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    Rene Wellek

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    mohandas76
    Wellek discusses the key characteristics of Romantic literature in England, including their shared views of poetry, nature, and style. He explains that the major English Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats - viewed imagination as a creative power allowing insight into reality through symbols and nature, rejected the mechanistic views of the 18th century in favor of nature as an organic whole, and employed symbolism and mythology, drawing from sources like Greek mythology, in their poetic style.

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    Rene Wellek

    Uploaded by

    mohandas76
    541 views2 pages
    Wellek discusses the key characteristics of Romantic literature in England, including their shared views of poetry, nature, and style. He explains that the major English Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats - viewed imagination as a creative power allowing insight into reality through symbols and nature, rejected the mechanistic views of the 18th century in favor of nature as an organic whole, and employed symbolism and mythology, drawing from sources like Greek mythology, in their poetic style.

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    The concept of Romanticism in literary history (René Wellek)

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    Wellek discusses the key characteristics of Romantic literature in England, including their shared views of poetry, nature, and style. He explains that the major English Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats - viewed imagination as a creative power allowing insight into reality through symbols and nature, rejected the mechanistic views of the 18th century in favor of nature as an organic whole, and employed symbolism and mythology, drawing from sources like Greek mythology, in their poetic style.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    541 views2 pages

    Rene Wellek

    Uploaded by

    mohandas76
    Wellek discusses the key characteristics of Romantic literature in England, including their shared views of poetry, nature, and style. He explains that the major English Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats - viewed imagination as a creative power allowing insight into reality through symbols and nature, rejected the mechanistic views of the 18th century in favor of nature as an organic whole, and employed symbolism and mythology, drawing from sources like Greek mythology, in their poetic style.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 2

    The concept of Romanticism in literary history

    (René Wellek)

    Wellek begins by discussing the characteristics of Romantic literature


    throughout Europe which had the same conceptions and poetic style,
    with the use of imagery, symbolism and myth as a distinct difference
    from that of eighteenth century neoclassicism.
    From that explanation, Wellek moves on to the poets of the English
    Romantic Movement who formed a coherent group, by sharing the same
    views of poetry, conceptions of imagination and the same views of nature
    and mind, therefore they basically shared the same poetic style. Wellek
    states that this conclusion is reached by three standards in the practice
    of literature:
    -Imagination for the view of poetry
    -Nature for the view of the world
    -Symbolism and myth for poetic style

     Imagination:
    - Blake considers all nature to be imagination itself. Imagination is not
    merely the power of visualization, but a creative power by which the
    mind ' gains insight into reality, reads nature as a symbol of something
    behind or within nature not ordinarily perceived'
    - The concept of imagination in Wordsworth is the same.
    - Coleridge's theory of primary and secondary imagination is based on a
    fanciful etymology of the German.
    - Shelley's conceptions were almost the same as Coleridge. Imagination is
    the principle of synthesis; therefore poetry may be defined as the
    expression of the imagination. To Shelley, imagination is creative and the
    poet's imagination is an instrument of knowledge of the real.
    - Keats' had more of the sensationalist vocabulary than either Coleridge
    or Shelley, but he also said 'what the imagination seizes as beauty must be
    truth whether it existed before or not'

    * A summary of the theories of imagination of all romantic poets is:


    Such is the power of creative imagination, a seeing, reconciling,
    combining force that seizes the old, penetrates beneath its surface,
    disengages the truth slumbering there, and building afresh, bodies forth a
    new a reconstructed universe in fair forms of artistic power and beauty.
     Nature:

    Wellek states that there are individual differences between the great
    romantic poets concerning the conceptions of nature, but they share one
    common view by considering nature as an organic whole with an
    objection to the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth century.

    - Blake violently objects to the eighteenth century cosmology by Newton


    and his writings are full of condemnations of Locke and Bacon, atomism,
    deism, and natural religion.
    - Wordsworth conceptions of nature were influenced by Christianity.
    - Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley shared the same concept 'the sprit of
    nature'
    - Keats was less affected by the romantic conceptions of nature because
    he was a student of medicine.

     Symbolism and mythology:

    - Blake's mythology draws in an obscure way on some Celtic mythology


    or rather names, but it's considered as an original creation.
    - Most of Wordsworth interests were in Greek mythology in terms of
    animism.
    - In Coleridge a theory of symbolism is central, his first works were
    affected by Christian mythology, but later on he became more interested
    in Greek mythology.
    - Shelley is a symbolist and mythologist, his poetry is fully metaphorical,
    but he aspires to create a new myth of the redemption of the earth which
    uses classical materials very freely.
    - Keats is also a mythologist.

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