Romanticism…A literary and philosophical background

English Romanticism• Dates vary among critics, but generally accepted to be

1785-1830 (Neo-classicism preceded Romanticism – Victorian era followed it)

• Five canonical Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats

• 1798: Wordsworth and Coleridge publish the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems completely revolutionary for the time

• 1800: Wordsworth publishes the “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads to explain what he and Coleridge were doing with their poetry

Key Tenets of English Romanticism

Wordsworth: “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Coleridge: “…to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

Keats: “negative capability is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysterious, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

American Romanticism• Dates vary among critics, but generally accepted as 1840-

1865 (preceded by Rationalism, followed by Realism)

• Canonical American Romantics: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman

• 1850-1855 considered the glory years of American Romanticism: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, Walden… just to name a few!

Major Characteristics of Romanticism

• Source of poem is NOT in the outer world (as classicism held,) but within the individual poet—emphasizing the power of the imagination to perceive the world and shape it. Thus, “I: in Romantic lyric poetry is often closely tied to the poet.

Major Characteristics of Romanticism

• Nature is seen as a place of meditation, contemplation, and transcendence: poems do not merely describe nature, but often serge as a frame for a personal crisis or epiphany

Major Characteristics of Romanticism

• Poets often glorify the ordinary and the outcast sections of society; they look back nostalgically on childhood as a time of unfettered imagination and freedom.

Major Characteristics of Romanticism

• Supernatural events have a deep psychological impact; poets were interested in unusual modes of experience.