This blog presents Romantic and Victorian Literature course as its
main theme. To be more practical, this blog focuses on Romantic period of
English Literature, specifically on the concerns of nature as one of romantic
elements usually discussed. Besides, this site also includes some information
concerning prominent Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley and their respective works.
What is Romanticism?
Romanticism in English Literature began in the 1790s with the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the
English Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet
of the movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of the Romantic
Movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary
style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the
supernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and
Friedriech Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling,
belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, the Vicomte de
Chateubriand and Mme de Stael were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by
virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.
The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about
1805 to the 1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and
a new attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and
imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and
music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revived
historical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir Walter
Scott, who is often considered to have invented the historical
novel. At about this same time English Romantic poetry had reached its
zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelly.
A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional
were works dealing with the supernatural , the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by C.R. Maturin, the
Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The second phase of Romanticism in
Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Görres,
and Joseph von Eichendorff.
By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and concentrated more on exploring each nation’s historical and cultural inheritance and on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the Brontë sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Père), and Théophile Gautier in France; Alessandro Manzoniand Giocomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikail Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.
Prominent Romantic Poets
The best known Romantic poets were Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Shelley and Keats and their poetry was dependent on various features
peculiar to their time: a reaction against previous literary styles, arguments
with eighteenth century and earlier philosophers, the decline in formal
Anglican worship and the rise of dissenting religious sects, and the rapid and
unprecedented industrialization of Britain and consequent changes in its countryside.
Above all, however, it was the impact of the French Revolution which gave the
period its most distinctive and urgent concerns. Following the Revolution
itself, which began in 1789, Britain was at war with France on continental
Europe for nearly twenty years while massive repression of political dissent
was implemented at home. Against this background much of the major writing of
the period, associated with the term Romantic, takes place between 1789 (when
the French Revolution began) and 1824 (the death of Byron) and can be seen as a
response to changing political and social conditions in one respect or another.
Romantic Literature
Element: Appreciation of Nature
In this
blog, we choose to focus only on one element of Romantic Literature which is on
the appreciation of nature. This is because nature has contributed and affected
our lives the most. Therefore it is an important element which worth to be
noted and appreciated by all human being. Nature refers to the phenomena of the
physical world, and also to life in general. It is generally distinguished from
the supernatural and it ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.
Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness – wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention.
We believe
through literature mainly poetry, readers will have better understanding about
nature and our surroundings. Some may see God’s creation only at surface level,
that nature is created by God to serve the need of living things on earth. But
through overwhelmed emotion while reading poetry, one may gradually understands
what is beyond nature itself and thus, creates an in-depth and emotion-attached
understanding and appreciation towards nature.