Characteristics of Romanticism vs. The Age of Reason

18th Century Characteristics

• Society valued reason and judgement

• Artists, writers, etc. concerned with general experiences (not individual)

• Sought common good

• Authority and tradition (styles of classical Greece and Rome)

• Reason has authority

• Age of Enlightenment

• Social Contract Theory

  • Government serves people and people follow rules for public good

• Self-regulating economy

• Influences revolution

Romanticism Characteristics

• Imagination

• Emotion!! (exclamation points)

• Mystery

• Human Psychology

• Concerned with the individual

• Nature!!

• Concerned with poet’s own life and emotions

• Inspired by medieval world

The American Revolution

• Neoclassical ideas of democracy (18th century ideals)

• Influenced by people like John Locke

• People deserve a voice

The French Revolution

• France inspired by America

• Scarier for England

• Romantics are all “go france” but then Napoleon and guillotine makes it scary so they opt out of the fan club

  • Figured it was supposed to be all humane and then disappointment ensues

The Romantic Poets (5)

William Wordsworth

• Lived in the lake district (away from the cities - liked nature) with his sister Dorothy

• Besties with Coleridge

• Lyrical Ballads in 1798

• Two processes in poetry: growth and memory

  • Growth of the poet’s mind and moral character into adulthood

  • Memory → emotion recollected in tranquility (tracing growth)

• Works:

  • Lyrical Ballads in 1798

  • “Lucy Poems” written in Germany

  • “My heart leaps when I behold”

    • Rainbows are exciting (nature and emotion)

    • Hopes that rainbows will always be exciting even though he’s getting older (growth concept)

    • “The Child is the Father of the Man”

    • Adult comes from the child paradox

    • Reverent regard for nature

  • “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey”

    • Visiting the same historic sight twice

    • Two emotional experiences, both impactful

    • Hopes the experience is continually impactful

  • “THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US”

    • Nature!!

    • Emotion!!

    • We take nature for granted

    • It needs to be appreciated

    • Rather be a pagan than not emphasize nature

  • “LONDON 1802”

    • Wants Milton to come back and save England

    • Milton wrote for democracy

    • People are fighting for power not democracy in this time

    • Romantic ideal: normal people with their great insight to make poetry and stuff→Milton

    • Individual ideal seen in promotion for democracy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Besties with Wordsworth

• Fell in love with his sister-in-law but his love was unrequited

• Literary critic, journalist, and poetry

• “Willing suspension of belief

• Wrote about nature and supernatural

• Cambridge → Kicked out → Military → Cambridge → Dropped out

• “Pantisocracy” → planned american utopian society

• Anglican

• Opium addiction

  • Fight with Wordsworth

  • Went crazy

  • Weird dreams and poems

  • Many poems left unfinished

• Works

  • Lyrical Ballads in 1798

  • Ancient Mariner: Guy telling the story to Dave about when he killed the bird and then there were a bunch of ghosts and stuff

  • “Kubla Khan”

Lord Byron

• Didn’t want to be tied down

• Lavish college lifestyle: pet bear/drank out of a skull

• Embodied spirit of the romantic age

• Poems had strong ties to 18th c. literary traditions

• Byronic hero (he kinda is a byronic hero)

  • Willoughby

  • Passionate, moody, restless, lives under weight of some mysterious sin, good hair

• Satirical epic: Don Juan

• Buddies with Shelley

• Tried to help Greece get away from Turkey

  • Regarded as a national hero in Greece

• Works:

  • “She walks in beauty”

Percy Shelley

• Bullied as a kid

• Expelled from Oxford for “The Necessity of Atheism” pamphlet

• Became a social outcast bc he moved away with some girl

• Met shelley in switzerland (became buddies)

• Joined a poetry crew in france

• First wife drowns herself cause he'd left her for another woman

• Killed on a boat named "Don Juan” in Italy (ironic)

• Believed that by perfecting their own natures, people could free themselves from pain/injustice from present existence

• Second generation of Romantic poets

• Works:

