TOPIC 48: ROMANTICISM IN GREAT BRITAIN: NOVEL AND POETRY

I. INTRODUCTION

2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROMANTICISM

3. PRE-ROMANTICS IN GREAT BRITAIN (Ist decades of I8th century)

4. THE IST GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS (Lake District poets)

4.I. William Blake (I757-I827)

4.2. William Wordsworth (I770-I850)

4.3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I772-I834)

5. THE 2ND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS

5.I. Percy Bysshe Shelley (I792-I882)

5.2. John Keats (I795-I82I)

5.3. Lord Byron (I788- I824)

6. THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

6.I. Sir Walter Scott

6.2. Gothic Literature

6.2.I. Horace Walpole

6.2.2. Ann Radcliffe

6.2.3. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

7. ROMANTICISM IN THE CLASSROOM

8. CONCLUSION
TOPIC 48: ROMANTICISM IN GREAT BRITAIN: NOVEL AND POETRY

I. INTRODUCTION
The present unit aims to provide a useful introduction to Romanticism in Great Britain, dealing with the main
social and political changes of the period and its influence on the poetry and prose. In general, the
literature of the time was both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day which means
that this is an account of literary activity in which social, political, economic and cultural allegiances are placed
very much to the fore.

2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROMANTICISM

Romanticism is a cultural and political movement occurring between I775 and I830 that emphasizes the
rebellion against society and an attempt to stand one’s way against institutions and political schemes.
The Romantic period lasts about forty years, from the French revolution in I789 to the Reform Act
of I832. It is sometimes called the Age of Revolutions: the American Revolution of I776, and the spirit of
“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” of the French revolution made it a time of hope and change

Politically, Romanticism is connected with the births of nationalisms and democracy responding to a natural
demand of men given the fact they had been previously curtailed by political authoritarian powers.
The search for political liberty and independence of countries, led to important political movements like the
American and the French revolution. Nationalism in politics, was followed by an interest in folklore as
the true spirit of people and representing man’s creation at its most natural phase.

In literature, Romantic writing is mostly poetry: Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted a revolution too, in
poetic language and in themes which contrasted with the earlier Augustan age. For Augustans, feelings and
imagination were dangerous; for Romantics, reason and the intellect were dangerous.

The Romantic Movement is a reaction against Rationalism in arts, literature and thought. Rationalism believed
in a superior being, the designer of the universe; however, the new conception rejected the idea of
the artist or the intellectual practicing art in his solitude. The romantic artist creates a self-orientating poetry
believing in instincts, imagination, spontaneity and freedom of thought as the driver of Man’s life
contraposing experience to reason. The scenery chosen by romantics revolves around nature,
wilderness, ruins and decay, opposite to the traditional locus amoenus. Nature is used as the expression of
human mood and therefore, the poet acts as an interpreter of nature developing a subjective
sensibility towards Nature as well as an interest for the exotic and the exciting ways of life. During the
romantic period there was a rediscovery of the classics.

The Romantics were fascinated by the faculty of imagination. They celebrated the limitless possibilities of
the human mind and explored the means of penetrating down the subconscious level: dreams, drugs,
hypnosis… This was a way of escaping from the rational world. Romantic writers were individualistic and they
did not see themselves as part of a movement.

3. PRE-ROMANTICS IN GREAT BRITAIN (Ist decades of I8th century)

Before entering in Romanticism, it is interesting citing the Pre-Romantics. A development in the
direction of the Romanticism took place toward the middle of the century with an influential group of
poets known as The Graveyard School of Poetry. These poets reflected a clear shift in sensibility and
feeling especially in relation to natural order and Nature. Thus, they manifest preoccupation with death
and decay, ruins and graveyards and the brevity of life as a renewal of the old ubi sunt theme.
Nature is seen a meaningful scenery that functions as a reaction against Augustan decorum which
frowned upon anything melancholy, self-indulgently piteous. Feelings as grieving melancholy, mournful
reflectiveness and self-indulgent sentimentality are the core of their poetry. One of the main
representative poets of this school is James Macpherson.

