ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM

1
ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM

• Literary Criticism
• Sandya Maulana, S.S.

2
ROMANTIC LITERARY CRITICISM

• Romanticism is a reaction towards the advances in
  science and technology and, later, society and
  economy, seen in the late eighteenth century.
  These advances were seen as degenerating people
  into rigid structures of society and nature into
  mere commodities. Thus, the rational world, in
  the Romantic point of view, was artificial,
  devoid of consideration of nature and human
  emotions. When Romanticism first swept Europe, it
  rejected the neoclassical ideas, which are full
  of rigid and prescriptive rules as well as
  elevated language and composition.
•  
• Romanticism was thought to begin in Germany in
  the late eighteenth century. The works of Goethe
  embody Romantic qualities, although this
  conclusion came later after Romanticism was well
  all over Europe and America. It is important to
  note that Romanticism is usually characterized by
  the depiction of idealized nature, preference to
  everyday language, and importance of human
  feelings. These characteristics were expanded by
  the writers of the late Romanticism, including
  American writers of the middle of the nineteenth
  century

3
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749 1852)

• Like most great poets, Goethe tried to stand free
  of labels, but the critic Schlegel was certainly
  right to identify many of his views with
  Romanticism. Goethe held a number of opinions
  that became current in his time, and thus became
  identified with Romanticism, particularly the
  distinction between allegory and symbolism. His
  Maxim no. 279 is also Romantic in nature. In
  it, Goethe prefers the poet that starts his
  poetry with the particular, which is what
  reveals poetry in its true nature it speaks
  forth a particular without independently thinking
  of or referring to a universal, but in grasping
  the particular in its living character it
  implicitly apprehends the universal along with
  it.
• Notable work Conversation with Eckermann(1836).

4
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770 1850)

• Wordsworths Preface to the second edition of
  Lyrical Ballads shifts emphasis from the
  relationship between poem and reader to that
  between poet and poem. He considers the poet a
  teacher not of concepts but of immediate
  intuitions of nature. He defines the poem
  primarily in terms of idea of a poet. Wordsworth
  then describes the poem as the result of these
  powers and activities. It is a spontaneous
  overflow of powerful feelings it takes its
  origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
  Wordsworth makes clear that the poem does not
  simply rush forth memory and contemplation come
  into play in its composition. Nevertheless,
  emphasis in the definition is on the dominance of
  feeling over intellect. Feeling becomes the real
  basis of imagination, which is the power to grasp
  nature in its totality and to order ones
  experience. Wordsworth attacks the popular style
  of his time as employing a gaudy and inane
  phraseology that veils nature rather than
  reveals its spirit. In his view, simple, concrete
  language expresses a close relationship to the
  permanent forms of nature, which he associates
  with rural speech and rural life.
• Notable work Preface to the second edition of
  Lyrical Ballads

5
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

• Emersons essay The Poet provides a compendium of
  Romantic ideas about poetry. His attitude toward
  symbolism helped to lay groundwork for such
  theories as Cassirers philosophy of symbolic
  forms. Emerson thinks that language tends to wear
  itself out in clichés, and expression becomes
  dull and inaccurate. Every thought eventually
  becomes a sort of prison. It is the poet who
  forges a new language and new thoughts and
  provides the possibility of mental liberation. In
  this view, language would seem to be a primary
  means by which man forms reality. The poem
  remains for Emerson a vehicle for transcendental
  thought nature itself is a symbol or a language
  that somehow can be read. But if nature is
  language of symbols, then it would seem that
  poetic language itself becomes only a copy of
  natural symbols and might best be transcended or
  bypassed for immediate communion with the natural
  world.
• Notable work The Poet