The Age of Romanticism

The Romantic Period

● Considered as a movement, holding a significant place in the history
of the English literature.
● It started with the publication of lyrical ballads in 1798.
● The poetry of the Romantic revival is a revolt against the poetry of the
Classical age.
● Reason no longer held the high place and it is taken over by
imagination, emotion, and individual sensibility.
Romanticism
● Difficult to give an accurate definition.
● is a doctrine which holds that art and literature should be free from classical
and neo-classical rules and constraints.
● “Romanticism is the extra-ordinary development of imaginative sensibility.”
● “Romanticism is the addition of strangeness to beauty.”
● “Romanticism is the renaissance of wonder.”
● “One poet is romantic because he falls in love; another romantic because he
sees a ghost; another romantic because he hears a cuckoo; another romantic
because he is reconciled to the church.”
Salient Features
● High imagination
● Love for the primitiveness of nature and spontaneity
● Interest in the remote or love for the past
● Simplicity in expression
● Revolutionary zeal
● Individualism
● Supernaturalism
● Subjectivity
● Medievalism
● Love for freedom and liberty
● Predominance of lyricism
Salient Features
● All romantic literature is subjective, as it is an expression of the inner urges of
the artist.
● It does not care for rules and regulation but gives free expression to their
emotion.
● Romantic poetry is often pessimistic in tone, or gives emphasis on
introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness.
● Romanticism is a revolt against all artificiality.
Notable Authors:
● William Wordsworth (The Prelude)
● Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kubla Khan)
● Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
● Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)
● Lord Byron (Don Juan)
● John Keats (Endymion)
References:
Literaturemini (2018). What is Romanticism? Retrieved November 27, 2020, from
https://www.literaturemini.com/2018/08/salient-feature-of-romanticism.html

Characteristics of Romantic Literature (n.d.). Retrieved November 27, 2020, from

sturgeonenglish.com/uploads/1/3/6/0/13602064/rom.lit.char.pdf

Cliffsnotes (n.d.). About the romantic period. Retrieved November 27, 2020, from
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/k/keats-poems/about-the-romantic-period