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CONTENTS
Chapter I Introduction to Romanticism. The Romantic Movement in England.. ..............4
Literary Sources.............7
Aesthetic Theories Elements Of Romantic Poetry 8
A. Poetry and the Poet 9
B. Romantic Imagination 10
C. Insights of Childhood 12
D. Romantic Typology 13
E. Romantic Escapism 14
F. Mythology and Symbolism 15
G. Romanticism and Form 17
Chapter II The First Generation of Romantic Poets - The Image of Nature 19
William Wordsworth 20
The Shorter Poems of the Middle Period 32
The Longer Poems 36
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 38
Chapter III The Second Generation of Romantic Poets - Views on Nature 50
Percy Bysshe Shelly 50
George Gordon Byron 56
John Keats 58
CONCLUSION 62
BIBLIOGRAPHY 66

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?The English Romantics and the Theme of Nature pag. {p}

The English Romantics and the Theme of Nature pag. {p}

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Chapter I

Introduction to Romanticism.

The Romantic Movement in England

Romanticism (the Romantic Movement), a literary movement, and profound shift in sensibility, which took place in Britain and throughout Europe roughly between the year 1770 and 1848. Intellectually it marked a violent reaction to the Enlightenment.

Politically it was inspired by the revolution in America and France and popular wars of independence in Poland, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere.

Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience, together with the sense of the infinite and transcendental. Socially it championed progressive causes, though when these were frustrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook. The stylistic keynote of Romanticism is intensity, and its watchword is ‘Imagination’.

The word “romanticism” appeared for the first time in the English language about the middle of the seventeenth century, meaning “like the old romances” and stressing the fantastic and the irrational elements of these literary works. In contrast to the classical tendencies of the period, the word had something pejorative and unpleasant in connotation. Federick Schlagal gave the first definition of the Romantic poetry in 1798: “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. This tendency is and must be to combine inventive genius with criticism, the poetry of the art with the poetry of nature, to make poetry living and social, and life and society poetical, to turn wit into poetry”.

Generally, it was delimited between the year 1978, in which William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, and the year 1832 when William Scott died. Recent studies (C.M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination, 1969, and D. Daiches, A Critical History of the English Literature, 1969) included William Blake and Robert Burns among the Romantic poets, although they preceded them with a generation .

Thus C.M. Bowra applies the term Romanticism to a phase of English poetry which began in 1768 with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and ended with the death of Keats and Shelley: “This at least fixes a historical period, and there is no great quarrel about calling it the ‘Romantic Age’. In it five major poets, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelly and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things.” (C.M. Bowra, 1969, p. 271).

Romanticism represented the revolution in the European mind against thinking to terns of static mechanism and the redirection of the mind to thinking in terns of dynamic organism. Its value is change, imperfection, growth, creative imagination and the unconscious.

The history of Romantic poetry in English literature falls into two sections: in one a bold, original outlook is developed and practiced; in the other, it is criticized or exaggerated, or limited or, in the last resort, abandoned.

On the one hand, there is a straight line of development; on the other hand, there are variations and divagation and secession. But both section belong to a single movement which insisted on the imagination, but demanded that it should be related to truth and reality. (C.M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination, 1969, p.272) .

The English Romantic Movement is made up of two generation of writers:

1. The first generation, known under the name of Passive Romantics, was contemporary with the French Revolution. It included William Blake and the Lake poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge , and Robert Southey;

2. The second generation, or the Active Romantics, were contemporary with the Vienna Treaty. They were represented by: Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, and John Keats.

Whereas the first generation fought against the rationalistic spirit of the Enlightenment, the second one followed its principles in siding with the progressive tendencies of society and in analysing the social and political problems of the time.

The period, which generated the Romantic trend, was characterised by a great social and economic instability.

England was undergoing a rapid and painful process of industrialisation which changed its former status of an agricultural society into an industrial one. Improvements in technique as scientific discoveries brought about the development of new industrial branches and determined a migration of the ladles peasants towards great towns.

