Romanticism

Romanticism is a cultural movement during the years 1800-1837 that is generally understood as standing opposite to overly rational neo-classicism. Romanticism originated in Germany with idealist philosophers like Goethe and was very passionate. When transported to Britain, romanticism gained earthier attitude of British calm nature. Romanticism provided a space for fantasy, imagination, fascination about past, put emphasis on feelings and growing interest in supernatural spirituality. Romantics did not reject God either but sought more personal contact with God and were interest in Buddhism and Hinduism.

The industrial revolution created a class of educated people who became new consumers of culture. This middle-class was mainly self-made people who educated themselves, build their own career as doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and supported liberal thinking of individualism. As more people were literate, more people read books and for the first time individuality of authors began to matter. Before that, writer’s individuality was not important but the poetic skill and especially not originality. Newly, imagination of an author is in a centre of attention and professional writers emerged. Byron was the world‘s first celebrity and he loved public attention. As publishing companies started to produce a lot of copies for anonymous mass readership, authors were not dependent on patronage anymore.

The first generation – Lake Poets

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

He met Coleridge who had a lecture on revolutionary politics. Their bond was forged to last a lifetime, they wanted to change the world and moved to the Lake District where they collaborated in the collection of poems that defined Romanticism. Being disillusioned by French Revolution that started great but ended in butchery, they diverted from politics and looked for freedom in nature.

This book for new age was called Lyrical Ballads and it is a pure expression of Romantic ideas, a revolution in 23 poems. The political dimension is only implicitly expressed as they wanted a world where outcasts, children and women have also their voice but that is why the collection was not well received by critics. Afraid of persecution, they had to publish it anonymously.

Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads is a short preface where they formulated their idea of poetry, at that time experimental since they used common language to satisfy readers who would be otherwise confused by terminology of whole poetic diction of classical poetry. Poems should illustrate human passions and all that is rooted in nature. Poem The Last of the Flock is about their animals.

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey is dedicated to his sister thanks to whom a lot of poems were helped into existence as she pointed things he could not see (like daffodils on the hill) and was a hidden power of his poetry. In this, he speaks of his childhood when he felt nature directly like another sense, without any deep philosophy. He lost that direct feeling but discovered something different that is even better since as young he was too animalistic to feel God.

The narrator returns to the nature after five long years ("five years have past") and meditates on the feeling ("thought of more deep seclusion") under trees. He feels everything vividly ("sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the heart") but with "tranquil restoration." He compares his attitude to nature as it was then and how it is different now ("and so I dare to hope, though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came"). But "that time is past" he he "have learned to look on nature" differently, though he is "still a lover of the meadows and the woods." He knows that God manifests through nature but he cannot describe that feeling so he only compares it. This is typical to Romanticism - poets connected with nature to connect with God. Then the narrator complains about "dreary intercourse of daily life" and recalls his childhood but now "these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure" and he is left with a memory.

The most famous poem of Romanticism is probably I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud. The first line is considered the most famous line in English poetry. It suggests freedom mixed with melancholy and “cloud” is a perfect example of metaphor as the speaker is comparing himself to a cloud as he has a wandering nature as well. He describes carefree atmosphere with humanized flowers that are dancing. Trees and breeze accumulate long vowels that produce a feeling of natural movement. He compares daffodils (narcisy) to stars as there is a never-ending line of them. Mood is still positive and joyful and he again humanizes flowers as they are tossing their heads. The speaker admits that he was not aware how much he enjoyed the view in that particular moment, saying “but little thought what wealth the show to me had bought.” In the last stanza he describes ideal conditions for his writing. He has to comfortably sit on his sofa, be alone and in contemplative mood. He writes with his imagination (inner eye) on basis of memories filter retrospectively, not spontaneously in the moment he sees the particular situation. This is typical Wordsworth style – his poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquillity.

