Romantic Period

 Romantic Period 

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Defining Romanticism A Revolt and a revival

• Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that emerged in the late 18th century and lasted until the mid-19th century, characterized by ____
• a rejection of the order, harmony, and rationality of Neo-Classicism and the Enlightenment. and its focus on logic, and universal truth
• Instead, Romanticism was a revival of individualism and subjectivity, that is the emotional and imaginative aspects of human experience along with the celebration of the sublime beauty of nature that characterized Elizabethan literature. It found the genius of the artist in the exploration of human emotions and inner struggles and showed a fascination for Imagination to connect with the exotic, the mysterious, and the supernatural, to see beyond the “real”. This often led them to draw inspiration from medieval culture and folk traditions where they found a manifestation of Nature, unalloyed by “culture”. 
• In Germany, the movement was influenced by the Sturm und Drang period, with figures like Goethe and the Schlegel brothers playing significant roles. In England, Romanticism is often associated with poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, particularly following the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. 

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The socio-political context of Romanticism 

• Romanticism was not a single unified movement, consolidated around any single place, moment, or manifesto. 
• The American Revolution in 1776 and French Revolution in 1789 created an overall mood of resistance against authoritarianism and enthusiasm for liberty, equality and fraternity, emphasizing individualism. 
• The Romantic period also coincided with the societal transformations of the Industrial Revolution which the Romanticists considered as a threat to the human spirit because of the massive destruction of nature, the long hours of work, unsafe conditions, and the exploitation of child labor in factories. On one hand, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein questioned the advancement of science, on the other hand, poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote in favour of “a return to nature” for the beauty and spiritual solace of the rural, natural world as an antidote to the grimy, man-made environment of industrial cities.
• The state’s counterrevolutionary measures into the traumatizing violence in the Peterloo massacre of 1819, the post revolution chaos in France and the overall disillusionment led the Romantic poets and thinkers to turn their face away from the real and escape into the medieval world of mystery and self-discovery. 

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The philosophical context of Romanticism 

Romanticism was often influenced by the philosophical questioning of Plato to Kant’s synthesizing perceptions of Imagination and Rousseau’s theory of the goodness of human nature and the corrupting influence of society. 

• “The Ideal” by Plato : Plato argued that the world of objects is only a shadow of ideal forms, which exist eternally. At birth, we forget our knowledge of ideal forms, which we knew before being shackled to our bodily senses.To see things in their ideal form would be like having someone who had been tied up in a cave all his life seeing nothing but shadows on a wall suddenly released to see the sun and our world of objects. 
• Locke’s Tabula Rasa :According to Locke, the human mind at birth is akin to a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which impressions are laid, i e, to say the mind has no innate ideas, that all we know comes from experience. This philosophy of John Locke drove philosophy in two opposite traditions over the course of the eighteenth century— The Materialists or Objectivists and The Idealists or Subjectivists. Hume and David Hartley from the Objectivist’s school, argued that, if all our ideas come originally from perceptions of the material world, then we are nothing but what we perceive, that is, the objects of the world and our experiences determine who we will be. Berkeley from the Subjectivist school wrote, "No object exists apart from the mind; mind is therefore the deepest reality" and that the world is nothing unless we perceive.

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• Kant's synthesizing Imagination and Understanding : Kant sought to reconcile these two tendencies by arguing that though the mind has no content until it interacts with the world, it does have innate formal structures or templates that order the world that is perceived in the formal constructs of time and space. Therefore, the mind has the power to synthesize its perceptions through the capacity of Imagination through which we are able to see what is common in external objects. Also, the mind includes a yet higher capacity of Understanding, which is intimately connected with our power of judgment, and seeks to draw conclusions about what lies beyond the boundaries of senses, time and place. As though we can not know anything of Immortality, God, or Freedom directly but we can recognize it through the power of the Understanding which by going beyond time and place determine the abstracts like duty, ethics, and laws.
• Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took Kant's ideas and expanded on them, conceiving of the objective world as a manifestation of an absolute spirit or mind. 
• Rousseau's idea of Inner goodness: Often called the "father of Romanticism," Rousseau, in his “Social Contract” said that man is born free but everywhere in chains. emphasizing the innate goodness of humanity and the corrupting influence of society and the importance of emotion, individualism, and nature. 

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The impact of French Revolution in the literature of the Romantic Age 

 The French Revolution with its new slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity swept away time-honoured hierarchies in different and promised an egalitarian society, marked with individualism.

