The Age of Romanticism

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The Age of Romanticism

• An Age of Passion, Rebellion, Individuality,
  Imagination, Intuition, Idealism, and Creativity

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The Age of Romanticism

• Several centuries B.C., Plato described humans as
  a careful balance of reason, passions, and
  appetites, with reason as the guide. The Age of
  Reason elevated reason, but perhaps suppressed
  passions too much. For some, the emphasis on
  reason had gotten out of balance with the rest of
  human nature.

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Age of Reason v. Age of Romanticism

• Descartes Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore
  I exist.)
• Rousseau Exister, pour nous, cest sentir
  (For us, to exist is to feel.)

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Qualities of Romanticism

• Love of Nature
• Idealization of Rural Living
• Faith in Common People
• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination,
  wonder
• Passionate individual religiosity
• Life after death Organic view of the World

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Love of Nature
• Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a
  part / Of me and my soul, as I of them? Byron
• A mountain is the type of a majestic
  intellect, . . . There I beheld the emblem of a
  giant mind that feeds upon infinity. Wordsworth

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Idealization of rural living
• I met a little Cottage Girl / She was eight
  years old, she said / Her hair was thick with
  many a curl / That clustered round her head. /
  She had a rustic, woodland air, / An she was
  wildly clad / Her eyes were fair, and very fair
  / --Her beauty made me glad. Wordsworth

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Idealization of rural living
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The Exotic
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The Exotic
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Faith in Common People
• For theres not a man that lives who hath not
  known his god-like hours Wordsworth
• Man is as a god, though in the germ. Browning

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Honore Daumier 1862--realism
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The Common People
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Faith in Common People
Gustave Courbet 1849
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
• Political freedom--American and French
  Revolution(liberty, equality, fraternity)
  antislavery and womens suffrage movements
• Men of England, wherefore plough / For the lords
  who lay ye low? / Wherefore weave with toil and
  care / The rich robes your tyrants wear? . . . .
  . . . . . . . Wherefore, Bees of England, forge /
  Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, / . . . . . .
  / Sow seed,--but let no tyrant reap / Find
  wealth,--let no imposter heap Shelley
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
  perhaps it is because he hears a different
  drummer. Thoreau

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Commoners seeking their rights.
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination,
  wonder
• Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse,
  not from rules. Blake
• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feeling and is put into art from emotion
  recollected in tranquility. Wordsworth

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Passionate individual religiosity
• Protestant view of each man his own intermediary
  with Christ
• Transcendentalism
• Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that
  calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the
  five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this
  age. William Blake

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Life after death
• Organic view of the world

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Romanticism A Poetic Age

• Wordsworth-- Poetry is the spontaneous overflow
  of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.
• Hazlitt--poetry is the language of imagination
  and the passions.
• Shelley--poetry redeems from decay the
  visitations of the divine in man.
• Keats--If poetry comes not as naturally as the
  Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

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Romanticism A Poetic Age

• Popular forms blank verse, the ballad, the
  short lyric, Rime Royal stanzas, Spenserian
  stanzas, the sonnet
• Meter lines were often enjambed, loose, with a
  free use of caesura and other spontaneous breaks
  in patterns.
• . . . spinning still/ The rapid line of motion,
  then at once/ Have I, reclining back upon my
  heels,/ Stopped short yet still the solitary
  cliffs/ Wheeled by me -- . . . (Wordsworth--
  The Prelude)

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Gothic Models Replace Greco-Roman Architecture
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Gothic Architecture
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Romantic Music