  • “Ozymandias”

    • Ramses II

    • Old bold inscription

    • Humble and forgotten appearance after time

  • Defense of Poetry

    • `Explains meaning and importance of poetry

John Keats

• Died really young

• Studied medicine, but went into poetry

• Begins an epic inspired by Paradise Lost → Hyperion

• Romantic poem - The Eve of St. Agnes

• Showcases personality in poetry and focuses on complex individuality

• NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

  • the poetic attitude of forgetting oneself in concentration on subject of the poem

  • putting yourself in someone else’s shoes

• Despite his negative capability theory, his personality is seen in his poems (great poet) and his letters (great person)

• Works:

  • Hyperion

  • The Eve of St. Agnes

  • “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”

  • “Bright Star“

  • “When I have fears that I may cease to be”

The Second Generation of Romantic Poets

Byron/Shelley/Keats

• Short lives

• More radical

• Further developed the art form, didn’t just copy

Lyrical Ballads

• Coleridge and Wordsworth

• Left 18th c. diction → want to use real language of men

  • Want to be more authentic to everyday

• Wordsworth: focus on everyday experience

• Coleridge: concern with individual experience (your thoughts of nature/experience

  • Supernatural and weird

  • Suspend belief willingly

  • nature

  • emotion

The Role of the Romantic Poet

One of the people but also “special” with unique powers of perception and understanding

The Industrial Revolution

• Machines

• Coal/steam engines

• Beginning of modern era

• Individuality lessened (machines are making, not you — you’re replaceable)

  • romantics didn’t like lack of individuality

• Cities = industrial centers

• Unfair conditions and no unions

• Enclosure: people kicked off lord’s land and go work in factories

  • Romantics hate it → urbanization problem/environment/worried about worker

Jane Austen & Sense and Sensibility

• 18th c. Age of Reason AND 19th c. Romanticism

  • 18th:

    • uses satire and illustrates conventions about society

    • doesn’t want people to lead with their emotions

  • 19th:

    • Interested in personal thought/the individual

    • Interested in emotion (marrying for love)

• All her novels → women happily married

• Practical sense of marriage

• marriage = security for these women

  • Austen doesn’t condemn this

• Main characters = strong central morality

• Never marries

• Plays with conventions of romanticism

  • Sense and sensibility (18th sense and 19th sensibility)

    • Miss Dashwood and Marianne (rational and emotional)

Dates to Know

1776: American Revolution

1789: French Revolution

1798: Beginning of Romantic Age (Lyrical Ballads are written by Wordsworth and Coleridge)

1832: End of Romantic Age (death of Sir Walter Scott)

Terms to Know

Lyric: A type of personal rhythmic poetry that’s intent is to make feelings understood rather than relating events. It is often concerned with complicated feelings of the speaker (who may or may not be the poet themselves).

Satire: a type of social commentary where writers use exaggeration, irony, and other devices to poke fun at society and conventions.

Byronic Hero: Passionate, moody, restless, lives under weight of some mysterious sin, good hair ex. Willoughby

Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which an absent or a dead person, an abstract quality, or something nonhuman is addressed directly

Allusion: regarded as brief but purposeful references, within a literary text, to a person, place, event, or to another work of literature

Review Questions

1. Who wrote “She Walks in Beauty”? Lord Byron

2. Who wrote “Ozymandias”? Shelley

3. Who wrote “The World is Too Much with Us”? Wordsworth

4. Who wrote Don Juan? Lord Byron

5. Who wrote “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”? Keats

6. Who wrote “Kubla Khan”? Coleridge

7. Who wrote Sense and Sensibility? Jane Austen

8. Who wrote the Lucy Poems? Wordsworth

9. Who wrote “London, 1802”? Wordsworth

10. Identify the 2nd generation Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats

11. Which Romantic poet died of tuberculosis? John Keats

12. Which Romantic poet died in Greece? Lords Byron

13. Which Romantic poet drowned? Shelley

14. Who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Coleridge

15. Which Romantic poet was addicted to opium? Coleridge

16. Who was Wordsworth’s sister? Dorothy

17. What year was Lyrical Ballads published? 1798

18. Who wrote Lyrical Ballads? Wordsworth and Coleridge

19. Why were Romantic authors inspired by nature? They were surrounded by industrialization, so there was a need to get away. Romantics were also not threatened by the wilderness, so they were able to see the beauty in it.

