Features of Romanticism

 

Every literary movement has behinded by some big historical events as well as a set of radical ideas which are philosophical, psychological and economical so on. The historical event behind the literary movement romanticism is French revolution as it offers freedom at the core. Romanticism in fact is an attempt to liberalise literature as victor Hugo remarks.  

 Romanticism as a literary movement begins from 1798, with the publication of Lyrical Ballads to some times between the passing of the first Reform Bill of 1832 and the death of Wordsworth in 1850, with political revolution on the Continent and the industrial revolution underway. 

 

Romantic literature is characterized by several features. It emphasized the dream, or inner world of the individual visions and fantastic imagery. There was a growing suspicion of the established church and a turn toward pantheism (nature is the visible form of god. It solves everything). Romantic literature emphasized the individual self and the value of the individual’s experience. Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to logic and analysis. For the romantics, poetry was believed to be the highest form of literature, and novels were regarded as a lower form.  Most novels of the time were written by women, some of the most famous British novelists wrote during this period, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. In addition, this period saw the flowering of some of the greatest poets in the English language: the first generation of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, followed by Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

 

Features of Romanticism:

R – Reaction against Neo- classicism

O – Ordinary life

M – Man at the core

A – Agony of life and death

N - Nature

T- Treatment of love and beauty

I - Imagination

C - Childhood

I- Idealism

S- Supernaturalism

M- Medievalism

 

 

 

As a new literary movement in literature Romanticism challenges all the existing poetic diction and decorum (manner). Neo-classical writers strictly abided by the rules established by the classical writers. Their writing is noted for its dissociation of sensibility as they failed to capture emotion and feeling. Only thought permeated in their writing. While romantic writers democratised literature and they established a new trend. It abolished all the traditional rules. They give more importance to the sense of feeling. As the definition of poetry by William Wordswoth marks it’s a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.

 

Ordinary pattern of rustic life is the hallmark of Romanticism. Their love for simplicity is conspicuous in their verse forms. The poems like ‘Chimney sweeper’ by William blake, ‘Solitary reaper’, ‘stolen boat’ and ‘idiot boy’ by Wordsworth in fact celebrate the ordinary life. Any person irrespective of their social class or gender can be the subject matter of poetry. Neoclassical poetry concentrates the royal people in their poems, just a loyalty upon royalty. Where as romanticism marks a complete departure from it. As it contains the rhythm and harmony of common life.

 

The poet critic William wordworth underlines the fact that “a poet should be a man speaking to men” in his remarkable treatise on romantic poetry entitled Preface to lyrical ballads. All notions of romanticism is based on human beings and how he is associated with nature.

 

Agony and endless pain become a constant occurrence in romantic poetry. Thus sorrows, distresses and mortality are general themes. The celebrated poem ‘Ode to a nightingale’ begins with explaining the emotional suffering. The speaker is extremely unhappy and disappointed that is why he feels envy on the happiness of the bird. The popular line in ‘To a skylark’ “My sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” affirms the general condition. As human beings in general is subject to suffer and for them happiness is just an occasional episode.

 

Return to nature can be considered as the slogan of romanticism. Since nature acts as a major source of influence and inspiration for romantic writers. They generated life lesson primarily from nature and immortalised the beauty of it. They glorified nature and for them nature itself is the solution for everything. The industrial modernity disturbed human life and nature. Thus, romantic writers validates the role of nature in human life. Writers could find harmonious life at the lap of nature. The philosophy of pantheism was prevalent in romantic age, it considers nature as the visible form of God.

 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever says John keats in his poem Endymion. They can even find heaven in a wild flower. According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘poetry is the best words in the best order’.  Which clearly indicates the idea of the beautiful and the sublime is the primary concern of romanticism. The luster and the vitality of nature are well exhibited by the romantic writers.

 

Romanticism in fact is an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. Imagination acts as a source of creativity and enables the reader to go beyond the material life. It’s a kind of passport to leave behind the tragic and earthly aspects of human life. Wordsworth defines imagination as the means of deep insight and sympathy, the power to create and express images far removed from material reality. According to Coleridge imagination is a poetic faculty in which human mind works on external objects visible to the eyes. It transforms an object into something new as well as creates and modifies new objects. Coleridge’s poem Kublah khan and Keat’s odes significantly explores the possibilities of human imagination and creates a conceptual world.

 

Childhood and innocent life is a special point of discussion in romantic poetry. The Romantic poets value the individual over society, emotion over intelligence, natural over artificial. Their main inspiration is nature, folklore and the past (childhood). Constantly, themes that deal with the concepts of childhood and innocence, and childhood and education, can be found frequently in their poems. They claim that the relationship between child and nature should be very close and not be lost. The child for them should be protected from the harsh realities of life. Spiritually, they place the child close to God and nature.

Consequently, childhood and a child's innocence have become one of the major themes of Romantic poetry. They use the images of the child in different ways. The poem ‘My heart leaps up’ presents a beautiful and thought provoking line “The Child is father of the Man”

 

The central motto of French revolution ‘liberty’ empowered the romantic writers to express their own ideal views. Especially the second generation of romantic writers were highly revolutionary and radical. They proposed several daring idealisms.

 

Some romantic writers were highly fascinated by the supernatural elements and they supernaturalise the natural things especially the writers like Coleridge and Keats. Gothic can be considered as a sub-genre of Romantic poetry. They paved the way for supernatural in romantic poetry, as both Gothic and the supernatural referred to beings and events that do not fit within the excepted confines of nature. Examples of supernatural beings include ghosts, spirits and phantoms, as well as witches and goblins (dwarfs).

 

Romantic poetry also draws inspirations from medieval myths and folklore. John Keats composed the poems like La Belle Dame Sans Merci and The Eve Of St.Agnes  based on the medieval themes.