Literary Movements: 18th Century to Romanticism
18th Century Poetry Characteristics
- Imitation of the classics
- Hierarchy of genres
- Rationalism
- Skepticism
- Urbanity, sophistication, and cosmopolitanism
- Preoccupation with the here and now
- Aristocratic taste
- Use of personification and mythological references and figures of Rome and Greece
- Critical and analytical spirit
- The purpose of literature was to instruct through pleasure, thereby uniting aesthetic and didactic purposes
- Greatest virtue in art was a universal significance
- Conversational ease, restraint, and dignity
Samuel Coleridge: Imagination
Primary imagination: The capability by which one perceives oneself and the impression of something. Perceiving something shakes you.
Secondary imagination: Thinking, being aware of it, and being conscious about that. An object is connected with an idea.
Gerard Hopkins: Inscape and Instress
Inscape: The uniqueness of each created thing or person.
Instress: How that individuality of any thing or person is perceived and experienced by the observer.
Keats: Negative Capability
Negative capability is the most important statement in Keats’s letters. His insistence upon the impersonality of the poet. Negative capability is conceived by Keats as when a man is capable of being in doubts, uncertainties, or mysteries… without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Byron and the Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero embodies Byron’s own characteristics. The untamed vigor and masculinity of Romanticism were displayed in his demands for freedom, liberalism, and individualism. For him, there is only one essential subject: himself. Faith and cynicism, rationalism and Romantic illusion, seriousness and flippancy, cruelty and benevolence were, among others, the opposites that made him appear very complicated. He was independent of any authority of power, and his own mind generates the values by which he lives. He created for himself a moral code beyond the inherited standards of good and evil. Byron was characterized by his romantic pessimism. The Byronic characters were autonomous and remorseful. The characters were identified with incest and suicide. Byron and gothic fiction were both tainted with incest.
Robert Burns: Scottish Poet
He wrote his poems in English and Scottish dialect and he has a popular poetry. He defends the French Revolution and Scottish nationalism too. He was a proletarian voice in the revolt against neoclassicism. He promotes the glorification of the humble and simple life. He was a pre-romantic poet and for those poets, nature is very important and it is not a simple decorative tool. For this reason, he was very interested in man’s interdependency with the rhymes of nature. He emphasizes so much in the essential goodness of life. His poems were focused on the satire of Scottish religious life.
John Donne: Metaphysical Poetry
Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the personality is multiple, quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His love poetry is related with such a frustrated careerist. He belittles the public world, defiantly asserting the superior validity of his private experience, and frequently he erodes the traditional dichotomy of body and soul. (Metaphysical characteristics).