20. How did Romantics perceive the role of the poet? Poet’s were normal people with special insight that could articulate and write everything down.

21. What three major revolutions took place during the Romantic period? Industrial, American, French

22. Who perfected the steam engine in 1765? James Watt

23. How does Lyrical Ballads embody the Romantic ideals of its authors? Individual/emotion/supernatural/nature

24. Who began as a champion of revolution and change, but became a despot, dictator, and emperor? Napoleon

25. What two poets are considered the founders of English Romanticism? Wordsworth and Coleridge

26. Which Romantic wanted to establish a utopian community in America? Coleridge

27. What is a Byronic hero? Can you provide an example? Willoughby - moody/passionate/good hair/haunted and overcome with guilt of past sins/mysterious

28. When did the Romantic Age begin? 1798

29. In “London, 1802” for whom does Wordsworth call? Milton

30. Identify the poet: “Great God! I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; / So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, / Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreath`ed horn.” Wordsworth

31. Identify the poet: “But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! / A savage place! As holy and enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon lover!” Coleridge

32. Which of Byron’s works is satire? Don Juan

33. Identify the poet: “And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy / Of youthful sports was on they breast to be / Borne, like they bubbles, onward; from a boy I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me / Were a delight…” Byron

34. Who was described by Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”? Byron

35. What are the names of the three Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility? Marianne, Elinor, and Margaret

36. Which Romantic poet was born with a clubfoot? Byron

37. What event in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester demonstrates the dissatisfaction of the working classes? Peterloo massacre

38. Who were the two prominent novelists of the Romantic Age? Scott and Austen

39. John Keats originated the idea of negative capability. What is negative capability? The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and be really focused on their character

40. What year did the French Revolution begin? 1789

41. Who fell in love with Annette Vallon before the French Revolution? Wordsworth

42. Which term describes the action of consolidating land by evicting tenants in order to use more efficient farming methods? Enclosure

43. Who loved Fanny Brawne? John Keats

44. Who loved Annette Vallon? Wordsworth

45. Who loved Harriet Westbrook? Shelley

46. Wordsworth emphasizes what two forces in his poetry? Give examples from his poetry. Growth and memory: “Lines composes a few miles above tintern abbey”

47. What is Deism? The belief that there is a god who created everything, but he doesn’t intervene with humankind

48. What bill was passed by Parliament in 1832 and what did it do? The First Reform Act allowed more people to vote

49. Coleridge planned to establish a utopian community in the United States. What was the name of the community? Pantisocracy

50. Which English king went mad? George III

51. What is another name for Ozymandias? Ramses II

52. Identify the two English political parties which arose during the 18th century. Whigs and Tories

53. What four regions make up the United Kingdom? England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

54. What word describes anyone who was not Anglican? Secular

55. Who was the first Hanoverian king? George I

56. The 18th century is called what because of its emphasis on common sense? Age of Reason

57. Which monarch was expelled by the Glorious Revolution? King James II

58. What year did the Glorious Revolution occur? 1688

59. Who ruled as monarch after the Glorious Revolution? William III of Orange

60. Who was the last Stuart monarch? Queen Anne

61. What family ruled England after the Stuarts? George of Hanover

62. Who described poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”? Wordsworth

63. What do we call the 18th -century shift from hand labor to manufacturing via power-drive machines? Industrial Revolution

64. William Wordsworth was born in what area in England? The Lake District

65. Wordsworth assumed what title in 1843? Poet Laureate

66. Who wrote “La Belle Dame sans Merci”? John Keats

67. Identify the poet: “Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Shelley