Enlightenment ends in 1789
Swift 1667-1745
Dryden 1631-1700
Pope 1688-1744
Johnson 1709-1784
Boswell 1740-1895
- 1789: French Revolution
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Thomas Paine
- William Blake
- These 3 hung out with Samuel Cooleridge and William Wordsworth
- American Revolution just happened; England crack down on free speech like N. Korea about this topic
- Cooleridge does it anyway
- 1792 - Wollstonecraft & Wordsworth both in Paris
- if you looked foreign, you were sent to guillotine, so Wordsworth was almost killed
- 1798 - Cooleridge & Wordsworth go to Lake district near Scotland to hid because they're revolutionaries and are looked for:
- Unwrote preface to Lyrical Ballads
- Liked Pope, but didn't like the Pope imitators that followed him
- wanted simple, clear language everyone can understand
- wanted to talk about the emotions of men
- Pope would find this stupid
- The heart described in an intellectual way
- Only the few, elite can write great art
- Great poetry can only be written in rural areas
- Purest emotions happen here
- understanding of life is best discovered & known here
Second Generation Romantics
- Mary Shelley
- Percy Shelley
- Lord Byron
- John Keats
In Napoleon War, so in a "police state" most of the time.
Lines written a few miles above
Tintern Abbey: - Wordsworth
- enjambement
- soft, soothing sands in beginning to create a mood
- "Thinking" poem - he's thinking, wants us to as well
- him thinking about the universe
- uses observation to focus on something else; its not about the description
- Engraver
- eccentric
- father was dissinter
- saw visions
- educated at home
- Christian - Swedenborg - Blakeland
- Tried at school - didn't work
- marries in 1782, practical marriage, not love
- 1787 - Brother dies of TB
- additional of strangeness to beauty, weird states of consciousness, mystic religions
- radical individualism
- Man's mind was made in the image of the creator. It had access beyond sense to the infinite through reason or imagination.
- Refuses to submit to his limitations
- set ambitious goals and experimented boldly
- introduced the theme of the exile which continues into the Moderns
- The Gothic novel effected Romantic poetry
- Two great novelists of the period-Austen and Scott
- alien
- mysterious
- gloomy
- regards common man as less than himself
- inner demon
- nameless guilt
- driven toward and inevitable doom
- self-reliant
- will not betray the one he loves fatally
- attractive to men and women
fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of the 18th C conventions.
The French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all.
In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, and experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth's romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, "The Prelude" (1805-50). 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.
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.
Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination; a shift from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and natural; a shift from public, impersonally poetry to subjective poetry; and from concern with the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite. Mainly cared about the individual, intuition, and imagination.
- Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience through truth
- Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on "natural" feelings as a guide to conduct are valued over controlled, rationality
- Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for primitivism, and a valuing of the common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize country life and believe that many of the ills of society are a result of urbanization.
- Nature for the Romantics becomes a means for divine revelation (Wordsworth)
- It is also a metaphor for the creative process–(the river in "Kubla Khan").
- Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the supernatural, the mystical, the "gothic," and the exotic
- Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution, especially concerned with human rights, individualism, freedom from oppression
- There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness. The art often dealt with death, transience and mankind's feelings about these things. The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose creative spirit was more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.
- The byronic hero
- emphasis on the individual and subjectivity
- Not "romantic", happy, or hallucinating
"Preface to Lyrical Ballad" - both wrote this
- simplicity, non-archaic language, democratic language that appeals to everyone, language to men, about things from the heart, feelings of men
- Romantics believe that only the few, the elite, can write great poetry
- Purest emotion comes not from the city, but from rural folk - more pure cleaner, no distractors, etc
- Nature/Earth as a spirit or mother
- Sublime - Wordsworth in some of his poetry (Alps) Anne Radcliffe, etc (Big with Gothic writers)
- Mary Shelley
- Percy Shelley
- Lord Byron (couldn't stand Keats)
- John Keats
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