Romanticism: An Introduction

P Hegarty 2012

Romanticism 1760-1850. These years are very approximate. Eras don’t really end. They continue and intertwine and reappear…we can identify Enlightenment, Neoclassical, Romantic, Modern and Post Modern values in our world today.

• Before we look at the Romantic Era, let’s look at the period of time leading up to it

• Let’s first look at the 18th century 170018001700-1800 The Eighteenth

CenturyThe Enlightenment; Neoclassical Period;The Augustan Age…Age of Reason

Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson

1785-1830 Romanticism The Age of Revolution William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Jane Austen, the Brontës

1830-1901 Victorian Period Early, Middle and Late Victorian Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1901-1960 Modern Period The Edwardian Era(1901-1910);The Georgian Era(1910-1914)

G.M. Hopkins, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot

Enlightenment 1650 [an approximate date]

1700-1800: This century is given different titles including;1. Neo classical age [as writers and artists looked to the writing of the ancient

classical world of Greece & Rome as models for their work• 2.The Augustan age 3. Age of reason 4. Age of Satire• Mechanical view of the world. The clock becomes a metaphor for the universe.

God created the ‘mechanism’, wound it up and let it be• Newton and other scientists saw it as their Quest to discover the mystery of this

‘machine’, the universe • The importance of authority…be it government, classical authority…religious

authority…the sciences…mathematics. While Neo-classicists tended to reject the ‘superstition’ of religion and its lack of reason and logic, many saw the institution important for order

• The notion of progress through science and mathematics

• “order, logic, restraint, accuracy, correctness, restraint, decorum, and so on, which would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals.”

Neoclassicism • “ To a certain extent Neoclassicism represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant,

and enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual growth. Neoclassical theorists, by contrast, saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited. They replaced the Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention and experimentation, and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on restraint, on common sense, and on religious, political, economic and philosophical conservatism. They maintained that man himself was the most appropriate subject of art, and saw art itself as essentially pragmatic — as valuable because it was somehow useful — and as something which was properly intellectual rather than emotional.” Neoclassicism

• Hobbes’ Leviathan • “The fading away of Neoclassicism may have appeared to represent the last flicker of the

Enlightenment, but artistic movements never really die: many of the primary aesthetic tenets of Neoclassicism, in fact have reappeared in the twentieth century — in, for example, the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot — as manifestations of a reaction against Romanticism itself: Eliot saw Neo-classicism as emphasising poetic form and conscious craftsmanship, and Romanticism as a poetics of personal emotion and "inspiration," and pointedly preferred the former.” Neoclassicism

Characteristics of Neoclassical literature• Reason, controlled emotion, sophistication…detachment• Witty and clever• Philosophical• Satirical [attacks on other writers, politicians, society, injustice

etc. A Modest Proposal• Mock Heroic• Rigid structure of rhyming coupletsAWAKE, my St. John! leave all meaner thingsTo low ambition, and the pride of kings.Let us (since life can little more supplyThan just to look about us, and to die)Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man;A mighty maze! but not without a plan; Pope extract ‘An essay on Man’

Neoclassical Garden Neoclassical Art

Neo Classical Painting

Art Romantic Era This and the next two images are from the Romantic EraT

Dark Romanticism ‘The Nightmare’ by Fueseli

Romanticism

• Rousseau [1712 – 2 July 1778)• Age of Revolution• French Revolution 1789…storming of The Bastille- Challenge to authority…political…The divine right of kings and

absolute authority….challenge to religious authorities- Old feudal systems breaking down…rise of an underclass- Republicanism- American War of Independence 1775

England• Industrial revolution.• Child Labour• Deepening distrust of some aspects of science• An agrarian country becomes an Industrial one• Rapid Urbanisation…dreadful social conditions• William Blake• Revolution in Verse

LONDON I wandered through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow,A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every man,In every infant's cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear: How the chimney-sweeper's cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier's sighRuns in blood down palace-walls. But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot's curseBlasts the new-born infant's tear,And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Analysis

Holy Thursday

’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean The children walking two & two in red & blue & green Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow

O what a multitude they seem’d these flowers of London town Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor Then cherish pity, lest you drive angel from your door

Analysis

Nature• Reaction…urbanisation…industrialisation…imprisonment• Cities unnatural, unhealthy ‘hellish’ places• Spiritual & emotional engagement• The point of interaction between the human and divine• Evidence of the divine at work• Therapeutic…healing …• SolitudeIndividualism• Elevation of the status of the individual• Freedom of the individual…free from shackles…• The potential of the individual• Sense of idealism

Imagination

• IIMA

• The Romantic did not reject reason but elevated the status of the imagination

• Great creative faculty. We process our experience, ponder on these experiences and come to certain conclusions…liberating force

• The imagination allows us to travel into the past and future• It allows us to explore other worlds both real and imagined• It allows us to consider alternative ways of thinking, other forms of society• It can take us into the world of fantasy and horror - The Gothic e.g.

