The British Romantic Movement

1. The British Romantic Movement

2. Historical Events • 1789-1815 Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France • July 14, 1793 Storming of the Bastille • 1793-94 The Reign of Terror under Robespierre

3. The Spirit of the Age Writers did not think of themselves as Romantic. Many writers felt that there was something distinctive about their time—not a shared doctrine or literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate. “Great spirits on earth are sojourning.” —John Keats

4. Influence of the War • The imagination of many writers was preoccupied with the revolution. • Seeing the hand of God in the events in France and understanding those events as the fulfillment of the prophecies of the coming millennium came easily to figures such as Barbauld, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and Blake. • Some writers rethought apocalyptic transformations so that it no longer depended on the political action of collective humanity but depended instead on the individual consciousness.

5. Lyrical Ballads • Wordsworth undertook to justify those poems by means of a critical manifesto, or statement of poetic principles, which appeared first as a short advertisement in the original Lyrical Ballads. • Organized isolated ideas into a coherent theory • Coleridge and Wordsworth fathered the movement.

6. Romantic Poetry • Wordsworth described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” • Female poets were challenged to disprove the idea that their sex—traditionally seen as creatures of feeling rather than intellect—wrote about their own experience because they were capable of nothing else.

7. Nature • Considered to be synonymous with Nature poetry because poets tried to keep their distance from city life in an effort to undo the harmful effects of what Wordsworth called “the increasing accumulation of men in cities.” • Wordsworth said the ability to observe objects accurately is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poetry. • Romantic poems endow the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness.

8. Glorification of the ordinary • “To combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar …this is the character and privilege of genius.”—Coleridge • Supernatural elements also used to achieve a sense of wonder.

9. Period redefined heroism. Percy’s phrase, “the desire of the moth for a star” came to be revalued as the glory of human nature. • Marked by alienation and individualism • Desolate landscapes