Romanticism: Context, Debates & Key Texts (Lecture 2 Notes)

Course & Lecture Context

  • Second lecture for ENGL/ENGX 2020 – “Revolution, Evolution, Humanity, Literature, Change in the Long Nineteenth Century.”
  • Lecturer using desk-mic (radio mic malfunctioning); prefers moving while thinking.
  • Goal of the week: introduce the literary movement that dominates the opening decades of the “long nineteenth-century” – Romanticism.

Traditional Canon & Its Problems

  • The “Big Six” poets long dominated university syllabi: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats.
    • An older undergraduate would study entire units devoted solely to them; omission was once “scandalous.”
  • Issues with this narrow focus:
    1. Genre bias – centres on poetry while early-C19 literary culture increasingly privileges prose (novel, essay, journalism).
    2. Gender bias – all six are men; ignores simultaneous rise of women writers & readers.

Literacy & Demographic Change

  • Approximate reading competence in Great Britain:
    • 1700!:\;20\% (based on the test “can you sign your name?” – an overestimate because signing ≠ reading).
    • End of the nineteenth century: 80\%.
  • Reading public shifts from elite male aristocrats/upper middle class to include women, working class, and wider middle class.

Periodisation Challenges

  • Continental Romanticism precedes English version:
    • German Sturm und Drang (“Storm & Stress”) c.1760–1790 spearheaded by Goethe & Schiller.
    • English Romantic “take-off”: 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth & Coleridge).
  • First generation (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake) active c.1780s–1850 (Wordsworth’s death).
  • Second generation (Byron, Shelley, Keats) all die in the 1820s; many scholars therefore bracket “core” Romanticism as ending mid-1820s.
  • Victorian re-evaluation: Pre-Raphaelites (mid-C19) revive Shelley & Keats, showing porous boundaries between periods.

Popularity vs. Critical Categorisation

  • Lord Byron – best-selling poet of the 1810s.
    • The Corsair held single-day poetry sales record until Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters (early 2000s).
    • Byron’s comic/narrative mode (Don Juan = mock-heroic epic) opposes the “inward, sincere lyric” stereotype of Romanticism.
  • Hence: standard Romantic descriptors (“lyric,” “personal,” “nature-worship”) exclude much contemporary writing.

Visual Culture & The Picturesque/Sublime

  • Visual art studied alongside texts throughout the unit.
  • Example slide image: J. M. W. Turner, A View over Lago Maggiore – loose brushwork, atmosphere, large sky → pre-Impressionist interest in mood over line.
  • Picturesque aesthetic: juxtaposes “safe human spaces” with “wild sublime spaces.”
  • Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Mists – lone figure (back turned) dwarfed by mountains & fog; emblematic of Romantic introspection & human insignificance.

Enlightenment Background (Intellectual Antagonist)

  • Romanticism reacts against the Enlightenment/“Age of Reason.”
  • René Descartes’ foundational maxim \texttt{Cogito ergo sum} (I think, therefore I am):
    • Shifts epistemological centre from divine revelation to human subject & rational observation.
  • Knowledge built via empiricism (sensory data → rational inference). God still possible but unverifiable.
  • Literary correlate: tightly controlled neoclassical verse (Alexander Pope’s heroic couplets) treated as highest form of “decorous” poetry.

Poetic Decorum & Popular Fatigue

  • Pope’s endless, perfect heroic couplets dazzled the educated but bored emergent lay readership.
  • Reaction → call for new forms & more “authentic” language – one taproot of Romanticism.

Pre-Romantic Sentimentalism

  • Laurence Sterne:
    • The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – digressive, whims-driven “autobiography.”
    • A Sentimental Journey – travel book that omits facts, foregrounds fluctuating feelings. Illustrates movement toward interiority.

Core Romantic Tendencies

  • Sentiment & Feeling: affect as knowledge rather than mere embellishment.
  • Introspection: inward turn; self becomes valid poetic subject.
  • Imagination:
    • Alternative faculty to reason.
    • Generates meaning, value, even reality.
    • Not unanimously celebrated – each poet theorises it differently (see below).

