1. The Romantic spirit Beowulf 1798, publication of the Lyrical Ballads
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012

2. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818
1. The word ‘Romantic’
The Romantic Age
the period in which new ideas and attitudes arose in reaction to the dominant 18th-century ideals of order, calm, harmony, balance,
rationality
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818
Performer - Culture&Literature

3. 2. Romanticism vs Enlightenment
Enlightened trends
Emphasised reason and judgement.
Focused on society as a whole.
Followed authority.
Interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends
Emphasised imagination and emotion.
Valued individuals.
Looked for freedom.
Represented common people.
Interested in the supernatural.
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4. 3. English Romanticism English Romanticism The Romantics:
a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason.
influenced by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution.
The Romantics:
expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions;
placed the individual at the centre of art;
argued that poetry should be free from all rules.
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5. John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection
4. The Romantics’ key ideas
Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being.
Use of creative imagination.
Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect.
A new view of the artist as an individual creator.
Fascination with the irrational, the past, the mysterious, the exotic.
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection
Performer - Culture&Literature

6. 5. The Romantic nature Opposed to reason.
A substitute for traditional religion.
A vehicle for self-consciousness.
A source of sensations.
A provocation to a state of imagination and vision.
An expressive language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self.
J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay, c ; Musée du Louvre, Paris
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7. 6. The Romantic imagination
A creative power superior to reason.
Shaped the poets’ fleeting visions into concrete forms.
A dynamic, active, rather than passive power.
Allows human beings to ‘read’ nature as a system of symbols.
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery
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8. 7. The Lake poets
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England.
In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.
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9. 8. The manifesto of English Romanticism
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
The poet
Themes
Language
Linked to nature, emotions, feelings
Interested
in the lives
of the humble
Nature,
memory, children
Simple, common
used to liberate imagination
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10. 9. The second generation of Romantic poets
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats
died very young and away from home;
experienced political disillusionment reflected in their poetry;
were linked to individualism, escapism.
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11. 10. The Romantics on nature
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Byron
Shelley
Keats
a source of joy
inspiration and knowledge
a mother and a moral guide
a universal force
the representation of God’s will and love
the companion of his loneliness
the counterpart of his stormy feelings when it was violently upset
a source of enjoyment and inspiration
pervaded by a guiding power leading man to love
the creative mind benefits from the beauty of the natural landscape
a kind of muse to the poet’s artistic quest
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12. 11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
In the Napoleonic era:
the British navy dominated the sea;
the French army dominated the European continent;
the great hero of the British navy was Admiral Horatio Nelson
defeated the French-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain in 1805.
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13. 11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
The total defeat of Napoleon in at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium where the British troops, commanded by Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.
Their consequences
the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and Malta was of strategic interest;
enormous financial costs;
Britain was on the verge of starvation, bankruptcy and evolution.
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14. 12. The Luddites
Poverty
Deteriorating working conditions
Mechanical looms and spinners replacing skilled craftsmen
led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of
They caused so much alarm that the government made machine-breaking punishable by death.
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15. 12. The Luddites
In 1819, during a peaceful public meeting in Manchester, soldiers fired into a crowd and eleven people were killed  the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’.
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16. 13. The Regency The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency.
The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted as monarch during the illness of his father George III ( ).
In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the new age of reforms.  
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