 Grand
handouts
 Romantic Literature
 Wordsworth and Blake lecture followed by
poem activity
 Change in calendar – no homework tonight
 Hamlet essay grades are up and we will go
over them on Friday.
 1796
– William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads
 Was in part a reaction against the artificiality of
Enlightenment and effects of industrialism
 Romanticism reflected the spirit of the French and
American revolutions
 Thee key motifs:
 The redemptive power of nature
 The idea of nature’s sympathy with humankind
 The view that one who is close to nature is close
to God
 Imagination
 Emotion
 Individual
experience
 Freedom
 Nature

Sublime: power &
mystery inspire awe,
solace, & self-discovery
 Lyrical
Ballads w/Coleridge =
birth of Romantic movement
 Poetry is “the spontaneous
overflow or powerful feelings,”
which takes it origin “from
emotion recollected in
tranquility”
 Believed on connection with
elemental and divine universal
forces through nature
 Rejected artificial diction of
neoclassical verse in favor of
“real language of men”
“Most spiritual of artists”
 More radical than Wordsworth
 Triple threat – artist, poet, and mystic
 Mysticism: awareness of an ultimate spiritual truth
(divinity, God, etc.) through direct experience,
intuition, instinct, or insight
 “May God us Keep/ From single vision and Newton’s
sleep”
 Difference in attitude toward human experience
 The rational, objective “single vision” of Newton
went against Blake’s beliefs
 Method of understanding was imaginative,
intuitive, and more spiritual

Love of nature
 Individual experience
 Memory, importance
of experiences

Religion – spiritual
 Not much of a nature poet
 Sees a need for both childhood
innocence and wisdom
 Uses artwork in his poetry