Likewise, Robert Burns, has been viewed alternately as a pre-Romantic poet for his sensitivity to nature,
his high valuation of feeling and emotion, his spontaneity, his fierce stance for freedom and against authority,
his individualism, and his antiquarian interest in old songs and legends. He connects folklore Scottish tradition
and language through a compilation and retelling of old Scottish songs and ballads. He is considered Britain’s
best song writes as he is able to consolidate old folklore, creativity and musical awareness.

4. THE IST GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS (Lake District poets)

The first generation of Romantics poet was formed by William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel
Coleridge also known as the Lake District poets, as they used to go to the Lake District to find
inspiration for their writing. They shared in common the romantic subjects and themes and a sort of
visionary and escapist notion of life. They are in general, disillusioned men. They have seen the French
Revolution become a despotic power, and the take refuge in nature, the past, and the exotic. They also
shared their attraction for diseases, the occult and the supernatural (superstitions, prophecies).

4.I. William Blake (I757-I827)

William Blake was poet, mystic, artist and engraver who defies all formal classification. He decorated
his poems and prophetic books. As an artist, he reflected a visionary world with no boundaries
between the perceptions of the corporal senses and the world of dreams and visions. Blake composed
more personal and original work due to his beliefs in the supernatural and in esoteric science. He believed
in an existential myth to be brought to light through art; thus, art for him represented the search for the
truth.

His most famous poetical work is Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were published in I794.
The former reflects the word of child innocence and the latter, in contrast, considers the word of
disillusionment at man’s doing through bitter and negative experience as a way to achieve a broad vision.
He was a rebel who turned against the Augustan beliefs of his time. Blake had a very individual view of the
world, and his poetic style and ideas contrast with the order and control of the Augustan world. His
poems
are simple but symbolic –the lamb is the symbol of innocence, the tiger the symbol of mystery. Blake show
the dangers of an industrial society in which individuals were lost. For Blake, London is a city in which the
mind of everyone is in chain and all individuals are imprisoned.

4.2. William Wordsworth (I770-I850)

Wordsworth’s poetical force developed through a melancholic attitude; from desperation he was
reborn into a mature poet living in the solitude of the country. His work was thus a revolution against
the modes of his time. Wordsworth’s poetry looks inward rather than outward. He was a poet of
Nature as he used it as a doorway into a state of visionary of the inner. He is a writer of reality, of
everyday life. Sometimes he writes in simple direct language which is close to the spoken language of
ordinary people.

Above all, Wordsworth wanted to show the importance of human memory, because it is the memory that
continues to give life to our major experiences. The memory allows us to keep our understanding of the
world fresh and alive. In The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, we read how an individual’s
thoughts and feelings are formed.

Lyrical Ballads written with Coleridge stands as a romantic manifesto in themes subjects and language. In
the second edition he added a preface, rejected by Coleridge, in which he stated his vision about
poet’s role and poetry. The poet perceives the external world through his own perception. He also
advocated for the use of common language, considered also poetic. In addition, he had as a subject
matter real ordinary people.

He had other well-known poems such as Daffodils and Tintern Abbey where he relates past to present
or tries to see the heart of things.

4.3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I772-I834)

Samuel Coleridge was a poet of the supernatural. He was an opium eater due to an illness he
suffered. He collaborated with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads. They are very different poets: Wordsworth’s
poetry is more about the day-to-day ordinary world; Coleridge’s poetry is more about the extraordinary and
supernatural world.

From the poems written by Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads the most well-known is Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner is another of his poems from Lyrical Ballads, an epic gothic tale that is an allegory of a man’s
downfall. It is an old ballad story told to a wedding guest by an old sailor, the typical sea adventure
where a mariner kills an albatross that is considered a good omen, nature and sacredness and by
committing this crime, man’s downfall of produced. The mariner is the archetypical gothic wanderer
condemn to repeat the tale as a way of poetic restitution.

He wrote other poems like Kubla Khan that reports an opium dream and represents the allegoric figure
of the poet on ecstasies after a vision. It is pure work of the imagination, the most powerful of all human
senses.
Another Coleridge’s poem is Christabel, an epiphany of evil with a nightmare atmosphere but an
unfinished poem. It shows that lasting truths can be found even if complete understanding is not
possible.

