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The Romantic Age (A Literary Guide) - Coggle Diagram
The Romantic Age (A Literary Guide)
Poetry
Robert Burns (1759 - 1796)
Close to the animal world and to suffering.
Defender of the deprived people, the common man.
Scottish national poet.
Walter Scott (1771 - 1832)
Fascinated by Border ballads.
His poems set in the 16th century, describing love and war through dramatic landscapes.
Pre- Romantic poetry
William Blake (1757 - 1827) was a printer, engraver, he belonged to the "radical thinkers, among Godwin and Thomas Paine.
He etched his works, resembling medieval manuscripts. He believed that man is divine but living on earth torn him with his origins. = Rejection of science, materialism, religious codes.
His religion is founded on conflict between freedom (Urizen() and rebellion (Orc)
In "Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), he arraigns the subordination of women and is an upholder of free sexuality.
The first generation of Romantic poets: the cult of nature
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) was sympathteic to the revolutionary cause. When he returned to England, he became conservative.
Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800) split up with neo-classical poetic conventions. Wordsworth reckoned that poetry convey essential passions of the heart because the poet addresses to men.
Three means to reach this aim: have a humble and rustic life which provides simple feelings; found a unelaborated language; the poet is gifted a heightened sensibility.
Wordsworth themes: healing essence of nature and influence of memory on the present.
Samuel Coleridge (1772- 1834) planned an ideal society: Pantisocraty. He deemed the regenerative power of nature and imagination at the core of his poetry, but it also include mystery and daemonic poems.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798): medieval ballad, a mariner slaughtered an albatross, his fellows mariners lie dead on the ship, he is banned by divinities and nature because killing a bird is a crime against nature.
In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge ponder about the distinction between fancy and imagination. Fancy is a primary imagination limited to combinations whereas imagination creates and reshapes.
The second generation of Romantic poets: the poet as a rebel
John Clare was a farmer marked by depression and poverty. Observer of natural life and he as lost by the change of countryside.
George Gordon Byron entered in Cambridge, he travelled to Spain and Greece. He estimates England as a land of hypocrisy and tyranny.
In Don Juan, Byron narrates the shipwrecking of the protagonist in Greece, in love with Haidee, daughter of a Greek pirate. He is sold as a slave in Constantinople to a sultana in love with him.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was scandalous: abandonment of his 1st wife, run way with the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822.
Jon Keats (1795 - 1821) lived in mourning: his parents died of tuberculosis, he caught the disease then. His poems escape his day-to-day sorrow in dreams and illusions to admit that reality is unavoidable. In his Odes, he makes the apology of aesthecism to underscores his sense of loss.
Drama
Few plays performed; revivals of Shakesêare and Elizabethan playwrights.
The novel and prose
The Gothic novel
Edmund Burke, in "Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful", emphasized the preeminence of awe and terror in sublime. The gothic landscapes are: abbeysn haunted castles where heroines are captured by villains.
Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823) depicted alpine landscapes, reminding paintings. In "The Mysteries of Udolpho", Emily de St-Aubert came in the Apennies with her uncle until she managed to escape and find her beloved one.
Gothic novels were set in disquieting places such as abbeys, convents, castles, inhabited with dreadful creatures: villains who capture heroines.
The major themes explored are: insanity, duality, doppelgangers, alienation, deterioration of human body.
Mary Shelley (1797 - 1851), the daughter of the feminist essayist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Frankestein (1818) in which a scientist experiments the creation of the perfect human body: it is doomed to failure. The behemoths lashes out at his inventor and becomes an outcast.
Essays
Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey discuss the topic of classes of society.
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) studied human nature limited until the arrival of newcomers who reveals the characters. She arraigns greed, complacency and raises moral qualities up to profits and economic issues. She uses monologues and free indirect speech.
Walter Scott (1771 - 1832) set his novels in periods of turmoil and war.