The Revolt Against Neoclassicism

The word romantic was first used in Germany in 1798 by the critics Friedrich and August von Schlegel. In many ways romanticism as a literary style began in Germany, among such Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.

The romantics, in contrast, were influenced by the same forces that gave rise to the American and French revolutions and by the agitation for political, social, and economic change taking place in their own country. As a result, they searched for freer artistic forms, outside the classical tradition. Romantic poets abandoned the measured, witty heroic couplet for the musical rhythms and richly evocative language of medieval and Renaissance poetry.

To the romantics, emotion became more important than reason, and the individual’s relationship to nature was of primary concern. They found delight in the commonplace, celebrating ordinary things—a bird’s song, a field of flowers—in their verse. Poetry became, in the words of William Wordsworth, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The lyric poem, with its emphasis on subjective experiences, thoughts, feelings, and desires, was the most popular literary form among the romantic poets.

Early Romantic PoetryAlthough the beginning of Britain’s romantic period is traditionally assigned to the year 1798, aspects of romanticism are evident in earlier British literature. Poet William Blake, who began publishing in the 1780s, produced mystical verse expressing his own personal philosophy and illustrated it with his own engravings. A Londoner of humble origins, Blake saw poverty and suffering all around him and was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution in its early days. He could not accept the neoclassical idea of a stable, orderly hierarchy in the universe but instead viewed existence as a blending of opposite poles—goodness and evil, innocence and experience, heaven and hell. In his landmark Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake included paired poems, one “innocent” and one “experienced,” on similar topics.

Scottish Pride Robert Burns,who also published poetry in the 1780s, exercised his own brand of romanticism by drawing on earlier traditions, particularly the oral poetry of his native Scotland. The son of a farmer, Burns had great sympathy for the democratic vision of the American and French revolutions and tried to convey in his poetry the experiences of simple, everyday Scottish rural life. Hailed as the Ploughman Poet,he often wrote in the Lowland Scots dialect, using vocabulary and pronunciations unlike those of standard English. Burns did not break completely with neoclassical traditions; his witty mock epic Tam o’ Shanter, for example, is reminiscent of Pope and Swift, but with a Scottish flavor. More in keeping with romantic attitudes are his well-known sentimental songs, such as “Flow Gently Sweet Afton,” “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose,” and the New Year’s Eve favorite “Auld Lang Syne.”

Another Scotsman who drew heavily on his heritage was Sir Walter Scott.Scott gathered traditional ballads and folk tales of his native land, collecting them in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and incorporating them into long narrative poems such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake. During the Regency, Scott became even more famous as a pioneer of the historical novel,reaching into Scotland’s and England’s legendary past for the plots and characters of Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, and a string of other popular novels. In Waverley, for example, he focused on the romantic themes of revolution and rebellion but set the story in the early 1700s, the time of Britain’s Jacobite rebellion.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 2994