Romantic Poetry (1750s-1880s)

Passion

Emotion

Spontaneity

Subjectivity

Mortality

NatureLove

Beauty

The Romantic Movement… Brief Overview The Romantic Movement was a revolt against

the Enlightenment and its focus on rational and scientific thought.

The characteristics of Romantic literature involved an emphasis on passion, emotion, spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, and nature.

Throughout the 19th century, romantic poetry, in particular, became the most significant work of the period.

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats are the notable British Romantic poets.

Nature, religious fervor, emotional response to beauty, and Ancient Greek aesthetics, are some of the common themes in their work.

Note that each Romantic poet had his own style and emphasized different aspects.

William Blake (1757-1827) In his Life of William Blake

(1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake "neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself 'a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth."

Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of men.

Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing.

Poet, painter, and engraver, Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men.

Blake’s two famous volumes of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience show "the two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”

Blake had a unique religious, spiritual viewpoint based on a visionary idea, freedom and individualism, and he had radical political views.

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Wordsworth's mother

died when he was eight--this experience shapes much of his later work. Not long after, his father died, leaving him and his four siblings orphans.

Wordsworth's poetry centers around the interest and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of the "common man".

Wordsworth was influenced by his wanderings and his preoccupation with nature and man’s obsession with materialism.

He was friendly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's most famous work is The Prelude. The

poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry.

Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously.

Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions.

Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847, Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) As the eldest son,

Shelley stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather's considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament.

He attended Eton College and Oxford University.

Shelley had heretical and atheistic opinions.

Shelley eloped and married, only to later elope and marry Mary Shelley (who wrote Frankenstein).

Shelley was influenced by Godwin (Mary Shelley’s father) and his freethinking Socialist philosophy.

Shelley was also a good friend of Byron’s.

He traveled and lived in various Italian cities throughout his life.

His poetry emphasizes individualism, freedom, nature, and the importance of the subjective imagination.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

John Keats (1795-1821) Keats lost both his

parents at a young age.

He was a licensed apothecary, but never practiced as one; instead, he dedicated himself to writing poetry.

Keats’ poetry focuses on mortality, the beauty of nature, and includes many myths and allusions to Greek mythology and aesthetics.

Keats contracted tuberculosis and died at only twenty-five years old.

Because he was ill for a time before he died, many of his poems address his awareness of death, the importance of beauty and God, and frequently reference mythology and the ancients.

John Keats (1795-1821)

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1782-1824) The most flamboyant

and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was also the most fashionable poet of his day.

He created an immensely popular Romantic hero (known as the Byronic Hero)—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model.

Byron is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshipper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence.

His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose.

In his dynamism, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1782-1824)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

published The Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth in 1798, an event later seen as the beginning of the Romantic movement in England.

Coleridge held imagination to be the vital force behind poetry, and distinguished among different kinds of imagination in his long prose work Biographia Literaria.

Coleridge is probably most noted for the haunting imagery of his poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”.

He was influenced by Plato's Republic, and co-constructed a vision of pantisocracy (equal government by all).

Coleridge suffered from financial problems, and later ill health. He became addicted to opium (evident in much of his poetry), and lived off of financial donations and grants until he died.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Romantic Poetry (1750s-1880s)

In Your Group…- READ the assigned Romantic poem.- DISCUSS/ANALYZE the elements of TPCASTT and fill in graphic organizer.- READ your poem to the class and -SHARE your analysis of THEME.

William Blake (1757-1827)Auguries of Innocence

Laughing SongWhen the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;When the air does laugh with our merry wit,And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,When Mary and Susan and EmilyWith their sweet round mouths sing “Ha, Ha, He!”

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread,Come live & be merry, and join with me,To sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, Ha, He!”

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)London 1802

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,Have forfeited their ancient English dowerOf inward happiness. We are selfish men;Oh! raise us up, return to us again;And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,So didst thou travel on life’s common way,In cheerful godliness; and yet the heartThe lowliest duties on herself did lay.

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty

John Keats (1795-1821)Bright StarBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art-Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,And watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth’s human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors;No-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1782-1824)She Walks in Beauty

SHE walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes:Thus mellow’d to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impair’d the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with all below,A heart whose love is innocent!

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)To Nature

It may indeed be phantasy, when IEssay to draw from all created thingsDeep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings ;And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lieLessons of love and earnest piety.So let it be ; and if the wide world ringsIn mock of this belief, it bringsNor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.So will I build my altar in the fields,And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yieldsShall be the incense I will yield to Thee,Thee only God ! and thou shalt not despiseEven me, the priest of this poor sacrifice

ANNOTATE for elements of Romanticism: passion, emotion,

spontaneity, subjectivity, mortality, nature, love, and

beauty