THE ROMANTIC ERA (1798-1832)*
“Nature Poetry”
Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary, and
intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th
century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial
Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and
political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against
the scientific rationalization of nature.
The movement validated strong emotion as authentic experience,
placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, terror
and awe (associated with the Gothic)—especially that which is
experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its
picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art
and ancient custom to something noble and made spontaneity a
desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). Implied in this
movement is a new respect for the “common man” and “real,”
imperfect, untamed or uncontrolled human experience.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models, attempting to escape the
confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism and to embrace the exotic and
unfamiliar, and to harness the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character was heavily influenced by the philosophies of Henry David
Thoreau, the American philosopher, and may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps
misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of
contemporary society.
Although the movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the
ideologies and events of the French Revolution (1789-1799) laid the background from which both
Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also
had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities. Romanticism
elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering
examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority,
which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.
CHARACTERISTICS
 Value on emotion, passion
 Interest in social justice
and equality
 Concern with private, not
public
 “spontaneous overflow of
Powerful feelings”
 value on real, not ideal
 Value on spontaneity
*
 Respect for untamed,
unconquered natural world
 Declining value on
institutions (seen as
controlling, inauthentic)
 Value on imagination,
magic, supernatural
(return of some medieval
elements)
notes from Wikipedia and Norton Anthology of English Literature (online)
 value on emotions formerly seen
as negative or ugly, like fear,
awe, despair.
 Disdain for artifice
 Spirtitual vs religious
 pantheism—belief that God, or a
divine, unifying spirit, runs
through everything in the
universe.
TERMS
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Allusion
Apostrophe
Ballad
Contrast
Gothic
6) Inversion
7) Lyric (Wordsworth)
8) Ode
9) Romanticism
10) Sonnet (Keats, Wordsworth)
11)
12)
13)
14)
Terza Rima (Shelley)
Quatrain
Spenserian stanza (Byron)
Supernatural
WORKS
TITLE
THEME/IDEAS
My Heart Leaps
Up
(William
Wordsworth
1770-1850)
 Beneficial influence of nature
 Power of human mind
 Appreciation of wandering/wanderers (the
lonely artist)
 Splendor of childhood: “the child is the father of
the man”
 Power of memory
 Power of sensory experience (vision/sight)
 Spirituality found in being “one” with nature
 Beneficial influence of nature
 Burdensome nature of worldliness,
consumption
 Lack of harmony between modern society and
nature (allusion here to the business and
materialism of Industrial Revolution)
The World is Too
Much With Us
(William
Wordsworth
1770-1850)
FORM
 lyric
CONVENTIONS, DEVICES,
CHARACTERISTICS
 paradox
 naiveté and awe of childhood is
reminiscent of Blake’s “The Lamb
 lyric
 sonnet
(Petrarchan)
 allusion
 pastoral mood
 meditative
TITLE
The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner
(Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
1772-1834)
Apostrophe to the
Ocean
(George Gordon,
Lord Byron
1788-1824)
THEME/IDEAS
 experiencing, respecting, and empathizing with
nature are integral to the development of a
complete soul and sense of personhood.
 Imagination, intellect, philosophy, poetry, piety
are not at odds with one another, but are
derived from nature and thus work together and
are linked to God.
 The natural world, and all the beings in it, no
matter how physically ugly or “below us” are
part of us and our world. We are all
interdependent.
 Mistreatment of the natural world will have dire
consequences for humanity and the individual.
 Nature contains an innate, constant joyousness
wholly separate from the ups and downs of
human experience. It should NOT have human
emotions attributed to it (don’t personify it; it is
larger than we are)
 Glimpse of the Byronic/Romantic Hero seen:
defiant, melancholic, free, but haunted by
secret guilt
 Nature is awe-inspiring in its wildness,
supremacy, power, and amorality.
 Humans do not control nature
 Humans wreak havoc upon the earth and only
nature can control or overpower humans,
making it Godlike.
 Time ravages all but the natural world.
 There is beauty in the terrible, the ugly.
 Nature is the “father” of humans; we are part of
and from nature and thus, Nature is Godly.
FORM
 Ballad
 Loose
tetrameter
 Ode
 The Spenserian
stanza, invented
by Edmund
Spenser. Each
stanza has 9
lines: 8 in iambic
pentameter,
followed by 1
'Alexandrine' line
in iambic
hexameter.
Rhyme scheme:
ababbcbcc.
CONVENTIONS, DEVICES,
CHARACTERISTICS
 Symbolism: albatross, sleep,
dreams/dreaming, sun, moon: the
sun and the moon represent two
sides of the Christian God: the
sun represents the angry, wrathful
God, whereas the moon
represents the benevolent,
repentant God.
 Christian Symbolism
 Intentionally archaic language and
the epigraph combine to create a
truly “Romantic” (reminiscent of
medieval times) feel.
 Aphorism
 Didacticism
 Apostrophe
 Personification
 Allusion
 Metaphor
 Simile
 Repetition
 Parallelism
 Hyperbole
 Pantheism
TITLE
THEME/IDEAS
FORM
Ode to the West
Wind
 pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine,
unifying spirit, runs through everything in the
universe.
 This force is the cause of all human joy, faith,
goodness, and pleasure and can influence
people to change the world for the better.
 It is also the source of poetic inspiration and
divine truth.
 Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature’s
power is not wholly positive. Nature also
destroys cruelly and indiscriminately.
 Delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness
of its dark side.
 The divine in nature is the source of poetic
inspiration.
 Death is inevitable; life is transient
 Life is paradoxical (“aching pleasure”)
 Beauty should be contemplated.
 Beauty can be overwhelming and even painful.
 speaker leaves the real world to explore a
transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At
the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his
ordinary life transformed in some way and
armed with a new understanding.
 Nature gives comfort, escape, relief from
numbness incurred by existence in material,
modern, industrialized world.
 The weight of the world causes need to escape
through art, thought, emotion, drugs/alcohol,
nature
 Escapism
 Freedom and relief/comfort in isolation
 Ode
 5 stanzas in
each part (4
tercets and a
couplet)
 Iambic
pentameter
 Terza rima
 ABA BCB CDC
DED EE.