 With the abolition of Monarchy and the feudal structure and the dissolution of hierarchies, the genres of the epic and the tragedy (resonant with those social structures) which were at the top of the literary pyramid had to yield place to such forms as the lyric, the ode and the ballad. 

In the choice of themes, great events had to make way for more commonplace incidents ___ the life, culture, belief and disbeliefs of the characters like a leech-gatherer, or a solitary reaper or a simple ignoble country lass Lucy___ became the renewed interest for poetic composition.

There was a change in diction in tune with the thematic changes, like the language, the cultivated speech of the elite was replaced by the speech of the common people. 

Overall, the French Revolution caused a democratization of literature in genre, in diction, in themes and in characters.

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Tenets of Romanticism 

• Subjectivity or individualism
• Imagination 
• A return to Nature 
• Medievalism
• Supernaturalism
• Glorification of Childhood 

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Romantic Poetry 

Poets of Romantic Age

First and Second Generation of Romantic poets: The first generation of Romantic poets included William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose primary thematic concerns were nature, imagination, and common life. The second generation—- Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats dealt with themes of beauty, love, death, and social change. Shelley and Byron took up rebellious, politically radical themes using more complex language and verse.

Lake Poets: Refers to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who lived in the Lake District and collaborated on works and shared similar philosophical and poetic ideals. 

Cockney School : John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and their circle of London-based writers whose aesthetic concerns focused on sensual imagery and everyday language by challenging traditional poetic forms and subject matter, faced criticism from conservative critics who derogatorily termed them as Cockney school. 

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Themes of Romantic Poetry 

• A Return to Nature : In Romantic poetry Nature was often portrayed as Sublime evoking a sense of awe and transcendence. 

Wordsworthian perception of Nature had a pantheistic zeal that sought to represent a sense of Oneness with Nature. For Wordsworth Nature is the “nurse, the guard and the guardian” of his soul and his belief “One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man,/Of moral evil and of good,/Than all the sages can” suggests a deep, almost mystical connection between humanity and the natural world. 

Nature in Coleridge's poetry often blurs the line between the real and the supernatural as Coleridge believed that the poet's imagination could transform the natural world. In both Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, nature had a profound symbolic meaning and appeared as both real and surreal in Coleridge's creative vision. 

Shelley admired the mighty aspects of Nature as a harbinger of revolution, both —- physical and spiritual. Nature, for Shelley was the voice of the ideal, sometimes the spontaneous flow of euphoric joy that characterizes his Skylark or, that of a renewal of vitality through destruction and restoration by the Westwind. 

Keats endowed Nature with the sensuous aspect to create a sense of profound joy, beauty, and comfort that can provide respite from human suffering. 

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• Medievalism: Romantic poets often made their imaginary excursion into the medieval world of castles, mysterious setting, waning moon and demon lovers to escape from the burden of reality. They sought an escape into regions and states of beings as far removed in time and space as possible. It is this love of the remote, the strange, and the mysterious which induced in them an interest in the Middle Ages. Coleridge's Christabel migrated the readers to a medieval world of mystery and enchantment to deal with the repressed sexual anxiety and link it to the biblical “Fall of Man” through Christabel, questioning the societal taboos of women sexuality through the idea of “sin and shame”. Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci seemed to question the Romantic search for the ideal through the Knight and the Belle as the ideal who, like his vision of the Nightingale, keeps the reader wondering “Was it a Vision or a waking dream?”

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• Hellenism: Hellenism denotes a love for classical Greece ____ its mythology, literature and culture. Romantic poets adhered to it because of its Pagan aspects of associating Nature with divinity and of a more spontaneous connection of man with spirituality. John Keats' poetry is full of allusions to the art, literature and culture of Greece, as for example in “Ode to a Nightingale” he compared the invisible presence of the Nightingale with the “light wing Dryad”, the “blushful Hippocrene” described the red wine and the mood of poetic spontaneity. Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” the hair of Maenads’ creates the vision of Westwind’s mighty stretch from horizon to the zenith.

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• Supernaturalism : Most of the romantic poets used supernatural elements in their poetry. Coleridge represents human quest, desire and the notion of morality in the symbolic narratives of the supernatural . Kubla Khan explores his poetic desire to create the sublime by infusing ideas with words and his lack of it was juxtaposed with Kubla’s command to make a “sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice”___ that blends the conscious and the subconscious. The Rime of the Ancient Marina captures the guilt and the feeling of being stuck through the supernatural ambience. Christabel explores the idea of a woman’s sexual venture and her perception of body through the narrative of “good and evil”, almost recreating the myth of Adam’s fall from God's grace.

