Elements in the Romantic Period

Adapted from:

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html

Element 1

Imagination

Imagination

• Imagination became the most important aspect of the Romantic Period.

• This was a significant contrast to the Restoration, which focused on the power of reason.

• The Romantics believed the imagination was the ultimate “shaping” or creative power.

• Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. It also helps humans understand and form a perception of reality.

Imagination Part 2

• Wordsworth suggests we “not only perceive the world around us, but also, in part, create it.”

• Paradox and bringing opposite ideas into a unifying whole was a central idea for the Romantics.

• It ties other concepts together, because imagination enables us to “read” nature as a system of symbols.

Element 2

Nature

Nature

• Nature was often presented as a work of art, created through divine imagination.

• Nature was seen as a symbolic language.

• Nature was seen as – a healing power, – a source of subject and image, – a refuge from the artificial constructs of

civilization

Nature Part 2

• Everything was seen as organic, replacing the rationalist fascination with the machine.

• Focus on describing natural phenomenon accurately.

• “Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.”

Element 3

Symbolism and Myth

Symbolism and Myth

• Symbolism and myth were extremely important in the Romantic’s understanding of art.

• Symbols were the way of understanding the aesthetic portrayal of nature’s language.

• Symbols were valuable because they could simultaneously suggest many things and were superior to one-to-one comparisons.

• Symbols express the “inexpressible”—the infinite—through the available resources of language.

Elements 4, 5, and 6

Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

Emotion and Lyric Poetry

• Romantics called for greater attention to the emotions instead of logical reason.

• This caused a very important shift when focused on poetry.

• According to the Romantics, art’s main purpose was not to mirror the external world, but to illuminate the world within.

• This led to prominence in first-person poetry, with the poet becoming the speaker more than developing a persona.

The Self

• “Wordsworth’s Prelude and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet’s mind (the development of self) as subject for an “epic” enterprise made up of lyric components.”

• The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantics.

• Developed the type of artist-as-hero.

Element 7

Individualism: The Romantic Hero

The Romantic Hero

• Romantics preferred boldness over restraint.

• Romantics preferred suggestiveness over clarity.

• Romantics preferred experimentation over the “rules” of literature.

• Romantics promoted the idea of the artist as “inspired.”