Romanticism

 Romanticism was a movement in literature, music and art from the late
18th Century until the mid 19th Century. Although some of the writers and
artists were friends, they did not necessarily see themselves as a unified
group.
 Politically, the movement was inspired by the American War of
Independence and, more especially, the French Revolution of 1789.
 The movement rejected authoritarian forms of government, and many of
the artists and writers in the movement favoured republics.
 Artistically, the movement is often seen as a reaction against the
Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the intellectual movement which
dominated European and American thought from the 18th Century
onwards.
 The Romantic movement also coincided with the Gothic revival, which
was preoccupied with death, horror, mediaeval settings and dark
atmospheres.
Romanticism

 The Romantic movement rejected:
 18th Century Classicism.
 The ordered rationality of the Enlightenment.
 Impersonal and artificial feeling.
 Industrialisation.
 Conservative morality.
Romanticism

 Romanticism embraced:
 Freedom of individual expression.
 Feelings of spontaneity, sincerity and originality.
 Emotional directness.
 The power of the imagination and dreams.
 The power and beauty of the natural world.
Romanticism

 The ‘big six’ of English romantic poetry are:
 William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.
 George Gordon (Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley and
John Keats.
 The English romantic poets drew inspiration, in terms of
content matter and form, from Edmund Spenser, John
Milton and Shakespeare. Homer, Dante, the 14th century
Italian writers Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Pindar
were also major influences, particularly on Keats.
Romanticism

 Typical themes of English Romanticism:
 Remembered childhood
 Mythology
 Revolution
 Imagination
 The exiled hero
 Unrequited love
 Power of the natural world
Key Events in Keats’s
Life

 Born 1795. Died 1821. Many of his most celebrated works were written
between 1818 and 1819.
 Keats’s father was killed after a fall from a horse when Keats was eight
years old.
 Keats’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen.
 Initially wanted to be a doctor, and registered as a student at Guy’s
Hospital.
 Keats’s younger brother Tom died of tuberculosis in 1818 – Keats had
nursed him for several months.
 Keats fell in love with a close neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Their relationship
was an intense one, but was never consummated. They were engaged, but
Keats’s health and finances made marriage impossible.
 Keats died in Rome at the age of twenty-five, after a long battle against
tuberculosis, the disease that killed his mother and brother.
Keats: the Writer and
the Man

 Keats was thin, delicate and generally in poor health. Sensitive and slightly
effeminate, he was derided by the more ‘macho’ Lord Byron, who referred
to ‘Johnny Keats’s piss a bed poetry’.
 Wordsworth talked about the ‘egotistical sublime’ and focused on his own
creative genius, but Keats referred to ‘negative capability’, the ability of
the poet to have no self, and to have doubts and uncertainties.
 Most of Keats’s poems focus on love: spiritual or physical, for beauty,
nature or art. These have often been considered ‘feminine’ concerns.
Keats’s poems contain few references to ‘manly’ issues such as history and
politics.
 Keats’s attitude towards women is ambiguous: sometimes he depicts them
as victims, at other times as inflicting pain on men. He seems to admire
them, and also fear them. Perhaps his idealised and unconsummated love
for Fanny Brawne may help to explain this?
Links

 www.ron.umontreal.ca
 www.rc.umd.edu
 www.eup.ed.ac.uk/journals/Romanticism
 www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism
 www.john-keats.com
 www.englishhistory.com/keats.html