The Romantic Age

1798 1832

I. Romance and Romanticism

II. Historical and political background
a. American Revolution
b. French Revolution
i. Reign of Terror
ii. Napoleon
c. Industrial Revolution
.i Two Nations:
.ii Laissez faire
III. The five major poets
a. Wordsworth
b. Coleridge
c. Byron
d. Shelley
e. Keats
IV. Poetic theory and poetic practice
a. Spontaneity
b. Nature poetry
c. The commonplace
d. The supernatural
e. Individualism, infinite striving, and nonconformity
V. The familiar essay, drama, and the novel

Restoration
decorum
level of diction
conservative
respect for order

Romanticism
enthusiasm
revolution x3
language of the common man
democrative sympathies

Epic
Tragedy
Comedy
Satire
Pastoral
Lyric
 The Romantic Period
1798 1832

I. Introduction
Following the common usage of historians of English literature, we shall
denote by the Romantic Period the span between the year 1798, in which William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, and in 1832,
when Sir Walter Scott died, and when the passage of the first Reform bill set in motion
the Victorian era of cautious readjustment of political power to the economic and social
realities of a new industrial age.
Before we look at the main features of this period, we need to thing about
the words Romantic and Romanticism. The names we apply to broad periods of literary
and cultural history can often be misleading, and this is especially true of the Romantic
Age and Romanticism. The word romance (French roman) was a broad term in origin
and was applied indiscriminately to any long narrative in French verse for example, the
Roman du Rou, a chronicle of Normandy; the Roman de la Rose, an allegory of
aristocratic courtship; the Roman dAlexandre, the history of Alexander the Great. By the
end of the Middle Ages, however, the word roman, or romance, had become restricted to
something like its modern meaning: a tale of knightly prowess, usually set in remote
times or places and involving elements of the fantastic or supernatural.
Therefore, the word romance originally referred to the highly imaginative medieval
tales of knightly adventure written in the French derivative of the original Roman (or
romance) language, Latin. (That these tales often involved amorous encounters between a
knight and his lady is partly responsible for the modern meanings of romance and
romantic.) When we speak of the Romantic Period, we are using the word romantic in
this older sense. We are referring indirectly to an interest in the charming, magical world
of medieval romance, and more generally to the rich imaginative activity displayed in
that world, which is deeply characteristic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-
century writers. To avoid confusion, we should remember that romance as freely
imaginative perfection-seeking fiction, not romance as love between men and
women, is the true basis for the terms Romantic Age and Romanticism.
II. Historical and Political Background
The eighteenth century was a time of great prosperity and confidence for the
upper and middle class in England, but toward the end of the century two major political
revolutions disturbed the established sense of security and well-being in the country.
Although both revolutions occurred outside England, they nevertheless affected the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century thinking.
First, there was the revolt of the English colonies in America against the uncaring
and unjust economic policies of the mother country under the blundering leadership of
George III. The victory of the American movement for independence was certainly a
blow to English confidence, but practically and philosophically it was less threatening
than the second revolution, which took place in France in 1789.
Unlike the American Revolution, which was merely a rejection of authority and
control by a distant and unorganized group of colonies, the French Revolution was a
complete overthrow of the government of a great European power from within. This
seeming change in the balance of power sparked the feeling in English liberal and
radicals that, in the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the
Bastille to liberate political prisoners, England was now primed for a triumph of popular
democracy. (Historical accounts suggest that the Bastille liberation was more symbolic
than actual.)
Later, however, English sympathizers dropped off as the revolution followed its
increasingly grim and violent course. When revolutionary extremists gained control of
the government in 1792, they executed hundreds of imprisoned nobility in what became
known as the September Massacres. The year 1793 saw the execution of King Louis XVI
and the establishment under Robespierre of the Reign of Terror, during which thousands
of those associated with the old regime were guillotined. Most disturbing of all to the
English mind was, perhaps, the invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands by the
army of the French Republic, and the French offer of armed resistance to all countries
desiring to overthrow their present governments. This threat of internal rebellion spurred
the existing conservative parliament into war against France, which after savage reprisals
against those who had held power during the Reign of Terror, produced Napoleon as
