The Romantic Period

1
The Romantic Period

• 1798-1832

2
Introduction

• During the spring of 1798, two young English
  poets sold some of their poems to raise money for
  a trip to Germany.
• Each had published books of poetry, but their new
  joint work was to be anonymous.
• As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the younger of the
  pair, told the printer Wordsworths name is
  nothing . . . mine stinks.
• Soon after they left England, their book, Lyrical
  Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, appeared.
• Among the few other poems was Coleridges long
  narrative The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and a
  last-minute addition, Wordsworths Lines
  Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
• Both of these works are now among the most
  important poems in English literature.
• So began what is now called the Romantic period
  in England.
• Literary historians have found other important
  events to mark its beginning and end, but we
  should remember the casual, modest appearance of
  Lyrical Ballads as we consider the Romantic
  period and the writers associated with it.

3
Turbulent Times, Bitter Realities

• Another way to date the Romantic period is to say
  that it started with the French Revolution in
  1789 and ended with the Parliamentary reforms of
  1832 that laid the political foundations for
  modern Britain.
• It was a turbulent, revolutionary age, marked by
  important historical developmentsan age in which
  England changed from an agricultural society to
  an industrial nation.
• We think about this era in terms of some
  important historic developments.
• Beginning in America in 1776, an age of
  revolution swept across western Europe.
• During the next century, new political, economic,
  and social forces produced some of the most
  radical changes ever experienced in human life.

4
The French Revolution

• A radical revolution started in France with the
  storming of the prison called the Bastille on
  July 14, 1789.
• Unlike the American Revolution, the more radical
  French Revolution had threatening repercussions
  for England.
• For the English ruling classes, the French
  Revolution came to represent their worst fears
  the overthrow of an anointed king by a democratic
  mob.
• To English conservatives, the French Revolution
  meant the triumph of radical principles, and they
  feared that the revolutionary fever would spread
  across from France to England.

5
The New Regime

• Democratic idealists and liberals felt
  exhilarated by the events in France.
• During the revolutions early years, they even
  made trips to France to view the new regime
  firsthand, as if it were a tourist attraction.
• Many became disillusioned, however, when in 1792
  the September massacre took place in France.
• Hundreds of French aristocrats and some members
  of the clergywith only the slightest ties to the
  regime of King Louis XVIhad their heads severed
  from their bodies by a grisly new invention, the
  guillotine.
• In 1793, France and England declared war on each
  other.
• Many English liberals, including Wordsworth and
  Coleridge, turned against France.
• In the midst of the turmoil, control of the
  French government changed hands again.
• Napoleon Bonaparte, an officer in the French
  army, emerged first as dictator and then, in
  1804, as emperor of France.
• In the end, Napoleon became as ruthless as the
  executed king himself had been.

6
The Conservatives Clamp Down

• The bewildering changes in western Europe
  prompted conservatives in England to institute
  severe repressive measures.
• The English outlawed collective bargaining and
  kept suspected spies or agitators in prison
  without a trial.
• After a brief peace in 18021803, England began a
  long war against Napoleon.
• The English first defeated Napoleons navy at the
  Battle of Trafalgar and, finallyin 1815 with the
  help of alliesconquered Napoleons army at
  Waterloo, Belgium.
• The conservatives in England felt they had saved
  their country from a tyrant and from chaos the
  early supporters of the revolution felt betrayed.
  
• For them, Waterloo was simply the defeat of one
  tyrant by another.
• Still, the Romantics clung to their hopes for the
  dawn of a new era through peaceful changehopes
  provoked and shaped by upheavals in English life
  brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

7
The Industrial Revolution Finds a Foothold

• England was the first nation in the world to
  experience the effects of the Industrial
  Revolution.
• Previously, goods had been made by hand, at home.
  
• Now, production switched to factories, where
  machines worked many times faster than human
  beings could work by hand.
• Since factories were in cities, the city
  populations increased, resulting in desperate
  living conditions that would horrify even the
  most hardened social worker today.
• In addition, the land once shared by small
  farmers was taken over by individual owners and
  converted into private parks or privately held
  fields.
• This resulted in large numbers of landless
  people.
• Just as some unemployed and homeless people do
  today, these landless people moved to cities in
  search of work, or relied on the forms of charity
  of the time, the poorhouse and begging.

8
The Tyranny of Laissez Faire

• The economic philosophy that kept all this misery
  going was a policy called laissez faire, a French
  term meaning let (people) do (as they please).
• According to this policy, the new economic forces
  should be allowed to operate freely without
  government interference.
• The result of laissez faire was that the rich
  grew richer, and the poor suffered even more.
• The system, of course, had its most tragic
  effects on the helpless, especially children.
• Small children of the poor were often used as
  beasts of burden.
• In the coal pits, for example, very small
  children were even harnessed to carts for
  dragging coal, just as if they had been small
  donkeys.

9
The Rebellion of the Romantic Poets

• The Romantic era has been most often identified
  with six poets.
• Three of them (William Blake, William Wordsworth,
  and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) were born before the
  period began and lived through most or all of it.
  