The Prelude was planned as a prologue to a collaborative poem with Coleridge that was supposed to surpass Milton's Paradise Lost but they failed to finish it. In Milton in America he puts Milton in a Pilgrim ship, it is pure fiction.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

While Wordsworth turned to nature, Coleridge looked into his own consciousness. Many of his poems have a feeling of hallucination since he was a heavy smoker of opium. He started to smoke it as a pain killer but then used as a gate to his imagination. However, it eventually damaged his health.

The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere is about a mariner driven off its course to South Pole. He shots an albatross and as result the ship is hunted by phantoms but he survives and tells his tale. The poem is both about nature and consciousness. The albatross is a part of nature but mariner disrupted it. We should respect everything in nature, even one death of albatross can destroy harmony. The mariner is doomed to re-tell the story all over again as warning.

Kubla Khan was written under influence of opium when he fell asleep. He woke up with a clear memory of the dream and started to write right away but somebody knocked and he forgot what he wanted to write so the poem remained a fragment. It is impossible to provide rational analysis of this poem since it is a dream without reason. The poem provokes feelings and impressions, shows exotic fantasy land Xanadu with undertone of doom. There are both dark and positive aspects present – the world is going to doom but will be re-created. Kubla Khan as a character is a Mongolian Emperor representing power. He was a warrior so there is atmosphere of threat but also the beauty of a kingdom he created. He represents power of creation which is also a dangerous act.

In To the River Otter Coleridge shows that although he is very introspective and also a poet of nature. Form of this poem is closely connected to content – a river flows regularly but something can interrupt it like throwing a stone or a bridge. In the same way, the poem has only a hint of regularity that falls apart. The narrator is speaking to an unanimated object through the method called apostrophe, addressing “dear native brook.” There is a relation between past and present. As a child he saw the river with innocent eyes but in adulthood it is more complicated. He wishes to be a careless child once again, not this burdened man he became. Past visions of childhood are distorted as filtered by memory, more like a vision and nostalgic. The river acts as a symbol of time’s passage that connects past and present and throwing of stones represents passed years.

The second generation - Revolutionaries

GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824)

He was an aristocrat, even a member of House of Lords but bankrupted. To maintain his rich life, he was borrowing money. As a poet, he is not the best of Romantics but he is fascinating because of his lifestyle. He was considered a sex symbol since he was good looking, slim and tall (though he was limping since childhood), claiming to have sex with 700 women, and the first international celebrity. He boasted to lose his virginity at the age of nine to his babysitter and then started to count women. He was experimenting also with bisexualism. The British were prudish but he had a strong female fanbase in Britain. He loved attention and was changing his image with every new book he published as he loved self-styling. He took it so far that it was impossible to connect real Byron with styled Byron. His ladies in their diaries claimed he had a big penis and a century later when his body was exhumated from the ground, his body was so well-preserved thanks to Greek traditional binding that his penis was still standing. Byron was presumably sexually obsessed and was collecting pubic hair of all his lovers.

During 1809-11 he travelled through Europe and exotic lands recorded his experience in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage. When it was published it became such a big hit that the first edition sold out in two days, the second in ten days. It was the biggest hit in history of English literature and thanks to it he gained money he needed.

He was very popular but Britain would not tolerate all his excesses. When his scandals were revealed (like incest with half-sister, bisexuality, love affair with a wife of another aristocrat), the public came to believe that Byron was a monster engaging in sodomy and after almost being lynched by an angry crowd, he was forced to exile. He bought a villa at Geneva lake, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, but rumours were spreading that that villa is a nest of demonic orgies and tourists were paying to get with binoculars near to villa. The public imagining that all the residents (Byron, doctor Polidori, his half sister Clare) were all engaging together.

After Shelley’s death Byron thought that Shelley fought for a better world so he went to Greece which was struggling for independence against the Turks. At this stage he was already half mad because of syphilia and had dreams of becoming a future leader of the Greek republic. He died on fever not as soldier but an exiled half-mad man, however, he changed the face of British literature forever.

His epic Don Juan /džuan/ was another success where he created his Byronic hero = a very contradictory character full of passion but also extremely egoistic, self-centred, not respecting anyone, yet sophisticated, knowledgeable and extremely sensitive.