Competing Theories of Imagination

  • Wordsworth:
    • Imagination crucial yet dangerous (“fancy” can corrupt → superstition).
    • Poetry = “emotion recollected in tranquillity” – balance imagination with reflective reason.
    • Anti-Catholicism ties to suspicion of iconography (fancy ↔ superstition).
  • Byron:
    • Unfiltered imaginative outpouring; “Poetry is the lava of the imagination bursting forth.”
    • Cultivates myth that he dashes off 100 lines after night-long revels (manuscripts show heavy revision – self-fashioning).
  • Shelley:
    • Imagination = world-making power; “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

French Revolution as Catalyst

  • Overturns ancien régime; inspires hopes for liberty & equality.
  • Wordsworth’s famous memory: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”
  • Revolution’s later Terror & Napoleonic wars dim optimism yet revolutionary impulse remains, especially for younger Romantics who were infants/unborn in 1789.

Wordsworth & Coleridge: Partnership & Rivalry

  • Friendship, shared radical politics; proposed American “pantisocracy” commune (utopian scheme with inter-marriages & servants).
  • Lyrical Ballads (first ed. 1798):
    • Originally to be Wordsworth’s book; padded with Coleridge’s poems.
    • Publisher placed Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” first → mild resentment; sparks sense of rivalry.
    • Coleridge’s laudanum addiction later strains relationship.

Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Key Points)

  • Written to answer critics who said the poems “are good, but not poetry.”
  • Claims to:
    1. Use “language really used by men.”
    2. Treat “incidents & situations from common life.”
    3. Infuse them with imagination so ordinary becomes extraordinary.
    4. Blend lyric (learned, classical) with ballad (popular, oral) → hybrid form.
  • Poetry defined as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… recollected in tranquillity.”

Case Study 1 – “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth)

  • Opens with temporal framing: “Five years have passed…” – memory & return motif.
  • Romantic signatures:
    • Solitary speaker in sublime landscape.
    • Re-encounter contrasts past self vs. present self.
    • Memory functions as internal “landscape” available even in “lonely rooms” & “din of towns.”
  • City ⇄ Country binary: urban life corrupts; nature heals.
  • Imaginative Sociability: addresses sister Dorothy; suggests shared feeling binds minds even when experiences differ.

Case Study 2 – “This Lime‐Tree Bower My Prison” (Coleridge)

  • Speaker physically confined under a lime tree while friends hike.
  • Initial resentment → through imaginative empathy he “travels” with them, achieving freedom & spiritual enlargement.

Numbers & Statistics Recap (in LaTeX)

  • Literacy: 1700\;\approx\;20\% → c.1900\;\approx\;80\%.
  • Sturm und Drang begins \sim30 years before English Romanticism.
  • First Gen span: 1780s\text{–}1850; Second Gen deaths 1820s.
  • Byron’s claimed draft pace: 100 lines at dawn after parties.
  • Lyrical Ballads first edition: 1798 (second ed. with Preface: 1800).

Ethical, Philosophical & Practical Implications

  • Shift of epistemic authority: from God/Church → human subject; Romanticism tempers Enlightenment by reinserting emotion & imagination.
  • Gender & class politics: increasing literacy + broader readership undermine elite monopoly; yet canonical formation long stayed male & poetic.
  • Artistic interdisciplinarity: painting & poetry cross-pollinate (Turner ↔ picturesque theory).
  • Danger of Imagination: simultaneously emancipatory (political revolution, creative freedom) & perilous (superstition, moral decay, addiction).

Links Forward in the Course

  • Later weeks will:
    • Explore Pre-Raphaelites’ Victorian medievalism (Week 6) & their rescue of Keats/Shelley.
    • Examine prose traditions marginalized by “Big Six” focus.
    • Return to French Revolution in Week 4.
    • Continue analysing visual culture alongside textual forms.