Romanticism

1798-1850
William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Colerdige
Romanticism:

- is one of the most important historical events of all time

- Refers to the birth of a new set of ideas, it is about a mindset and a way of feeling.

- In the works of Poets, painters, and philosophers

- A reaction to the birth of the modern world ( urbanization, industrialization,

secularization,…)
 Important works that explain the attitude of romanticism:
- Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile or on Education: how to raise children, praises the
natural goodness of children, they are representive of everyting pure, natural
innocence AGAINST the rational mechanical world.
- Thomas Chatterton, a British poet who committed suicide because no one wanted to
publish his poetry (beauty and wisdom). A cult soon grew up around the young man,
an emblematic figure: the sensitive doomed person, a theme that would become
important in the Romantic writing. The image of the artist rejected by the world, noble
in the eyes of the few who understand.
- The German Goethe published a romantic love story, The Sorrows of Young Werter, a
passionate doomed love affair between a young poet Werter and a clever woman
Charlotte, the latter is married. But this does not stop Werter from dreaming and loves
art above all else. He kills himself. Through his romantic style he drew empathy to the
character and readers came on the character’s side. It led to previliging feelings and
emotions over traditional . It is always right and noble to follow your heart.
Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters
Dove Cottage, Lake District. Where Wordworth wrote the best English
poetry, about the natural world under threat (daffodils, trees, butterflies)
- An abiding hatered for everything that is mechanical. The side of nature
against industry
Augustus Pugin (1847), oddly though the building was new, it’s made old
very old, medieval in fact (armors, knights) his building is noble because it
returns to preindustrial past.
Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti Women on the Beach
« Civilization is what has made us sick »
 Romanticism was a REACTION
against the enlightement
• Political: democratic ideals and social equality
(rejection of monarchy, feudalism)
• Art: a turn away from neoclassicism perfection
• Philosophy: contends with rationalism- the
belief that truth could be discerned by logic
and reason.
• An idealization of the individual.
 Characteristics
• In art, it marked a fascination with the individual
genuis and elevated the artist, philosopher, and
poet above all others.
• A deep appreciation of the beauties of nature
• Romantics tried to capture the feelings nature
inspired in them.
• They emphasized the importance of the subjective
experience. They believed that emotions and
feelings and the senses could lead to higher truths
than either reason or the intellect.
 Characteristics

• Romantics supposed that feelings such as fear,

delight, joy and wonder, were keys that could
unlock the mysteries of the world.
 The sublime
• The concept of ‘‘the sublime’’ (a thrilling
emotional experience that combines awe,
magnificence, and horror) was introduced.
Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to
logic and analysis. For the romantics, poetry was
believed to be the highest form of literature, and
novels were regarded as a lower form, often as
sensationalistic and titillating, even by those most
addicted to reading them. Most novels of the time
were written by women and were therefore widely
regarded as a threat to serious, intellectual culture.
 The sublime

• The “sublime” — an effect of beauty in

grandeur (for example, a view from a
mountaintop) — produced feelings of awe,
reverence, vastness, and a power beyond
human comprehension.
 Imagination
• The imagination became one of the highest
faculties of human perception.
• In the preface to « Lyrical Ballads »,
Wordsworth professes all the basic principles
of romanticism:
• He exults the power of the romantic poet to
give voice to individual feeling.
• He speaks of the power of nature to show the
way of/to the spirit.
Wordsworth felt that imagination could take the
experiences of everyday men and women and
turn them into art. The aim of the Lyrical poems
was “to choose incidents and situations from
common life” and “to throw over them a certain
colouring of magination,whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect.” By highlighting the ordinary,
Wordsworth points to the deeper spirit that lives
in all things; the problem, as he sees it, is that
human habit has made these wonders too
familiar.
Pantheism
Pantheism, which is the belief that there is no difference
between the creator and creation, holds that God is not
separate from the world, but manifested in it. This idea was
popular among romantics. For example, Wordsworth writes
in his poem ‘‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,
July 13, 1798’’:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
This sensation of a divine ‘‘presence’’ in all things marked a shift in public
perceptions of nature. Until this period, most people were busy struggling to eke out
a living, largely through could be used and harvested, not as a place of renewal and
purity. However, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, cities became more
crowded and dirty.
Wordsworth, for his part, was ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to

excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the

lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us’.

