Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

Unit 4Literary Focus Essays

Collection 7: 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 and laissez-faire economics

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

Influences on Romantic Poetry

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

• Invited readers to feel power and passion

A New Focus in Poetry

Romantic PeriodAugustan 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 world romance.

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

• 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 neoclassical formality and explore psychological and mysterious depths of human experience.

A New Focus in Poetry

Romantic poets

• Saw history as a cycle in which tradition and authority must be constantly questioned to improveliving conditions

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

• Were fascinated with youthand innocence, particularly a child’s fresh view of the world

• Believed people had to accept change to survivePercy Bysshe Shelley

A New Focus in Poetry

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

• Many say the Romantic movement began in 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads.

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.

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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.

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

For the Romantic poets, nature was a balmto soothe the relentless hounding of an industrialized world.

• Poets tried to translate scenes of natural beauty into words so that readers might know the power of natural forces to shape thought and feeling.

• The poets had a strong sense of nature’s transformative properties.

Nature: The Wise Teacher

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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

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?

Collection 7: Themes of Romantic Poetry

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Collection 8: 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 was 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 was more important than form.

The Romantics took poetry in a new direction.

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

“Tintern Abbey” a First

• In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth for the first time used blank verse that sounds like the flowing rhythms of natural speech.

• Like other Romantics, he experimented with simpler rhythms and language.

Tintern Abbey by J. M. W. Turner

Function over Form

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

ode

Romantic Forms

The Romantics favored these poetic forms:

1

2

3

sonnet

Spenserian stanza

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

An ode is a long complex poem (usually a meditation on a serious topic).

“Ode to the West Wind”

Ode

The Ode1

• Each stanza is a variation on the sonnet form.

Percy Bysshe

Shelley

• Looks both inward and outward—exalting the powerful,but invisible, wind and reflecting on unseen forces in the poet’s own mind

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem in iambic pentameter.

2 The Sonnet

The Spenserian stanza

Invented by the Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, this form has nine lines with a complex rhyme and rhythm pattern.

Wordsworth made the sonnet popular again.

Byron used the Spenserian stanza.

3

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

Ask Yourself

1. What was more important to Romantic poets, form or function? Why?

2. What topics did Romantic poets pursue? Why?

Collection 8: Forms of Romantic Poetry

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