dictator and eventually as emperor of France. Once a champion of the Revolution,
Napoleon became a tyrannical despot who strove to conquer Europe and establish a hew
dynasty.
The reaction of the supporters of the Revolution was on of disillusionment and
hopelessness in France as well as England. In England, the government and ruling
classes, in reaction to the fear that the early democratic principles of the revolution might
spread to their own country, introduced severe measures. Public meetings were
prohibited, habeas corpus was suspended for the first time in over a hundred years, and
advocated of even modest political change were charged with high treason. The
disillusionment of the liberal and democratic thinkers seemed to reach its deepest when
Napoleon, still regarded by some as a song of the Revolution, was defeated by British
forces as Waterloo in 1815. This defeat by on despotic power over another, rather than
showing democratic progress and reform, seemed to have consolidated the power of the
wealthy and reactionary ruling classes.
Though less sudden and obvious in its consequences that the political revolutions
in America and France, the Industrial Revolution was ultimately more important in
transforming European society, and its own way more violent in its impact of human life.
This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of
change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been
concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modernized industrial nation, in which
the balance of economic power shifted to large scale employers, who found themselves
ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly resistive working class. The
result of this industrialization of Britains cities was to depopulate the countryside by
forcing workers to seek employment in the various city mills. Working and living
conditions in these cities were terrible; women and children as well as men labored for
long hours under intolerable conditions. More than ever before the population was
becoming increasingly polarized into what Prime Minister Disraeli called the Two
nations- the two classes of capitol and labor, the large owner or trader, and the
possessionless wageworker, the rich and the poor.
No attempt was made to regulate the shift from the old economic world to the
new because of the pervasive social philosophy of laissez- faire. This theory of let
alone allowed corrupt, or at least insensitive, employers to abuse their employees rights
 without government interference. Subsequent reports done on the conditions of the
mining industry where five to ten years old children were forced to pull carts on their
hands and knees read like passengers from Dantes Inferno.
In summary, the Romantic Age was a time of vast and largely unguided political
and economic change. Most of the writers of this period were deeply affected by the
promise of subsequent disappointment of the French revolution, and by the contorting
effects of the Industrial revolution. In many ways, both direct and indirect, we can see the
historical issues we have just been surveying reflected in the main literary concerns of
romantic writers.
Much as the French Revolution signaled an attempt to break with the old order
and to establish a new and revitalized social system, romanticism sought to free itself
from the rules and standards of eighteenth-century literature and to open up new areas of
vision and expression. The democratic and insistence on the rights of the individual,
which characterized the early states of the French revolution, have their parallel in the
Romantic writers interest in the language and experience of the common people, and in
the belief that writers and artists must be free to explore their own imaginative worlds.
The main consequences of the industrial revolution the urbanization of English life and
landscape, and the exploitation of the working class underline the Romantic writers
love of the unspoiled natural world or remote settings devoid of urban complexity, and
his passionate concern for the downtrodden and oppressed.
III. The Five Major Poets of the Romantic Age
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)
Although Wordsworth is the least colorful of the major Romantic poets, he
is recognized by many as the greatest. Wordsworths reputation is based on his
collaborative efforts in Lyrical Ballads and his autobiographical masterpiece the
Prelude, the greatest and most original long poem since Miltons Paradise Lost.
Wordsworth is remembered as the poet of the remembrance of things past, or as
he himself put it, of emotion recollected in tranquility. Where an object or event
in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he has experienced in youth;
the result is poetry that exhibits a discrepancy between who he is aat the present
and who he once was.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
Coleridge, Wordsworths co-collaborator on Lyrical Ballads, is most
famous for his mysterious and demonic poetry, including The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel. Coleridge was regarded by his friends as
one of the greatest intellectual minds of the day; albeit, a mind that should have
produced more, and one that suffered the dehabilitating effects of opium