He is also the author of short lyrical pieces like So We'll Go no More a-Roving written in exile when he wanted to take a break from his extreme passions although he did not do it. In this poem he tries to find a balance but he knows it is not possible. Even though he was tired from too much drinking and travelling and realises he should take a break in harsh lifestyle, it was not in his nature. The poem shows the opposition between passion and necessity to control it.

The 1 stanza depicts a heart still overflowing with passion and although the narrator feels he needs to take a break, “the shine of moon is still be as bright.” The 2 stanza states that he has so much passion that “sword outwears its sheath.” He admits that the burden can crush him. In the 3 stanza he knows that “night is still there” and feels he should use the time he has. It would not be a complete end of passion, just a break. The poem shows something ending and yet it cannot possibly ends because passion is simply too strong. There are symbols of light and dark – moon and day.  Short vowels depict passion if you breathe quickly, the moment, long vowels long breath when you rest and illusion of eternity.

She Walks in Beauty is about a lady he spotted at the ball and fell in love with her immediately.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

Shelley died very young at the age of 30 when he drowned during a boating trip on the coast of Italy. After his body was washed out on the shore, his friends gave him a pagan funeral and burnt the body since he was an atheist. This was shocking and totally socially unacceptable. From ashes Byron grabbed Shelley’s heart and it is maybe still preserved somewhere and several museums claim to have it. Byron and Shelley did not have much regard for the previous romantic generation even though they followed it. Wordsworth and Coleridge started rebellious but ended conservative so they seen it as betrayal. However, Byron and Shelly were maybe lucky to die young otherwise they could turn the same.

He was as unconventional and rebellious as Byron and also came from the privileged background, lower gentry aristocracy. He was a promising student at Oxford but after his published his essay The Necessity of Atheism where he stated that we should overcome dogma of the church, they expelled him. However, he was in fact deeply spiritual and believed in God, just did not agree with the Church. His relationship with God was personal as he believed that God is everywhere in everything.

Just like Byron he was sometimes cruel to his ladies. He had an affair with 16-year-old girl, had children with her but he felt imprisoned in marriage and felt that his liberty was restricted so he left. This selfish liberty is typical of Romanticism. His next lover was another 16-year-old girl, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a daughter of two important philosophers. Her father William Godwin was for liberty and revolution and exercises idea of free love. But even though he had this attitude, he did not like Shelley stealing his daughter from him. Mary never knew her mother as she died after giving birth. Her father educated her so she grew up as a free spirited woman but there was not much emotional attachment between them which was partly the reason for passionate relationship with Shelley.

Prometheus Unbound is a rework of an ancient myth in which Prometheus was punished for bringing fire to people so Greek gods bound him to a rock and every day an eagle came to feed on his livers but Hercules freed him. Prometheus was later on forgiven but had to wear a ring of that rock to label him as a rebel. Prometheus was rebel among gods and did everything against him – he rebelled against establishment and paid the price but never gave up on his ideas of free mind. Shelley was fascinated by him so the poem became a celebration of freedom and revolution.

Ozymandias is a sonnet with rather irregular patters with the title striking as something exotic. More voices are present, creating an interplay: I of the poem speaker, a traveller and a king. The kings think he is mighty and echoes from his statue but all that is in a distant past and only a damaged statue in the desert survived which is ironic. Shelley deliberately breaks the rhythm to show the theme of cycling and decay. An empire is built, comes a golden era but then everything falls apart and another empire comes. Just the head with sneer of command and legs remain of the statue, the body is missing (symbolizing the country) which breaks the rhythm. And the same thing will eventually happen also to the British Empire.

Mutability expresses that everything changes and nothing is stable. "We are as clouds yet soon they are lost forever." Even the same things, though done over and over again, are not the same every time "no second motion brings one mood or modulation like the last." Even emotions are not stable: "one wandering thought pollutes the day." "Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow," so in the end "nought may endure but Mutability."

