2 The fundamental tenets of Romanticism

Dr. Neeru Tandon

1.0: Learning Outcome:

In this module we will understand the origin, nature, concept and tendencies of Romanticism. The fundamental tenets of Romanticism will be discussed in detail along with the short notes on major writers of the era.

Contents:

1.1: Introduction: Romanticism

1.2: What is Romanticism

1.3: Romantic Originality

1.4: Importance of Emotion

1.5: Distinction Between Imagination and Fancy

1.6: Romanticism Around The World

1.7: Dark Romanticism

1.8: Tenets of Romanticism

1.9: Did you know

1.10: A Quick Recap

1.11: Famous Romantic Writers

1.12: Decline of Romanticism

1.13: Summary

1.14: Check your progress

1.15: MCQ

1.16: Suggested Readings

1.1: Introduction: Romanticism, originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, was a literary, artistic and Intellectual movement (from 1800 to 1850). Critics label it as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism revived medievalism against the rational and Classical ideal models. We know it as Wordsworth’s poetic encounter with nature and himself in The Prelude, we value Coleridge’s literary theories about the reconciliation of opposites, we cherish the romantic posturing and irony of Byron, we can’t forget the imagery of Keats, and the transcendental lyricism of Shelley, even the Gothicism of Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters is an inevitable part of Romanticism.

1.2: What is Romanticism: Romanticism was a movement in the field of literature and art against the Neoclassicism. “Romantic” in English (‘Romantique’ in French) was adjective of praise for natural phenomena, but it ‘never incorporated the sexual connotation’. This term was first applied to literature in Germany. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), “I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns. Friedrich Schlegel was a German Poet who for the very first time used the term romantic for 19th century literature. He defined it as, ‘Literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.’’ Thus the work of art became an expression of a ‘voice from within’, as the leading Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) put it. –Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.The Romantic Movement promoted ‘creative intuition and imagination’ as the basis of all art; Literature, painting and music.

1.3: Romantic Originality: Romantic Originality was the concept of the artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of “creation from nothingness”, which is key to Romanticism. One must note that to be derivative was totally prohibited. In romantic thought, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science– Inspiration for the romantic approach initially came from two great shapers of thought,

1.4: Importance of Emotion: The German painter Caspar David Friedrich stressed on the importance of emotion and said that “the artist’s feeling is his law”. We can understand it more clearly by quoting Wordsworth. To William Wordsworth, poetry should begin as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions,” which the poet then “recollect[s] in tranquility”. Artist’s imagination is important as the content of the art piece will come from it only and there should be less interference from “artificial” rules.

1.5:Distinction Between Imagination and Fancy: Coleridge divided the “mind” into two distinct faculties: “Imagination” and “Fancy.”Coleridge made the distinction between Fancy and the Imagination based on the fact that ‘Fancy was concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind’ and Imagination described the “mysterious power”. It also determined “the various operations of constructive and inventive genius.”

Coleridge has distributed imagination into two categories: primary and secondary. Primary imagination is “the living power and the prime agent of human perception”. Through it we identify the world around us; it works through our senses and is usual to all human beings. Secondary imagination is the poetic vision, the faculty that a poet has “to idealize and unify”. When we are in a state of trance, images do not appear secluded, but linked according to laws of their own. The imagination is juxtaposed with fancy, which is inferior to it.

DID YOU KNOW

• “The Romantics” was first used by later Victorian critics to designate the writers of previous time and not by earlier Romantics themselves.
• Poetry was contemplated the most important literary genre of the Romantic period, although novelists embraced many similar themes.
• New approaches of production and distribution made the written word available to more people in more places.
• “The big six”— Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—were generally referred as Romantics.
• The heroic element mixed with revolutionary idealism created an impassioned Romantic style, which appeared in the stir of the French Revolution as a reaction against the restrained academic art.
• Melancholy was quite the catchword for the Romantics.
• The ‘poetic diction’ of the Neo-Classical Age was completely avoided and the language of the ordinary people became the language of Romantic poetry.
• Although Romanticism degenerated near about 1830, it continued to influence the reading public for a longer time.

