Romanticism: Characteristics, Themes and Poets

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence. The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe. Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase. The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Modernismo or Transatlantic Romanticism: José Martí and William Wordsworth

In this essay, I argue that Spanish American modernismo (1880-1917) constitutes an affirmation and negation of Romanticism: it is a manifestation of Romanticism’s critical reason and self-definition as literature in the Spanish American sphere, and it is a denial of Romanticism as a European cultural period and as a metropolitan literary model. To explore this contradiction, I contrast the allegories of literature in William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1802) and José Martí’s “Prólogo al Poema del Niágara de Juan A. Pérez Bonalde” (1882). Both texts have been considered as pivotal literary manifestos of Romanticism and modernismo, respectively. Through this essay, its theoretical background, and rhetorical reading, I rethink the transatlantic relationship between both cultural movements and their self-definitions as literature.

View of Alfoxton Park, early 19th century

A view of Alfoxton Park in Somerset, where Wordsworth wrote Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Unknown artist

Sibylline Leaves (1817), "The Ancient Mariner"

This page shows Coleridge's greatest poem, "The Ancient Mariner", as it appeared in Sibylline Leaves. It had appeared in Lyrical Ballads, but under Wordsworth's name rather than Coleridge's. This was the first time it had been attributed to Coleridge, and the first time it had appeared with marginal glosses, which are now standard in most modern texts.

Romantic Elements in Laxmiprasad Devkota’s Muna-Madan

This article is an attempt to study Laxmiprasad Deckota’s poetic work Muna-Madan to see how much it concords the romantic philosophical parameters. It analyses the textual properties of the work on the basis of romantic principles and philosophy propounded by William Wordsworth in his famous essay “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” It also invokes C. W. F. Von Schlegel’s poetic theory and the philosophically grounded definitions of romanticism given by authors like Bertrand Russell, Justin and Gaarder. Finally the paper comes to the conclusion that Devkota’s Muna-Madan contains all the major characteristics like strong subjectivism, foregrounding of folk culture, privileging the common over the sophisticated and spiritualization of nature that a romantic poetry should possess.

Gothic Ruins and Revivals

This chapter discusses Gothic history and Gothic selfhood in the writings of the Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Wordsworth’s ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ is the central text, and the chapter traces the mixture of traditionalism and ‘temporalization’ in this ‘history / Homely and rude’ of family breakdown and generational crisis. The chapter then relates ‘Michael’ to the personal and artistic context of a gradually ‘materializing’ Gothic ‘Plan’ (Coleridge’s phrase), from Lyrical Ballads (1798) to The Excursion (1814) and The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), and argues that these works reflect the turn from a ‘revolutionary architecture’ of the Gothic to an influential ethos of ‘self-evolving’ ‘insularity’. The chapter ends with a discussion of ‘global’ presences in the ‘national theodicy’ of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Preserving and erasing lines on China after the loss of his brother John to the Canton trade, Wordsworth replays the historical drama of ‘Michael’ in personal and global form.

Introduction

The introduction elaborates the key claim of the book, namely that Robinson was the most pioneering comparative critic in England during the early Romantic period. He developed a revolutionary theory of literature’s cross-cultural ethical relevance from his unrivalled understanding of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, the Anglo-French philosophical tradition, as well as his broad reading across English, German, and French literature, primarily. Robinson’s prescient 1802 critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads as generating non-didactic moral discourse emerges as the exemplary manifestation of his critical approach, according to which a poet’s aspiration to artistic disinterestedness, though never to be fulfilled entirely, may function as a catalyst for moral disinterestedness. The introduction further places this claim in its historical and present-day contexts – from Hazlitt, Schiller, and the Schlegels’ critical schools to Walter Benjamin’s dissertation on German Romantic criticism to the present ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies – before parcelling it out by means of chapter synopses. It also clarifies the terminology that Robinson applied, for instance ‘literator’ for his career choice of cross-cultural literary critic and disseminator – or comparatist, in today’s terms.