1780-1830
“Wanderer uber dem
Nebelmeer”
Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
And Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Preface contains the two authors’ beliefs about
the new artistic and spiritual movement
The definitive statement of Romanticism.
A Period of Change
Politics-Radicalism
Culture-Romanticism
Economics - Industrial Revolution
Dichotomy between the Age of
Reason and the Romantic Age
Age of Reason
vs
Romanticism
Public and society
Rational
Objective
Science
Conscious intellect
vs.
vs.
vs.
vs.
vs.
Private reality
Emotional
Subjective
Intuition
The Unconscious
The Romantic Hero
The Romantics asserted the importance of the
individual, the unique, even the eccentric.
The Byronic hero is a moody, turbulent individualist,
haunted by past sins committed.
Byron
Percy Shelley
Glorification of the
Common Man
Romantic poets (like William
Wordsworth) looked to the French
Revolution as example of social
ideals at work
Glorification of Children
Youth is the “fount of wisdom.”
“The child is father of the man.” -Wordsworth
Childhood state of free imagination is
perfect
Wordsworth’s View of
Humanity
At birth: still “trailing clouds of glory
from God;” closest to nature
In youth: slightly farther from nature and
God, but still “nature’s priest,”
As a young adult: the “prison house of
the world” begins to close in on us.
We can recapture the bloom of childhood
and revive our creativity by communing
with nature.
New Subject Matter
No more “lofty” subjects
Wordsworth wrote about children, the aged, the
mad, the poor, rural people.
“Poet’s duty” to “descend lower , among
cottages and fields, and among children.”
Confront basic humanity “by stripping our own
hearts naked, and by looking out of ourselves
toward men who lead the simplest lives, and
those most according to nature.”
New Style
Systematic denial of literary
pretension.
Common, not lofty language
Often childlike vocabulary
Freely expressed emotion
Direct connection between the reader
and author
Pantheism
Belief that God is present in nature
and not separable from it.
Espoused by Wordsworth
Nature is a spiritual guide—not
just a collection of pretty scenery.
William Blake
A mystic; said he communicated with spirits
Ahead of his time
Believed children are closer to the divine than
adults because they possess free imaginations
unhampered by the constraints of society and
education.
Blake believed that naive innocence must pass
through and assimilate experience if it is to move
on to “organized innocence,” which transcends
both.
Robert Burns
Scottish poet
Dialect: a regional variety of language
with a particular pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary.
Farmer, limited education, struggled
with poverty much of his life, died at
37. He expressed the feelings and
concerns of ordinary people.
Medieval Subjects, Gothic
Settings
Romantic writers fascinated with
medieval subjects
Gothic novels (like Frankenstein and
Dracula featuring gloomy castles and
supernatural events became popular
Exotic places and characters were
widely written about
Schmadribach Waterfall in
Lauterbrunnen Valley
Joseph Anton Koch, 1811
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