The Romantic Period

Notes

Length of the period

Length of the period

Short, relative to other literary periods, but is still quite complex.

Dates of the period

The beginning and ending dates of the Romantic period are identified differently by various scholars, though these dates always coincide with major literary, cultural, political, or social events. (Spans the time period from about 1798 - 1837 or 1800-1850.

The big six

Blake,Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats

Transition of the nation

A primarily agricultural nation to one focused on manufacture, trade, and industry.

Revolutions

Revolutions outside of England’s borders had considerable impact within those borders, including the revolutions in America and in France.

Negative aspect of the revolution

While many English people initially supported revolutionary efforts like those in France, just as many came to abhor the violent tyrannies that followed.

The Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution is a primary example.

Two nations

(1) the rich and privileged

(2) poor and powerless

it is this latter group upon which the Industrial Revolution depended, though it is the former group who benefitted.

Slavery

Early efforts to abolish slavery met with little success.

those in power saw the granting of widespread freedoms as the prelude to violent uprising.

Shopping

Society’s newfound love for buying the goods that imperial colonization and industry could produce.

Bluestocking

A certain class of educated women writers and intellectuals.

Women authors

Did not enjoy equality but had more readership than had previously been the case.

Romantics

Didn’t define themselves, but were defined by later Victorian critics who first used the term to describe the previous generation of writers.

Poetry

Considered the most important literary genre during the Romantic period.

Negative aspect of communication

New modes of production and distribution made the written word available to more people in more places than had previously been the case in England.

some authors even worried about the problem of “overproduction” of written works.

Literacy

The number of people who could read, and who wanted to read, grew dramatically during the Romantic period, particularly among those of the lower and middle classes.

Printing

Increased the number of books that could be printed. In this way, writing was affected by the Industrial Revolution in England just as agriculture and manufacturing were.

Control on printing

The British state tried to control what could be printed and read not so much by direct censorship but by charging authors or publishers with sedition or blasphemy. The state also tried to control publication by imposing prohibitive taxes on printed matter in some cases.

Flourishment of other literary forms

Political pamphlets, reviews, drama, and novels.

Emergence of the professional literary critic

Came to have considerable influence in shaping national literary tastes.

Drama during the Romantic period

Focused on visual spectacle rather than literary value.

People wanted to see something rather than hear great literature spoken to them.

Novels

The novel as a genre grew in importance throughout the Romantic period and it, like poetry, saw increasing efforts on the part of authors to experiment with form, style, and content.

Schools

Just as there were many different, and sometimes conflicting, “schools” of poetry during the Romantic period, there were many competing visions for what good poetry should be and what its aims should be.

Writers

Was often conceived as the solitary figure, removed from the realities of everyday life.

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Ozymandias poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias theme

All power is temporary, no matter how prideful or tyrannical a ruler is.

Nothing remains intact and the same forever in this world.

Rich or poor mighty or weak everyone has to leave this world. Time does not spare even the 'king of kings'.

Shelly beliefs

Poetry is utilitarian, as it brings civilization by “awakening] and enlarging] the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.

World has been stunned by reasonable thinking, and poetry “creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure”

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner theme

All living things are equal.

The core theme is that every creature has value, simply because their existence is indicative of God's love and power.

Coleridge beliefs

Coleridge perceives nature as something that surrounds man and considers it a privilege to interpret it.

Considers poetry as the fragrance of all human knowledge and thoughts.

Ode to a Nightingale poet

John Keats

Ode to a Nightingale theme

The speaker perceives “immortality” in the figure of the bird—a creature that, the speaker believes, is unplagued by human anxiety about the inevitable march of time towards death, and whose song has echoed across the centuries.

Eventually, though, even the nightingale flies away—leaving the speaker with a deep sense of loss and a seeming reassurance that everything inevitably fades.

The speaker’s ability to enjoy the world is dampened by the awareness that nothing will be around forever.

John Keats beliefs

Poetry, he argued, made life permanent.

A poem must strive for the infinite and that there is a real world of mortality and an ideal world of permanence.

Keats regarded poetry primarily as a form of escape. The poet, he believed, fleeing from the painful realities of life, takes refuge in a dream world of enchanting beauty and unalloyed bliss.