The Romantics

1. The Romantics Famous Philosophers and Poets

2. John Locke • 1632-1704 • British philosopher • Known for his liberal, anti-authoritarian theory of the state, his empirical theory of knowledge, his advocacy of religious toleration, and his theory of personal identity. • Opposed government and argued that humans could discover, by careful reasoning, that there are natural laws which suggest that we have natural rights to our own persons. • This is how reasoning places limits on the proper use of power by government authorities.

3. John Locke • Tabula Rosa – blank slate – before the mind has been contaminated by experience. Children are born blank. Through experience, they then find God. • The mind is like a prison, with only five senses for perception. The understanding is “a closet, wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances or ideas of things without.” • Prison imagery from Enlightenment becomes more important.

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau • 1712-1778 • One of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment. • First major philosophical work – A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts • Argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. • Second major work – The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality • Central claim is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Recognized “the innocence and contentment of primitive man in a state of nature.” • The child comes into the world innocent. • Saw the need for a new scheme of education in which the child is allowed full scope for individual development in natural surroundings, shielded from the harmful influences of civilization. • “The noble savage.” The common uneducated man is admired because he has innocence. • “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Image of prison.

6. William Blake • 1757-1827 • English poet, painter, printmaker • Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, but is now considered an important figure in the history of poetry and visual arts during the Romantic Age. • Wrote the famous “Song of Innocence and Experience” • Embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself.”

7. William Blake • Why is man in chains? Read “London” • Childhood is the time when the imaginative powers are at their most intense. • Perception comes when the mind and the imagination are a state of energy. • The man of spirit is a “mental traveler” who, in walking through the world of experience or laboring at his creative work develops “intellect,” thus discovering true wisdom, - through the “intellectual eye.” • “His own ideal … submits him not to the world of sense perception, but to the inner illuminations of innocent vision.” • “Truth is always in the extremes – keep them.” We must experience extremes.

8. William Blake • “Blake felt drawn to press a particular point of view to the extreme, allowing its contrary to then emerge and shape something new.” • “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” – a reconciliation between reason and energy within a larger human vision. • What has been lost is the presence of an integrating power that should work in the human psyche and harmonize various functions. (Id, ego, super ego). • Blake believed that many of the ills of the world resulted from a loss of imagination and an unwillingness to cultivate human energies in freedom.

9. William Blake – 2 Sets of Contraries -

10. First generation of English Romantic Poetry - Wordsworth & Coleridge • Men meet at Cambridge • Publish Lyrical Ballads in 1798 • Seeks to abandon formal language of 1700’s • Balance between poet’s influence and “real language” • Balance between commonplace and supernatural

11. William Wordsworth • 1770-1850 • Credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1789) in collaboration with Coleridge. • He devoted his passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness. • He embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution.

12. William Wordsworth • Out with the old – Gone were the flowery language, the wittily crafted figures of speech and the tragic complaints that defined poetry in the past … • In with the new – Wordsworth offered an intensified presentation of ordinary life and nature using common language. • One of his greatest works The Prelude was his autobiography in poetry. It was not entirely factual; Wordsworth claimed his work told the story “of the growth of my mind.”

13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge • 1772-1834 • Famous works include Lyrical Ballads, KublaKhan, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner. • Writing was extremely versatile • Best known for long, narrative poems • Wrote most of his major work within a few years • Through Wordsworth, he ushered in the modern use of “conversational” poetry. • Unlike Wordsworth, he stuck by most of the theories and beliefs that he held in his youth.

14. Second generation: Byron, Shelley, Keats • All have tragically short lives • Byron and Shelley both aristocrats, well educated, leave England under pressure, see themselves as outcasts • Byron popular, while Shelley misunderstood • Keats produces poetry at 24, dies at 25

15. George Gordon, Lord Byron • 1788-1824 • Born with a club foot • Acquired his title at age 10 from his great-uncle • Known for his works Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the short lyric “She Walks in Beauty” • Travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence – considered a national hero. • Known for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumors of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. • Created the “Byronic Hero” – one who presents an idealized, but flawed characters whose attributes include great talent, great passion, a distaste for society and social institutions, lack of respect for rank and privilege, rebellion, exile, arrogance, self-destructive manner, etc.

16. Percy Bysshe Shelley • 1792-1822 • Considered too radical in his poetry an his political and social views to achieve fame during his lifetime • Second wife – Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein • Best known for classic poems: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, etc. • Early profession of atheism led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him as a radical thinker. • Many refused to publish his works for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy.

17. John Keats • 1795-1821 • Poems not generally well-received by critics during his life. • His reputation grew after his death and he became one of the most beloved of all English poets. • His poetry is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. • Like many Romantic poets, Keats’ work is defined by an elevated view of the human imagination, a deeper reverence for nature, and the use of symbolism and myth as a prominent subject matter.