please get out your romantic poetry packet (green). take notes in your ap lit. binder under the...

Please get out your Romantic Poetry packet (green).Take notes in your AP Lit. binder under the “journal”

section.

This week:Membean quiz next classRomanticism quiz Friday

Where it all began…

The Enlightenment (philosophical movement in 18th century)

• Writings = elite only!• Man in natural state = trouble• Science and reason explains everything• If every man uses reason and knows his rightful

place, world will work perfectly, like a machine

Diderot

• Didn’t believe there was a place for God in society

• Wrote an encyclopedia that had him arrested by French government

• BFF with Rousseau

Rousseau

Rousseau• Emotional • Believed man in his natural state was GOOD and

PURE• Emotions lead to creativity!• “Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in

chains…”• Eventually jailed by French police as well

These ideas could only exist in a new world…

American Revolution

Thomas Paine Common Sense

Meanwhile…. In France and Britain

• English conservatives worry that revolutionary fever will cross the Channel to England.

• Because the French king has been overthrown by a democratic mob, the French Revolution is radical and frightening to English ruling classes.

History of the Times

• Until the violence and terror escalate, English liberals support the French Revolution’s ideals of “liberty, fraternity, equality.”

Key Concept: Revolution Spreads

Romantic Era

• 1770s late 1800s• Coincides with American/French

Revolution• Unite reason and feeling!• Reaction to science (The

Enlightenment)

The Romantics

• Hugged and kissed all the time– Not

• Imagination• Gothic elements• Nature• Individual• Creativity• Written for all social classes / easy to

understand

Literature of the Times• In reaction to the ugliness

and turmoil of the times, writers turn to nature, the past, and a dream world of imagination.


• Romantic period begins in 1798 with publication of Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, a collaboration by two young poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

• Included both Coleridge’s long narrative The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

• Both poems are now among the most important poems in English literature.

• Represented “a new kind of poetry”—spontaneous, emotional, self-revealing poems written in simple language about commonplace subjects.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems


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Literature of the Times

The Romantic poets • were dedicated to political

and social change• believed in the power of

literature• thought imagination—not

reason—was the best response to forces of change

• created private, spontaneous lyric poetry

Key Concept: Conservatives Clamp Down

Some Romantic Poets

But to the eyes of the man of imagination nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. . . . To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.

—William Blake

George Gordon, Lord Byron

John Keats


William Blake

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets that should come to mind when you think of ROMANTICISM• WILLIAM

WORDSWORTH• SAMUEL

COLERIDGE• PERCY SHELLEY• LORD BYRON

Literature of the Times

• Romantic literature was dominated by poetry.• Romantics thought poets were extraordinary

people, necessary to humanity and society.• Keats called poets “physicians,” Blake called

them teachers, and Shelley thought they were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”


• The novel also thrived, however. Key novelists included Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Sir Walter Scott.

History of the Times

• Swelling urban populations create desperate living conditions.

• England is the first nation to experience the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

• The era’s misery and poverty are justified by an economic policy called laissez faire.

Key Concept: Industrialization Finds a Foothold

Themes of Romantic Poetry

• Spread of democratic ideals through the American and French Revolutions and disillusionment after failure of French Revolution

• Reactions against harsh living and working conditions created for urban poor by the Industrial Revolution

• Fascination with nature and country life, which seemed a blissful retreat from city slums

Influences on Romantic Poetry


• Invited readers to feel power and passion

A New Focus in Poetry

Romantic PeriodRestoration Era

• Order had just been restored.

• Society needed social change.

• Poets celebrated order, hierarchy, and enlightened rule.

• Poets wrote about personal feelings, supported individual rights, and used everyday language.

• Tried to capture personal experience

Romantic comes from the word romance.


• A medieval romance is a tale of high adventure that idealizes knightly virtues and has supernatural elements.

• Romantic writers used elements of romance to go beyond Restoration Era formality and explore psychological and mysterious aspects of human experience.


Romantic poets

• wrote about personal experiences and emotions, often using simple language


• embraced imagination and naturalness instead of reason and artifice

• saw nature as transformative; focused on the ways nature and the human mind mirrored each other’s creative properties

Percy Bysshe Shelley



Imagination: The Inspired Guide

• The Romantics are often considered nature poets.

