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Features of Romantic thought, Romantic poetry, The Sublime - Coggle Diagram
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Romantic poetry
Early Romantic poetry emerged in the second half of the 18th century and moved away from the intellectual and refined character of Augustan poetry.
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Two important trends of this period, considered forerunners of Romantic poetry, are 'Graveyard' and 'Ossianic' poetry
Graveyard poetry refers to poems often set in cemeteries or among ruins and characterized by a gloomy, melancholy tone.
Ossianic poetry consists of fragments of ancient poems attributed to Ossian, a legendary Nd-century Irish warrior who lived in Scotland, collected, translated and published by James Macpherson.
Romantic Poets:
William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are referred to as the first generation of Romantic poets
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats are referred to as the second generation of Romantic poets
They shared a desire to explore new modes of conveying feelings, visions and perceptions
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The Sublime
The aesthetic category of the "sublime" became central in 18th-century England thanks to Edmund Burke's "Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful"
According to Burke, the principal effect of experiencing the sublime is the feeling of astonishment
This can be described as a mixture of fear, awe, and wonder that can be experienced in both literature and nature (e.g. standing on a mountain peak, contemplating the night-time sky full of stars)
In his essay "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Wordsworth argues that encounters with both the sublime and the beautiful are vital experiences
While beauty leads to "love and gentleness," the sublime promotes "exaltation or awe"
According to Wordsworth, in order to be healthy, the mind must be "frequently and strongly moved both by sublimity and beauty"
For Coleridge, the experience of the sublime is a mental act which requires appropriate conditions
Nature is not sublime per se, it becomes a source of sublimity when the mind is put in the condition of experiencing rapture, as for example, when it is presented with the stunning beauty of a majestic landscape.