Romanticismo inglese - Contesto culturale

English romanticism in poetry

Enlightenment: Objectivity and reason. Nature: abstract and philosophical concept
Romanticism: Irrational parts of human, emotions, feelings, introspection and relationship with nature. Imagination: essential to give expression to emotional experience.
Nature: something which man could control thanks to the reason. It is opposed to the common rules of institutions; it helps to discover ourselves; is a source of emotion; is a substitute for religion, because in nature we can find God (Pantheism).

In English literature we can find two generations of poets:
Wordsworth and Coleridge (1st generation): language: direct, simple and gives an immediate message. Exaltation of sensations and main rule of nature.
Byron, Shelley and Keats (2nd generation)
Language: complex, elaborated, use of artificial end versification
Exaltation of sensations and main rule of nature.

Wordsworth

Life:
• Cumberland, 1770
• Experience in revolutionary France: enthusiasm for democratic ideals which, accorded to him could lead to a new and social order
• The brutal development of the Revolution and the conflict between England and France brought him to a breakdown
• Disillusionment of these years: restored by contact with nature
• Production of Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge
• Last years of his life: decline of his creative powers
• He continued to write poems until death (1850)

Romantic features

• Interested in the relationship between the natural world and human consciousness.
• Idea that man exists not outside the natural world, but as an active participant in it, so that nature means something that includes both inanimate and human creature.
• Nature is desire and enjoyment; it shows man how to love and to act in a moral way.
• We can discover the beauty of nature through the senses, they lead to simple feelings, which later combine into complex and organised ideas.
• Imagination: emotion recollected in tranquillity, through the recreative power of memory, an emotion is reproduced and purified in poetic form so that a second emotion, similar to the first, is generated. Imagination is something that helps him to teach men how to understand their feelings and improve their moral being
• The poet has a superior sensibility and can get into the heart of things. His task consists in drawing attention to the ordinary things of life, where the deepest emotions and truths are to be found.
• Daffodils: 1804 and 1807; records the experience of a walk the poet went for with his sister. He conveys his love for nature.

Coleridge

Life:
• Devonshire, 1772
• He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals, which made him a republican
• After the disillusionment with the French revolution, he planned to establish a utopian community “pantisocracy”
• He met Wordsworth, they published the Lyrical Ballads
• In London produced Biographia Literaria
• Died in 1834

Romantic features

- He saw nature as the projection of the “real” world of ideas on the flux of time; believed that natural images carried abstract meanings and used them in his visionary poems. It is also connected with God, so men had to respect it and its creatures in order to respect God.
- Imagination: power to transform reality. He distinguished it between primary and secondary:

Primary Secondary

Fusion of perception and human power to produce images. It is also the power to give chaos a certain order. The poetic faculty which not only gave order to a given world, but built new worlds.

- The rime of the ancient mariner: 1789

Byron

Romantic features:
- He believed in individual liberty, wished to be without compromises, he wanted all men to be free and so he went to fight against tyrants.
- In the foreground of his poetry there is always an isolated man whose feelings are reflected in the wildest and exotic landscapes.
- Nature is not a source of consolation and joy and it doesn’t have any message to convey.
- He popularised the Byronic Hero: a restless, mysterious rebel characterised by proud individualism and rejects the conventional moral rules of society. He is isolated, outsider, but attractive at the same time. He is of noble birth, but wild in his manners. He has a great sensibility to nature and beauty.

Keats

Romantic features:
Imagination takes two forms:
1) The world that he images is non-natural
2) His poetry comes to imagination in the sense that a great deal of his work is a vision of what he would like human life to be like, stimulated by his own experiences of pain and misery.

- New concept of beauty: the only truth in our existence. His first apprehension of beauty proceeds from the senses, from tangible physical sensations: physical beauty. Beauty can also produce a much deeper experience of joy, which introduces a sort of spiritual beauty, that is the one of love, poetry, friendship. The 2 kinds of beauty are closely linked.
- The poet has the ‘negative capability’: the capability to repudiate his personalities in order to recognise himself with the object. When the poet can count on this negative capability, he is able to search for sensation and allows him to purify it through poetry.
- Rule of the time: rebirth, life and death fort seasons and also for human, regeneration.

Shelley

Life:
• Sussex, 1792
• Son of conservative member of parliament

Romantic features

- Rejection of social conventions and political oppression
- Shelley believed in the principles of freedom and love
- Imagination: the essay A Defence Poetry consists of a glorious protection of poetry as the expression of imagination, meant to change the reality of a more and more material world.
- Nature is a protection from disenchantment and injustice, the interlocutor of his melancholy dreams and of his hopes for a better future.
- The poet is like a forecaster, he helps to create an ideal world where freedom, love and beauty are sent form their enemies (destruction, tyranny, alienation).