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Romanticism Evolves

Romanticism Evolves • Lyrical Ballads launched the romantic period. • Romanticism valued the individual, emotion, nature, the commonplace, and the imagination. • The Lake poets and personal essayists were romantics; Jane Austen wrote novels of manners.
In 1798, William Wordsworthand Samuel Taylor Coleridgepublished their landmark poetry collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. It was with this publication that the romantic periodis traditionally said to have begun.

The two poets, who had first met in 1795, were united by their shared desire to explore new modes of literary expression. Wordsworth had traveled extensively in both Germany and France, where he had become committed to the revolutionary cause. He developed into a poet of the common man, writing to capture everyday experiences in simple language, without concern for artificial rules or conventions. For both Wordsworth and Coleridge, nature and meditation were linked, with insight into the human experience flowing freely from communion with nature.

The Lake PoetsColeridge explained that the poems in Lyrical Ballads focused on two aspects of human experience, the natural and the supernatural. Wordsworth’s nature poetry gave “the charm of novelty to things of every day,” while Coleridge himself explored supernatural events that nevertheless had a “human interest” and “semblance of truth.”

In a preface to the work, Wordsworth would essentially define the features of English romanticism: an emphasis on the individual, a rejection of artificiality in favor of passion and emotion, a love of nature, a respect for the commonplace, and a freeing of the imagination.

Lyrical Ballads was so different from the usual 18th-century neoclassical fare that Romantic essayist William Hazlittlikened it to the French Revolution itself. Soon after its publication, Wordsworth, who had grown up in the beautiful Lake District of northwestern England, resettled there in the town of Grasmere, with Coleridge moving nearby. Along with their friend and fellow poet Robert Southey,they became known as the Lake poets.Also part of their circle was Dorothy Wordsworth,who lived with her brother in Grasmere and kept a keenly observed journal of their life.

Romantic EssayistsAnother friend of Coleridge’s, Charles Lamb,remained in London and won fame writing personal essays. Such essays—also called familiar essays—often appeared in leading journals of the day. They were a popular Romantic Age form because of their emphasis on personal experiences and feelings. Other Romantic essayists of note were William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey.

An English OriginalOne talented prose writer of the era seems largely untouched by the Romantic movement. Instead, Jane Austenremained in many ways a neoclassical writer. She confined her novels to the experiences of the intimate world she knew, the genteel society of England’s rural villages. Her novels, often called novels of manners,include Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.



Austen’s work does contain Romantic elements, however: a focus on the details of daily life and a preoccupation with character and personality. Also, certain characters, such as the passionate Marianne of Sense and Sensibility, are imbued with the Romantic spirit. However, Austen typically causes such characters to see the error of their ways and become more reserved by novel’s end.

The Late Romantics

The Late Romantics • A new generation of romantic poets flourished during the Regency. • The Byronic hero (dark, brooding, diabolical) became a literary staple. • Percy B. Shelley wrote verse dramas and lyric poetry celebrating nature, freedom, and artistic expression. • Mary Shelley’s gothic tale Frankenstein expressed society’s fears. • John Keats wrote sonnets, odes, and ballads that used nature as a starting point for philosophical meditations.
A New GenerationDuring the Regency, a second generation of Romantic poets came on the literary scene, the most prominent of whom was George Gordon, Lord Byron.The handsome aristocrat won instant fame with the 1812 publication of the first part of his long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, whose darkly brooding romantic hero became associated with the poet himself. For a time, Byron was the darling of fashionable London, but his radical politics and personal escapades soon made him the subject of scandal. In 1816 he abandoned Britain for a self-imposed exile on the European continent, where he died of a fever while helping the Greeks fight for independence. Throughout the 19th c., he remained the most famous of the romantic poets, known as much for his romantic life as his poetic talent. The Byronic hero—dark, handsome, restless, and a bit diabolical—became a staple of literary fiction that many younger poets and other artists tried to imitate.

Byron’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley’sdismay at social injustice made him even more radical than Byron. An admirer of the philosopher William Godwin,Shelley scandalized London when he eloped to the continent with Godwin’s 16-year-old daughter, Mary. He spent most of his remaining years abroad, writing the verse dramas The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound as well as beautiful lyric poetry that celebrates nature, freedom, artistic expression, and other values the romantics held dear. After Shelley died in a boating accident at age 29, his wife Mary Shelleyreturned to England, where she helped edit her husband’s works for publication.

Mary Shelley was a talented writer who won fame in her own right for her gothic horror tale Frankenstein. Mary moved in intellectual circles and was familiar with the scientific theories of her day. In her introduction to Frankenstein, she describes listening to conversations about “Dr. Darwin, ... who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things. ...” Thus, Shelley’s dark tale of a monster who destroys its maker can be read not only as a horror story, or a Romantic meditation on passion versus reason, but as a warning against the dangers of science. Indeed, Frankenstein’s monster can be seen as the embodiment and expression of Shelley’s society’s fears—fears of unchecked progress and of science and industry’s negative effects on humanity.

Poet John Keatscame from humbler origins than Byron and Shelley. He was acquainted with Shelley, however, through his friend Leigh Hunt,the publisher who encouraged his career and introduced him to leading artists of the day. Orphaned at 14, Keats spent much of his short life fighting the tuberculosis that killed his mother and brother and eventually claimed him as well. He produced most of his finest poetry in a feverish eight-month span—sonnets, odes, ballads,and other poetic forms, all handled with remarkable dexterity. Many of his poems use vivid images from nature as a starting point for philosophical meditation about joy, sorrow, love, death, art, and beauty. After Keats died, Shelley eulogized him in his famous elegy Adonais: “His fate and fame shall be / An echo and a light unto eternity!”

 


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1128


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