5. THE 2ND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS

The second generation of poets were closely related by family and love relationships and they all share
residence as well in Italy and Switzerland. These poets reacted against the British environment, and their
attraction for the south took them to Italy, where Shelley and Keats died. All of them also loved Greece
and their mythology. This second group is different from the first group in the categorical expression of
disagreement before the society of their time, their arrogant, desperate, contemptuous living attitude, their
despise for the established morality, their idealism and their aesthetic worries. They were true romantic
heroes who died in their 20s.

5.I. Percy Bysshe Shelley (I792-I882)

Shelley is considered the poet of hope and rebellion who represents liberalism and reject morality. He was
spontaneous and sincere. T.S. Elliot said that Shelley was a poet only enjoyed by teenagers. He was an
idealist who believed in the goodness of human nature and yearned for a world of perfect love. Shelley’s
poetry is similar to Keats’s poetry in some ways; they both wanted to capture deep personal experiences.
But Shelley’s writing is, like Blake’s, more political.

As his main features, we may highlight his lyrical power, which expresses the highest emotional ecstasy;
his choice of subject, which concerns with the same themes that defined Romantic poetry, especially among
the younger English poets of his era: beauty, nature, political liberty, and creativity; his descriptive
power, with an instantaneous effect and radiant loveliness; his style, being described as simple, flexible and
passionate.

Shelley wanted greater freedom, and in his best-known lyric poem Ode to the West Wind he makes the
wind a symbol of the power of change as the wind blows away the old life and spreads the seeds which
will create a new life of greater freedom for all.

Shelley was both optimistic and pessimistic. In Julian and Maddalo he sees the modern world as a wasteland
which shows that all individuals are isolated from one another, but which also shows that everything is possible
for the human soul.

Among his main poems are Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and to Wordsworth a poem against him since
he betrayed the second generation of romantics as he sold to conventions. Other short lyric poems such
as The Window Bird communicate deep feelings through descriptions of the world of nature

5.2. John Keats (I795-I82I)

Keats is acknowledged as the poet of the senses as his poetry creates sounds, visions, etc. He represents
the greatest Romantic British poet since his poems are carefully worked with a rich and varied symbolism
and the use of epithets. He mastered the poetic technique through various sources like Spencer,
classical Greek or the Middle Ages.
In a period of two years Keats wrote much of his poetry, both long narrative poems and his famous
odes. The narratives Isabella, Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci have
mythic, classical or medieval backgrounds. Like Coleridge, Keats, was interested in the irrational,
mysterious and supernatural world of the distant past. The main themes of the poems are the search for
lasting beauty and happiness and for permanent meaning in a world where everything fades and dies.
These themes are central to the odes. In Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to a Grecian Urn the song
of a nightingale and the artistic images on the urn show that art and artistic creation can make things
permanent, and that poetry can keep human feelings and ideas alive for ever in the words of the
poem.

In To Autumn Keats paints a picture of the world of nature which is dying at the end of the year,
but ends the poem by stressing the beauty and fullness of autumn which cannot die. It is relevant to bear
in mind that most of his works were published posthumously. The main features of his poetry were his
choice of subject, which differs from other romantic poets in his love of nature, and the imagery of his
poems, intense and beautiful; and his style, which is characterized because of his speed in the blank verse,
and the delicacy of touch and a pure taste.

5.3. Lord Byron (I788- I824)

Lord Byron was a poetic hero of his age, bringing together many of the concerns of Romanticism. The
sudden changes in style and context are common in Byron’s poetry. He succeeded in making a character
out of himself, the so called Byronic hero, a defiant melancholic young man brooding on some
mysterious unforgivable event in the past.

