19th century

The Romantic

poet

The Romantic

hero

Imagination

Love theme

SubjectivismRevolution of language

Nature

Sublime

Revival of the past

“Lyrical Ballads” 1798

Romanticism19th century

French Revolution

Ideas of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”

Industrial Revolution

The Romantic poets reacted against the spreading

industrialisation, that led to a society in which men's

individuality had been denied.

Rousseau’s idea of

Freedom

American Revolution

1760-1780: European Romanticism started in Germany with the “Sturm und Drang” movement

1798: English Romanticism

1798Wordsworth was going to

deal with “ordinary things” but throwing a new light on

them.

Coleridge was going to deal with the supernatural.

The “Lyrical Ballads” are the manifesto of English

Romanticism, written by W. Wordsworth and S.T.

Coleridge

The Romantic Poets

The leading English poets

were

William Blake (1757-1824)

William Wordsworth(1770-1850)

John Keats(1795-1821)

George G. Byron(1788-1824)

Percy Bysshe Shelley

(1792-1822)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(1772-1834)

The Romantic Poets

Most of the Romantic Poets

were socially and politically

committed.They moved away

from the poetic diction of the past.

THE ROMANTIC

HERO

A Rebel

An Outcast

Against social restraints

His past is unknown

He’s of noble origin

•The power of a poet's mind to see beyond the surface of reality;

•“This power reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite discordant qualities” (S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria).

Imagination

•Importance of feelings and emotions.

The Love theme

•Importance of personality: everybody has an individual interpretation of the world;

•“In the capitalist world the individual faced society alone, without an intermediary” (E. Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach).

Subjectivism

REVOLUTION in LANGUAGEUse of ordinary language which everybody could understand.

The Romantic poets abbandoned formalised diction.

REVIVAL OF the pastRediscovery of previous forms like sonnets, odes and songs.

Interest in folklore, fairy tales and orality, ballads, lyrical dramas, mythological poems, lyrical fragments and autobiographies in verse was renewed.

NATURE

Nature is a friend of the

poet in which he reflects himself

Poets consider nature as a shelter.

Caspar David Friedrich, Viandante sul mare di nebbia

“Romanticism rejected mechanistic conception, because it reduce man to a passive observer of his world. Nature was a living organic structure, which it took more than reason to understand. Imagination and the moral sense were equally, or more, important, in understanding it.”

O.Edwards G.Martin, A. Scharf, Romanticism

SUBLIMEEdmund Burke explained how the Sublime originates:

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear […]. Whatever is fitted in any sort to exite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is source of the sublime; that is,it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

E.Burke,Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

The Sublime is a feeling generated by something

frightening but at the same time attracting.