Consequently, the necessity to supply the requirements of the growing population increased the process of enclosures and the destruction of home industry. Buying small independent farms formed large capitalist estates.

Whole social strata disappeared (e.g. the yeomen and the squires), whereas the peasantry was pauperised. In cities, the misery and dissatisfaction of people grew. The wage less labourers, living in miserable conditions, were organising meetings, protesting against shortage of food, high taxes and prices. The landed classes and the industrialists prospered, deepening the social differences and accentuating the polarisation into what B. Disraeli called “The Two Nations” of England – the rich and the poor.

To this situation, more than twenty years of war with France have to be added. They ended in 1815, bringing about the extinction of French Napoleonic empire (after the Treaty of Vienna – 1815 ).

The resulting collapse of war industry, the returning veterans, the huge national debt added impetus to the cries for reform. The reign of George III (1760-1820) and William IV (1830-1837), a series of reform bills began to rectify some of the inequalities caused by the social and political upheavals. Almost all the Romantic writers were acutely aware of their environment and, therefore, deeply involved In its study and criticism.

Their best work came out of their impulse to come to term with it .A conclusion about personal feelings became a conclusion about society and an observation of natural beauty carried a necessary moral reference to the whole life of man.

The poet was a prophet leading masses in their fight against oppression and tyranny. His rebellious attitude urged people to unite their efforts in a common pursuit or liberty and independence.

Literary Sources

The literary works that influenced the English Romantic Movement can be divided in four great groups. Three of them cover, in fact, the whole course of poetry in England.

1. First, the Greek and Latin classics whose study knew a remarkable revival especially in the eighteenth century;

2. Second, early English poetry like Beowulf and the Arthurian Cycle, Chaucer and the Elizabethans. The poetry of Chaucer was taken up with great interest after the publication of Th. Worton’s History of English Poetry (1774-81). Spenser influenced some poets like W. Shenstone ( Schoolmistress, 1742 ), Thomson ( Castle of Indolence, 1748), and J. Beattie (The Ministrel, 1771), who followed his manner of writing and used his stanza form. The lovers of poetry were brought into closer contract with Shakespeare’s works in the editions of Ar. Pope, Th. Hanmer Warburton, and S. Johnson;

3. Third, classical poetry, whose influence on poets like G.G. Byron was still considerable. According to Cleanth Brooks (1939, “ there is, in fact, a great deal of continuity in the poetry of the century, especially in its didactic character and perfection of forms” );

4. Fourth, the pre-romantic writers: Edward Young, James Thompson

and Thomas Gray, as well as S. Richardson and A. Radcliffe and their sentimental and Gothic novels.

Of great importance were Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and James Macpheron’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry(1762), presented by the author as a translation of Gaelic epic poems. Both works stirred the interest in the romantic past and made writers seek among the ruder times of history for wild, natural stories of human. They made the public enjoy the strange atmosphere of lonely and savage scenery, hidden in the mist of far-off, forgotten times.

The influence of the English poetic tradition on the works of the Romantic writers could be possible because they laid “ the knowledge and experience of all ages under a heavy toll” (E. Albert, 1967,p. 307) because they based their poetry on the knowledge and experience of the previous ages. If the Classical writers were explored anew by the genius of Shelley and Keats, the Middle Ages inspired the novels of Scott and the poems of Coleridge and Southey.

Modern times were analysed and dissected in the satires of Byron and in the production of miscellaneous writers.

Aesthetic Theories Elements Of Romantic Poetry

The main ideas on poetry, creativity, imagination, and nature are expressed in prefaces, letters, and essays published by the Romantic poets on various occasions. The most important ones are Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, 1802, S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, 1819, P. B. Selley’s A Defense of Poetry , 1821 and J. Keats’s Letters.

A. Poetry and the Poet

The following characteristics of poetry are considered representative for the Romantic trend:

a) poetry is like science, a branch of knowledge : “poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads); “It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought” (A Defense of Poetry);

b) It brings about order and harmony in the mind of man, helping him to penetrate into the essence of the world : “ it may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony” (A Defense of Poetry);