Sara Valle Marco |
HOME | ||||
"The Human Seasons" |
|||||
John Keats |
|||||
HISTORIC, LITERARY AND BIOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND Following the common usage of historians of English literature, we will denote by the “Romantic period”, the span between the year 1798, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, and 1832 when Sir Walter Scott died. England had been a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power were largely concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, and became a recognizably modern industrial nation, with large scale employers, who focused themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive working class. This change occurred in a context first of the American and then much more radical French Revolution, of Wars, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the storming of the Bastille evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radical alike. Two influential books indicate the radical social thinking stimulated by the Revolution, “Tom Paine's Rights of Man” and “Reflections on the Revolution in France ”.
|
|||||
| Analysis and comment | |||||
| Further analysis 1 | |||||
| Further analysis 2 | |||||
| Historic, literary and biographic background | |||||
| Relation of the poem with today | |||||
| Online references | |||||