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

He died of tuberculosis in Italy when only 26-year-old. He was helped by Shelley but Byron did not like him. Although he worked hard he could not establish himself as poet since he did not have connections and nobody believed a poor boy could write poetry. While Shelley and Byron were true friends, Keats stood outside the circle. He was unrecognised by his contemporaries but now he is considered a genius, maybe the best romantic poet.

He believed that poetry has a healing power and is medicine for human souls. He even studied medicine for a while but he quit after he saw dissection of corpse because he hated scientific attitude. He considered himself rather a physician of soul and was the biggest humanist of all romantic poets. He was interested in ideas of immortality, what dies and what survives, and thought that art will survive because beauty never dies. It became his last hope when he was dying and he was right, his poems survived him and we enjoy them even nowadays.

Ode on a Grecian Urn is considered the best poem of Romantic movement on a relationship between life and art. The urn is through simile compared to "unravished bride of quitness" – an idea of virginity, an ideal untouched woman – the urn is preservation and what is inside should be untouched because it is sacred. The poem presents the argument that people die but beauty of art survives generations. "When old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain." The last two lines in quotation marks are his personal motto, something told to him by someone else, introducing another voice, maybe the voice of art as spiritual itself. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Irish Romanticism

THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852) started a literary revolution in Ireland and is called the Bard of Erin (old name for Ireland). He collected Irish folklore melodies and wrote lyrics to them as his poems are meant to be sung. He was very gifted so when the Parliament opened Trinity College also for Catholics, he went there and still at school published his first verses.

He became known for his Irish Melodies (1797-1834). He wrote for newspapers The Press and became a barrister. In America he met Thomas Jefferson and upon returning in 1804 he published Odes and Epistles about his experience of American culture. He was a friend with Byron who gave him a part of his biography. Before death, Byron wanted to burn it but Moore preserved it. 

Every time Moore mentions Ireland he personifies HER as a female named Éire. He wrote in symbols but they are deliberately easy to understand. Moore's symbols played with light (meaning freedom and good times: represented by sunshine, spring) and darkness (meaning slavery, represented by clouds, rain, winter). Harp is an instrument of bards when they played in great halls but now the harp is muted as analogy to enslaved Ireland. Symbol of green colour means Ireland’s emerald, red is bloody Britain, shamrock symbols a holy trinity, Tara is a place of High Kings (good old times) and Saint Patrick.

The Minstrel Boy is a patriotic song.

Pro Patria Mori means dying for my country. He is talking directly to the country (thee, thine) and loves her so much that he is willing to die for her. He calls for action but did not fight with weapons, just wrote poems, though. However, he is the first well-known Irish poet who told the world what was happening there. He is celebrating dead rebels as heroes.

Come o’er the Sea is about running away since the Act of Union Ireland resulted in high migration to America. Storms at the same mean slavery but on waves they journey for liberty in America. "Seasons may roll but the true soul (=nationality) burns“ so it does not matter when they end up they will be still Irish. There is hope, spring will come again. In America they have “no eye to watch, not to wound us,” the British cannot hurt them anymore.

The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls depicts Tara hill near Dublin that used to be a seat of high kings. It was era of freedom and great days when they were ruled by their own Irish kings. At the Tara’s hall they were enjoying themselves with music by bards which refers to history of that great time. Harp is a symbol of freedom but now they only see freedom when they die for it.

Erin, Oh Erin plays again on contrast of light in great halls (glory days) and current darkness of slavery. The country is desperate in tears but “thy spirit appears” and “the sun is rising” over slavery’s cloud.

Prose

WALTER SCOTT is a founder of historical novel as whole new genre and was one of the biggest collector of folk tales.  The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is a set of collected Scottish ballads, his first sign of interest in Scottish history. Waverley was a bestseller and often regarded as the first historical novel. His series of novels on similar themes of Scottish Highlands written during the same period have become collectively known as the Waverley novels and include Rob Roy, Ivanhoe and Kenilworth.

