Romanticism and Romantic poetry

1. Romanticism and Romantic
Poetry

2. Timeframe of Romantic Poetry
• First work of Romantic poetry - Lyrical
Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
William Wordsworth in 1798
• Traditionally ends with death of Sir
Walter Scott in 1832
• Some consider poetry produced in
Victorian and even Modern eras to be
“Romantic”

3. Major features of Romantic
Poetry
• Freely imaginative idealizing fiction
• imagination and emotion
• particular as opposed to general or universal
experience
• value of the individual - link to French
revolution
• freedom rather than authority

4. Major features continued
• Optimistic sense of renewal
• Interest in the language and lives of common
people
• love for unspoiled natural world
• revitalized interest in medieval subjects and
settings

5. Historical context
• Prosperity and confidence
in 1700’s
• American and French
revolutions
• disappointment in bitter
and violent ends - Napoleon
• Industrial Revolution
• dirty, unorganized cities
emerge
• huge class shift

6. First generation of English
Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth
and Coleridge
• Men meet at Cambridge
• publish Lyrical Ballads in 1798
• seeks to abandon formal
language of 1700’s
• balance between poet’s
influence and “real language”
• balance between commonplace
and supernatural

7. First generation of English
Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth
and Coleridge
• Apparent contradictions
seek to reveal what
Wordsworth calls “the
essential passions of the
heart” and what Coleridge
calls “our inward nature”
• natural and commonplace,
supernatural and romantic
all contribute to basic
operation of human mind
and emotions
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8. Second generation: Byron,
Shelley, Keats
• All have tragically short
lives
• Byron and Shelley both
aristocrats, well educated,
leave England under
pressure, see themselves as
outcasts
• Byron popular, while Shelley
misunderstood
• Keats produces poetry at 24,
dies at 25