THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1798- 1832)

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that

originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the
publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798
as probably the beginning of the movement, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in
1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world
later; in the United States, it arrived around 1820. The Romantic period was one of
major social change in England, due to the depopulation of the countryside and the
rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities that took place roughly between
1798 and 1832. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two
forces: the Agricultural Revolution, which involved enclosures that drove workers
and their families off the land, and the Industrial Revolution which provided them
employment, "in the factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steam-
power". Indeed, Romanticism may be seen in part as a reaction to the Industrial
Revolution, though it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms
of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as a reaction against the scientific
rationalization of nature. The French Revolution was an especially important
influence on the political thinking of many notable Romantic figures at this time as
well.

The term Romantic referring to the poets and novelists who wrote between
1770-1830 appeared after 1880 and was used by some literary critics in opposition
to the term neo-classical. The word Romantic comes from the French-Provençal
word Romans or Romance referring to a book written in a Provençal language and
not in Latin. Romantic age is to return to nature. [In the age of enlightenment,
reasoning has been given a lot of importance, while romantic age, feelings and
emotions were given more importance. Romanticisms is a movement in the arts
and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration,
subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. The romantic age poets like
Wordsworth and Coleridge supported the idea of French revolution, such as
individual freedom of an individual.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

There are three major historical events during Romantic period, the American
Revolution, French Revolution and Industrial Revolution. The American Revolution
was an epic political and military struggle waged between 1765 and 1783 when 13
of Britain's North American colonies rejected its imperial rule. The protest began in
opposition to taxes levied without colonial representation by the British monarchy
and Parliament. The French Revolution was a period of major social upheaval that
began in 1787 and ended in 1799. It sought to completely change the relationship
between the rulers and those they governed and to redefine the nature of political
power. The French Revolution was mostly a failure because of the ineffective
execution of reforms and unnecessary massacre of lives. However it was a minor
success because of the socialistic ideologies that were given birth to during the
Revolution, which helped reform France into what it is today. The abolishment of
the monarchy makes every man closer to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity because it
gives everyone a chance to voice their opinion to a representative instead of being
ignored by one superior being. Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the
process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by
industry and machine manufacturing. These technological changes introduced novel
ways of working and living and fundamentally transformed society. There were
many harmful effects of the Industrial revolution such as the pollution,
materialization, child labor and dehumanization of labors. Therefore, writers and
poet started pointing out the importance Nature, Beauty and Imagination. [ It was
important for human beings to connect with nature to keep the humanity intact.

During these times, there are literary features that they commonly follow in writing.

 Simple and plain language was used. [ they write for the common people. No
flowery words unlike the Enlightenment age]

 Feelings and emotion gained the centre stage. The romantic age was a revolt
against the logic and rationalism of the enlightenment age.

 Emphasis on Nature. The romantic age poets idealized a rural life. They
believe that nature , was a place of spiritual truth and beauty.

 The imagination was celebrated. You can find supernatural elements and
poems and novels of Romantic age, Coleridge coined the term 'willing suspension of
disbelief" so the readers will enjoy reading about supernatural elements in
literature.

 Free verse gained popularity. Free verse was used for free flow of words. The
romantic poets rejected strict poetic metres such as Heroic Couplet.

Most Famous Writers in The Romantic Period in English Literature

1. William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

2. S.T Coleridge (1772–1834)

3. Lord Byron (1778–1824)

William Wordsworth

• He was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a remote town in the lowlands of

northern England.

• He is known as “Poet of Nature,” “Worshiper of Nature,” “The Lake Poet.” The

French Revolution inspired him. He became The Poet of Laureate in England.” In
nature, the great Creator exists,” his belief is known as Pantheism William
Wordsworth

• He was the brightest star of the age of the Romantic Period.. This poet died in
1850.

William Wordsworth grew up in the Lake District of northern England. There he

spent much of his boyhood playing outdoors and exploring the mountains and lake-
strewn valleys—“fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” as he would later testify in
his autobiographical poem The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind.

Orphaned at age 13, Wordsworth attended Cambridge University, but he remained

rootless and virtually penniless until 1795, when a legacy made possible a reunion
with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. He became friends with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, with whom he wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), the collection often
considered to have launched the English Romantic movement.