1.6: ROMANTICISM AROUND THE WORLD: Towards the end of 18th century in France and Germany, literary taste began to change.From classical and neoclassical conventions people moved to science and reason.Doubts and pessimism now confronted the hope and optimism of the 18th century. People felt a intense concern for the issues like existence, death, and eternity. It was in this setting that Romanticism was born.

Spanish Romanticism (1810-30)

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was the leader of Spanish Romanticism. People know him for his set of 11 small paintings, popularly known as Fantasy and Invention.

French Romanticism (1815-50)

Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) was the first major Romantic painter in France. He was associated with the academic style of painting. Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) was another important pioneer of the Romantic art movement in France. He is famous for masterpiece Raft of the Medusa.

Romanticism in England (c.1820-1850)

Turner is an important forerunner of modern abstract painting. The Romantics, including Pre-Raphaelites, focused on emotion and fantasy. The realists sticked to a more naturalistic idiom having Realism and Impressionism.Other famous English Romantic painters were William Blake (1757-1827) and John Martin (1789-1854),who had a great role to play in the Romantic era of England.

Characteristics of American Romanticism

•   Places faith in the imagination

•  Shuns civilization and seeks nature

•  Prefers innocence to sophistication

•  Values feeling over reason

• Fights for individual’s freedom and worth

•  Trusts past wisdom, not progress

•  Reflects on nature to gain spiritual wisdom

•  Finds beauty and truth in supernatural or imaginative realms.

• Sees poetry at the highest work of the imagination

• Is inspired by myth, legend, and folklore

1.7:Dark Romanticism:

Dark romanticism is developed from the transcendental philosophical movement popular in America.Dark Romantic works are notably less optimistic than transcendental texts about mankind, nature, and divinity. Representative of dark romanticism are Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. They present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction and nature in a much more sinister light than does Transcendentalism. Dark Romanticism presents that individuals are not changing for the better.

1.8: The Tenets of Romanticism included Imagination, Independence a return to nature; strong belief in the humanity, the advancement of justice for all and need for emotions. They felt the need to invest in senses and emotions, rather than reason and intellect. Other points to be noted were spontaneity, freedom from rules, devotion to beauty, worship of nature, love for the past, emphasis on myths and mysticism etc.

ROMANTICISM: Its Basic Tenets

1. Imagination
2. Individuality and Personal Freedom
3. Emphasis on Emotion and Intuition
4. Gothicism: Spiritual/Supernatural Elements
5. Glorification, Personification and Idealization of Nature:
6. Interest in the Rustic/Pastoral Life.
7. Rejection of Reason and Enlightenment
8. Primitivism: Celebration of the Simple Life
9. Glorification of Nationalism and Patriotism
10. Use of Common Language and Diction

1.   Imagination: Imagination was the keystone of the writers of Romantic era. The Romantics wrote their works on the basis of their imaginations, dreams, and thoughts. A true logical link was noticed between imagination and an appreciation for aesthetic beauty. ‘Coleridge’s dual definition of the Imagination, combined with Wordsworth’s comments on Romantic literature, is can be seen into three simple functions: Essentially, the Imagination is a mode of memory, a mode of perception, and a mode of projection.’

In the words of William Wordsworth, ‘poetry is the first and last of all knowledge’. The phenomenon of imagination is the essence or core of romantic poetry. According to romantic poets, it is possible to attain a transcendental experience by means of imagination. It takes us near to the spiritual truth. The imagination of the Romantics allowed them to foresee a better world as well as helped them to make their poetry visible to the reader.

2.  Individuality and Personal Freedom: Individualism is one of the important characteristics of  romantic  poetry.Bold   and   courageous  heroes   are  presented   as   individuals  who       were responsible to God alone.They loved their personal freedom. This individualism permitted rebellion against established rules and authority.

3.Emphasis on Emotions and Intuition: Romanticism promoted antinationalism and rebellion against the strict forms and the emphasis placed on reason during the Enlightenment. The Romanticist belief was that virtue and truth can be found easily by the “heart” than by the “head”. Truth could be found within oneself or perceived through one’s inner feelings and intuition.

