Romantic to Modern Poetry

7/29/2019 Romantic to Modern Poetry

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What does Romantic mean?

The word

Romantic first became current in 18th-century English and originally

meant romance-like, that is, resembling the strange, fanciful, mythical character

of medieval romances. The word came to be associated with interest in the Middle

Ages, the emerging taste for wild scenery, ruins and other sublime locations, a

tendency reflected in the increasing emphasis in aesthetic theory on the sublime as

opposed to the beautiful.

Romanticism

In Europe, Romanticism flourished in England, Germany, and France

It elevated the individual, the passions, and the inner life, embracing a more

dramatic, personal, and emotional style--even to the point of melancholic emotion

Romanticism followed a period we call the Enlightenment. During the 18th

century, in a reaction against Enlightenment ideas, feeling began to be considered

more important than reason, both in literature and in ethics.

What was the Enlightenment?

A broad intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly Britain,

France and Germany, characterized by a rejection of superstition and mystery and

an optimism concerning the power of human reasoning and scientific endeavor. It is

also referred to as The Age of Reason. It was both within and against

Enlightenment thought that Romanticism can be said to have been conceived.

What is Neoclassicism?

An 18th-century artistic movement, associated with the Enlightenment, drawing on

classical models and emphasizing reason, harmony, and

restraint. Literally, new classicism, it marked a renewed interest in the literary

and artistic theories of ancient Greece and Rome and an attempt to reformulate

them for contemporary society.

British Romanticism

The Romantic period in British Literature (roughly 1780-1832) stands between andconnects the Enlightenments promotion of commerce, reason, and liberty and the

Victorian experience of industrialization and empire.

Romanticism in both artistic production and cultural reception elevated aesthetic

practice to an almost divine activity, a realm wherein the individual might forge his

or her very self as an ethical, political, and creative being.


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A key concept in Romanticism is the sublime

While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the sublime is majestic, wild, and

sometimes savage. Viewers are moved and often made happy by the beautiful, but

they are overwhelmed, awe-struck, and sometimes terrified by the sublime.

What is the sublime?

Often associated with huge, overpowering natural phenomena like mountains,

waterfalls, turbulent seas, and thunderstorms, the delightful terror inspired by

sublime visions was supposed both to remind viewers of their own insignificance in

the face of nature and divinity and to inspire them with a sense of transcendence.

How did the sublime relate to the beautiful?

Mere beauty was thought by the Romantics to be inferior to the concept of the

sublime. The British writer and statesman Edmund Burke, who was interested in

categorizing aesthetic responses, identified beauty with delicacy and harmony, andhe identified the sublime with vastness, obscurity, and a capacity to inspire terror.

What shaped Romanticism?

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the

energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists, writers, and intellectuals sought

to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the philosophers Jean

Jacques Rousseau (France) and William Godwin (England) had great influence, the

French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact.

What shaped Romanticism?

In England, initial support for the French Revolution was primarily utopian and

idealistic

When the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals

renounced the Revolution

However, the Romantic vision had taken forms other than the political, and these

continued to develop.

Romanticism emphasized. . .

Individualism

Creativity

Revolutionary political ideas

The use of the imagination over reason


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Reverence for nature

Mystery

Transcendence

Synthesis

Universality

The beginnings of Romantic Poetry In Lyrical Ballads

(1798 and 1800), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and

illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language,

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; in wild country sides, the power of the sublime could be felt most

immediately.

The beginnings of Romantic Poetry

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. Another important subject

of the Romantics was memory. Wordsworths romanticism and originality is most

evident in his lengthy autobiographical poem,

The Prelude (180550)

British Romantic poets tend to. . .

Show exuberance and optimism--at times revolutionary optimism--about the

prospects for changing the individual and society

Explore divisions within the human psyche (between self and others and self and

nature)

Strive after the infinite, not after limited perfection

Emphasize individual expression, not imitation and obedience to formal rules, in art.

Emphasize the concrete, the sensuous, and the particular in poetry.

Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole.

