How well do you know Romantic poetry?

Overview of Romantic Poetry and its Characteristics

• Romantic poetry was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850.

• Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles, and songs.

• Romantic poetry is characterized by the emphasis on emotions, imagination, and nature, and the rejection of the objectivity of neoclassical poetry.

• Romantic poets include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake, Victor Hugo, and Alessandro Manzoni.

• The Sublime is one of the most important concepts in Romantic poetry, referring to language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary experience.

• Romantic poetry is also characterized by melancholy, medievalism, Hellenism, supernaturalism, and subjectivity.

• German Romanticism was the dominant intellectual movement in the philosophy, arts, and culture of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

• Romanticism in Poland was a literary, artistic, and intellectual period in the evolution of Polish culture, which began around 1820.

• Romanticism in Russia was a time of poetic talent, with Alexander Pushkin being considered the central representative of Romanticism in Russian literature.

• Romantic Spanish poetry was influenced by Germany and England and emphasized the power of human emotion and the use of myth and symbol.Romanticism in Poetry: A Global Overview

• Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer is considered the most important Romantic poet in Spain.

• The Romantic movement in Catalonia triggered the Catalan Renaissance, led by Jacint Verdaguer.

• The Swedish Romantic period, known as the Golden Age, was heavily influenced by German literature and emphasised the Vikings as heroic figures.

• Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement in the US that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s, rooted in English and German Romanticism, and was influenced by Indian religions.

• Walt Whitman, influenced by Transcendentalism, praised nature and the individual's role in it in his poetry.

• Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the US, but he disliked Transcendentalism.

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in the US in his time, but his popularity declined in the 20th century.

• Romanticism can be seen in the work of later American poets like Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Sylvia Plath, but they are associated with more recent movements.

• Romantic poetry is considered by some as a way for a better life, with more literate and articulate citizens.