When it comes to romantic poetry, reason and logic take a backseat. The one thing which rules the world of romanticism is emotion. Romantic poetry is one of the best means to set free one’s emotions through words. The overflow of emotions depicted through romantic poetry transcends the boundaries of logical reasoning. Spontaneity in romantic poetry arises from an emotional outflow. Poetry expressed emotions: William Wordsworth’s definition of Romantic poetry is “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

4.Gothicism: Spiritual or Supernatural Element : People developed a distinct taste for the Gothicism and supernatural elements. Gothicism flourished in the 19th century. The movement saw a revival in the 1740s when Horace Walpole purchased a grand estate and refashioned it in the “Gothick” style. He made the building quite a scary place by adding towers, arched windows, and steeples. Many houses in the surrounding areas did the same and supported this movement in their own way.. It’s classified by highlighting on the surreptitious elements. Conceptions such as magic, hidden passages, bloody hands, screams, and other supernatural creatures and happenings were all supports the Gothic literary movement. Walpole published a novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, which promoted Gothic movement in the true sense. The supernatural, the mysterious, death, the grotesque, the dark and horror were dear to Romanticists. They felt that these things were natural and there was an unacknowledged beauty in such things. Writers like Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen also used Gothic elements in their writings.

5. Glorification,Personification and Idealization of Nature: A romanticist’s observation of nature is that of an organic phenomenon. Nature is also viewed as a setting or place, which offers relief from the man-made world that we occupy. Romanticism places a strong emphasis on awildness or the dreamlike qualities of nature. Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment view of nature as a precise, harmonious whole. Nature to the Romanticist is divine, spiritual as well as life-like, occasionally changing according to the Laws of Nature.. A romantic poet can let go his/her imagination in the course of decoding natural spectacles. It is said that romantic poetry associated with nature is a kind of a contemplative process. The rationalists managed to link nature with some kind of machine.

6.Interest in the Rustic or Pastoral Life: Romantic poetry frequently comments on the pastoral life, culture and traditions. In most cases, the relaxed and slow-paced pastoral life of shepherds is depicted in these poems. Romantic poetry retains this item in order to present before readers the complications of life in a simple manner.

7.   Rejection of Reason and Enlightenment: To the Romanticist, rationalism had been too concerned with reason; classicism, with old forms; deism, with a cold, uninspired, impersonal approach to God. Romanticism rejected the concept that natural law could be found through human reason, and it further rejected the Enlightenment notion that society should be reformed by scientific methods.

8.Primitivism:Celebration of the Simple Life A belief in the goodness and value of the unspoiled naturally created state of individuals and groups. For example, children and savages were regarded as heroic and admirable in the Romantic world view. Also, the artistic productions of the “uncivilized” population, the folklore and folk art of the peasantry, were highly esteemed for their natural, unspoiled quality. It follows that each of the artist’s productions will be unique. Therefore, Romanticism insists on novelty and originality in art, in contrast to the Neoclassical view that the measure of artistic excellence is to be found in the conformation of particular works to known, established-in-the-past standards of artistic goodness.

9.Glorification of Nationalism, Patriotism: Romanticism emphasized folk tales, traditional costumes, country and village life, and national histories, although the history promoted was an idealistic, not a realistic one.. Romanticists expressed a vital optimism about life and the future. Romantic nationalists were fanatical patriots and passionate revolutionaries. The Romantic hero played an important part in the nationalist rebellions of the early nineteenth century.

10.Use of Common Language and Diction: Romantics developed a new style of the language. They used more natural rhythms and expression in place of the grandiloquent and pompous language of the eighteenth century. The relinquishment of the heroic couplet in favour of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and many experimental verse forms cannot be overlooked. In poetic forms, rhymed stanzas were replaced by Blank verse, which was unrhymed but still rhythmic. Its purpose was to heighten conversational speech. Poetry came to be regarded as the spontaneous expression of the poet’s own subjective feelings and did not confirm to the poetic conventions of classical doctrines. Poets have completely avoided the use of ‘Heroic Couplet’ and replaced it with simpler verse forms like the ballads, which belonged to the English rural Folk. In fact the ‘Ballad Revival’ is said to have sparked off the English Romantic Movement. Robert Burns uses his Scottish dialect to support the “common everyday language” of the age. William Blake supports the emphasis of emotion in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Poetry focused upon common language and resisted poetic diction of past: Wordsworth claims in his Preface to his Lyrical Ballads that his poems “choose incidents and situations from common life and relate and describe them throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

