1. Revolution of language
“Lyrical Ballads” 1798
Love theme
19th century
Nature
Imagination
Sublime
English Romanticism
The Romantic hero
Subjectivism
Revolution of language
Revival of the past
The Romantic poet

2. Romanticism 19th century French Revolution Industrial Revolution
Ideas of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”
Industrial Revolution
The Romantic poets reacted against the spreading industrialisation, that led to a society in which men's individuality had been denied.
Rousseau’s idea of Freedom
American Revolution

3. 1760-1780: European Romanticism started in Germany with the “Sturm und Drang” movement
1798: English Romanticism

4. Coleridge was going to deal with the supernatural.
1798
Wordsworth was going to deal with “ordinary things” but throwing a new light on them.
Coleridge was going to deal with the supernatural.
The “Lyrical Ballads” are the manifesto of English Romanticism, written by W. Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge

5. The Romantic Poets The leading English poets were William Blake
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William Wordsworth
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John Keats
George G. Byron
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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6. The Romantic Poets
Most of the Romantic Poets were socially and politically committed.
They moved away from the poetic diction of the past.

7. Against social restraints
THE ROMANTIC HERO
A Rebel
An Outcast
Against social restraints
His past is unknown
He’s of noble origin

8. Imagination
The power of a poet's mind to see beyond the surface of reality;
“This power reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite discordant qualities” (S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria).
The Love theme
Importance of feelings and emotions.
Subjectivism
Importance of personality: everybody has an individual interpretation of the world;
“In the capitalist world the individual faced society alone, without an intermediary” (E. Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach).

9. REVOLUTION in LANGUAGE
Use of ordinary language which everybody could understand.
The Romantic poets abbandoned formalised diction.
REVIVAL OF the past
Rediscovery of previous forms like sonnets, odes and songs.
Interest in folklore, fairy tales and orality, ballads, lyrical dramas, mythological poems, lyrical fragments and autobiographies in verse was renewed.

10. NATURE
“Romanticism rejected mechanistic conception, because it reduce man to a passive observer of his world. Nature was a living organic structure, which it took more than reason to understand. Imagination and the moral sense were equally, or more, important, in understanding it.”
O.Edwards G.Martin, A. Scharf, Romanticism
Nature is a friend of the poet in which he reflects himself
Poets consider nature as a shelter.
Caspar David Friedrich,
Viandante sul mare di nebbia

11. SUBLIME
Edmund Burke explained how the Sublime originates:
The Sublime is a feeling generated by something frightening but at the same time attracting.
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear […]. Whatever is fitted in any sort to exite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is source of the sublime; that is,it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
E.Burke,Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful