Romantic literature in English
was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the Coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
The Romantic period was one of social change in England because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid growth of overcrowded industrial cities between 1798 and 1832. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, which involved enclosures that drove workers and their families off the land; and the Industrial Revolution, which provided jobs "in the factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steam-power". Indeed, Romanticism may be seen in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, though it was also a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. The French Revolution had an important influence on the political thinking of many Romantic figures at this time as well.
England
18th-century precursors
The Romantic movement in English literature of the early 19th century has its roots in 18th-century poetry, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. This includes the pre-Romantic graveyard poets from the 1740s, whose works are characterized by gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms". To this was added by later practitioners, a feeling for the "sublime" and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. These concepts are often considered precursors of the Gothic genre. Gothic poets include Thomas Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is "the best known product of this kind of sensibility"; William Cowper ; Christopher Smart ; Thomas Chatterton ; Robert Blair, author of The Grave, "which celebrates the horror of death"; and Edward Young, whose The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality is another "noted example of the graveyard genre". Other precursors of Romanticism are the poets James Thomson and James Macpherson.The sentimental novel or "novel of sensibility" developed during the second half of the 18th century. It celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction which began in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age. Sentimental novels relied on emotional response both from their readers and characters. Scenes of distress and tenderness are common, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models for refined, sensitive emotional effect. The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations. Famous sentimental novels in English include Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality, Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.
Foreign influences were the Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is another important influence. The changing landscape, brought about by the expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influence on the growth of the Romantic movement. The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts and the pollution of the environment led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialization, and an emphasis on the beauty and value of nature.
Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto created the Gothic fiction genre by combining elements of horror and romance. Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek by William Beckford and The Monk by Matthew Lewis were other notable early works in the gothic and horror literary genres. The first English short stories were gothic tales like Richard Cumberland's "remarkable narrative" The Poisoner of Montremos.
Romantic poetry
The physical landscape is prominent in the poetry of this period. The Romantics, and especially Wordsworth, are often described as "nature poets". However, these "nature poems" reveal wider concerns in that they are often meditations on "an emotional problem or personal crisis".The poet, painter and printmaker William Blake was an early writer of his kind. Largely disconnected from the major streams of the literature of his time, Blake was generally unrecognized during his lifetime but is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, "and profound and difficult 'prophecies'" such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Book of Urizen, Milton and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
After Blake, among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and journalist Thomas De Quincey. However, at the time, Walter Scott was the most famous poet. Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poem Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past.
The early Romantic poets brought a new form of emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic manifesto in English literature, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In it Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men", and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, though Coleridge contributed one of the great poems of English literature, the long Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the South Seas, and involves the symbolically significant slaying of an albatross. Coleridge is also especially remembered for Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: An Ode, 'Christabel', as well as the major prose work, Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge and Wordsworth, along with Carlyle, were major influences through Emerson, on American transcendentalism. Among Wordsworth's most important poems are Michael, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, Ode: Intimations of Immortality and the long, autobiographical epic The Prelude. The Prelude was begun in 1799, but published posthumously in 1850. Wordsworth's poetry is noteworthy for how he "inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects, and style by elevating humble and rustic life and the plain into the main subject and medium of poetry in general", and how, in Coleridge's words, he awakens in the reader a "freshness of sensation" in his depiction of familiar, commonplace objects.
Robert Southey was another of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843, although his fame has been long eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Thomas De Quincey was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an autobiographical account of his laudanum use and its effect on his life. William Hazlitt, friend of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, is another important essayist at this time, though today he is best known for his literary criticism, especially Characters of Shakespear's Plays.
Second generation
The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least "romantic" of the three, preferring "the brilliant wit of Pope to what he called the 'wrong poetical system' of his Romantic contemporaries". Byron achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings. Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". A trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe, but also a sharp satire against London society. The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels between 1809 and 1811. However, despite the success of Childe Harold and other works, Byron was forced to leave England for good in 1816 and seek asylum on the Continent, because, among other things, of his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Here he joined Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, with his secretary John William Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva, during the "Year Without a Summer". Polidori's The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. This short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. Between 1819 and 1824, Byron published his unfinished epic satire Don Juan, which, though initially condemned by the critics, "was much admired by Goethe who translated part of it".Shelley is perhaps best known for poems such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud, The Masque of Anarchy and Adonais, an elegy written on the death of Keats. Shelley's early profession of atheism, in the tract The Necessity of Atheism, led to his expulsion from Oxford, and branded him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalization and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time. Similarly, Shelley's 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry displayed a radical view of poetry, in which poets act as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world", because, of all of artists, they best perceive the undergirding structure of society. His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, philosopher William Godwin. Works like Queen Mab reveal Shelley "as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s." Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as later W. B. Yeats. Shelley's influential poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley's verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences.
Though John Keats shared Byron and Shelley's radical politics, "his best poetry is not political", but is especially noted for its sensuous music and imagery, along with a concern with material beauty and the transience of life. Among his most famous works are The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode to Psyche, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and the incomplete Hyperion, a "philosophical" poem in blank verse, which was "conceived on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost". Keats' letters "are among the finest in English" and important "for their discussion of his aesthetic ideas", including 'negative capability. Keats has always been regarded as a major Romantic, "and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion".