Romantic poetry

The term "'Romantic Poetry"' refers primarily to a particular style and mode of poetry that emerged in the late 18th century and continued into the early 19th, largely as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day. Inevitably, the characterization of a broad range of contemporaneous poets and poetry under the single unifying name can be viewed more as an exercise in historical compartmentalization than an actual attempt to capture the essence of the actual ‘movement’. Indeed, the term “Romanticism” did not arise until the Victorian period. Nonetheless, poets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing classical forms and language in an effort to use ‘real’ language.

Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply”. Thus, though many people seize unfairly upon the notion of spontaneity in Romantic Poetry, one must realize that the movement was still greatly concerned with the idea of composition, of translating these emotive responses into the form of Poetry. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent Romantic poet and critic in his On Poesy or Art sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of Romantic Poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process.

Early to Late Romanticism

The first period of British Romanticism, beginning around 1790 was mainly defined by the works of William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The movement was, in a sense, formalized with the joint publication by Wordsworth of Coleridge of Lyrical Ballads 1798. The work emphasized what would become the key tenets of Romanticism, namely the reconciliation of man and nature, along with an attempt to abandon the high language of 18th century English poetry and to attempt to convey poetic ideas via a common vernacular.

John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron then comprised the latter half of the movement, largely continuing in the same tradition, though deviating slighty into more metaphysical matters.

Cult of Personality

Perhaps due to the perceived personal nature of Romantic poetry (one which the Romantic Poets themselves are not entirely innocent of encouraging), there has often been a fascination with the lives of the Romantic poets. This view is often reinforced by the imagery conjured up in contemporary discourse due to the fact that a great many of them died before reaching thirty: William Blake (29), Percy Bysshe Shelley (29), and John Keats (25). This has led to a conflation of the lives of the Romantic poets with the poetry itself.

Influence

The scope of influence exerted by Romantic Poetry is often hard to quantify, despite certain obvious instances such as in the Modernist poetry of William Butler Yeats, who even went so far as to call his generation “the last romantics”. Certainly, the cultural idea of Romanticism still persists very much today, as an evocative term that is often as much associated with the lives of the Romantic Poets as the poetry itself.

Major Romantic poets

• Brazil: Álvares de Azevedo, Castro Alves, Casimiro de Abreu, Gonçalves Dias
• England - Big Six: William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Keats.
• France: Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire.
• Germany: Novalis, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, Achim von Arnim
• Hungary: János Arany
• Ireland: Oscar Wilde, Thomas Moore.
• Italy: Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo.
• Poland: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński.
• Romania: Mihai Eminescu.
• Russia - Golden Age of Russian Poetry: Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Evgeny Baratynsky
• Scotland: Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie.
• United States: Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Minor Romantic poets

• Brazil: Qorpo Santo, Sousandrade
• Czech Republic: Karel Hynek Macha, Rainer Maria Rilke
• Denmark: Adam Oehlenschläger, Jakob Orbesen, Hans Christian Andersen.
• England: Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, James Henry Leigh Hunt, Thomas Chatterton, John Clare, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lady Anne Lindsay, Charlotte Smith.
• France: Alfred de Vigny, Gerard de Nerval, Leconte de Lisle.
• Hungary: Sándor Petőfi, Mihály Vörösmarty.
• Iceland: Jónas Hallgrímsson.
• Ireland: James Clarence Mangan, Thomas Davis.
• Norway: Henrik Arnold Wergeland, Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven.
• Portugal: Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano.
• Russia: Vasily Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov.
• Spain: José de Espronceda.
• Scotland: James Macpherson, Walter Scott.
• Slovenia: France Prešeren.
• Sudan: Rashad Hashim.
• Sweden: Erik Johan Stagnelius.
• Ukraine: Taras Shevchenko.

See also

• Romanticism
• Romance (genre)

External links

• Article on Romantic Poetry
• Romantic Poetry in the Styles of Old with Contemporary Rhythms
• Examples of Romantic Poetry

Bibliography

Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Oxford University Press. London, 1960.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On Poesy or Art. Harvard Classics, 1914.

British Theory and Criticism 3: Romantic Period and Early Nineteenth Century. The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. http://litguide.press.jhu.edu.proxy.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/view.cgi?eid=40&query=British%20Romanticism

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