1798, publication
of the Lyrical Ballads
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
The Romantic spirit
1. The word ‘Romantic’
The Romantic Age
the period in which new
ideas and attitudes arose
in reaction to the dominant
18th-century ideals of order,
calm, harmony, balance,
rationality
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818
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The Romantic spirit
2. Romanticism vs
Enlightenment
Enlightened trends
• Emphasised reason and judgement.
• Focused on society as a whole.
• Followed authority.
• Interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends
• Emphasised imagination and emotion.
• Valued individuals.
• Looked for freedom.
• Represented common people.
• Interested in the supernatural.
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The Romantic spirit
3. English Romanticism
English
Romanticism
a revolt of the English imagination
against the neoclassical reason.
influenced by the French Revolution
and the English Industrial Revolution.
The Romantics:
• expressed a negative attitude towards the existing
social or political conditions;
• placed the individual at the centre of art;
• argued that poetry should be free from all rules.
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The Romantic spirit
4. The Romantics’ key ideas
• Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being.
• Use of creative imagination.
•
•
•
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection
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Exaltation of emotion
over reason and
senses over intellect.
A new view of the
artist as an individual
creator.
Fascination with the
irrational, the past, the
mysterious, the
exotic.
The Romantic spirit
5. The Romantic nature
• Opposed to reason.
• A substitute for
traditional religion.
• A vehicle for
self-consciousness.
• A source of sensations.
• A provocation to a state
of imagination and vision.
• An expressive
language: natural
images provide the poet
with a way of thinking
about human feelings
and the self.
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J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay,
c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Romantic spirit
6. The Romantic imagination
• A creative power superior
to reason.
• Shaped the poets’ fleeting
visions into concrete forms.
• A dynamic, active, rather than
passive power.
• Allows human beings to ‘read’
nature as a system of
symbols.
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J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –
The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery
The Romantic spirit
7. The Lake poets
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets
because they lived together in the last few years of the
18th century in the district of the great lakes in
Northwestern England.
In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads,
the manifesto of English Romanticism.
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The Romantic spirit
8. The manifesto of
English Romanticism
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
The poet
Linked to
nature,
emotions,
feelings
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Interested
in the lives
of the humble
1798
Themes
Language
Nature,
memory,
children
Simple,
common
used to liberate
imagination
The Romantic spirit
9. The second generation
of Romantic poets
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats
• died very young and away from home;
• experienced political disillusionment reflected in their
poetry;
• were linked to individualism, escapism.
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The Romantic spirit
10. The Romantics on nature
NATURE
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Byron
a source of
joy
a universal
force
inspiration
and
knowledge
the
representation
of God’s will
the
and love
counterpart
of his stormy
feelings
when it was
violently
upset
a mother and
a moral guide
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the
companion
of his
loneliness
Shelley
a source of
enjoyment
and
inspiration
Keats
the creative
mind benefits
from the
beauty of the
natural
landscape
pervaded by
a guiding
power leading a kind of
man to love
muse to the
poet’s artistic
quest
The Romantic spirit
11. The Napoleonic Wars
(1799-1815)
In the Napoleonic era:
• the British navy dominated
the sea;
• the French army dominated
the European continent;
• the great hero of the British
navy was Admiral Horatio
Nelson
defeated the French-Spanish
fleet off Cape Trafalgar on
the Atlantic coast of southern
Spain in 1805.
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The Romantic spirit
11. The Napoleonic Wars
(1799-1815)
The total defeat of Napoleon
in 1815
at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium
where the British troops, commanded by
Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.
Their consequences
1. the acquisition of the Cape of Good
Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and
Malta
was of strategic interest;
2. enormous financial costs;
3. Britain was on the verge of starvation,
bankruptcy and evolution.
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The Romantic spirit
12. The Luddites
Poverty
Deteriorating
working
conditions
Mechanical
looms and
spinners
replacing skilled
craftsmen
led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating
in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of 1811-1812.
They caused so much alarm that the government
made machine-breaking punishable by death.
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The Romantic spirit
12. The Luddites
In 1819, during a
peaceful public meeting
in Manchester, soldiers
fired into a crowd and
eleven people were
killed  the so-called
‘Peterloo Massacre’.
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The Romantic spirit
13. The Regency
The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency.
The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted
as monarch during the illness of his father George III
(1760-1820).
In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his
short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the
new age of reforms.
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