His poetry is perhaps most original in its vision of the organic relation between man
and the natural world, a vision that culminated in the sweeping metaphor of nature
as emblematic of the mind of God. The most memorable poems of his middle and
late years were often cast in elegiac mode; few match the best of his earlier works.
By the time he became widely appreciated by the critics and the public, his poetry
had lost much of its force and his radical politics had yielded to conservatism. In
1843 he became England’s poet laureate. He is regarded as the central figure in the
initiation of English Romanticism.

His Well-known Works :

1. Lyrical Ballads – In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical

Ballads.
- The publication of this work is the beginning of the English Romantic
Age because it change the ideas, concept, and definitions of English
Literature.
- The poems in this collection were very different from the earliest style
of writing because the poems were written in the common man’s
language which was easily understandable. It was also written about
 life experiences that is why this was the beginning of the new
movement.

- poems that were included:

“We are seven” by Wordsworth.

(a) She had a rustic, woodland air,

(b) And she was wildly clad
(c) Her eyes were fair, and very fair
(b) Her beauty made me glad

( This poem is the conversation between the poet and little cottage girl)

The 2nd edition of the Lyrica Ballads was a Preface. It was actually an essay which
considered as the manifesto of the romantic movement. It was published year 1800.

• In this preface, Wordsworth raised some major ideas like using common language,
poetry takes inspiration from emotion, and he also said that day to day language is
best for poetic use.

• The 2nd edition contains all information about this new style of Poetry that
Wordsworth and Coleridge had introduced through this collection.

• It is also one of the key texts of the romantic period so it really defines what the
early romantic movement was all about.

• and then after publishing the preface, 2 more editions were published later.

Wordsworth also has his famous poem entitled

2. “Daffodils”

(a) I wondered lonely as cloud,

(b) That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
(a) When all at once I saw a crowd,
(b) A host, of golden daffodils;
(a) Beside the lake beneath the trees,
(b) Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The first thing you noticed when you read this is that it says a lot of nature. That was
Wordsworth defining quality, he wrote about nature often.

- These poems were significant and romantic because ballad meter isn’t
sophisticated poetic meter or a traditional meter of English poetry,
because it’s a folk meter. It’s the meter of folk song and of nursery
rhymes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Born in 1772.

• He was an influential writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher of the age of the
Romantic Period.

• He was a founder of his friend William Wordsworth of the Romantic Movement in

England. He was called “Opium Eater,” “The Poet of Super-naturalism.” This poet
died in 1834.

Coleridge studied at the University of Cambridge, where he became closely

associated with Robert Southey. In his poetry he perfected a sensuous lyricism that
was echoed by many later poets. Lyrical Ballads (1798; with William Wordsworth),
containing the famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Frost at Midnight,”
heralded the beginning of English Romanticism.

While in a bad marriage and addicted to opium, he produced “Dejection: An Ode”

(1802), in which he laments the loss of his power to produce poetry. Later, partly
restored by his revived Anglican faith, he wrote Biographia Literaria, 2 vol. (1817),
the most significant work of general literary criticism of the Romantic period.
Imaginative and complex, with a unique intellect, Coleridge led a restless life full of
turmoil and unfulfilled possibilities.

His Well-known Works :

1. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Lyrical Ballads

(a) I looked upon the rotting sea,
(b) And drew my eyes away;
(a) I looked upon the rotting deck,
(b) And there the dead men lay

2. Biographia Literaria

- published in two volumes in 1817.

- Biographia Literaria was the most important work of literary criticism
of the English Romantic period, combining philosophy and literary
criticism in a new way, and it was lastingly influential.
- The first volume of the book recounts the author’s friendship with
poets Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. Coleridge goes on to
describe the influences on his philosophical development, from his
early teachers to such philosophers as Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte,
 and Friedrich von Schelling. This section includes his well-known
discussion of the difference between fancy and imagination.
- In the second volume Coleridge concentrates on literary criticism and
proposes theories about the creative process and the historical
sources of the elements of poetry.

Lord Byron

• George Gordon Byron was a British poet and one of the leading figures in the
Romantic movement.

• He was born in 1788 in London, the year preceding the French Revolution.

•He was called the Rebel poet in England.

• He was also an influential poet of the age of the Romantic Period.

•This poet contracted fever at the age of 36 and died in 1824.

Educated at Cambridge, he gained recognition with English Bards and Scotch

Reviewers (1809), a satire responding to a critical review of his first published
volume, Hours of Idleness (1807). At 21 he embarked on a European grand
tour. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), a poetic travelogue expressing
melancholy and disillusionment, brought him fame, while his complex personality,
dashing good looks, and many scandalous love affairs, with women and with boys,
captured the imagination of Europe. Settling near Geneva, he wrote the verse
tale The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), a hymn to liberty and an indictment of tyranny,
and Manfred (1817), a poetic drama whose hero reflected Byron’s own guilt and
frustration. His greatest poem, Don Juan (1819–24), is an unfinished epic picaresque
satire in ottava rima. Among his numerous other works are verse tales and poetic
dramas. He died of fever in Greece while aiding the struggle for independence,
making him a Greek national hero.

It is hard to connect his poetry to the time period because even though he is
considered to be part of the Romantic time period, many of his poems were more
closely linked with Satire.

• Written in 1814. It was made into a Jewish Song in 1815.

• Written after Byron had seen a lady in a black dress in a ball room.

But it was really referring to his half sister Augusta! • One of Byron's most famous
poems.

the topic is about his love for his cousin. The poem is also about how he is trying to
convince the woman into loving him.
The poem was received badly, most likely because he wrote it about his cousin.

His Well-known Works :

1. “She walks in beauty”

I.

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

[The first stanza explains her beauty. The narrator is comparing her beauty to the
brightness of the day. It is explaining how her entire outfit and features, like her hair
and eyes can be so dark, but brightly beautiful at the same time. Despite her black
exterior, her beauty brings new light to any who look at her.]

[The second is the stanza that explains the light. He compares the woman's beauty
to the sunlight, and states that the rays of the sun makes her face glow beautifully. It
also states that even though the sun goes away, her face still glows beautifully]
[while the third stanza is that these lines, its says that her outer beauty is the same
as her inner beauty. She is pure and good on the outside, so she is pure and good on
the inside. Her morals are soft and gentle, while her looks are the same]

The second most famous work of Byron was Don Juan.

• divided up into 16 parts, termed 'cantos'.

• he wrote the first canto in late 1818, and the seventeenth canto in early 1823.[3]
Canto I was written in September 1818, and canto II was written in December 1818
through January 1819. Cantos III and IV were written in winter of 1819–1820 and
canto V was written in October–November 1820. Cantos I and II were published on
15 July 1819, and cantos III, IV, and V were published on 8 August 1821.

• Byron began to write canto VI in June 1822, and had completed writing canto XVI
in March 1823. Given the moralistic notoriety of the satirical, epic poem, John
Murray refused to publish the latter cantos of Don Juan, which then were entrusted
to John Hunt, who published the cantos over a period of months; cantos VI, VII, and
VIII, with a Preface, were published on 15 July 1823; cantos IX, X, and XI were
published on 29 August 1823; cantos XII, XIII, and XIV were published on 17
December 1823; and cantos XV and XVI on 26 March 1824.

• but the story of

Don Juan begins with the birth of the hero, Don Juan, in Seville, Spain. As a sexually
precocious adolescent boy, Juan has a love affair with a married friend of his mother.
When the woman's husband discovers her affair with the boy, Don Juan is sent to
the distant city of Cá diz. On the way, he is shipwrecked on an island in the Aegean
Sea, and there meets the daughter of the pirate whose men later sell Don Juan into
Turkish slavery. At the slave market of Constantinople, the sultana sees Don Juan up
for sale, and orders him and then she disguised him as a girl, in order to sneak him
into her chambers. Consequent to arousing the jealousy of the sultana, Don Juan
barely escapes alive from the harem. He then soldiers in the Imperial Russian army,
rescues a Muslim girl, and attracts the favor of Empress Catherine the Great, who
includes him to the royal court. In the course of Russian life, Don Juan falls ill
because of the climate, and Catherine returns him to England, as a Russian courtier.
In London, the diplomat Don Juan finds a guardian for the Muslim girl. The narrative
then relates Don Juan's ensuing adventures with the British aristocracy.