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    Romantic Period Lecture Notes (1798-1837) : I Will Not Reason & Compare: My Business Is To Create

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    Anshika Sharma
    The Romantic period in British literature began in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This period was influenced by events like the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The six major poets of this era were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Romantic poets embraced imagination and nature, used simple language to express emotions, and turned to the past or inner dreams to escape the industrial age. They valued individual liberty and believed in the power of imagination over reason.

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    Romantic Period Lecture Notes (1798-1837) : I Will Not Reason & Compare: My Business Is To Create

    Uploaded by

    Anshika Sharma
    173 views3 pages
    The Romantic period in British literature began in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This period was influenced by events like the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The six major poets of this era were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Romantic poets embraced imagination and nature, used simple language to express emotions, and turned to the past or inner dreams to escape the industrial age. They valued individual liberty and believed in the power of imagination over reason.

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    The Romantic period in British literature began in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This period was influenced by events like the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The six major poets of this era were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Romantic poets embraced imagination and nature, used simple language to express emotions, and turned to the past or inner dreams to escape the industrial age. They valued individual liberty and believed in the power of imagination over reason.

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    173 views3 pages

    Romantic Period Lecture Notes (1798-1837) : I Will Not Reason & Compare: My Business Is To Create

    Uploaded by

    Anshika Sharma
    The Romantic period in British literature began in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This period was influenced by events like the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The six major poets of this era were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Romantic poets embraced imagination and nature, used simple language to express emotions, and turned to the past or inner dreams to escape the industrial age. They valued individual liberty and believed in the power of imagination over reason.

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    ROMANTICISM LECTURE NOTES 1

    Romantic Period Lecture Notes (1798-1837)

    I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.


    --William Blake

    Why/how it began:
    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth wrote Lyrical
    Ballads, 1798 which included “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
    (STC) and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
    (WW)

    EVENTS AND PEOPLE:


    French Revolution: Largely influenced the ideas/feelings of this
    period; Parliamentary Reforms of 1832 ended the period (these laid
    the foundations of modern Britain)
    • Wordsworth = idealists/liberals like WW traveled to France to
    view the “new regime” first hand, as if it were a tourist attraction
    early during the French Revolution

    Six Major Poets Dominated Era:


    1) William Blake
    2) William Wordsworth
    3) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    4) Percy Bysshe Shelley
    5) John Keats
    6) George Gordon, Lord Byron

    1792 – “September Massacre” took place in France


    • hundreds of French aristocrats with ties (even though some were
    slight ties) to King Louis XVI were subjected to the guillotine

    1804 – Napoleon, Emperor of France

    Conservatives in Britain – were outlawing collective bargaining


    and keeping suspected spies in prison, trying to keep down the
    worldwide spread of Revolution
    • 1805 – English began war with France/Napoleon
    • 1815 – English defeat Napoleon at 1815
    ROMANTICISM LECTURE NOTES 2

    Economics – laissez faire (les a fer’) (“let people do as they please”


    or “hands off”) – little government laws structure the economic
    world
    • led to child labor in some areas

    ROMANTICISM AND LITERATURE:


    Romantics…
    • believed in private, spontaneous, lyric poetry; they also believed
    that imagination, rather than mere reason, was the best
    response to the forces of change
    • embraced imagination and naturalness
    • preferred poetry that spoke of personal experiences and
    emotions, often in simple, unadorned language
    • used the lyric as the form best suited to expressions of feeling,
    self-revelation, and the imagination
    • turned to a past or an inner dream world that they felt was more
    picturesque and magical than the ugly industrial age they lived
    in
    • believed in individual liberty; sympathized with those who
    rebelled against tyranny
    • thought of nature as transformative

    1966-1975 in America could be thought as the “romantic era” in the


    U.S.

    Gothic: some of the gothic influences carried over from 18th


    century into the Romantic Period
    • was one way in which people of the age expressed a sense of
    helplessness about forces beyond their control: frightening
    revolutions in Europe and industrialization’s unsettling economic
    changes
    • allows readers a moment to share their fears about the age’s
    suffering, injustice, and other unseen “evils”
    ROMANTICISM LECTURE NOTES 3

    About POETRY in the Romantic Era…


    (According to Wordworth’s Preface and Coleridge in NAEL)

    1. The Concept of Poetry and the Poet


    a. individual, emotional
    b. 1st person lyric
    c. Wordworth’s self-view: “spokesman”
    2. Poetic Spontaneity and Freedom
    a. implusive, spontaneous
    b. “truth lies in a union of opposites” (1321)
    3. Romantic “Nature Poetry”
    a. Romantic poetry = nature poetry
    b. Nature = primary scene
    c. meditative; refuge in nature
    d. “natural objects correspond to an inner or a spiritual
    world” (1322)
    4. The Glorification of the Ordinary and the Outcast
    a. Wordworth’s school of poetry comparable to French
    Revolution
    b. common, everyday lives, subjects, and language
    c. subjects = outcasts
    d. democratization
    5. The Supernatural

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