addiction.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)
Byron cuts one of the most fascinating personalities of the Romantic Age.
He Achieved great fame during his lifetime and was rated as one of the greatest
poets through the nineteenth century, but is now viewed as the least consequential
of the major Romantic poets. Interestingly, none of the major poets, bar Shelley,
thought highly of Byron or his work; while Byron spoke slightingly of all the
major poets except Shelley. Byron felt that all his contemporaries were focused on
the wrong subject matter he chose the favorite of the neoclassicists, satire against
modern civilization, in his masterpiece Don Juan. Byrons chief claim to be
considered an arch-Romantic is with the personage of the Byronic hero. This
persistent character is that of a moody, passionate, remorse-torn, but unrepentant
wanderer; in essence, a reflection of himself. The literary descendants of this
Byronic hero are Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Rochester in Jane Eyre, and
Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Byron died at the age of thirty-six in Greece, where
he is regarded today as a national hero for his efforts in training Greek soldiers
during the Greek/Turkish wars.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
Shelleys writing is the most passionate and intense of all the
romantics. Eccentric in manners and in religious and political beliefs, mad
Shelley was expelled from Oxford for the publication of an article called The
Necessity of Atheism. Like Byron, Shelley felt himself to be an alien and outcast
from his own country and society; subsequently, Shelley lived out the latter years
of his life in Italy. Shelleys greatness as a poet is seen in hi philosophical
masterpiece Prometheus Unbound, and for his great Ode to the West Wind,
 among others. Shelley, like Byron and Keats, died at a young age. Only twenty-
nine, Shelley was killed in a boating accident in 1822. Shelleys body was thereby
cremated by a group of friends, including Byron, and his ashes buried in the
Protestant cemetery in Rome.
Mary Shelley (wife) Frankenstein; daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft- A
Vindication of the Rights of Women
John Keats (1795-1821)
The brevity and intensity of Keats career are unmatched in
English poetry. At the age of twenty-three, Keats had achieved the culmination of
his brief career. Within five years of first trying his hand at poetry, Keats had
written The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Lamia, all of the great
odes, as a sufficient number of the sonnets to make him, like Wordsworth, a
major Romantic craftsman in that form.
To put Keatss potential in comparison, it should be remembered that
Wordsworth did not start writing in earnest until he was twenty-seven, and on his
death at the age of twenty-five, Keats achievements greatly exceeded that of
Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton.
IV. Poetic Theory and Poetic Practice
Although no writer during William Wordsworths time considered himself a
Romantic, a word not applied until half a century later by English historians, many
of then did feel there was a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which
some of them called the spirit of the age. The Revolution left the feeling that this
was a great age of new beginnings when, by discarding inherited procedures and
outworn customs, everything was possible, not only in the political and social realm
but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well. Remember, the major writers of the
day including Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were all
fervent supporters of the early Revolution. Even after its collapse, writers such as
Shelley and Byron felt when purged of its errors, the Revolutions example still
comprised humanitys best hope.
As was mentioned, the Romantic Age in England began with perhaps the greatest
act of collaboration in all of English Literature; the publishing of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridges Lyrical Ballads. In excited daily
communions these two men set out to revolutionize the theory and practice of poetry.
Wordsworth undertook to justify the new poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In
it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those writers of the
preceding century Dryden, Pope, and Johnson- who, in this view, had imposed on
poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural development. Although
Coleridge did not agree wholeheartedly with all of Wordsworths assumptions, he did
see the necessity of overturning the reigning tradition. This preface, therefore,
deserves its reputation as a turning point in English literature, for Wordsworth
gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory based on explicit
critical principles, and made them the rationale for his own massive achievements as
a poet.
a. Spontaneity
Wordsworth described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition,
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Although there existed varied
theories of what Romantic poetry was, all concurred on the crucial point that it
was the mind, emotions and the imagination of the poet that were the defining