Both of them were to observe what they considered to be ‘the two cardinal points of poetry,

the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of

nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of

imagination’. As far as the Ancient Mariner was concerned, Coleridge fulfilled his share of

the bargain brilliantly. The supernatural events of the poem symbolize the pattern of sin,

repentance, grace and expiation that is part of man’s religious experience, but old and

familiar things are presented in a new way. By investing a voyage of exploration and

discovery with what he called ‘the depth and height of the ideal world’, he transforms it into

a spiritual odyssey.
An insight into Coleridge’s thought and poetic aspirations at the time when
Lyrical Ballads was in preparation can be gained from a letter he wrote to his
brother on the 10th March 1798. He describes his purpose in poetry as an
endeavour ‘to elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the
beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of
Life’. In prose he will seek to know ‘with patience & a slow, very slow mind….
What our faculties are & what they are capable of becoming’. The letter also
contains a tribute to nature and its power to heal the troubled mind:

I love fields & woods & mounta[ins] with almost a visionary fondness—and
because I have found benevolence & quietness growing within me as that
fondness [has] increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of
implanting it in others.
In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth professes all the basic

principles of romanticism ( breaks with traditions, Alexander Pope and

Samuel Johnson), he exults the power of the Romantic poet to give voice to

individual feeling; he speaks of the power of nature to show the way of the

spirit, he praises the faculty of the imagination to give voice to the

subjective voice experience.

The Romantic poetry = seeming simplicity + real abstruseness

 American Romanticism
• European romanticism tended to be founded on a
wish to escape its own history and to start over/ or
it is a continuation of its long history and deep
traditions.
America, however, was the embodiment of that
wish. Everything was new. Anything was possible.
Continually breaking the molds of European
traditions, the emergent United States began to
place its unique stamp on government, art,
philosophy, and literature.
• America was not yet culturally developed

enough to create its own art. Its artists and

thinkers were still too enmeshed in European

tradition to develop a genuinely American

voice
There was an important difference: Romanticism in
America coincided with the period of national
expansion and the discovery of a distinctive
American voice. The solidification of a national
identity and the surging idealism and passion of
Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the
American Renaissance.”
• Art, Romantics argued, could best express
universal truth. The Romantics underscored
the importance of expressive art for the
individual and society. In his essay “ThePoet”
(1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the
most influential writer of the Romantic era,
asserts:
“For all men live by truth, and stand in need of
expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics,
in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful
secret. The man is only half himself, the other
half is his expression.”
The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness,

a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature

were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of

knowledge opening up the universe.

The idea of “self” — which suggested selfishness to earlier

generations — was redefined.

New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-

realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.”

 Hudson River School painting
English born immigrant Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded the Hudson River
School famous for its romantic paintings of the American landscape.
 Transcendatalism
• Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal on
October 6, 1836, “Transcendentalism means, says
our accomplished Mrs. B. [Almira Penningman
Barlow] with a wave of her hand, A little
beyond.”
• Emerson was half in jest here, because in one
sense Transcendentalism was a great leap beyond
the ordinary material world. It saw the entire
physical universe as only a representation of a
higher spiritual world. “Nature,” wrote Emerson,
“is the symbol of the spirit.”
 Transcendentalism
• Perhaps the best way to understand
Transcendentalism is that it also went a little
beyond European Romanticism, causing many to
define the transcendental movement as American
Romanticism. Like European Romanticism,
Transcendentalism shares many of the same
characteristic attitudes: a deep appreciation of
nature; a preference of emotion over reason; a
belief in the self and the potential of the
individual; a predilection for the artist in
particular and the creative spirit in general; and a
distrust of classical forms and traditions.
 Emerson’s philosophy
• “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most
persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very
superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of
the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the
child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and
outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;
who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era
of manhood.”
• Emerson alludes to the “childlike” appreciation of
nature intentionally, for he believes that the
appreciation of nature is innate in human beings, but
lost over time as people go about the business of living
(which he defines as “COMMODITY”).
Thus the fascination with such evidences of community as could be found or
imagined, a fascination seen in the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle,
and Matthew Arnold in England, and in those of Chateaubriand, Tieck,
Schiller, and Goethe on the Continent. In a great deal of the Romantic
writing of the early nineteenth century there is to be seen a fascination with
themes provided by the individual in his relation to the soil, to village, to
family, and to other reminders of the traditional society that had been so
severely damaged, it was believed, by the impacts of industrialism and mass
democracy. The often-noted renascence of interest in the Middle Ages, of
which the Gothic novel was a part, was, at bottom, a renewal of devotion to
those values, structures, and symbols which had been dominant during the
medieval epoch.
By the time of the war, the major figures of the romantic movement were of

advanced age or dead. William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, James

Fenimore Cooper, Horace Mann, and Theodore Parker all died before the

Civil War. Thoreau was in bad health at the outbreak of the Civil War and

died of tuberculosis in 1862. The survivors did their part for the cause of

emancipation. Emerson gave his full support to the Union cause; Whitman

worked tirelessly as a Union nurse; Louisa May Alcott also served the Union

as a nurse, contracting a lifelong illness for her efforts

In 1865, a few days after Lincoln’s assassination, Emerson delivered a
moving elegy at the funeral services held in Concord: “We might well be
silent, and suffer the awful voices of the time to thunder to us.” However, a
romantic in the end, Emerson chooses to honor the principles by which
Lincoln lived, seeing even in the darkest hours the triumph of the good:
There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of nations, which makes
little account of time, little of one generation or race, makes no account of
disasters, conquers alike by what is called defeat or by what is called victory,
thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes everything immoral as
in-human, and obtains the ultimate triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of
everything which resists the moral laws of the world.