• However, they are really “mind poets” who sought to understand the bond between humans and the world of the senses.


The Romantics saw imagination as the link between mind and nature. • To them, imaginative experi-ences were especially moving, perhaps superior to human reasoning.

• The mysterious forces of Nature inspired them.

• All six of the major Romantic poets had their own ideas about imagination, but all believed that it could be stimulated by nature and the mind.

Imagination: The Inspired Guide


If imagination is the Romantic poet’s guide to truth, Nature is the wise teacher that can deliver the lesson.

Nature: The Wise Teacher

• Romantic poets considered themselves especially sensitive.

• They wanted to help people see the world in all its beauty, sadness, and tenderness.


The Romantics’ interest in natural images and themes was reflected in Gothic literature.

Eerie settings

Supernatural events

Questions about humans’ ability to manipulate nature

Novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appealed to the imagination through

Nature: The Wise Teacher


Romantic poets favored idealized rural settings.

Experience: The Worthy Subject

However, some celebrated the people who lived in crowded cities.

They promoted rights to

Healthful living conditionsRelief from political or economic oppression

Self-expression


Some Romantics dreamed that poetry could offer an example of model behavior to improve horrific social conditions:

Undemocratic governments

Dangerous factories

Child labor

Laissez-faire economic policies that left businesses unregulated Child workers in coal mine

Experience: The Worthy Subject

EMOTIONS

RULE

Because the Romantic poetry valued individual experience, the rationalism previously admired was replaced by a trust in one’s emotions. The literature in England prior to this movement was witty, intellectual, and social. Romanticism rejects the social ‘us’ and embraces the ‘me’! Intuitions, feelings, and emotions ruled. Man’s heart was a more valued guide than his head. So, another characteristic of Romantic poetry is this enlightenment by emotion.


Faith in Senses and Feelings

Another characteristic of Romantic literature is the inclusion of supernatural elements.

Perhaps, for the Romantics, Nature was so powerful that it could not be contained. Nature takes on a mysterious, sometimes even scary quality in literature of the Romantics. Supernatural elements play a large part in these works.


Belief in the Supernatural

The Romantics searched for personal experiences and strove to communicate their power in meaningful ways. To achieve this, the Romantic writers employed simple and direct language. This was another way to reject the Neoclassical movement that hoped to emulate the ancient writers in lofty styles and language. Think of it this way… our most personal conversations, our most private, do not need elevated language to impress or ring true. This simple language is another Romantic characteristic.


Use of simple language

Ask Yourself

1. Where did Romantic poets look for inspiration? Why?

2. Why do you think Romantic poets wrote about nature during a time of change?

[End of Section]


Forms of Romantic Poetry

• Expresses the emotions and concerns of an individual as well as of society

• Varies the structure of traditional forms to suit a poem’s purpose

• Focuses on a poet’s personal connection to nature

Characteristics of Romantic Poetry

Function over Form

Romantic Poets

• Poetry was a playground of feelings.

• Form seems more important than function.

• Poets experimented with forms and expressed feelings in natural language.

18th Century Poets• Poetry was a strictly

defined literary genre.

• Poets used formal language and structured traditional forms such as odes and sonnets.

• Function seems more important than form.

The Romantics took poetry in a new direction.

Forms of Romantic Poetry

Early Romantic Poets

William Wordsworth• Lyrical Ballads, with a Few

Other Poems• “Lines Composed a Few

Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Samuel Taylor Coleridge• The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner• Kubla Khan

Late Romantic Poets

Percy Bysshe Shelley• “Ozymandias”• “Ode to the West Wind”• “To a Skylark”

John Keats• “On First Looking into

Chapman’s Homer”• “Ode to a Nightingale”• “Ode to a Grecian Urn”

William Blake (1757-1827)

• Rebelled against teacher (art cannot be taught, it must be felt)

• Married illiterate woman; taught her to read• Disgusted with society / rules / oppression• Wrote poems about the cruelties of child labor

please get out your romantic poetry packet (green). take notes in your ap lit. binder under the...

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