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• Sensuousness: "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts,” was the poetic philosophy of John Keats who espoused the “idea of senses” through the verbal picturization in his poetry by creating a synthesis of images in Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn and later influenced the poetic oeuvre of the Pre-Raphelites. 

• Glorification of Childhood: Romantic poets like Wordsworth glorified childhood in Ode to Immortality as a state of celestial bliss, unaffected by the materialistic orientation. Shelley also ruminated on his boyhood days to liken himself with the West Wind. Blake pointed out both the Childlike curiosity and innocence in his Songs of Innocence, and the effect of Industrial revolution upon child labour and the idea of a spiritual revolution through the apparent childlike cadence of Songs of Experience .

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Poetic techniques and forms

• Lyric : Romantic poets expressed their spontaneous flow of powerful emotions of joy, of disappointed , of home and of anxiety through their lyrics like "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by Wordsworth and "Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley, Ode to a Nightingale by Keats  
• Odes: Odes celebrated specific subjects, often using elevated language and complex structures Keats' odes Grecian Urn, Nightingale exemplify the Romantic approach to this classical form.
• Sonnets: were adapted to express personal emotions and philosophical ideas Wordsworth's sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us" critiques materialism.
• Ballads : Romantic poets often used narrative poems to explore complex ideas so they revived their interest in traditional ballad forms and incorporated the supernatural elements. Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" exemplifies the Romantic narrative ballad whereas Byron's "Don Juan" combines narrative with satirical and philosophical elements

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Romantic Novel

• Gothic novel : Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the pioneering example of Gothic novel in the Romantic age, setting the trend of a moated castle, unnatural echoes or silences, nocturnal landscapes, remote locations, demonic possession, ghosts, and the damsel in distresses. Ann Radcliffe, through her novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), dealing with vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined castles, terrified by supernatural perils, had distinguished “terror” and “horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of “uncertainty and obscurity.” Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction by criticizing the narrative of “scientific progress”. Other examples include Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), William Beckford’s Vathek. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock was written to parodise the genre of gothic fiction. 

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• Walter Scott's Historical novels and medieval romances included a large variety of subject matters like chivalry, honor, and love in Ivanhoe, Scottish history, identity, and honor in Rob Roy, political intrigue, love, and power struggles in Kenilworth, fate, fortune, and the supernatural in Guy Mannering, justice, sacrifice, and social issues in The Heart of Midlothian, obsession with the past, family, and secrets in The Antiquary etc. His works, known as the Waverley Novels, are set in past historical periods and blend fictional characters and events with actual history. 
• Jane Austen's gynocentric novels dealt with the themes of social realism and class hierarchy. But one aspect of the revolutionary aspect of Romanticism is noted in the interclass marriages in Austen's world that symbolically portrayed the decay of aristocracy and the rise of the Bourgeoisie. Along with that, her protagonists like Elizabeth, Emma and others embraced their individuality and resisted to fit in socially conventional roles destined for women.

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• Women novelist do emerge noticeable in the literary scenario with contents like the celebration of the rights of the individuals as in Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, Nature and Art by Elizabeth Inchbald, Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays; or the discussed the threats of the social changes as in Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray. Maria Edgeworth’s novel Castle Rackrent (1800),a comic portrait of life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the works of Scott whose regional novels are known as Waverly Novels. 

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Other Romantic Prose

• Impersonal Prose: The literary phenomena of Romanticism was effectively influenced by the French Revolution and its multifold socio-economic and philosophical aspects. Certain eloquent polemical prose emerged leading to a fierce debate about social and political principles, beginning with Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) which was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Tom Paine countered Burke through his Rights of Man, which was countered by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft voiced the feminists' concerns, and paved the way for certain rights of women. 

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• Personal criticism and essays: Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period, particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. William Hazlitt reflected his subjective criticism in his collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819) and in The Spirit of the Age (1825) . Charles Lamb in his The Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833) projects his personal thoughts and experiences with the structural restraint often blending humour with pathos which created a carefully managed portrait of himself— sometimes whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. In a reflective tone Thomas De Quincey also narrated personal experiences in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The English Mail Coach reflects his unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare and his On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts seems to have a significant contribution in the Victorian Aesthetic movement. 

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