ROMANTICISM

• An international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the ways in which
people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world;

IN LITERATURE

• Beginning: 1798, Wordsworth, W & Coleridge, S. Taylor. Lyrical Ballads Novavilis

Novavilis.

• Ending: 1832, deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an
international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the
1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American
literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than
in literature;

IN LIFE

• The early Romantic period: "age of revolutions" – the American (1776) and the French
(1789) revolutions;

• A revolutionary energy: change to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry
(and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts have
survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period;

• IMAGINATION: was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind –

ultimate "shaping" or creative power;

• Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase,
"intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty,
enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance.
The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally,
imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is
presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols;

• SYMBOLISM AND MYTH: were given great prominence in the Romantic

conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic
correlatives of nature's emblematic language;

• SELF AND FEELING: Wordsworth – poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of

powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history.
 • INTUITION, INSTINCTS, EMOTIONS a necessary supplement to purely logical
reason. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as
subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic
type;

• AMBIGUOUS ATITUDE TOWARDS REAL: Advanced certain realistic techniques,

such as the use of "local color" but social realism was usually subordinate to
imagination;

• POLITICS: Romantics were ambivalent. They were politically and socially involved,
but they distanced themselves from the public. Romantic’s emotions included social
and political consciousness – as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that
reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world;

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757 – 1827)

"To see a world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wild flower/

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour."

• William Blake was a poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver. During his life the
prophetic message of his writings were understood by few and misunderstood by
many. However Blake is now widely admired for his soulful originality and lofty
imagination;

• His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romanticism and
"Pre-Romantic” for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but
hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of
the French and American Revolution as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and
Emanuel Swedenborg;

• EARLY POEMS: His first book of poems, POETICAL SKETCHES, appeared in

1783 and was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience
(1794). Typical for Blake’s poems were long, flowing lines and violent energy,
combined with aphoristic clarity and moments of lyric tenderness.

• Songs of Innocence

INTRODUCTION THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

Piping down the valleys wild, My mother bore me in the southern wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee, And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
On a cloud I saw a child, White as an angel is the English child,
And he laughing said to me:
‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’
So I piped with merry cheer.
‘Piper, pipe that song again.’
So I piped: he wept to hear.
‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
‘Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.’
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. rejoice’,’’
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his
head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so
I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your
head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your
white hair."
And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight,
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned,
and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointed to the east, began to say:
‘‘Look on the rising sun: there God does
live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat
away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men
receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
‘‘And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt
face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
‘‘For when our souls have learn’d the heat to
bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His
voice,
Saying, ’Come out from the grove, my love
and care
And round my golden tent like lambs
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud
free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing,
they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left

behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want
joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,

And got with our bags and our brushes to
work./ Though the morning was cold, Tom
was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

• Songs of Experience

INTRODUCTION THE TIGER

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
Hear the voice of the Bard, In the forest of the night,
Who present, past, and future, sees; What immortal hand or eye
Whose ears have heard Could Frame thy fearful symmetry?
The Holy Word
That walked among the ancient tree; In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
Calling the lapsed soul, On what wings dare he aspire?
And weeping in the evening dew; What the hand dare seize the fire?
That might control
The starry pole, And what shoulder and what art
And fallen, fallen light renew! Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
‘‘O Earth, O Earth, return! What dread hand and what dread feet?
Arise from out the dewy grass!
Night is worn, What the hammer? what the chain?
And the morn In what furnace was thy brain?
Rises from the slumbrous mass. What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
‘‘Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away? When the stars threw down their spears,
The starry floor, And watered heaven with their tears,
The watery shore, Did he smile his work to see?
Are given thee till the break of day.’’ Did he who made the lamb make thee?

THE CLOD AND THE PEBBLE Tiger, tiger, burning bright

‘‘Love seeketh not itself to please, In the forests of the night,
Nor for itself hath any care, What immortal hand or eye
But for another gives it ease, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’’
LONDON
So sang a little clod of clay, I wandered through each chartered street,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet, Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
But a pebble of the brook And mark in every face I meet,
Warbled out these metres meet: Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

‘‘Love seeketh only Self to please, In every cry of every man,

To bind another to its delight, In every infant’s cry of fear,
Joys in another’s loss of ease, In every voice, in every ban,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’’ The mind-forged manacles I hear:

THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER How the chimney-sweeper’s cry

A little black thing in the snow, Every blackening church appals,
Crying ‘‘weep! weep!’’ in notes of woe! And the hapless soldier’s sigh
‘‘Where are thy father and mother? Say!’’— Runs in blood down palace-walls.
‘‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
‘‘Because I was happy upon the heath, How the youthful harlot’s curse
And smiled among the winter’s snow, Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
They clothed me in the clothes of death, And blights with plagues the marriage-
And taught me to sing the notes of woe. hearse.
‘‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his priest and
king,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.’’
-
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH – WE ARE SEVEN
"Their graves are green, they may be seen,"
A Simple Child,/ That lightly draws its breath, The little Maid replied,
And feels its life in every limb,/ What should it know of "Twelve steps or more from my mother's door,
death? And they are side by side.

I met a little cottage Girl: / She was eight years old, she said; "My stockings there I often knit,
Her hair was thick with many a curl My kerchief there I hem;
That clustered round her head. And there upon the ground I sit,
She had a rustic, woodland air, And sing a song to them.
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair; "And often after sun-set, Sir,
--Her beauty made me glad. When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
"Sisters and brothers, little Maid, And eat my supper there.
How many may you be?"
"How many? Seven in all," she said "The first that died was sister Jane;
And wondering looked at me. In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
"And where are they? I pray you tell." And then she went away.
She answered, "Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell, "So in the church-yard she was laid;
And two are gone to sea. And, when the grass was dry,

"Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother."
"You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven!--I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be."
Then did the little Maid reply,
"Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree."
"You run above, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five."
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
"And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side."
"How many are you, then," said I,
"If they two are in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! we are seven."
"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"