The Age of Romanticism

1. The Age of Romanticism An Age of Passion, Rebellion, Individuality, Imagination, Intuition, Idealism, and Creativity

2. Definition of “Romanticism” • marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized • Having no basis in fact; imaginary • ROMANTICISM--often capitalizeda (1): a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms (2):

3. The Age of Reason versus The Age of Romanticism • Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I exist.) • Rousseau: “Exister, pour nous, c’est sentir” (For us, to exist is to feel.)

4. 7 Qualities of Romanticism • Love of Nature • Idealization of Rural Living • Faith in Common People • Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism • Emphasized Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination, wonder, nostalgia for the past • Use of language common to the people • Life after death (spirit/soul); Organic view of the World

5. 5 Traditional “Romantic” Beliefs • Belief that intuition, imagination, and emotion provide a clearer route to truth than reason alone • Belief that poetry is superior to science • Belief that contemplating/studying the natural world is a means of discovering the truth • Distrust of industry and city life; idealization of rural life and the wilderness • Interest in the supernatural

6. EXAMPLE QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM • Idealization of rural living “I met a little Cottage Girl: / She was eight years old, she said; / Her hair was thick with many a curl / That clustered round her head. / She had a rustic, woodland air, / An she was wildly clad: / Her eyes were fair, and very fair; / --Her beauty made me glad.” Wordsworth

7. EXAMPLE QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism • Political freedom--American and French Revolution(liberty, equality, fraternity); antislavery and women’s suffrage movements • “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” Thoreau

8. QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM Love of Nature “Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part / Of me and my soul, as I of them?” Byron “[A mountain is] the type of a majestic intellect, . . . There I beheld the emblem of a giant mind that feeds upon infinity.” Wordsworth

9. Romanticism: A Poetic Age • Wordsworth-- [Poetry is] the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility. • Hazlitt--[poetry is] the language of imagination and the passions. • Shelley--[poetry redeems from decay] the visitations of the divine in man. • Keats--[If poetry] comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

10. Romanticism: A Poetic Age • Popular forms: blank verse, the ballad, the short lyric, Rime Royal stanzas, Spenserian stanzas, the sonnet • Meter: lines were often enjambered, loose, with a free use of caesura and other spontaneous breaks in patterns. • “. . . spinning still/ The rapid line of motion, then at once/ Have I, reclining back upon my heels,/ Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs/ Wheeled by me -- . . .” (Wordsworth-- “The Prelude”)

11. The Wanderer above the Mists 1817-8 Casper Friedrich

12. Nature in the raw, wild state. Awe-inspiring. Sublime. Divine. Man is less Imp. than Nature The Wanderer above the Mists 1817-8 Casper Friedrich

13. Authors—The Fireside Poets • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • William Cullen Bryant • John Greenleaf Whittier • James Russell Lowell • Oliver Wendell Holmes • Washington Irving • James Fenimore Cooper

14. Authors—Dark Romantics • Edgar Allan Poe • Herman Melville • Nathaniel Hawthorne

15. Authors--Transcendentalists • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau

16. Dark Romantics • Like the Transcendentalists, they valued intuition over logic • Explored the conflict between good and evil. • Explored the psychological effects of guilt & sin, and even madness in human psyche • Invented “Gothic” style of writing • Edgar Allan Poe is credited with the invention of the horror story and mystery genre of writing.

17. Fireside Poets • Became first American authors famous worldwide. • Famous for avoiding the normal poetic conventions (forms, meter, and rhymed stanzas) • Works were easy to memorize and recite both in schools and home • Were sources of entertainment for families and even soldiers gathered around the fire • Primary subjects were domestic life, mythology, and politics in America (the latter of which several poets were involved).

18. CLASSWORK/HOMEWORK • Read pages from your literature book to finish answering your notes template