ROMANTICISM

Click to add subtitle

Kinds of poetry

• narrative poetry• dramatic poetry• lyric poems (sonnets, the ode, the elegy)

Romaticism

• artists, poets, writers, musicians + political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th century, e.g.

music – Beethowen, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Wagner, Paganini, Liszt, ...

visual arts – Delacroix and Gericault (France), Blake, Turner and Constable (Britain), Hudson River School in the USA

philosophers – Fichte and Shelling (German idealism) literature – Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe and

Nathaniel Hawthorne (USA), Goethe (Germany), Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Stendhal (France), Pushkin and Lermontov (Russia) ...

Romantic period

focus on: imagination, intuition, emotion, individual sensibility;the eccentric and the singularexotic, mysterious and distant(untamed)nature and solitudenative traditions – folk culture, national and ethnic

cultural origins, the medieval erathe genius, the hero and the exceptional figure in

general

Romantic period

• writers tended to regard themselves as the most interesting subject for literary creation

• the impact of new forces (esp. French Revolution) – promise of liberty, equality and fraternity

• a variety of forms such as:

balladthe sonnetottava rimablank verseSpenserian stanzathe metrical romance

Romantic period

Two generations of writers:The First Great Romanticists - Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Lamb, ...

Romantic periodTwo generations of writers:The Younger Romanticists - Keats, Shelley, Lord

Byron (and Mery Shelley)

William Blake•Songs of Innocence•The Marriage of Heaven and Hell•Songs of Experience

Taylor Coleridge•The Rime of Ancient Mariner•Christabel•Kubla Khan•Meditative Poems in Blank Verse

William Wordsworth•Lyrical Ballads(one of the most famous ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’)•The Prelude•Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Sir Walter Scott•The Lady of the Lake – poem•Ivanhoe - novel

George Gordon, Lord Byron•Hours of Idleness•Don Juan•Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage•Manfred•Cain

Percy Bysshe Shelley•Prometheus Unbound•Adonais•The Cloud•To a Skylark•Ode to the West Wind

John Keats•Ode on a Grecian Urn•Ode to a Nightingale