JANE AUSTEN has in fact nothing to do with Romantic movement, she just wrote in that time. She stood outside the current trends, she was not interested in fantasy or revolutionary ideas. Her writing shows feminine perspective on love and prestige of upper classes and but she understood psychology of both women and men. She became one of the most valued novelists of the 19^th century for her biting social commentary and masterful use of irony. Novels based on dialogues between a husband, a wife and people around, usually in dining room. However, this is not boring at all - she was master of English language with good dialogues and witty observation of society.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners and its opening is one of the most famous lines in English literature: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The story addresses courtship and marriage among the gentry in the early 19th century. The heroine is a beautiful 20-year-old woman in possession of a quick mind and a quicker tongue. Sense and Sensibility is the first of Austen's novels to be published under the pseudonym . Emma is a comic novel about the dangers of romance.

Her Northanger Abbey is a parody of gothic fiction on Anne Radcliffe´s The Mysteries of Udolpho and the most light-hearted of her novels. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels upside down and made her heroine a plain and undistinguished girl from a middle-class family and allowed her to easily fall in love with the hero.

MARY SHELLEY received an excellent education; unusual for girls at the time, but it was her father who taught her. When only 16-year-old, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley who was unhappy in his current marriage.

Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, a warning against the over-reaching of modern man and the Industrial Revolution. The Modern Prometheus is the novel's subtitle and Prometheus in some versions of Greek mythology was the Titan who created mankind so Victor's work by creating life by new means obviously reflects that creative work. Prometheus was also the bringer of fire who took fire from heaven and gave it to man. The book is a study of a disastrous results of playing God and creating artificial life. Published already in the Romantic period, it is considered to be culmination of the gothic novel as genre.

The novel is written in epistolary form, documenting a correspondence between Captain Walton and his sister. Walton sets out to explore the North Pole in hopes of achieving fame. One day, the crew sees a dog sleigh with an indistinct feature of a large man. A few hours later, the crew finds a nearly frozen man named Victor Frankenstein who has been in pursuit of that gigantic man. Frankenstein retells his story to Walton. Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born into a wealthy family, he is encouraged to seek a greater understanding of the world around him through science. His parents adopt Elizabeth, an orphan of some aristocrat who died and Victor loves her as sister.

As a young boy, Victor is obsessed with studying outdated theories of science that focus on achieving natural wonders. At university, he excels at sciences and develops a secret technique to revive inanimate bodies with life. Frankenstein finds himself making the creature much larger than a normal man (about 2,5 metres tall) because of the difficulty in replicating small parts. His creation, which he has hoped would be beautiful, is instead hideous to his eyes. After bringing his creation to life, Victor is repulsed by his work and flees, hoping to forget what he has created. His abandonment leaves the monster confused, angry and afraid. Soon after, his kid brother is murdered and the nanny is hanged for it based on a discovery of mother's locket in her pocket but it was places there by Victor's creatures. Victor returns home and sees the monster in the woods where his brother has been murdered and becomes certain that his monster is the killer.

After some time, the monster approaches him. Intelligent and able to speak, it tells Victor of its encounters with people, and how it had become afraid of them and spent a year living near a cottage, observing a certain family living there. They had originally been wealthy, but have been forced into exile upon wrongful accusation of a crime. Through observing the family, the monster has become self-aware. It had also discovered books and learned to read. Seeing its reflection in a pool, it realized that its physical appearance is hideous compared to the humans it watches. In its loneliness, it sought to befriend the family. It presented itself first to the aged father of the family, who is blind and was received with kindness and hospitality.

Unfortunately, the others of the family were horrified by its appearance and reacted viciously out of fear. The Creature in rage burned the house, being his first act of destruction. Later the creature rescues a child but is wounded by a man with a gun. The monster has now sworn to have vengeance on all humanity and especially on its creator. The monster met Victor's brother William in the woods but horrified, the boy shouted insults and revealed himself as a Frankenstein. The creature in rave kills him as first act of vengeance against its creator. The monster demands that Frankenstein create for it a female companion like itself, on the basis that it is lonely since nobody will accept it. It argues that as a living thing, it has a right to happiness and that Victor, as its creator, has a duty to obey it. It promises that if Victor grants its request, they will vanish into the wilderness uninhabited by man.

