrote
poetry with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
 Both saved Romanticism
from the chaos of the
French revolution.
 Both made a bond to
change the world
through poetry

14.  A collection of poems written by both W. Worsdworth and
Samuel T Coleridge.
 This collection is considered as the bible of Romanticism for it
contains its main principles.
 They wrote with the same purposes of the French revolution
 People cease to be subjects and become citizens
 Topics were the same as earlier poetry (rural poor, beggars,
deserted mothers) but what made it different was its depth of
moral and psychological complexity

15.  He gave lectures on Revolution
after the French Revolution
 Wrote The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner in which a voyager shots
an Albatross and his ship was
followed by ghosts. A warning
that man should respect other
creatures.
 Through this poem, the search of
freedom led Romantics to the
Natural world

16.  Coleridge explored the limits of human imagination
which inspired him Kubla Khan (1797) the
experience of the exotic –Opium—
 For Coleridge, Mind is a mystery discovered through
imagination
 Imagination is the human soul, able to create a new
world.
 God and religion are not at the centre of the world.

17.  He experienced the horror of
conducting surgery on human
bodies without anesthesis
 Wrote people’s pain in poetry
 A poet is a sage, a humanist, a
physician to all men. (words are
medicine)

18.  Sought the meaning of life and
claimed that it was found in
Atheism.
 Had different love affairs,
sought self gratification.
 By violating social conventions,
Shelley pioneered a notion of
Free Love
 Driven by Individual will and
feeling

19.  The great object of life is
sensation
 1812 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
a poem of a wanderer looking
for an exotic experience
 Impossibility of satisfation
both of Byron and his character
Childe.
 Desire for extreme experience
 Heightened sensation

20.  She was poet and Novelist
daughter of philosopher and
feminist MARY Wollestonecraft
and politician William Godwin
 Wrote Frankenstein
 Gothic stories of ghosts and
beasts, supernatural, mystery,
antiquity
 Fear of the supernatural

22.  THE FIVE Is OF ROMANTICISM:
o INNOCENCE AND YOUTH: YOUTH IS NOT CORRUPTED
thus free from the evils of society
o IMAGINATION: A SOURCE OF INFORMATION which
deserves exploration
o INSPIRATION: BY NATURE. Nature is more valuable than
towns and cities. People are free from judgement and from negative
influences
o INTUITION: INNER VOICE
o INDIVIDUALISM: A DIVINE SPARK IN EVERY HUMAN
BEING

23.  Wordsworth, William, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. London:
Wordsworth Editions, 2003. Print.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scck3YCiRxg
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVQ21KZfOI
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mefXs5h9o
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiRWBI0JTYQ