Allusion
Imagery
Apostrophe
Hyperbole
Assonance
Consonance
Pantheism
Autumn as a symbol and motif
 Ode
 10 line stanzas
 ababcdecdcde






Alliteration
Allusion
Apostrophe
Imagery
Hyperbole
Pantheism
 Shakespearean
Sonnet with
solution in final
couplet




Quatrain
Couplet
Parallelism
Hyperbole
(Percy Bysshe
Shelly
1792-1822)
Ode to a
Nightingale
(John Keats
1795-1821)
When I Have
Fears that I May
Cease to be
(John Keats
1795-1821)
CONVENTIONS, DEVICES,
CHARACTERISTICS

Achieving oneness with nature and God are
impossible due to human and temporal
limitations.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet,
philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, historian, and leading transcendentalist who
was best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings,
and his essay Civil Disobedience. In addition, his writings on natural and environmental history,
ecology, and philosophy are sources of modern day environmentalism.
Thoreau was deeply interested in the ideas of close observations, personal experience, and
survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. He advocated
abandoning illusion, materialism and consumerism, in order to discover life's true essential
needs. Thoreau was one of the original American nonconformists. He rejected materialism,
lived modestly, often in near-poverty, and “did his own thing” despite social pressure and ostracism. Regarded as an
eccentric failure in his lifetime, posterity sees him as a heroic philosopher who walked the walk rather than blithely talking
the talk from a position of comfort and security.
Thoreau's environmental philosophies and writings on civil disobedience and abolitionism have influenced the political
thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Romantic poets, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and George Gordon (Lord Byron)
Excerpt from Walden
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and
see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I
did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it
was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life
into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by
experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to
me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat
hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."