The Evolution of Thought: From the Age of Revolutions to Romanticism

The Age of Revolution

These years are also called ‘’Age of revolution’’ with a changing society on different sides in different ways. George III wanted to reduce the public debt due to ‘’Seven years wars’’, introducing new duties on corn, paper and tea, but there was a fierce opposition in the American colonies and some taxes were repealed but not taxes about tea. Several American colonies wanted to pay taxes approved only by their local govern. He controlled the country surrounding himself with loyal supporters and a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. He tried to simplify the financial system supporting Adam Smith’s theory, the laissez-faire. Their policy were conservatives at home and abroad and in 1801 the Act of Union joined Ireland to Britain.

Romanticism and Nature

It was a period in which new ideas and attitudes of harmony, balance and rationality of the Enlightment were replaced by creative imaginations and strong emotions. Romantic tendences were anticipated by the German literary movement ‘’Sturm and Drung’’, which rebelled against Classicism and started to focus on Individual and nature. Nature offered the poets solitude to develop their romantic ideas, and it was a source of emotions and a real and living thing. It was also a form of language because natural imagery offered the poet a way to contemplate human emotions. In contrast with the enlightment there are other differences like individualism that replace the impersonality or common people that stay away from social conventions, rather than elevated people and their interest in science. The Romantics expressed a negative attitude towards the social and political conditions so they placed the individual at the centre of art and they asserted that poetry should be free from all rules. They had interest in everyday life staying away from the chaos of the city. They exhibited fascination for the mysteries of the past.

The Sublime and Romantic Imagination

The source of the sublime were strong emotions like danger or fear, for example the emotions that can give us a vulcano’s eruption. The Sublime have supremacy over the beautiful, frightening and seducing at the same time. It show us how great nature is and how small men are.
It was the prevailing genre in the Romantic period because it gives expression to feelings. Poets had to mediate between man and nature, pointing out the evils of society and to give voice to the ideals of freedom. The Romantic imagination was a power in the process of poetic composition and it allows men to understand nature as a system of symbols. Children were like poets because they were endowed with imagination and they were uncorrupted by civilization. Wordsworth and Coleridge were part of the 1st generation of romantic poets, who were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the district of the Great Lakes in England. In 1798 they published the Lyrical Ballads, the 1st collection of English Romantic poems, but the most important is the second one, published in 1800 because it had a preface, and it was called ‘’The Manifesto’’. It deals with 4 point: Topic, situations of everyday life because with that conditions the passion of the heart were less restraint and were incorporated with nature; Language, really used by man; Poetry, a spontaneous overflow of feelings; Poet, a men with more sensibilty and imagination for expressing what he thinks and feels.