The Romantics

• Romanticism is the name given to a dominant movement in literature and other arts.
• The period of 1770s to mid 1800s is associated with Romanticism.
• Romanticism is regarded as a transforming artistic style and practice.
• The term 'Romanticism' covers a wide and varied range of artists and practices.
• Romanticism is a retrospective term, applied by historians.
• Romanticism is a European phenomenon, particularly in Britain, France and Germany.
• There was also an extent of an American version of the movement in Romanticism.
• Romanticism developed in reaction to the dominant style of the preceding period, the 18th century which is described as the Augustan Age to emulate the culture of the Roman emperor Augustus 27BCE-14CE.
• Classical standards of order, harmony and objectivity were preferred in the 18th century.
• In literature, Greek and Roman authors were taken as models, producing translations or imitations of poetry in classical forms in the 18th century.
• In its early years, Romanticism was often associated with radical and revolutionary political ideologies, in reaction against a conservative mood of European society.
• Central features of Romanticism include emotional and imaginative spontaneity, importance of self-expression and individual feeling, religious response to nature, capacity of wonder, and interest in 'primitive' forms of art, work of the early poets written in ancient ballads and folksongs.
• Romanticism also includes interest in outcasts of society.
• The idea of a poet as a visionary figure, with an important role to play as prophet politically and religiously, is central to Romanticism.
• William Blake 1757-1827, a visionary poet, is considered pre-romantic.
• William Wordsworth 1770-1850, the leading poet of the lake district, was associated with the centrality of self and love of nature.
• John Keats 1795-1821, a London poet, was known for his odes, sonnets, and letters, containing many reflections on poetry and work of imagination.
• Robert Burns 1759-1796, worked as a ploughman and farm labourer, was interested in early Scots ballads and folksong.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834, Wordsworth's closest colleague/collaborator, was influenced by contemporary ideas of science and philosophy.
• Thomas de Quincy 1785-1859, the youngest, was best known as an essayist and critic, and wrote a series of memories of lake poets.
• Charles Lamb 1775-1834, a poet but best known for his essays and literary criticism, was close to Coleridge.
• Mary Shelley 1797-1851, who was associated with some of these figures, Coleridge, Lamb, and de Quincy, was more associated with the second generation of romantics: George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• The second generation of romantics dominated the romantic canon, were most republished, read, anthologised, written and taught, however, a revised romantic canon has emerged, laying more emphasis on women, working class, and politically radical writers of the period.
• Walter Scott 1771-1832, developed an interest in old tales of border and early European poetry.
• Robert Southey 1774-1834, a writer of poetry and prose settled in the lake district, was poet laureate in 1813, but his work was later mocked by Byron.