• Birth of a new set of ideas

• Began in Western Europe -> spread all over the world

• Reaction to birth of modern world

• The Marais Paris --> Jean Jacques Rousseau publishes book on raising children

  • Against oppressive world of adults

  • Emphasis on the child's spontaneity and innocence; seen as seed of imagination

• Enlightenment & industrial revolution

• Thomas Chatterton dies by suicide because no one would publish his poetry

  • Becomes emblem of the idea of a sensitive, doomed person

• Romanticism borrows from christianity

  • Romantic heroes viewed similarly to martyrs for their art, a mystery to all except the few who understand them

  • Seen as noble, doomed artists

• Romantic love story published

  • Main guy kills himself because his love interest is married and their love is impossible

  • Impulsivity and impracticality of character's heart admired

  • Declared greatest work in Europe by Napoleon

• Madrid -- The sleep of reason painting

  • To be romantic is to have sympathy for madness and hold a vengeful attitude toward claims of logical and scientific superiority

• William Wordsworth

  • Greatest poems in english language

  • Wrote about natural world

  • Abiding hatred for industrial and mechanical things

  • To be a romantic is to prefer nature over industry

• Thomas Kole paints Niagara Falls

  • Show nature at most dignified

  • Go in search of emotions surrounding religion without believing God

  • Search for freedom and power that transcends competitive city and working life

  • Feel small compared to nature

• Pre-industrial, Medieval themed building made

  • Nobility thought missing from industrial world

• Paris --> prose poem written about a "flaneur"

  • Flaneur =  casual stroller, wanderer with no job that observes people in the city. Lack practicality, look at other city dwellers' lives

BGD DOC.

• French Revolution

• Industrial Revolution

• Napoleonic rule/war

• wordsworth and Coleridge kick off Romantic era

  • publish poetry book Lyrical Ballads

  • Coleridge publishes Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Thought to have started around French Revolution and ended with the parliamentary reforms

  • transition from agricultural to industrial England

  • shortest major British Literature Era

• 6 main poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1st gen), Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon, Lord Byron (2nd gen)

• England loses France & 13 colonies → economic, political, & egotistical losses

  • seen as “overthrow of an anointed king by democratic rabble”

• Wordsworth = idealist & liberal, support democracy

  • supported French revolution until the “September Massacre”, when he was disillusioned by mass execution via guillotine

• Massive repressive measures instituted in England

• twenty-two year war against Napoleon

  • defeat him at battle of Trafalgar and Waterloo

  • British win

• Wordsworth + revolutionary supporters felt betrayed

  • waterloo = defeat of one despot by another

• Industrial revolution cause city populations to increase, housing conditions terrible, land no longer communally held → many homeless, child labor

• Laissez faire - economic laws should be allowed to operate without government interference

  • good for rich, bad for poor

• Romantic poets frustrated by England resistance to political and social change → turn to more private, spontaneous lyric poetry that expressed the romantics’ belief that imagination rather than reason was the best response to change

• Inspired by Janus → look backward and forward, beginnings and endings, transitory era, living in two centuries and two worlds

• First gen took inspo from Milton and Shakespeare; invent new forms of lyric poetry, search for recompense for stolen childhood & destroyed youthful optimism

• Second gen more extravagant and visionary; never made peace with repressive atmosphere following Napoleonic wars; felt that 1st gen betrayed revolutionary spirit of the age

• saw older writing as more “genuine'“, explore new psychological and mysterious aspects of humanity

• Historical definition of romantic

  • fascination with youth and innocence, ‘growing up’ by exploring and learning to trust our emotions, free will, and identity

  • cyclical development of societies when people need to question tradition and authority in order to imagine a better life → idealism

  • Stronger awareness and adaptation to change (industrialization)

• Nature poets = romantic poets

  • ‘nature’ here means interdependent mysterious forces at work, where one change can cause unseen, threatening results

    • talk about killing nature through pollution

    • nature doesn’t die, it’s the agent of death

  • Believe in creator/God but not a specific religion

  • sublime - romantic view of nature as healing, mysterious

  • focus on relationship of human mind and nature

• two ways of thinking about relation between mind and surroundings

  • 1. religious - cause of events in both mind and nature = higher power

  • 2. human beings have limited power to create thoughts → imagination

• mind is naturally a “mirror” of nature

  • usually present imaginative experiences as powerful or moving

• Poet - man speaking to men in order to accomplish something else

• lyric poetry asks us to imagine that the speaking is taking place & consider what kind of speaking

  • contrast narrative forms where the speaker is a storyteller like in novels and short stories

  • reason for development of lyric poetry in the Romantic period → during eighteenth century the novel/prose fiction became an important literary art form and took over storytelling role of poetry

  • speaking in lyric is more passionate

    • hear it vs. overhear it

  • idea of speaker as normal person = democratic views

    • the people speaking to the people

• speaker & poet both enlightened

• Wordsworth optimistic view of man’s intelligence

• forms of romantic lit.

  • novel

  • plays

  • poetic dramas

  • journals and letters

  • current event commentary

• lyrical rom. works more relevant today than those written for topical commentary