Lecture the theme: the romantic age in english literature (1780-1830). Representatives of romanticism

Romanticism in England

General Background


Romanticism, which was the leading literary movement in England for half a century, was caused by great social and economic changes. The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the middle of the 18^th century didn’t bring happiness to the people of Great Britain. During this period England changed from an agricultural to an industrial society and from home manufacturing to factory production. The peasants, deprived of their lands, had to go to work in factories. Mines and factories had changed the appearance of the country. In the cities a large new working class developed. But mechanization did not improve the life of the common people. The sufferings of the working people led to the first strikes, and workers took to destroying machines. This was a movement directed against industrial slavery. Workers, who called themselves Luddites after a certain Ned Ludd who in fit of fury broke two textile frames, naively believed that machines were the chief cause of their sufferings. These actions led to severe repression by the authorities.
During the early 1800s the French situation dominated England’s foreign policy. The French Revolution had begun in 1789 as a protest against royal despotism. In its early phases the French Revolution had seemed to offer great hope for common people. At the beginning of the French Revolution, most enlightened people in Great Britain had felt sympathy for the democratic ideals of the revolutionaries in France. But after achieving power, the revolutionary government in France resorted to brutality. Furthermore, in 1793 revolutionary France declared war on England.
Scientific achievements in the areas of geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy flourished during the Romantic Age, but they also did not improve the living conditions of the common working people. Now the belief of progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the new system fell to pieces. As a result the Romantic Movement sprang up towards the close of the 18^th century.
The Romantic Age brought a more daring, individual and imaginative approach to both literature and life. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of the most important English writers turned away from the values and ideas characteristic of the Age of Reason. The individual, rather than society, was at the center of the Romantic vision. The Romantic writers believed in the possibility of progress and social and human reform. As champions of democratic ideals, they sharply attacked all forms of tyranny and the spreading evils of individualism, such as urban blight, a polluted environment, and the alienation of people from nature and one another. They all had a deep interest in nature, not as a centre of beautiful scenes but as an informing and spiritual influence on life. It was as if frightened by the coming of industrialism and the nightmare towns of industry, they were turning to nature for protection. Or as if, with the declining strength of traditional religious belief, men were making a religion from the spirituality of their own experiences.
They all valued their own experiences to a degree which is difficult to parallel in earlier poets. Spencer, Milton and Pope made verse out of legend or knowledge, which was common to humanity. The romantic poets looked into themselves, seeking in their own lives for strange sensations.
Whereas the writers of the Age of Reason tended to regard evil as a basic part of human nature, the Romantic writers generally saw humanity as naturally good, but corrupted by society and its institutions of religion, education, and government.
In the period from 1786 to 1830 two generations of Romantic poets permanently affected the nature of English language and literature. Usually, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote most of their major works from 1786 to 1805, are regarded as the first generation of the English Romantic poets.



William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1770-1850) (1772-1834)
George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, who produced their major works between 1810 to 1824, are regarded as the second generation of English Romantics.



Percy Bysshe Shelley John Keats
(1795-1821) (1792-1822)

In 1798, with the publication of “Lyrical Ballads”, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave official birth to the Romantic Age in literature. The second edition of “Lyrical Ballads”, published in 1800, contained a preface in which Wordsworth stated the poetic principles that he and Coleridge believed in: first, that ordinary life is the best subject for poetry because the feelings of simple people are sincere and natural; second, that the everyday language of these people best conveys their feelings and is therefore best suited to poetry; third, that the expression of feeling is more important in poetry than the development of an action, or story; and finally, that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. These principles were often challenged by other writers of Wordsworth’s day, but, nevertheless, they served as a formal declaration of a new spirit in English literature and became a turning point in the history of English poetry.

The important figures of the second generation of Romantic poets were Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Though highly different in personality and artistic temperament, they were similarly intense, precocious, and tragically short-lived. During his brief lifetime, George Gordon Byron, was the most popular poet abroad as well as at home and also the most scandalous. He was reckless, bitter, in constant revolt against society and devoted to the cause of freedom and liberty. Shelley, too, like Byron was rebellious and scandalous. In his poems revolted against tyranny, he believed that the church and state commerce, as organized and conducted in his time, led to superstition, selfishness and corruption. That’s why some literary critics call them Revolutionary Romantics.
Romanticism represented an attempt to rediscover the mystery and wonder of the world. Romanticists made emotion, and not reason, the chief force of their works. This emotion found its expression chiefly in poetry.
Some poets were seized with panic and an irresistible desire to get away from the present. They wished to call back “the good old days”, the time long before the mines and factories came, when people worked on “England’s green and pleasant land”. These poets are sometimes called the Passive Romanticists. They spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life during the Middle ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and peaceful. Their motto was : “Close to Nature and from Nature to God”, because they believed that religion put man at peace with the world.
The poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey belonged to this group. They were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District in the north-west of England where they lived. The Lake District attracted the poets because industry had not yet invaded this part of the country.
In the poetry of all romantic poets there is a sense of wonder, of life seen with new sensibilities and fresh vision. This strangeness of the individual experience leads each of the romantics to a spiritual loneliness. They are keenly aware of their social obligations, but the burden of an exceptional vision of life drives them into being almost fugitives from their fellow-men. This sense, present in them all, can be found most strongly in Shelley, “who seems even more content amid the dead leaves, the moonlit water, and the ghosts, than in the places where men inhabit”. The romantic poets lead the reader to the strange areas of human experience, but seldom welcome him in the language of ordinary conversation, or even with the currency of normality.
Drama did not flourish during the Romantic Age. The main type of drama produced at that period was simplistic, in which all the poor are good and all the rich are evil. Some of the leading Romantic poets wrote so called closet drama, poetic drama written to be read rather than produced. Shelley’s tragedy “The Cenci”, Byron’s “Manfred”, and Coleridge’s “Remorse” are among the better known plays of this type.