1.9 Points to be Noted

• Intuition is favoured over reason
•  Focus on the imagination, emotional intensity, spontaneity, the individual, freedom, and nature as a source of escapism and spirituality
•  Romantic heroes are usually “common” men who will often remain away from the “corruption” of civilization and seek truth in Nature
• Helped instil proper gender behaviour for men and women
•  Romantic texts often contain elements of the supernatural or mysterious (dreams, visions, ghosts, irrational/absurd plot points with no explanation, etc.)
•  Romantics believed in the natural goodness of man; that man in a state of nature would behave well, but is hindered by civilization (The “Noble Savage”)

One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry.

MIMESIS: Mimesis (/maɪˈmiːsəs/; Ancient Greek: (mīmēsis), from (mīmeisthai), “to imitate,” from (mimos), “imitator, actor”) is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation and mimicry. The concepts of imitation and mimesis attempted to theorize the essence of artistic expression.’’In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings – that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic presentations.

Mimesis indicates how the self-sufficient and symbolically originated man-made world can relate to any given “real”or significant world.’That’s why Mimesis is essential to the relationship between art and nature.Michael Taussig describes the mimetic faculty as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.”

The mimetic text ‘’lacks an original model and its inherent intertextuality demands deconstruction.” Mimesis thus resists theory and constructs a world of illusion, appearances, aesthetics, and images in which existing worlds are appropriated, changed, and re-interpreted. Classification of literary theories

The classification used by Abrams

According to M H Abrams Literary theories can be divided into four main groups:

Mimetic Theories (relationship between the Work and the Universe)

Pragmatic Theories (relationship between the Work and the Audience) Expressive Theories (relationship between the Work and the Artist)

Objective Theories (interested in close reading of the Work.

1.10:   A QUICK RECAP

Wordsworth was known as the “Father of English Romanticism.”

Romantic poetry was often written in common everyday language for all to relate, not just the upper class.

Nature was a focus of many famous poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Charles Baudelaire quoted that “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of neither subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Others feel that it emphasizes individualism, freedom from rules, spontaneity, solitary life rather than life in society, and the love of beauty and nature.

Victor Hugo’s phrase “liberalism in literature,” meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas.

Romanticism is not known for the idealization of rural life (Goldsmith); enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and art; unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm for the uncivilized or “natural”; interest in human rights and realism.

Romanticism provides an escape from modern realities. Nature is a concept of divinity.

1.11: Famous Romantic Writers

For the Romantic Era in England, there are six writers who dominate the age. They are listed here in chronological order based on birth:

WilliamBlake (1757 – 1827)

Blake was a great poet, a greater painter and a master engraver. Blake is famous not only for his highly visual poems, but for the illuminated plates on which he printed his poems. The poems often function in pairs, one from the perspective of childlike “innocence,” the other from the perspective of disillusioned “experience.” Blake was much ahead of his time and his greatest contribution lies in his building up a personal mythology of creation and imagination.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Wordsworth is one of the domineering figures of British Romanticism, popularly known as ‘father of English Romanticism’. He settled in the Lake District in north-western England with his close friend S T Coleridge, hence also known as ‘The Lake Poets.’ In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge anonymously published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads. Second edition of Lyrical Ballads was published under Wordsworth’s name alone in which he added a preface. This preface is often considered as a manifesto of Romantic ideology. In his poems Wordsworth tried to show the natural dignity, goodness, and the worth of the common man.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): Coleridge’s role in Lyrical Ballads is often overshadowed by Wordsworth, but Coleridge’s poetic skill stands on its own. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a narrative poem that is a mix of traditional ballad form, adventure story, and tale of spiritual redemption. “Kubla Khan‘s ` back story is worth mentioning: Coleridge fell asleep while high on opium dissolved in alcohol. He had a crazy dream in which he wrote a few hundred lines of poetry, woke up claiming to remember everything he had written in the dream and started writing it in real life, only to be interrupted by a knock on his door after recording about 50 lines. The knock on his door caused him to forget everything else.

