The Age of Romantics
Romanticism
Romanticism has very little to do with things
popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art.
Rather, it is an international artistic and
philosophical movement that redefined the
fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.
Romanticism
In literature and the visual arts, a style that emphasizes the imagination, emotions, and creativity of the individual artist.
Romanticism also refers specifically to late-
18th- and early-19th-century European culture, as contrasted with 18th-century classicism.
Romanticism in literature began to emerge in the Augustan period, as early as 1726 (when James Thomson began ‘The Seasons’,
1726–30).
Inspired by the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and by contemporary social change and revolution (American and French), Romanticism emerged as a reaction to 18th-century values, asserting
• emotion and intuition over rationalism,
• the importance of the individual over social conformity,
• and the exploration of natural and psychic wildernesses over classical restraint.
The movement, in both literature and art, was a reaction against classical constraints of
style and theme. As the 18th century
progressed, classicism seemed less and less satisfactory as an expression of the
increasing dilemmas faced by society.
In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.
The Industrial Revolution was beginning to transform the traditional ways of life, particularly in the country, and
poverty and exploitation were increasing in towns and cities.
There was also a reaction against universal religious belief, as a result of scientific experimentation.
In this context, Romanticism replaced tightly controlled classical certainties with images of ideal, and often dangerous, natural beauty and grandeur.
The chaos of nature became an analogy for human emotions and experiences. The key issues were that emotion and
intuition, rather than logic, ruled man, and that the individual was more important than the society he or she lived in.
Major Themes of Romantic Art and Literature include
a love of atmospheric landscapes; nostalgia for the past, particularly the Gothic;
a love of the primitive, including folk traditions;
cult of the individual hero figure, often an artist or political revolutionary;
romantic passion;
mysticism; and
a fascination with death.
The Romantic movement developed the idea of the absolute originality and artistic
inspiration by the individual genius, which performs a "creation from nothingness;"
In literature, Romanticism is represented by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott in Britain;
Victor Hugo, Alfonse de Lamartine,
George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas père in France;
Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman in the US reflects the influence of Romanticism.
Goethe and Schiller in Germany,
Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This
contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason.
The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or
creative power, the approximate human
equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions.
Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, Uniting both
reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"),
imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The
reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably
bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to
"read" nature as a system of symbols.
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics.
As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine
imagination, in emblematic language.
--nature as a healing power,
--nature as a source of subject and image, --nature as a refuge from the artificial
constructs of civilization, including artificial language
--nature as an organically unified whole.
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and
feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason.
Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as
"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"
marks a turning point in literary history.
The Romantics asserted the
importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric.
In style, the Romantics preferred
boldness, free experimentation and
they promoted the conception of the
artist as "inspired" creator .
artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used
"the language of commen men," not an artificial
"poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).
Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time
and/or place also gained favor. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations.
Poetry
On the whole, literary romantics found poetry the most powerful medium of the Romantic
movement.
In search of sublime moments, romantic poets
wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world.
Early Romantics
The early Romantics witnessed a time of great revolution. This was the time of the French Revolution and the onset of
industrialisation. After the storming of the Bastille the revolutionary spirit spread all over Europe and gave rise to Romanticism.
The spirit of the Romantic period is evidenced in the poetry of early romantics such as
William Blake,
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Each Romantic poets tended to have their own individual views on Nature and the
benevolence of Nature is explored differently in the poetry of the early Romantics.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience
For William Blake nature in its glorious state epitomised the state of innocence. It provided a clear vision of how life should be and
showed the way for children and adults to behave.
Blooming nature, flowers, lambs and
shepherds illustrate the Songs of Innocence.
By contrast, the Songs of Experience are characterised by dark forests, sick flowers, and destroyed gardens.
For Blake nature symbolises harmony, the primitive view of the world, which has not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilised
“reason” and oppression.
The natural bond with nature for Blake is the symbol of humans’ invisible nature, their Imagination, which is the manifestation of God himself in the human
soul.
William Wordsworth's ‘The Prelude’
(published in 1850, after his death) contrasts his childhood in the unspoiled countryside
with the changes since, and portrays nature as a godlike force.
For Wordsworth Nature’s inspiration provides sufficient subject matter in itself, and it is a
stimulus for the poet to engage in the most individualistic of human activity, that of
thinking.
The work of English poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge frequently takes as its theme the healing power of natural beauty.
The Second Generation of Romantic Poets included
John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.
The most influential works of the Romantic movement is the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a
collaboration between the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The theme of death is also a major one, either in imagination or reality. English poet John Keats's
‘Ode to Autumn’ (1819), written two years before his own early death, confronts this issue in a positive
way.
The extremes of a literature suddenly freed from 18th-century restrictions are well
demonstrated by the open defiance of Christian belief and morality.
English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of God as the ‘enemy’, and not the preserver, of mankind in his long poem ‘Promethus
Unbound’ (1820).
Byron developed the ‘anti-hero’ (an immoral and destructive character) in his long poem
‘Don Juan’ (1819–24).
Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious,
irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony.
Another type of anti-hero is the individual who asserts his own desires without regard for the good of society. Such a character is found in Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
(1797–8), in which, after bringing a curse
upon himself and his fellow sailors by killing an albatross without any reason, he ends the poem wandering the earth.
Prose
The rejection of modern society led to a fashion for historical, and particularly medieval, stories. Good
examples are Ivanhoe (1819) and other works by Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott.
The influence of the medieval continued throughout the 19th century, particularly among the artists of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The gothic novel combined many romantic elements, including wild and dreadful landscapes were popular.
Novels such as Frankenstein (1818), by English writer Mary Shelley, shows increasing suspicion of scientific experimentation as opposed to the ‘natural’ way of life.
Although the great novelist Jane Austen
wrote during the romantic era, her work defies
classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the
context of English country life.
Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and
romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular.
