Romantic Tropes

God / Divine in Nature

a recovery and reconnection with God and the divine through nature, seeing nature as part of a spiritual or natural state

• Wordsworth, Keats

• pantheism, nature = spiritual truth

Reverence for the innocence of childhood

a desire to reclaim childhood innocence lost through industrialisation and the corrupting influence of the enlightened world

• Blake, Wordsworth

• innocence vs experience, loss of purity through adulthood

Interests in the ‘outcasts’ of society

Power of the Imagination and Emotion

the power of imagination and creativity to create freedom from the constraints of the world, escaping transience and limitation

• Wordsworth, Keats

• imagination as truth, emotional + visionary perception

The sublime

awe-inspiring and overwhelming nature that is both beautiful and terrifying

• Wordsworth, Shelley

• human insignificance, nature’s power

fight against uniformity

rejection of conformity and control in society and thought

• Blake, Shelley

• individuality, rebellion, anti-authoritarian ideas

solace in nature

nature provides solace from the industrial, rational, and oppressed world of the late 18th and early 19th century

• Wordsworth, Keats

• nature as emotional escape and healing

rebels against neo-classical canon

romantics reject neoclassical poetry in favour of creativity, imagination and emotional expression rather than strict rules and order

• Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley

• breaking form, emotional freedom, anti-rational structure

rebels against societal, bourgeois, political norms

Poetry challenges authority, class systems and political oppression

• Blake, Shelley, Byron

• protest, power critique, social injustice

Favours the individual

Focus on personal experience, identity and subjective truth over society

• Wordsworth, Byron

• inner life, selfhood, personal perception

Against the individual

Industrialisation is seen as destructive to nature, humanity and spirituality

• Blake, Wordsworth

• factories = corruption, nature = pity

The importance of the poet as a visionary prophet

Poets are seen as visionaries who reveal truth and guide society morally and spiritually

• Blake, Shelley

• poetry as guidance, social/spiritual authority

An interest in the ‘primitive’ - medieval and mythological inspiration from ancient times

a return to the primitive world (without modern tech), reclaiming a time when humanity was closer to nature and before Enlightenment rationalism

• Keats, Shelley

• myth, Greece, medieval settings, escape from modernity