ENGLISH
ROMANTICISM
English
Romanticism started in the 1740s.The word Romanticism derives from the French
word "Romance", which referred to the vernacular languages derived
from Latin and to the works written in those languages. Even in England there
were cycles of "romances" dealing with the adventures of knights and
containing supernatural elements.
Romanticism attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many
works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and
historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the
mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of
order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general
and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in
particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and
against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism
emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the
personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the
transcendental.
Among the
characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened
appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over
reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a
heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental
potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional
figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view
of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more
important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an
emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual
truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural
origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote,
the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even
the satanic.
Romanticism
proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century
on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such
trends was a new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic
movement derives its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric
adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the
mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of
prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical
tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in
relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary expressions of the
past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.
Romanticism
in English
literature began in the 1790s with the publication
of the Lyrical
Ballads of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth's "Preface" to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical
Ballads, in which he described poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings," became the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement
in poetry. William Blake was the
third principal poet of the movement's early phase in England. The first phase
of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by
innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the
mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of talents,
including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul,
Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling belong to this first phase. In
Revolutionary France, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël were the
chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and
theoretical writings.
The second
phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was
marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new
attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of
native folklore, folk
ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval
and Renaissance works. The revived historical appreciation was translated into
imaginative writing by Sir Walter
Scott, who invented the historical novel. At
about this same time English Romantic poetry had reached
its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
A notable
by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with
the supernatural, the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein and works by C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A.
Hoffmann. The second phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von
Arnim, Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Görres, and Joseph von Eichendorff.
By the 1820s
Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe.
In this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and
concentrated more on exploring each nation's historical and cultural
inheritance and on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional
individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers across
the Continent would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the
Brontë sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine,
Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Père), and
Théophile Gautier in France; Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy;
Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel
de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the
important writers in pre-Civil War America.
The adjective Romantic first appeared in English in the second half of
the 17th century as a word to describe the fabulous, the extravagant and the
unreal, something having no basis in fact. Throughout the 18th century
"romantic" was used to refer to the picturesque in landscape, but
gradually the term came to be applied to the feeling the landscape aroused in
the observer, and generally to the evocation of subjective and individual
emotions, especially loneliness and melancholy. The first to boast of having used
the term in this way were Goethe and Schiller. They did so in opposition to
"classic", thus clearly stating that the new meaning indicated not
just a change in taste but an open revolt against tradition.
A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries...The
German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term
romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting
emotional matter in an imaginative form." This is as accurate a general
definition as can be accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase
"liberalism in literature" is also apt. Imagination, emotion, and
freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any list of particular
characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an
emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life
rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason
and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature; and fascination with the
past, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages.
English
poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats
English Romanticism can be seen as a creative period in which, owing to
the radical changes taking place in the historical and social spheres, the
cultural view of the world had to be reconstructed or totally readjusted. The
attitudes of many Romantic writers were responses to the French and the
Industrial Revolution The remarkable expansion of industry and economy made its
effects felt in the field of economic theory which greatly flourished in the
period. Adam Smith's The wealth of Nations (1776) was a seminal book in the
development of the theory of laissez faire policies. It advocated no
interference from the government in economic activities and supported the idea
that efficiency and profit are absolute goods, thus widening the gap between
the affluent layers of society and the poor.
English Romanticism is best represented by poetry, which was more
suitable to the expression of emotional experiences, individual feeling and
imagination. The great English Romantic poets are usually grouped into two
generations: the first, represented by William Blake, William
Wordsworth and S. Taylor
Coleridge; while the poets of the second
generation were John Keats, P. Bysshe
Shelley and G. Gordon
Byron. No two writers were Romantic in the
same way, nor was a writer necessarily romantic in all his work or throughout
his life. These poets did not share a unity of purpose, so we cannot speak of a
literary movement; they certainly shared some ideas but they all remained
highly individual in their philosophy. Nor did a real break in continuity exist
between the first and the second generation, while the works of many Victorian
writers, especially the
Bronte, R.L. Stevenson, B. Stoker, Tennyson and Rossetti remind us of
the key concepts of Romanticism. Anyway, some elements are more typical of the
first
generation and others of the second. The poets of the 1st generation
were characterized by the attempt to theorize about poetry, they fervently
supported the French Rev. with its ideals of freedom and equality, being later
bitterly disappointed by the regime of terror and the Napoleonic wars in which
the experience of the French Rev. resulted, and by the results of the
Industrial Rev. which would lead them to adopt conservative views in the last
periods of their lives. The poets of the second generation instead all died
very young and away from home, in Mediterranean countries, especially Italy;
they also experienced political disillusionment, which results in the clash
between the ideal and reality in their poetry. Poetry thus became a means to
challenge the cosmos, nature, political and social order, or to escape from all
this. Individualism, the alienation of the artist from society, escapism were
stronger in this generation and found expression in the different attitudes of
the three poets: the anti-conformist, rebellious and cynical attitude of the
"Byronic hero", the
revolutionary spirit of Shelley’s "Prometheus" and Keats’s escape into the
world of the past of classical beauty.