attributes of a poem. The emphasis in this period on the free activity of the
imagination is related to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition
and the feelings of the heart to supplement the judgments of the purely logical
faculty, the head, whether in the province of artistic beauty, philosophical or
religious truth, or moral goodness.
b. Nature Poetry
Because of the prominence of landscape in this period, Romantic poetry
has to the popular mind almost become synonymous with nature poetry.
Romantic nature poems are in fact meditative poems, in which the
presented scene usually serves to raise an emotional problem or personal
crisis whose development and resolution constitutes the organizing
principle of the poem. Restate: Nature causes the poet to meditate over a
problem and resolve it.
c. The Commonplace
 Another characteristic of Romantic poetry was the glorification of the
common man and rustic life; or according to Wordsworth, to choose
incidents and situations from common life and to use a selection of
language really spoken by men, for which the model is humble and
rustic life. Byron maintained allegiance to both aristocratic proprieties
and traditional poetic decorum: Peddlers, and Boats, and Wagers!
Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
d. The Supernatural
Also characteristic of this poetry was an interest in the realm of mystery
and magic, in which materials from ancient folklore, superstition, and
demonology are employed in the distant past or far away locations.
Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and Keats
La Belle Dan sans Merci fit this character.
e. Individualism, Infinite Striving, and Nonconformity
Through the greater part of the eighteenth century, men and women had
for the most part been viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and
unchanging world. The opposite was true in the Romantic period, where a
higher estimate was put in human powers. Now a radical individualism
surfaced that argued that the human being should refuse to submit to
limitations and pursue infinite and inaccessible goals. For example,
Goethes Faust, unlike Marlowes Faustus, wins salvation through his
persistent striving for more. Also apparent in Romantic poetry is the
isolation of the individual, (contrast views of the Restoration). Many of
the poets of the day employed a protagonist with an individual vision that
was achieved outside of an ordered society. Finally, the theme of exile, of
the disinherited mind that cannot find a spiritual home in its native land or
society is introduced. This solitary Romantic nonconformist was
sometimes also a great sinner, therefore the fascination with Cain, Satan,
and Faustor in Coleridges case, his outcast Mariner.
V. The Familiar Essay, Drama, and the Novel
 The familiar essay a commentary on a non-technical subject written in
a relaxed and impersonal manner flourished in a fashion that paralleled the
Romantic poetry. Essayists such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De
Quincey wrote autobiographical, personal essays that sympathized with the lower
classes and employed a style that broke free from their neoclassical predecessors.
Because of rigid moral and political censorship the drama was virtually
non-existent during the Romantic period.
Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late eighteenth century;
the Gothic novel and the novel of purpose. The term Gothic derives from the
frequent setting of these tales in a gloomy castle in the Middle ages, but has been
extended to include a lager group of novels that include stories of decaying mansions
with dark dungeons, secret passages, and stealthy ghosts; chilling supernatural
phenomena; and, often, persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed and haggard
villain.
The second fictional mode popular at the turn of the century was the novel
of purpose that was written to give light to new social and political theories current in
the period of the French Revolution.
The Romantic period produced two major novelists, Jane Austen and Sir
Walter Scott. Austen is one of Englands greatest novelists. She wrote Sense and
Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, two novels that poked fun at popular Gothic tales.
She also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Emma novels that dealt with various
heroines and their capacity to demonstrate grace under social and financial pressure.
Sir Walter Scott, a contemporary of Austen who admired her work greatly,
wrote in fiction that was an extreme from hers. He wrote his fiction in the rich and
lively realm of history with characters that represented the middle and lower classes.
Scotts most famous works include Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, and, Ivanhoe.
With the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, and the passage of the First
Reform Bill in that same year followed by Queen Victorias accession to the throne in
1837, England entered a new phase in its cultural and literary history. The Romantic
concern with the dignity, freedom, and creative potential of the human mind in a
world that was becoming increasingly complicated, an alien, continued to be a major
concern of Victorian writers the next era of British literature.