ROMANTIC POETRY

WHAT IS ROMANTICISM?

• No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society

• Highlights individual consciousness, especially the individual imagination

• Romanticism was highly influenced by the Industrial Revolution in which they wrote poems in opposition of it.

• They evoke and depict emotional matter in poems.

• It praised imagination over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science

KEY ELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM

• Belief in the individual and common man

• Love of nature

• Interest in the bizarre and supernatural

• Interest in the past

• Looks at the world with more than reasonable optimism

• Faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination

TECHNIQUES

• Allusion in reference to the past

• End Rhyme: A rhyme that occurs in the last syllables of verses.

• Italian Sonnet: 14 line sonnet that consists of an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (six lines)

AP Style Writing Prompts:• Explain how the Industrial Revolution resulted in the rise of Romanticism.

• Analyze the major social contributions of Romanticism to society

• Compare the differences between Romantic and Victorian Era.

THEMES

Romantics tend to evoke emotion to emphasize a love of nature and a valuing of individualism

• Anything you want you can have if you only want it enough

• You’ll see the true beauty of nature if you look past the overpowering industrialized society

• You’ll rise above what you are with the use of imagination

• You’ll have the potential for great things if you have an internal beauty, born of the intellect

• Altruism has a limit, for everyone is motivated by self interest

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) • One of the major English Romantic poets and is

regarded by critics as among the finest lyric poets in the English language.

• In oxford 1810, expelled for the suspected authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.

• A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.

• In 1811 he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook but in 1814 eloped with Mary Godwin

• In the autumn 1816 Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley then married Mary and settled with her in 1817.

• Shelley himself drowned in a sailing accident in 1822.Notable works :

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Ozymandias Ode to the West Wind The Indian Serenade To a Skylark

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)• In the early 1790s William lived for a time in France, then

in the grip of the violent Revolution; Wordsworth’s philosophical sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with England, whose monarchy he was not prepared to see overthrown.

• The theory he produced and the poetics he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in English literature

• He romanticized peasants and children, whom he believed are capable of perceiving the divine more purely than those corrupted by city living.

• Wordsworth believed that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into the imperfect, un-ideal earth.

• Wordsworth’s most important legacy, besides his lovely, timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates for later writers such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Notable works: An Evening Walk (1793) Descriptive Sketches (1793) Borders (1795) Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (1798) Lyrical Ballads (1798)

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)• May 31, 1819-March 26, 1892• Learned the printer's trade at age twelve• Started reading/ getting inspired by Homors,

Shakespeare, and the works of the Bible and admired Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Journalism became a part of him• Editor of Brooklyn and New York's paper• Took a copyright of the Leaves on Grass and

self-published it• Used his skills and wrote about the Civil War• Became a poet, essayist, and Journalist• Poetry usually was about society and raceNotable works:

Franklin Evans (1842) Leaves of Grass (1855) Drum-Taps (1865)

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)• In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never

practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. • Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819,

Keats mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth.

• Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of inner conflicts

• Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry.

• Keats repeatedly combines different senses in one image; he attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice called synaesthesia.

• His synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings, the oneness of all forms of life.

Notable works: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819) "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819) "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1819) "On Autumn" (1820)

QUIZ

• What do Romantics write in response to?

• What is Romanticism concerned more about?

• Name at least three different topics that Romantics focused more on.

The Oxbow by Thomas ColeRain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by J. M. W. Turner

LINKS

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_poetry

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats