Il Romanticismo Inglese (1780-1830s)

ROMANTICISM (1780 – 1830s)

SOCIAL – POLITICAL CONTEXT:

• →

Industralisation + urbanisation new landscapes + 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 & REACTION

Mary Wollstonecraft = Mary Shelley’s mother. The first feminist militant.

Disillusionment with the French Revolution + 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 the nature through his sensibility, then he transmits it into

his poetry.

➢ The importance of the 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 is the one who introduces the concept of “primary” vs “secondary” imagination:

1) Primary = something everybody has, which allow to perceive there’s something that goes beyond the real

things (=c’è qualcosa che va oltre la pure fisicità del mondo)

2) 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 a 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 the

freedom and to free ourselves from the “mind forged manacles”, that are all the restrictions given by who rules

the society, which do not permit the men to be themselves. With the imagination, we find the sense of

humanity.