Victor reluctantly agrees. Working on a second being, he is plagued by premonitions of what his work might do as creating a mate might lead to an entire race of monsters. He destroys the unfinished example. The monster vows that it will have its revenge on Victor's wedding night and he murders Elizabeth as Victor has destroyed its mate instead. Victor vows to pursue the monster until one of them annihilates the other. After months of pursuit, the two end up near the North Pole. At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes the telling of the story. Frankenstein dies shortly thereafter and Walton discovers the monster on his ship, mourning over Frankenstein's body. Frankenstein's death has not brought it peace. It vows to exterminate itself that no others will ever know of its existence. Walton watches as it drifts away on an ice raft.

JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI was a physician and a writer, credited as the creator of the vampire genre. He famous short story was created at the same time when Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at Byron's cottage when the circle of friend decided each to write a horror story, Byron creating a vampire poem.

The Vampyre tells a story of Aubrey, a young Englishman, who meets Lord Ruthven, a man of mysterious origins who has entered London society. Aubrey accompanies Ruthven to Rome, but leaves him after Ruthven seduces the daughter of a mutual acquaintance. Aubrey travels to Greece, where he becomes attracted to an innkeeper's daughter who tells Aubrey about the legends of the vampire. Ruthven arrives at the scene and shortly thereafter the woman is killed by a vampire. Aubrey does not connect Ruthven with the murder and rejoins him in his travels. The pair is attacked by bandits and Ruthven is mortally wounded. Before he dies, Ruthven makes Aubrey swear an oath that he will not mention his death. Aubrey returns to London and is amazed when Ruthven appears, alive and well. Ruthven reminds Aubrey of his oath to keep his death a secret. Ruthven then begins to seduce Aubrey's sister. Just before he dies, Aubrey writes a letter to his sister revealing Ruthven's history, but it does not arrive in time. On the wedding night, she is discovered drained of her blood.

JAMES HOGG (1770-1835) was a Scottish poet and novelist who wrote in both Scots and English. He used to be a shepherd but he self-educated himself through reading and he was admired for overcoming the disadvantage of his peasant birth and lack of education.

He was a friend of Walter Scott of whom he later wrote a biography. He is best known for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with supernatural gothic elements including a schizophrenic narrator, The Three Perils of Man (1822) and The Three Perils of Woman (1823).

  

  

Criticism

The Romantic movement introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary study, including the idea that the object of literature need not always to be beautiful, noble or perfect but that literature itself could elevate a common object to the level of the "sublime." Some writer became more known for their critical essays then their own literary work.

Key texts of the 19th century literary criticism:

Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defense of Poetry contains his famous claim that "poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world." The work analyses the very essence of poetry and the reason of its existence and its development and operation on the mind. Shelley writes that poetry awakens and enlarges the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Poet expresses the need for America to have its own new and unique poet to write about new country's virtues and vices. The essay offers a profound look at the poem and its role in society.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Poetic Principle argues that a poem should be written for "a poem's sake" and that the ultimate goal of art is to be beautiful. He also argues against long epic poems which must be instead structured as a collection of shorter pieces, each of which is not too long to read in a single sitting. His most common complains is against didacticism.

WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) was remembered for his humanistic essay and literary criticism as the greatest art critic of his age. During his lifetime he befriended many people of the 19th century literary canon.

Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) is a book of criticism composed in reaction to neoclassical approach to Shakespeare's plays. Hazlitt focuses on the characters, incorporating psychological insights that became highly influential in later criticism. Hazlitt's work provided the groundwork for later critical interpretations. The Spirit of the Age is a collection of character sketches, portraying people whom Hazlitt believed to represent significant trends in culture. It was one of his most successful books, depicting the panorama of the age.