The Romantic Period: 1798–1832 Fast Facts Literary Highlights • Romanticism arises as a response to social and economic changes caused by the Industrial Revolution. • Wordsworth.
Download ReportTranscript The Romantic Period: 1798–1832 Fast Facts Literary Highlights • Romanticism arises as a response to social and economic changes caused by the Industrial Revolution. • Wordsworth.
The Romantic Period: 1798–1832
Fast Facts
Literary Highlights
• Romanticism arises as a response to social and economic changes caused by the Industrial Revolution.
• Wordsworth and Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Thus starting the Romantic Era.
• Keats, Byron, and Shelley write their greatest poems in the early nineteenth century.
Key Concept: Revolution Spreads
History of the Times
• Because the French king has been overthrown
by a democratic mob, the French Revolution is
radical and frightening to English ruling classes.
• English conservatives worry that revolutionary fever will cross the Channel to England.
• Until the violence and terror escalate, English liberals support the French Revolution’s ideals of “liberty, fraternity, equality.”
Key Concept: Conservatives Clamp Down
Literature of the Times
• were dedicated to political and social change • believed in the power of literature • thought imagination—not reason—was the best response to forces of change • created private, spontaneous lyric poetry
Key Concept: Conservatives Clamp Down
Some Romantic Poets
William Blake George Gordon, Lord Byron But to the eyes of the man of imagination nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. . . . To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.
—William Blake John Keats Percy Bysshe Shelley
Themes of Romantic Poetry
Influences on Romantic Poetry
• Spread of democratic ideals through the American and French Revolutions and disillusionment after failure of French Revolution • Reactions against harsh living and working conditions created for urban poor by the Industrial Revolution • Fascination with nature and country life, which seemed a blissful retreat from city slums
Themes of Romantic Poetry
A New Focus in Poetry
• Invited readers to feel power and passion • Tried to capture personal experience
Restoration Era
• Order had just been
restored.
• Poets celebrated order,
hierarchy, and enlightened rule.
Romantic Period
• • Society needed social change.
Poets wrote about personal feelings, supported individual rights, and used everyday language.
Themes of Romantic Poetry
A New Focus in Poetry
Romantic poets • embraced imagination and naturalness instead of reason and artifice • wrote about personal experiences and emotions, often using simple language • saw nature as transformative; focused on the ways nature and the human mind mirrored each other’s creative properties Percy Bysshe Shelley
Themes of Romantic Poetry
Imagination: The Inspired Guide
• Many say the Romantic movement began in 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. • The Romantics are often considered nature poets. • However, they are really “mind poets” who sought to understand the bond between humans and the world of the senses.
Forms of Romantic Poetry
Characteristics of Romantic Poetry
• Expresses the emotions and concerns of an individual as well as of society • Varies the structure of traditional forms to suit a poem’s purpose • Focuses on a poet’s personal connection to nature
Forms of Romantic Poetry
Function over Form
The Romantics took poetry in a new direction.
18th Century Poets
• Poetry was a strictly
defined literary genre.
• Poets used formal
language and structured traditional forms such as odes and sonnets.
• Form seems more
important than function.
Romantic Poets
•
Poetry was a playground of feelings.
•
Poets experimented with forms and expressed feelings in natural language.
•
Function seems more important than form.