• The other three (the second generation of Percy
  Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon, Lord
  Byron) began their short careers in the second
  decade of the new century but died before 1825.
• All six poets were, in their own ways, deeply
  aware of their revolutionary times and dedicated
  to bringing about change.
• They had no illusions about their very limited
  political power, but they believed in the force
  of literature.
• Frustrated by Englands resistance to political
  and social change that would improve conditions,
  the Romantic poets turned from the formal, public
  verse of the eighteenth-century Augustans to a
  more private, spontaneous, lyric poetry.
• These lyrics expressed the Romantics belief that
  imagination, rather than mere reason, was the
  best response to the forces of change.

10
What Does Romantic Mean?

• The word romantic comes from the term romance,
  one of the most popular genres of medieval
  literature.
• Later, Romantic writers self-consciously used the
  elements of romance in an attempt to go back to
  older types of writing that they saw as more
  genuine than neoclassical literature.
• The romance genre also allowed writers to explore
  new, more psychological and mysterious aspects of
  human experience.
• Today, the word romantic is often a negative
  label used to describe sentimental writing.
• The word is particularly applied to bestselling
  paperback romances about lovea subject that
  many people mistakenly think the Romantic poets
  popularized.
• As a historical term, however, romantic has at
  least three useful meanings, all of them relevant
  to the Romantic poets.

11
What Does Romantic Mean?

• A Childs Sense of Wonder
• First, the term romantic signifies a fascination
  with youth and innocence, particularly the
  freshness and wonder of a childs perception of
  the world.
• This perception seemed to resemble the ages
  sense of a new dawn and what Wordsworth saw in
  his first experience in France as human nature
  being born again.

12
What Does Romantic Mean?

• Social Idealism
• Second, the term romantic refers to a view of the
  cyclical development of human societies.
• This is the stage when people need to question
  tradition and authority in order to imagine
  better that is, happier, fairer, and
  healthierways to live.
• Romantic in this sense is associated with
  idealism.
• (The 19661975 period in the United States might
  be called a romantic era.)

13
What Does Romantic Mean?

• Adaptation to Change
• Finally, the term romantic suggests an ability to
  adapt to change an acceptance of change rather
  than a rigid rejection of it.
• In the so-called Romantic period of the first
  half of the nineteenth century (up to the Civil
  War in America), Western societies met the
  conditions necessary for industrialization.
• This demanded that people acquire a stronger and
  stronger awareness of change, and that they try
  to find ways to adapt to it.
• In this sense, we still live with the legacy of
  the Romantic period.

14
A New Kind of Poetry

• Lyrical Ballads did not remain unnoticed or
  anonymous for long.
• In 1800, with Coleridge looking over his
  shoulder, Wordsworth composed the Preface for the
  expanded collection.
• In it he declared that he was writing a new kind
  of poetry.
• The subject matter would be different from that
  of earlier poets like Alexander Pope, who used
  poetry to satirize, or to persuade the reader
  with argumentative techniques.
• For Wordsworth, good poetry was the spontaneous
  overflow of powerful feelings.
• Such poetry should use simple, unadorned language
  to deal with commonplace subjects.
• Furthermore, Wordsworth focused on rural life
  instead of city life he believed that there is a
  permanent and interactive bond between the human
  mind and nature.
• Wordsworth reveals and celebrates this bond in
  Tintern Abbey.

15
The Mystery of Imagination

• It is a mistake to think of the Romantics as
  nature poets.
• They were mind poets who sought a deeper
  understanding of the bond between human beings
  and the world of the senses.
• Their search led them to a third, more mysterious
  element present in both the mind and nature.
• The Romantics identified this power as the
  imagination, which was superior to human
  reasoning.
• Each of the Romantics had his or her own special
  view of the imagination.
• But all of them seem to have believed that the
  imagination could be stimulated by both nature
  and the mind itself.
• They had a strong sense of natures mysterious
  forces.
• Romantic poems usually present imaginative
  experiences as very powerful or moving.
• This suggests that the human imagination is also
  a kind of desirea motive that drives the mind to
  discover things that it cannot learn by rational
  or logical thinking.

16
The Romantic Poet

• In the Preface, Wordsworth makes it clear that
  the poet is a special person, endowed with more
  lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and
  tenderness . . . a greater knowledge of human
  nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
  supposed to be common among mankind.
• Though the word supposed (meaning thought) may
  suggest that Wordsworth thought his fellow
  citizens had too low an estimate of much of
  humankind, all of the Romantic poets described
  the poet in such lofty terms.

17
The Romantic Poet

• For William Blake, for example, the poet was the
  bard, an inspired revealer and teacher.
• The poet, wrote Coleridge, brings the whole soul
  of man into activity by employing that
  synthetic and magical power . . . the
  imagination.
• Shelley called poets the unacknowledged
  legislators of the world.
• Keats wrote that a poet is a physician to all
  humanity and pours out a balm upon the world.
• The poet, in other words, is someone human beings
  and society cannot do without.