• Use creative imagination• Focus on nature • Importance of myth and symbolism• Focus on feelings and intuition• Freedom and spontaneity • Simple language • Personal experience, democracy and liberty• Fascination with past

What Is Romanticism?

• Changing political and social conditions

• Reaction against Industrial Revolution

• Revolt against Enlightenment and literary styles

• Working long hours in dangerous factories

• Development of modern cities

Trends

Trends

• Interest in chaos and nature• Changing religious views

• Rebellion against authority• Crime, madness, suicide

Neoclassic Trends

• Stressed reason and judgment

• Valued society• Followed authority• Maintained the

aristocracy• Interested in science

and technology

Revolt Against NeoclassicismRomantic Trends• Stressed imagination

and emotion• Valued individuals • Strove for freedom• Represented common

people• Interested in

supernatural

• William Blake• William Wordsworth• Samuel Taylor Coleridge• George Gordon, Lord

Byron • John Keats• Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets of the Romantic Era

Blake Coleridge

KeatsShelley

Wordsworth

Byron

Thoughts of British Romantic Poets“…I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” William Blake

“ Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” William Wordsworth

“Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Blake

Coleridge

Thoughts of British Romantic Poets“Those who will not reason, are bigots,

those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” George Gordon, Lord Byron

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” John Keats

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects

be as if they were not familiar.” Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Visions of ghostly and angelic figures

• Possessed mystic “gift of vision”

• Born in London November 28, 1757

• Educated at home by mother • Enrolled in drawing school at

age ten

William Blake1757-1827

Blake’s Death

• Suffered from unknown sickness• Experienced stomach pain and

chills• Died on August 12th, 1827• Buried in unmarked grave

Blake’s Works

• Songs of Innocence• Songs of Experience • Poetical Sketches • The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell