Romantic Literary Movement: Authors and Works
Romanticism: A Literary Revolution (1798-1850)
Romanticism, as a literary movement, spanned from 1798, marked by the publication of Lyrical Ballads, to sometime between the First Reform Bill of 1832 and Wordsworth’s death in 1850. Amidst political upheaval in Europe and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, this era witnessed a dismantling of rigid societal structures and established worldviews. Emphasis shifted to the individual’s experience and subjective interpretation, rather than dictates of the church or tradition.
Key Characteristics of Romantic Literature
- Emphasis on the dream world, the inner self, and visionary, often fantastic, imagery.
- Growing skepticism of established religion and a turn towards pantheism (the belief that God is immanent in the created world).
- Celebration of the individual and the value of personal experience.
- Introduction of the concept of the sublime: a powerful emotional experience blending awe, magnificence, and horror.
- Elevation of feeling and emotion over logic and analysis.
For Romantics, poetry was considered the highest form of literature. Novels were often viewed as inferior, sensationalistic, even by avid readers. Most novels of the time were written by women, leading to their being widely regarded as a threat to serious intellectual culture. Despite this, some of Britain’s most celebrated novelists emerged during this period, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. The era also saw the flourishing of some of the greatest poets in the English language: the first generation of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, followed by Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Major Romantic Authors
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England, the youngest daughter of a clergyman. Her six novels, set in the provincial world of the comfortable, rural middle class, were often based on her observations of people she knew and her keen understanding of human nature. The novels depict young women entering society, navigating mistakes and confusion, but ultimately finding their way to a happy marriage. Austen began writing as a teenager, initially sharing her work only with family and friends. She published anonymously. Though not widely known in her time, she soon gained a reputation for her precision, irony, and delicate touch. Her best-known works are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emma (1816). She influenced many later writers, including Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Austen’s books remain enduring classics, widely read for pleasure in the twenty-first century. She died from illness on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, England.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Artist and visionary poet William Blake, born November 28, 1757, in London, England, to a hosier, was apprenticed at age fifteen to the engraver James Basire. Blake made drawings at Westminster Abbey for Basire. In 1783, Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed, and in 1789, he engraved Thel and The Songs of Innocence. The increasing turmoil caused by the French Revolution and the war between Britain and France influenced Blake to engrave America (1793) and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). The following year, he produced the combined Songs of Innocence and Experience, as well as Europe and The First Book of Urizen.
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
George Gordon Byron was born January 22, 1788, in London, England, inheriting the title of sixth Lord Byron at age ten. He grew up at the family estate near Nottingham, Newstead Abbey, and was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. His first publication, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was based on a tour of Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey he took between 1809 and 1811. The work was immediately successful, and he followed it with a series of tales featuring exotic Middle Eastern settings and hero-villains.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born October 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England, the youngest child of a clergyman and his wife. At ten, he entered Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he read widely in classical and political works. In 1791, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, becoming interested in revolutionary politics and Unitarianism. He left without a degree. In 1794, he met poet Robert Southey, with whom he planned a utopian community on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States. Coleridge married Southey’s sister-in-law, Sara Fricker, as part of this plan. In 1794, he published his first poetry in the Morning Chronicle. As chronicled by Daniel Robinson, Coleridge attempted sonnets but abandoned the form. In 1795, he lectured to finance the utopian scheme, but when the idea was abandoned, he returned to poetry. From 1797 to 1798, he lived at Nether Stowey in Somerset, completing The Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, and Kubla Khan, some of his best-known works.
John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats was the youngest of the major Romantic poets. He was born October 31, 1795, in London, England, to a lower-middle-class family. His first published poem, “O Solitude,” appeared in The Examiner in 1816, attracting the interest of Leigh Hunt, the periodical’s editor, who encouraged him to leave his medical practice and devote himself to poetry. His first collection, Poems 1817 (1817), was dedicated to Leigh Hunt. His second work, Endymion (1818), fell short of his expectations, but his third collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), contained some of the greatest poems in the English language, according to Jean-Claude Sallé in the Handbook to English Romanticism.
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)
Alexander Pushkin is Russia’s most famous and beloved poet. He was born June 6, 1799, in Moscow and began writing at an early age. His first poem was published when he was fifteen.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is best known as the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She was born August 30, 1797, in London, England. The daughter of authors William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s early years were marked by instability. Her mother died ten days after her birth, and she was raised by her father and stepmother. In 1812, she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a friend of her father, and in 1814, they eloped, though Percy was already married. During their travels in Europe, Mary began work on Frankenstein.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley was the oldest child and only son of a baronet. He was born August 4, 1792, in Horsham, Sussex, England. Shelley wrote some of his most important work, including Prometheus Unbound (1820) and his odes and lyrics. His work is noted for its reflections on science, history, and philosophy, and for his attempts to synthesize seemingly conflicting theories in these fields.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth began writing poetry as a young man, but his most notable works were composed after 1803, many collected in Poems in Two Volumes (1807). These volumes include the famous “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” and “Resolution and Independence.” His long poem The Excursion was published in 1814 and was widely read.