Frankenstein…and Dark Romanticism of writers like Poe

Reason

Characteristics of Romantic Poetry…revolutionary because;• The individual is at the centre of the poem recounting their first hand

personal experienceI wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw …

• The status of the common person is elevated and recognised. Blake wrote about orphans, child labourers, prostitutes…

• Their verse was political in its condemnation of inequality, industrialisation and urbanisation

• The poem was a product of the imagination and was in itself an imaginative journey

• The best Romantic poetry combined reason and emotion • Recognised the importance of intuition• Celebrated the importance of nature as a source of spiritual solace and

fulfilment…drew on nature for it dominant imagery…lauded the wonder and mystique of the natural world

• Simplicity of the language in contrast to the complex allusive [many allusions] language of the neo-classicists. ..sometimes conversational in style

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cryCame loud—and hark, again! loud as before.The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,Have left me to that solitude, which suitsAbstruser musings: save that at my sideMy cradled infant slumbers peacefully.'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbsAnd vexes meditation with its strangeAnd extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,With all the numberless goings-on of life,Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flameLies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

It is midnight in the countryside in the middle of winter. The persona personifies nature and is in awe of the magic of the frost forming. He speaks of nature as a mysterious force performing its ‘secret ministry’ as if it were a ritual of immense religious significance. For the Romantics, Nature was their source of spiritual sustenance. We can tell from the exclamatory language how much the persona delights in this moment as they describe the sights and sounds of the natural world. Everyone is asleep and he welcomes this ‘solitude’ and ‘extreme silentness’ as he holds his sleeping child. His imagination takes him out beyond the walls of the cottage and he imagines the landscape he knows so well from his daytime walks. The physical world will now stimulate deeper reflection about his childhood and how his son’s upbringing will differ. Typically the poem begins at a particular moment in time and place and this moment of solitude leads to deep consideration, speculation and realisations…

For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Great universal Teacher! he shall mouldThy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

He was sent to a city boarding school as child and likens both school and the city to being imprisoned …’pent ‘mid cloisters dim’.He could only see the stars and sky through the high windows.

Leaving the past he now imagines what sort of future his child will have growing up in the natural world being guided and moulded by that “Great Universal Teacher’- nature.

Nature is where the child will experience a sense of the divine.

• Originality…unlike the Neo classicist who modelled their work on past masters. Our notion of originality today comes from the Romantics

• Tended to celebrate the potential in humankind…and urge us to ‘seize the day’ in making the most of our life in this world…to rebel against whatever shackles are holding us back

• Could also despair of the reality of the human condition. Late Romantic poetry became trite and sentimental and quite shallow in its description of the role of nature. The best Romantic poetry could, like Keats below, capture the extraordinary beauty of nature while exploring the confronting reality of our existence…

To Autumn [3rd stanza] john KeatsWhere are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In the poem To Autumn, Keats in the first stanza describes the beauty of the countryside in Autumn. This leads in the second and third stanza to deeper speculation about life and the human condition. Autumn takes on a symbolic significance…of time passing, transience, old age, approaching death. These themes are reinforced by the time of day ‘soft-dying day’. The questions create a mood of doubt and uncertainty.

The Gnats are described as making a ‘wailful’ sound which reinforces this idea of mourning the passing of time. Ultimately there is a realisation that Winter has its ‘music too’ and we must accept the reality of life

• Some Favoured formats included the lyric and the ballad; a form traditionally belonging to the ordinary peasant class…a more rustic form of song e.g. The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.

The Rime of The Ancient MarinerIt is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. 'By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din

Unlike the polished sophisticated language of the Neo classicists, Coleridge in this ballad, employs an archaic style of language in keeping with the content of the poem which tells a very strange story of this sailor who recounts his crime and subsequent divine punishment.

His sea trip took him deep into the Antarctic, a fearful exotic , exciting place in the minds of the Romantics…where one could experience The Sublime in Nature…a mixture of terror & awe

• While the Romantics treasured the natural world around them, they were also enchanted by the exotic …other worlds…other times [We have already seen this in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner]

• The Romantics sometime harked back to the Middle Ages i.e. pre-Enlightenment. They longed for the sense of mystery, magic and superstition of that time…elements that the science and reason had sought to extinguish. They weren’t anti science or reason but argued that there is so much more to human existence

• Le Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats is one such ballad ….or listen• Coleridge creates an extraordinary world in his poem Kubla Khan