1780-1830
“Wanderer uber dem
Nebelmeer”

Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818
Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth
And Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Preface contains the two authors’ beliefs about
the new artistic and spiritual movement
The definitive statement of Romanticism.
A Period of Change

Politics-Radicalism
Culture-Romanticism
Economics - Industrial Revolution
Dichotomy between the Age of
Reason and the Romantic Age
Age of Reason
vs
Romanticism

Public and society
Rational
Objective
Science
Conscious intellect
vs.
vs.
vs.
vs.
vs.
Private reality
Emotional
Subjective
Intuition
The Unconscious
The Romantic Hero

 The Romantics asserted the importance of the
individual, the unique, even the eccentric.
 The Byronic hero is a moody, turbulent individualist,
haunted by past sins committed.
Byron

Percy Shelley

Glorification of the
Common Man

Romantic poets (like William
Wordsworth) looked to the French
Revolution as example of social
ideals at work
Glorification of Children

Youth is the “fount of wisdom.”
“The child is father of the man.” -Wordsworth
Childhood state of free imagination is
perfect
Wordsworth’s View of
Humanity

 At birth: still “trailing clouds of glory
from God;” closest to nature
 In youth: slightly farther from nature and
God, but still “nature’s priest,”
 As a young adult: the “prison house of
the world” begins to close in on us.
 We can recapture the bloom of childhood
and revive our creativity by communing
with nature.
New Subject Matter

No more “lofty” subjects
Wordsworth wrote about children, the aged, the
mad, the poor, rural people.
“Poet’s duty” to “descend lower , among
cottages and fields, and among children.”
Confront basic humanity “by stripping our own
hearts naked, and by looking out of ourselves
toward men who lead the simplest lives, and
those most according to nature.”
New Style

Systematic denial of literary
pretension.
Common, not lofty language
Often childlike vocabulary
Freely expressed emotion
Direct connection between the reader
and author
Pantheism

Belief that God is present in nature
and not separable from it.
Espoused by Wordsworth
Nature is a spiritual guide—not
just a collection of pretty scenery.
William Blake

 A mystic; said he communicated with spirits
 Ahead of his time
 Believed children are closer to the divine than
adults because they possess free imaginations
unhampered by the constraints of society and
education.
 Blake believed that naive innocence must pass
through and assimilate experience if it is to move
on to “organized innocence,” which transcends
both.


Robert Burns

Scottish poet
Dialect: a regional variety of language
with a particular pronunciation,
grammar, and vocabulary.
Farmer, limited education, struggled
with poverty much of his life, died at
37. He expressed the feelings and
concerns of ordinary people.

Medieval Subjects, Gothic
Settings

Romantic writers fascinated with
medieval subjects
Gothic novels (like Frankenstein and
Dracula featuring gloomy castles and
supernatural events became popular
Exotic places and characters were
widely written about
Schmadribach Waterfall in
Lauterbrunnen Valley

Joseph Anton Koch, 1811