Lord Byron (1788–1824): Lord Byron is one of the few British Romantic writers to achieve widespread fame during his lifetime. Byron was a good friend with Percy B. Shelley, but he really disliked Wordsworth and Coleridge. In fact, Byron’s poetry bears little resemblance to that of the Lake Poets. Its style and form is much more similar to British poetry of the 18th century.

PercyByssheShelley (1792–1822): Percy Bysshe Shelley was in many ways a stereotypical degenerate artist. He was a great romantic who inspired many. His poems have almost all the characteristics of romantic literature like imagination, love for nature, emotions, pictorial imagery etc. Shelley’s first mature work, Queen Mab, was printed in 1813, but not distributed due to its inflammatory subject matter. It was not until 1816, with the appearance of Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, and Other Poems—a visionary and semi-autobiographical work—that he earned recognition as a serious poet. Shelley’s next lengthy work, Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City, is an account of a bloodless revolution led by a brother and sister. It was immediately suppressed by the printer because of its controversial content, and Shelley subsequently revised the work as The Revolt of Islam, minimizing its elements of incest and political revolution. In 1819 Shelley wrote two of his most ambitious works, the verse dramas Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. In Prometheus Unbound. Shelley seems to have been rebellious by nature. He was particularly fascinated by the Gothic tradition. Shelley died in 1822, 30 years old, and the circumstances around his death and cremation were truly befitting a romantic rebel.

John Keats: (1795 – 1821)

Keats was the prodigy of the Romantics: ‘Romantic, Escapist and a pure poet of Nature’. He died at the age of 25. During his brief career, he was stubbornly insistent on maintaining his artistic independence and originality. He refused to befriend Percy Shelley because he apprehended that Shelly might influence his writing. He is best known for his sonnets and odes, particularly “Ode to a Nightingale” and Ode on a Grecian Urn.” He is also well known for his love of the classics of antiquity, which often filters into his poetry. He sought an escape in the past. The ancient Greeks and middle Ages attract his imagination. Keats’ themes are romantic in nature. Most of his poetry is devoted to the quest of beauty, love, chivalry, adventure and pathos. He loved pure nature and beauty was Keats’ religion. Keats was true romantic poet, because his attention was not only beauty but also truth. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

1.12The Decline of Romanticism: By about the middle of the 19th century, romanticism began to give way to new literary movements: the Parnassians and the symbolist movement in poetry, and realism and naturalism.

1.13: SUMMARY

The use of romanticism in literature appeals to our dreamy inner-self. It helps us transcend the boundaries that are set by rational thinking. It helps us understand the wholesome truth instead of just making conclusions on what we see or derive by logical reasoning. There are so many things in this world beyond our understanding. We can say that the urge to known the unknown is expressed in the form of romantic poetry.

All sorts of poetry deals with beauty in one way or the other, but romantic poetry goes a step ahead and imparts strangeness to the beauty. For Example Keats sees beauty in ordinary things of nature. The nightingale is, for Keats, the symbol of unlimited joy, infinite happiness and universal spirit of beauty.

The fundamental characteristic of Romantic Poetry may be summed up with Imagination, passion, love of Nature, simplicity of expression and use of language of the masses and not the classes. Lyric in place of mockery and satire was their forte. A sense of mystery surrounding simple objects in their poetry labels their time as a Renaissance of wonder. As Shelley said:

‘’The desire of the moth for the star

Of the night for the morrow

The devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow”

Reference

•  M.H. Abrams. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” In Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness. NY: Norton, 1970.
• Jon Klancher. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1987. [Introduction and Chapter 5] Clifford Siskin.
• Stuart  Curran.  “The  I  Altered.”  In  Mellor,  ed.  Romanticism  and  Feminism.  Bloomington:
• Indiana UP, 1988. Claudia L. Johnson. Equivocal Beings. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995.
• Elizabeth Fay. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Thomas Keymer, and Jon Mee, eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830. NY: Cambridge UP, 2004.
• Nicholas Roe, ed. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. NY: Oxford UP, 2005.