The Romantic period in English literature began in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some key aspects of Romanticism included an emphasis on emotion and imagination over reason, a focus on individual experiences and common people, and an interest in nature. Major Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats were influenced by political events like the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution as well as the beauty of the natural world.

1. Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
The Romantic spirit
1798, publication
of the Lyrical Ballads

2. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
the period in which new
ideas and attitudes arose
in reaction to the
dominant 18th
-century
ideals of order, calm,
harmony, balance,
rationality
1. The word ‘Romantic’
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818
The Romantic AgeThe Romantic Age

3. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Enlightened trends
• Emphasised reason and judgement.
• Focused on society as a whole.
• Followed authority.
• Interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends
• Emphasised imagination and emotion.
• Valued individuals.
• Looked for freedom.
• Represented common people.
• Interested in the supernatural.
2. Romanticism vs
Enlightenment

4. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
3. English Romanticism
English
Romanticism
influenced by the French Revolution
and the English Industrial Revolution.
a revolt of the English imagination
against the neoclassical reason.
The Romantics:
•expressed a negative attitude towards the existing
social or political conditions;
•placed the individual at the centre of art;
•argued that poetry should be free from all rules.

5. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living
being.
• Use of creative imagination.
• Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over
intellect.
• A new view of the artist as an individual creator.
• Fascination with the irrational, the past, the
mysterious, the exotic.
4. The Romantics’ key ideas
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection

6. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• Opposed to reason.
• A substitute for
traditional religion.
• A vehicle for
self-consciousness.
• A source of
sensations.
• A provocation to a state
of imagination and vision.
• An expressive
language: natural
images provide the poet
with a way of thinking
about human feelings
and the self.
5. The Romantic nature
J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay,
c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris

7. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• A creative power superior
to reason.
• Shaped the poets’ fleeting
visions into concrete forms.
• A dynamic, active, rather
than passive power.
• Allows human beings to ‘read’
nature as a system of
symbols.
6. The Romantic imagination
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –
The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery

8. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets
because they lived together in the last few years of the
18th
century in the district of the great lakes in
Northwestern England.
In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads,
the manifesto of English Romanticism.
7. The Lake poets

9. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
8. The manifesto of
English Romanticism
Linked to
nature,
emotions,
feelings
Interested
in the lives
of the humble
Nature,
memory,
children
Simple, common
used to liberate
imagination
Themes LanguageThe poet
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 1798

10. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats
• died very young and away from home;
• experienced political disillusionment reflected in their
poetry;
• were linked to individualism, escapism.
9. The second generation
of Romantic poets

11. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
10. The Romantics on nature
NATURE
Wordsworth Coleridge Byron Shelley Keats
a source of
joy
inspiration
and
knowledge
a mother and
a moral guide
a universal
force
the
representation
of God’s will
and love
the
companion
of his
loneliness
the
counterpart
of his stormy
feelings
when it was
violently
upset
a source of
enjoyment
and
inspiration
pervaded by
a guiding
power leading
man to love
the creative
mind benefits
from the
beauty of the
natural
landscape
a kind of
muse to the
poet’s artistic
quest

12. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
In the Napoleonic era:
• the British navy dominated
the sea;
• the French army dominated
the European continent;
• the great hero of the British
navy was Admiral Horatio
Nelson
defeated the French-Spanish
fleet off Cape Trafalgar on
the Atlantic coast of southern
Spain in 1805.
11. The Napoleonic Wars
(1799-1815)

13. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
The total defeat of Napoleon in 1815
at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium
where the British troops, commanded by
Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.
Their consequences
1.the acquisition of the Cape of Good
Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and
Malta was of strategic interest;
2.enormous financial costs;
3.Britain was on the verge of starvation,
bankruptcy and evolution.
11. The Napoleonic Wars
(1799-1815)

14. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
12. The Luddites
They caused so much alarm that the government
made machine-breaking punishable by death.
Deteriorating
working
conditions
Mechanical
looms and
spinners
replacing skilled
craftsmen
Poverty
led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating
in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of 1811-1812.

15. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
In 1819, during a
peaceful public meeting
in Manchester, soldiers
fired into a crowd and
eleven people were
killed  the so-called
‘Peterloo Massacre’.
12. The Luddites

16. The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency.
The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted
as monarch during the illness of his father George III
(1760-1820).
In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his
short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the
new age of reforms.
13. The Regency