ROMANTIC POETS

Anticipated by
PRE-ROMANTICISM
(1760-1801)

EXPONENTS

Thomas Gray
(1716-1771)

William Blake
(1757-1827)

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)

Reflection on death and mortality

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)

Cotrast between purity and evil

The elements that made Romanticism a rivolutionary phenomenon:

Subjectivity:

In contrast with Neoclassicists.
The romantic Intellectuals preferred to follow their inner self.

Nature:

Romantic intellectuals and artists idealised the role of nature as a benign and consoling entity

Beauty:

Imagination:

Romantic artists gave importance to new ideas of beauty, such as the exotic, the irregular, the wild, the supernatural and the strange.

Romantic artists declared that reality is much more than what we can experience with our senses.

Art:

Art according to the Romantic artists, was the expression of the supreme creative power of the artist.

GENERAL FEATURES

Exaltation of nature

Distrust in progress and industrial development

Use of imagination

Rejection of Neoclassicism

Accent on spontaneous feelings

Interest in the world of the self

A NEW SENSITIVITY TOWARDS NATURE

In pre-Romantic poetry, Nature is often depicted both as the right place for man and as the primordial force that can contrast the dehumanising effects of the Industrial Revolution.

First Generation of Romantic poets

Second Generation of Romantic poets

Lake Poets

Coleridge

Wordsworth

Shelley

Keats

Nature:

  • primary source of poetic inspiration.


  • divine healing force that permeates the universe.

  • He is interested in uncovering 'the supernatural’, ‘the sublime’ and ‘the fantastic' in Nature.
  • He exalts Nature as a majestic unifying force: THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY and inspire humans to act heroically for a better world.

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  • He interpreted Nature in Neo-Platonic terms as the visible translation of hidden spiritual truths that stand at the core of what is real.
  • benign entity.

  • Uncontrolled and distruptive force that can destroy indiscriminately and is often indifferent to human requests.