The Romantic Period: An Overview

• The Romantic Period occurred from 1789 or 1776 to 1832 or 1837.
• This period began with either the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 or the French Revolution in 1789.
• It concluded with either the Great Reform Act of 1832 or the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837.
• The Romantic Period was a time of transition that saw writers creatively responding to the emergence of modernity.
• The term "Romantic" was coined in the 19th century to define the literature of this time as something different from classical literature.

Romantic-Period Poetry

• Romantic poetry emphasizes inspiration and imagination.
• Its themes include equality and justice.
• In Romantic poetry, nature is seen as a source of value and inspiration.
• It uses popular forms and accessible language.
• Individual experience is important in Romantic poetry.

Texts for Study

• Works by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be studied.
• Works by Burns, Thelwall, Charlotte Smith, and Anna Barbauld will be studied.

Historical Contexts

• Enlightenment
• American Revolution
• French Revolution
• Reaction in Britain

Enlightenment

• The 18th century is often called the "Age of Enlightenment."
• There were rapid advancements in scientific discovery and technological innovation during this time.
• New philosophical and political ideas appeared, leading to new ways of understanding the world.
• The human mind and its potential was emphasized.
• "Received" ideas and authority were rejected.
• Importance was placed on discovering knowledge through rational thought and scientific methods.
• The American and French Revolutions were informed by Enlightenment ideas.

American Revolution

• British settlement of North America started in the 17th century.
• By 1763, Britain controlled large parts of North America.
• The colonists resented the unequal and exploitative relationship with Britain.
• The American Revolutionary War took place from 1775-1784.
• The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.
• John Locke's political philosophy influenced the leaders of the American Revolution.
• Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) stated that government needed the consent of the governed.

French Revolution

• In 18th-century France, power was centralized in the monarch.
• There were restrictions on free speech, political oppression, and great inequality.
• The storming of the Bastille occurred on July 14, 1789.
• The principles of the revolution were "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."
• The revolution presented a vision of a republican system of government, based on a rejection of hereditary power and authority.

Reaction in Britain and Ireland

• Many writers, philosophers, artists, activists, and reformers were inspired by the revolutionary events in America and France.
• The French Revolution and the French Revolutionary war were the most discussed issues in British politics and the British press.
• The Revolutionary debate of the 1790s in Britain had a profound influence on the political, religious and cultural life of the country.
• The French war produced almost unprecedented economic and social strains.
• Britain made a huge military, naval and financial effort to counter French ambitions.
• The 1790s were a decade of crisis that polarized British society into the friends and enemies of the French Revolutionary cause.
• Key publications that spurred this debate:
  • Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1790)
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791)
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1972)
• The Society of United Irishmen was founded in Ireland in 1791.
• In 1798 the United Irish rebellion occurred, with French troops landing on the Mayo coast.
• The Royal Proclamation against seditious writings was issued in 1792.
• Thomas Paine was charged and found guilty of sedition.
• Habeas corpus was suspended in 1794.
• Numerous people were arrested and several prominent radical writers charged with treason in 1794, including John Thelwall.

John Thelwall

• John Thelwall was a prominent figure in radical political circles in London in the 1790s.
• He used his literary talents in his activism and was renowned for impassioned and witty speeches.
• He composed songs on Republican themes.
• Thelwall was arrested and tried for treason in 1794.
• After his release, he was befriended by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
• His Poems Written in Close Confinement offer an example of a direct link between poetry and political radicalism.

An aesthetics of sincerity

• Thelwall's poems have little to recommend them other than their sentiment.
• They are transcripts of the heart, rather than flights of the imagination.
• They are intended to arouse patriotic feeling, rather than calculated to amuse the admirer of poetical enthusiasm.
• Thelwall spoke what he felt, and did not consider what he should speak.
• An honest method is the most successful in appealing to the hearts of others.
• His "Stanzas" are written in ballad form.
• A ballad stanza has 4 lines, alternating 4 beats and 3 beats, and the second and fourth lines rhyme.
• "Stanzas on hearing for certainty that we were to be tried for high treason":
  • Short is perhaps our date of life, (A)
  • But let us while we live be gay – (B)
  • To those be thought and anxious care (C)
  • Who build upon the distant day. (B)

Wordsworth (& Coleridge), Lyrical Ballads

• Lyrical Ballads was published in 1798, 1800, and 1802.
• Lyrical Ballads was first published anonymously in 1798.
• It was entitled Lyrical Ballads, with a Few other Poems and contained 23 poems.
• Coleridge wrote 4 poems and Wordsworth wrote 19.
• The 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads contains a second volume in which all the additional poems are by Wordsworth.
• Wordsworth's name appears on the title page and he added a Preface.
• The collection and the Preface were further expanded in 1802.
• Lyrical Ballads began modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.
• The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is one of the most influential documents in the tradition of liberal humanism.
• Wordsworth's poetry partakes of the revolutionary movement and proceeds on a principle of equality.

1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

• Redefining the meaning and purpose of poetry.
• A few words of introduction are required because the Poems are materially different from those upon which general approbation is at present bestowed.
• "Materially different" in:
  • Language that uses "the real language of men"
  • Subject matter that uses "humble and rustic life"
  • A "worthy purpose" for art and permanence
  • Importance of Nature
  • Importance of Imagination
  • Understanding of what a poet is

Lyrical Ballads: Language

• There is little of what is usually called poetic diction.
• The purpose was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men.
• Fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.

Lyrical Ballads: celebrating ordinary life

• Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity.
• Essential passions are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.
• In that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity.
• The feelings may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.
• The manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings.
• From the necessary character of rural occupations, the feelings are more easily comprehended, and are more durable.

Lyrical Ballads: Aim of Poetry

• Each of the poems has a worthy purpose.
• All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
• The aim of the poems is to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them the primary laws of our nature.
• The purpose is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature.

Lyrical Ballads: Nature

• The manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings.
• From the necessary character of rural occupations, the feelings are more easily comprehended, and are more durable.
• In that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Lyrical Ballads: Imagination

• The principal object proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life.
• The incidents and situations are related or described throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.
• At the same time, a certain coloring of imagination is thrown over the writing.
• Ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.

Lyrical Ballads: The Poet

• Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

Lyrical Ballads: “Old Man Travelling”

• Lyrical Ballads is populated by characters whose experiences of loss, rejection and neglect may be traced directly to the effects of conflict, industrialisation, agricultural reform and economic expansion.
• “Old Man Travelling" is subtitled “Animal tranquillity and decay, a sketch”.
• The little hedge-row birds,
• That peck along the road, regard him not.
• He travels on, and in his face, his step,
• His gait, is one expression; every limb,
• His look and bending figure, all bespeak
• A man who does not move with pain, but moves
• With thought—He is insensibly subdued
• To settled quiet: he is one by whom
• All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
• Long patience has such mild composure given,
• That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
• He hath no need. He is by nature led
• To peace so perfect, that the young behold
• With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
• —I asked him whither he was bound, and what
• The object of his journey; he replied
• "Sir! I am going many miles to take
• A last leave of my son, a mariner,
• Who from a sea-fight has been brought to
• Falmouth,
• And there is dying in an hospital."
• "Old Man Travelling" relates to the ideas expressed in the Preface.
• The central figure is an ordinary person.
• The setting is rural.
• The poem however is surprising, not predictable.
• Consider how the poet views and describes the man and how our ideas may change when we hear his own speech.