The Romantics

1790-1837
• The main stream of poetry in the eighteenth
century had been orderly and polished,
without much feeling for nature.
• The publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798)
came as a shock. The critics considered
the language too simple and the change
too violent.
• This important book- the signal of the
beginning of the romantic age-was the
joint work of William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition
in 1800 was a statement of revolutionary
aims, in which he denounced the upper-
 Romanticism
• Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary,
and intellectual movement that originated
in the second half of the 18th century in
Western Europe, and gained strength in
reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It
was partly a revolt against aristocratic
social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
against the scientific rationalization of
nature, and was embodied most strongly
in the visual arts, music, and literature.
(wikipedia)
• The French revolution in the early 1790s
fostered the sense in Romantic writers
that theirs was a great age of new
beginnings and high possibilities.
 Neoclassic and Romantic
Prominent features
 • Neoclassic authors exhibited a strong
traditionalism.

• Literature was conceived to be primarily an
“art”; that is, a set of skills which, though it
requires innate talents, must be perfected by
long study and practice.
• Human beings were regarded as the primary
subject matter of the major forms of
literature. Poetry was held to be an imitation
of human life “a mirror held up to nature”.
Poetry was meant to please and instruct at
the same time.
• Emphasis was placed on what human beings
possess in common-representative
characteristics and widely shared
experiences, thoughts, feelings and tastes.
• Romantic authors favored innovation over
traditionalism in the materials, forms, and
style of literature.
• In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
repeatedly declared that good poetry is
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings”.Poetry is not a mirror of men in
action, on the contrary, its essential
component is the the poet’s own
feelings. “If poetry comes not as naturally
as the leaves to a tree,” Keats wrote, “it
had better not come at all.”
• The outer scene is not presented for its own
sake but as a stimulus for the poet.
 Transcendentalism
• A philosophical and literary movement,
centered in and around Boston in the
mid-19th century. It was influenced by
German and British Romanticism. The
leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo
Emerson issued what was the
movement’s manifesto in his essay
Nature, which presents natural
phenomena as a symbol of higher
spiritual truths.
• anther famous transcendentalist is
Henry David Thoreau.
 William Wordsworth
• Lyrical Ballads
• Poems in Two Volumes “Immortality
Ode”
• The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s
Mind: It is a blank verse memoir in
fourteen books. In this most
worthwhile long poem of the 19th
century, Wordsworth records his
mental and psychic growth with
determined integrity.
• Among his best sonnets are “The
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• His own exceptional gifts produced five
absolutely remarkable poems:
• “The Ancient Mariner” in Lyrical ballads
• “Frost at Midnight”
• “Kubla Khan”
• “Christabel”
• “Dejection: An Ode”
• Biographia Literaria is an attempt to give his
‘literary life and opinions’ on poetry more
systematically. The centre of Coleridge’s
critical thinking is that literature is less a work
of art than a natural product of the
imagination.
 Younger Romantics
• Lord Byron:
Byron’s distinction and originality is found in his

anti-romantic “Don Juan”, a satirical poem

portraying Don Juan as a man easily seduced by
women.
• Percy Shelley:
His major achievement lies in his philosophical

poems such as “Mont Blanc”, “Prometheus

Unbound” and “The Triumph” of Life and the
pastoral elegy “Adonis”. Critics described his
poetry as lacking the touch with reality. Defence
of Poetry’s argument was that love and
imagination, the sources of moral feelings, can
be developed by poetry.
“Ozymandias” is frequently anthologized and is

probably Shelley's most famous short poems.

• John Keats:
Keats reputation rose at his death and

has not fallen.

Between April and September 1819,

Keats wrote six Odes. His odes are

usually addresses to abstract
entities: the Nightingale, the Grecian
Urn and Autumn.
• Romantic poetry changed priorities in
English literature. Poetry is henceforth
about personal experience rather
than the public and moral concerns of
a classical Christian Augustanism. In
this general cultural shift to finding
meaning in personal rather than
collective experience, poetry showed
the way. And whereas the 18th
century novel of Fielding focused on
moral action, the 19th century novel
chronicles the emotional development
of character-or of a leading character
with whom we are expected to
 Romantic Prose
• Fiction:
• Mary Shelley
She wrote the ghost story

Frankenstein which is an epistolary

narrative with three narrators and is
a cross between the Gothic tale and
the fable of ideas. Pg 246.
Its interest is cultural, moral,

philosophical and psychological.


• Jane Austen
Despite its sudden spring in the mid

18th century, the novel became a

major for again only after 1800.
before Austen, there were Gothic
tales, novels of sensibility, social
entertainments, experiments of ideas
but the novel reached perfection with
Jane Austen. It went on to popularity,
periodical publication, and bigger
things.

• Her novels are cast in the form of the
comedy of manners: accuracy of social
behavior and dialogue, moral realism,
elegance of style, and ingenuity of plot.
Austen is distinctly a moral idealist.
1.Sense and Sensibility
2.Northanger Abbey
3.Pride and Prejudice
4.Mansfield Park
5.Emma
6.Persuasion
Her novels offered an ‘admirable copy of life’.
 Next Week
• Victorian Literature
 To 1880