Il Romanticismo Inglese (1780-1830s)

Romanticism (1780 – 1830s)

Social and political context

• Industrialisation and urbanisation: new landscapes and emigration (from the country to the city)
• The life of people changes
• Nostalgia for the rural life
• Increasing wealth of the middle class, thanks to colonial markets
• 1807: abolition of slave trade (but not slavery itself)
• Free trade/laissez-faire philosophy by Adam Smith
• Big divide between rich and poor, working class and capitalism (⇒ the 2 nations!)
• Age of military revolutions:
  • French revolution (1789-1792)
  • Rebellion in Ireland
  • 1830s: revolutions in Europe leading to the formation of nation states

Revolution and reaction

Mary Wollstonecraft = Mary Shelley’s mother. The first feminist militant. Disillusionment with the French Revolution and fear of revolutions in England!

The cult of nature

• Reaction to urbanization
• Natural world/landscape = source of poet’s inner meditations. The stimulus starts from this.
• Aesthetic experience not through reason but senses ⇒ emotions and senses (perception) over reason (understanding)
• Expression vs imitation of nature ⇒ the poet filters nature through his sensibility, then transmits it into his poetry.
• The importance of individuality = every poet has his personal view of nature and reality!
• Glorification of the ordinary, of what is simple, domestic ⇒ the domestic sublime (what is simple, natural, ordinary acquires a transcendental meaning and importance)
• Romantic irony (Schelling, Fichte) ⇒ finite-infinite, contingent-transcendental, individual-universal (Blake: there is a universe in a grain of sand)
• The presence of the divinity in the contingent world!

Imagination

• Not simply vision ⇒ it is the most important transformative and creative faculty!
• The poet analyses the world, and his vision is recomposed through imagination ⇒ visionary poet!
• Coleridge introduces the concept of “primary” vs “secondary” imagination:
  • Primary = something everybody has, which allows perceiving there’s something that goes beyond the real things (c’è qualcosa che va oltre la pura fisicità del mondo)
  • Secondary = the creative faculty, which belongs only to the poets
• Blake → imagination as salvation ⇒ it’s what allows men to create a new world, to escape from the ruined modern world and gives us hope. “Jerusalem” = London will re-birth as a new Jerusalem. If men learn how to follow imagination, they will be able to build a divine city. In “London” the imagination helps us to reach freedom and to free ourselves.