Significant Romantic Works
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Byron published cantos one and two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, canto three in 1816, and canto four in 1818. The poem, based on Byron’s European travels, describes exotic landscapes and people, along with contemporary military and political events, from the viewpoint of Childe Harold. Harold is a typical Byronic hero: tormented by guilt over an unnamed sin, he is bitter, cynical, and melancholy, but also proud and remorseful. Isolated by his intense feelings and suffering, he wanders in search of release, but never finds it. Byron’s descriptions of current political events, such as the Spanish resistance to the French and the Battle of Waterloo, show the senselessness of war and the human drive for freedom. In his hero’s unsatisfied wanderings, he presents the idea that the only human permanence is found in writing and the lofty creations of the human mind.
Eugene Onegin: Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin was published serially from 1825 to 1832. It is considered a classic of Russian literature.
Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s novel, published between 1816 and 1818, is classically Romantic in its emphasis on feelings over intellect and the dangers of relying exclusively on intellect; the frightening, awe-inspiring nature of the sublime; the loneliness of the sensitive hero; and the sadness inherent in the human ability to corrupt what should be naturally good. In the novel, arrogant scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a man using dead bodies and animates him. The childlike monster wants only to be loved but horrifies everyone who sees him.
Pride and Prejudice: Austen’s 1813 novel, originally published anonymously, is her second and best-known work. Written for her family’s amusement, it has captivated readers with its wit, amusing dialogue, and insightful characterizations.
Prometheus Unbound: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long verse play Prometheus Unbound (1820) portrays the epic struggle between the Roman god Jupiter and the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. In the four-act play, Jupiter personifies tyranny, and Prometheus symbolizes revolution and liberty, making the poem a commentary on the current political situation in England and a depiction of the human struggle for freedom and truth. According to Murray G. H. Pittock in the Reference Guide to English Literature, C. S. Lewis called Prometheus Unbound the best long poem written in English in the nineteenth century. Pittock himself comments, “Prometheus Unbound is a stupendous vision of human potential,” while also clarifying that human beings are limited by the very desires they long to fulfill.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Blake wrote the earliest poems in his Songs of Innocence prior to 1784 and completed the collection by 1789. In 1793, Songs of Experience was published, and the two collections were combined in 1794. Blake subtitled the combination, “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” indicating their complementary nature. These beloved poems are both simple and remarkably complex. In some, such as “London” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake uses his poetic skill for social protest, expressing indignation about the suffering of the urban poor and accusing the Church and monarchy of ignoring the situation. In Songs of Innocence, Blake presents childhood fears and hopes from the perspective of individuals with limited experience. He also identifies the purity of country life with innocence and the depravity of city life with “experience.”
Some of these poems celebrate the joyful potential of childhood, for, like Wordsworth, Blake believed children are closer to the divine than adults. In Songs of Experience, Blake provides the street-wise, cynical perspective of children who have suffered or been betrayed by adults. Like all of Blake’s poetry, the collections contrast the gullibility and naiveté of innocence with the jaded cynicism of experience.
“To Autumn”: John Keats’s ode, “To Autumn,” written in September 1819, was the last ode he wrote that year.
Recurring Themes in Romantic Literature
Dreams and Visions: A prime example of the emphasis on dreams and visions is Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (1816), which he claimed to have written during a dream while deeply asleep.
Pantheism: Pantheism, the belief that there is no difference between the creator and creation, holds that God is not separate from the world but manifested in it.
The Self: During the Romantic period, people became aware, for the first time in history, that parts of each individual’s personality were beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness.
Emotion and Feeling: Consistent with the emphasis on the individual self, Romantics valued emotion, intuition, and feeling over logic.
Romantic Style
Rejection of Rigid Poetic Forms: In keeping with their glorification of the unlimited freedom and potential of the individual, Romantics rejected old poetic conventions, such as the heroic couplet used by Alexander Pope, and asserted the value of the language spoken by ordinary people.
Emphasis on Poetry: A notable aspect of the Romantic period was the emphasis on poetry. Most of the great Romantic writers were poets rather than novelists, as novels were widely regarded as inherently inferior to poetry.
Variations of the Romantic Movement
American Romanticism: In the Emerson Society Quarterly, James E. Miller Jr. writes, “America has traditionally incarnated the romantic in almost every sense,” and that “The American adventure, the great democratic experiment . . . are the essence of Romanticism.”
Celtic Renaissance: The Celtic Renaissance is a period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century.
Platonism: Platonism is the philosophy attributed to Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period.
Pre-Raphaelites: The Pre-Raphaelites were a circle of writers and artists in mid-nineteenth-century England.