Romanticism

Romanticism

Transcendentalism.

Tree Huggers.

This is Thoreau, not Emerson.

They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3).

Emerson was affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church.

society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupt the purity of the individual.

Thoreau went to live in a cabin in the woods

and had people bring him blueberry pies. He told the world to "simplify, simplify, simplify!"

Self-Reliance.

Creativity is divine.

Sought this connection to the "over-soul" through nature.

The British Romantics revered nature and this reverence carried over to American Romanticism as well...it just changed a bit.

Nature was regarded as an organically unified whole. It’s all connected, man!

Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine with the analogy of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself.

• nature as a healing power
• nature as a source of subject and image
• nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization--including artificial language

The Late Romantics

Lord Byron (George Gordon)

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” his life was the stuff of legend.

John Keats

THE BRITS

Placed emphasis on the sensual (synaesthesia) “Beauty is truth and truth, beauty.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Early Romantics

Fascination with the natural world unified by a greater amoral force.

William Wordsworth

Outspoken, energetic, tough-minded. Sought to scrutinize the everyday; find meaning in the common.

His wife, Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sensitive, gentle, physically weak (prone to sickness, thus a user of opium). Interested in the supernatural.

1798-1832

(more or less)

It stemmed from a psychological desire to escape from reality. (Who can't relate to that?)

What's it all about?

It hits you right in the feels.

Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known!

Intense Emotions.

Romantics were quite serious about their feelings. Almost self-centered about them.

Why save the drama for your mama when you can put it into a poem?

Romantics Embraced

This guy.

Wordsworth defined all good poetry as

"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"

Romanticism crossed the Atlantic through the work of American writers and thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and poets like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

THE YANKS

ROMANCE?

EXPRESSIONS OF PASSION &

OVERWHELMING RAW EMOTION

SENTIMENTALITY

(the aggrandizement of feeling, sensationalizing human emotion)

INDULGING in one’s emotional state

Elements of Romanticism

Recognition and appreciation of beauty & the sublime or truly awesome.

AWESOME: Inspiring awe, reverence, fear, appreciation.

Drama. So much drama.

The sublime often involves fear, danger, and terror, but is beautiful anyway…or because of those qualities.

Adoration of NATURE and all of its creative and destructive forces.

Emphasis on intuition, instinct, and feeling.

The individual's capacity for imagination is divine.

I shot the albatross

THE MOVEMENT

a host of golden

daffodils...

British poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, and John Keats propelled the English Romantic movement.

THE BRITS

• arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s.

• Its influence was felt across continents and through every artistic discipline into the mid-nineteenth century

• many of its values and beliefs can still be seen in contemporary poetry

In Xanadu...

political events and uprisings fostered nationalistic pride all over the place

German romantic poets included Fredrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe--(this is where most people think Romanticism originated).

THE GERMANS

reactions against neoclassicism and the boring, rigid Augustan poets in England

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the Romantic movement....can be traced to many events of the time:

a surge of interest in folklore in the mid- to late-eighteenth century (the brothers Grimm)

Ich ben ein

Romantiker!

Literary Things

The Gothic.

(Present in both British and American Romanticism)

It's eerie and mystical.

He is solitary and contemplative and on top of a weird, foggy mountain.

COMMON "GOTHIC" ELEMENTS OF ROMANTIC WORKS:

Emphasis on the individual and emotion marks a turning point in literary history.

This movement allowed poetry became the emotional, personal, meditative kind of poetry that we’re most familiar with today.

Now, art was not just valuable not as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within.

• Doomed quest
• Cursed wanderer
• Medieval haunted castles
• Solitary outcast
• Supernatural events
• Evil villain
• Coleridge’s "Ancient Mariner" is an example, so is anything by Poe.
• The Byronic Hero: a defiant and satiric take on a villain, sort of an anti-hero.

stereotype.

ME!

This led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry like never before, where the "poetic speaker" became a more the direct persona of the poet.

The writers of the previous enlightenment years were known as neoclassicists and their poetry was impersonal, logical, rigid. The romantics disagreed with their approach to poetry.

(sometimes accurate)

The

Flowering

of

Romanticism

The artist-as-hero concept.

The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist.

THE SUBLIME

intuition

"I wandered lonely

as a cloud..."

CREATIVITY

IMAGINATION

individualism!

1798—1832