The romantic age(appunti)

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The Romantic Period

The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions had brought an economic progress, but also a very bad conditions for many people. For this reason, many artists called Romantics, started to fight against dehumanisation and regimentation of the new urban industrial society. They wanted to break with the Past, with Rationalism. The cultural movement involved writers, philosophers and artists from Germany, France, Italy and England.

Pre-Romanticism

Scholars usually marks the start of the Romantic period in Britain in 1789. In this year Wordsworth and Coleridge published the ‘Lyrical Ballads’. 
In Europe, many philosophers began to have some romantic aspects in the last years of the XVIII century. For example, Rousseau exalted man’s emotional capacities, Kant questioned the validity of scientific empiricism. 
The writers which represented the pre-romantic movement of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ were Goethe, Schiller and Herder. 
In Britain these aspects were first evident in the Gothic novels.

Romantic Poetry

The most important poets of the Romantic period were Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake and Keats. They never saw themselves as part of the movement, but their works had common features and characteristics, which was later defined as ‘Romantic’. 
They have in common: 
• Imagination 
• Nature 
• Language 
• The figure of the Poet 
• Childhood

Imagination: It was very important for the Romantics. It was used to explore the unseen, the unfamiliar. Their fellow ordinary men lack of it. 
Nature: was seen as part of human life. Many artists took inspiration from the natural world. 
Language: Apart from some poets, writers use to write in the simple ‘language really used by man’. 
Poet: the poet was and individual creator, who used his creative spirit. The rise of journalism, literacy and lucrative market made artists and writers less dependent on noble patrons. Poets saw themselves as prophets who lived outside respectable society. As a matter of fact many romantic heroes are social outcasts (Frankenstein, the Mariner etc.). 
Childhood: The uncorrupted childhood and the nostalgia of the past were common aspects of the romantic writings.