The Romantic poets
The first generation
The second generation
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England.
In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.
The manifesto
of English Romanticism
The Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Themes
The poet
Language
Interested in the lives
of the humble
Linked to nature, emotions, feelings
Nature, memory,
children
Simple, common ->
used to liberate imagination
Percy B. Shelley,Byron and John Keats
died very young and away from home;
experienced political disillusionment reflected in their poetry;
were linked to individualism, escapism.
Nature
Byron
Shelley
Coleridge
Keats
Wordsworth
a source of joy
inspiration and knowledge
a mother and a moral guide
a universal force
the representation of God’s will and love
the companion of his loneliness
the counterpart of his stormy feelings when it was violently upset
a source of enjoyment and inspiration
pervaded by a guiding power leading man to love
the creative mind benefits from the beauty of the natural landscape
a kind of muse to the poet’s artistic quest
In his poems Wordsworth made poetry out of the incidents of simple rustic life, in a language that was similar to ordinary speech. Coleridge, instead, employed poetry to give credibility to the fantastic and supernatural.
While Byron and Shelley distinguished themselves for their rebellious spirit and passionate defence of freedom, Keats was mainly concerned with pursuit of beauty, and there are many who consider him a forerunner of the Aesthetic Movement
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From the literary point of view,
there are many features in
common between the first and
the second generation
But with the second generation there was
the emphasis on the cognitive power of the imagination
individualism
the concept of the role of the poet
the aspiration to the Infinite or the Absolute
many poems showed a new interest in the world of ancient Greece
the language became richer
a return to more complex forms of versification