Valorize engagement with or return to nature as the regenerator of imagination and

guide for all that is best in humankind.


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See the poet as the rock of defense for human nature (Wordsworth); the poet has

the power reunite a fragmented self and society.

Stress creative imagination as the source of art; the mind at least partially creates

what we call the world.

Cultivate theories of poetic genius.

Revere and explore the subjective nature of memory.

Emphasize the emotional, or passionate, element in human beings.

Reject the neoclassical emphasis on decorum, restraint, imitation of general

nature, and previous poets.

Are obsessed with originality and authority: they must create a system, or be

enslaved by another mans (Blake).

Treat poetry as an organic, living entity or whole.

May replace the neatly rounded poem with a fragment; to complete a poem is to

kill it, to destroy its growth as an organic, living entity (Nature is profoundly an

engine of process; it never finishes anything).

Defy the moral codes of ordinary society.

Believe that poetry does not so much delight and teach (neoclassical requirements)

as help the reader undergo a poetic/spiritual experience.

Attempt to forge a secular scripture, to overcome fallen or alienated language.

Favor the lyric over other types of poem (when a Romantic poet writes an ode, he

or she refers to a state of mind, not so much to the poetic genre).

Poets are the hierophants of an un-apprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the

gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express

what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they

inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the

unacknowledged legislators of the world. Shelley (from A Defense of Poetry)

Who were the British Romantic poets?

There were many men and women we can categorize as British Romantic poets

Today, we tend to focus on a canon of six British Romantic Poets

These six were not all particularly popular in their own time, however.

Other men and women whose names are largely forgotten were much more popular


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The canon of British Romantic poets:

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

John Keats (1795-1821)

William Blake (1757-1827)

A printmaker and painter as well as a poet

Relatively unknown during his own time

Considered a madman by some

A mystic and a visionary

A believer in racial and sexual equality

A critic of conventional religion

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped launch the Romantic Age in English

literature with their 1798 joint publication,

Lyrical Ballads

Revolutionary as a young man

Was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death.

Wordsworths Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of

Romantic literary theory.

In it, he discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based

on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much

eighteenth-century poetry.

Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow

of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)


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Poet, critic, philosopher.

With William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in

England and one of the Lake Poets

Best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as

well as his major prose work, Biographia Literaria

Attacked for political radicalism

Coleridge was influenced by the philosopher William Godwin

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Godwins daughter, recalled hiding behind the sofa as

a child to hear Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

An idealist and advocate for social justice

A strong skeptic

A notorious and denigrated figure in his life (he was a political radical, and he

abandoned his pregnant wife and his child)

The idol of the next two or three generations of poets

Famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron

His writing significantly influenced the American Revolution

John Keats (1795-1821)

His work was critical attacked in the periodicals of the day

His posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson was immense

His poetry is characterized by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery

Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of negative capability, are

almost as famous today as his poetry.

Salient features of Victorian poetry

Salient features of Modern Poetry

"[v]ery interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation,

"texture"; extreme intensity,

forced emotion--violence;


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a good deal of obscurity on sensation, perceptual nuances;

emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole;

experimental or novel qualities of some sort;

a tendency toward external formlessness:

an extremely personal style--refine your singularities;

lack of restraint--all tendencies are forced to their limits;

there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the

thoroughly subjective;

the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-

public--he is, essentially, removed;

poetry is primarily lyric, intensive--the few long poems are aggregations oflyric details;

poems usually have, not a logical, but the more less associational structure of

dramatic monologue."

Formal characteristicsOpen FormFree verseDiscontinuous narrative

JuxtapositionIntertextuality

Classical allusionsBorrowings from other cultures and languagesUnconventional use of metaphorMetanarrativeFragmentationMultiple narrative points of view (parallax)

Thematic characteristicsBreakdown of social norms and cultural suretiesDislocation of meaning and sense from its normal contextValorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable futureDisillusionmentRejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed withoutchronologyProduct of the metropolis, of cities and urban scapesStream of consciousnessOverwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century

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Romantic to Modern Poetry