His picture of the romantic hero, an isolated individual who attacks social conventions and challenges
the authorities of the age and who searches for, but never finds, peace and happiness, was particularly
influential. His hero, Childe Harold, in the long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, made Byron famous. Manfred,
in Byron’s poem Manfred, and Childe Harold are both heroes with passionate feelings who rebel against
society, who want to experience what is forbidden, and who seem to be beyond good and evil. In
Don Juan Byron is more satirical. He invites his readers to be involved in the poem, to laugh with him
at his hero, and to question their own values of their society. It shows Byron’s distinction and
originality in his anti-romantic hero, who is a legendary womanizer.

Some other poems by Byron are The Corsair and The Vision of Judgement, a satire
criticizing contemporary life.

6. THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

6.I. Sir Walter Scott

He is the Romantic novelist per excellence. He writes about revolution, history and social change and
about characters from all levels of society.
Scott made the novel the most popular of literary forms in the I9th and 20th centuries. He created
Scotland as a historical setting and gave the I9th century world, especially I9th century Great Britain,
historical identity

He was universally read because, like Shakespeare, he explored values in a world of rapid changes, and
created exciting plots and characters who live in the memory because they are both of their time and
beyond their time. The main features of his novels are the supremacy of legends, adventures and the
supernatural mixing reality and imagination, the use of medieval heroes and an accused of lightness of
characters, that is, flat characters.

His contribution to the novel, in particular, to the historical novel, was to provide a life-giving force, a vitalizing
energy, and a particular insight, which made the historical novel use a new social history to recreate the
past through characters imaginary and real; his style, regarded as fluent and narrative, detailed in exposition;
and his characterization, which is benign, detached, shrewd, humorous, owing much to the I8th century
theatrical tradition on Shakespearian qualities (free manner, melodramatic heroes, middle and lower
classes or eccentrics).

Some of his novels are Rob Roy, a historical Scottish novel that revolves around a romantic outlaw
who fights for justice and dignity for the Scots. And Ivanhoe an English medieval romance set in
Plantagenet England that is a tale of peril and rescue, chivalry and pageantry. They have become very
popular as they have been made into films.

6.2. Gothic Literature

During the Romantic period, the world of nightmare became to some extent institutionalized in the gothic
novel. The Gothic novel is a genre by itself that grew from one of the sides of Romanticism, interested
in medieval, gothic literature, arts and imagery as well as a portrait of the dark side of human nature. They
use medieval settings of castles and convents in their ugliest aspect as prison, both physical and psychological.

6.2.I. Horace Walpole

He is believed to be the first gothic writer. Castle of Otranto was said to be the translation of a
sixteenth- century Italian work which described a ghostly castle, in which there were walking skeletons,
pictures, and other strange incidents. His style worked on the ghostly machinery, which was interpreted
as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear. Thus, he sets the convention for horror
tales set in Middle Ages with the supernatural and the fantastic.

6.2.2. Ann Radcliffe

She is considered the most famous practitioner of Gothic novel following a style that united Gothic
sensationalism with the cult of feeling. Her success relied on a uniform plot, which involved mysterious
manuscripts, haunted castles, clanking chains, and cloaked and saturnine strangers. At the end of all the
horrors she rather spoils the effect by giving away the secret.
Among her novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.

6.2.3. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

It is the greatest and most lasting romantic prose fiction, presenting a double-conflict represented by Dr.
Frankenstein and his creature. It shows an extraordinary world in which a living being is made by a Genevan
student from the bones of the dead, but becomes a monster which nobody can control as well as
the attempts of man to be as powerful as God. The creature is usually mistaken by the name of his
creator, Doctor Frankenstein, representing the double self, the shadow that lives in the underneath and
comes alive at crucial moments. Insights of the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it
to the mortals, are present in the story. Likewise, the full title of the novel is Frankenstein or the Modern
Prometheus.

Gothic novel had an impact as well in the I9 th century, in some novels of Bronte sisters and in the 20 th
century with Dracula, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hide and Poe’s works.

7. ROMANTICISM IN THE CLASSROOM

Romantic poetry is too complex and remote for students’ comprehension. However, Romantic prose fiction
has present interest being a source of delight and entertainment for students as well as good for
vocabulary acquisition.

Moreover, nowadays new technologies may provide a new direction to language teaching as they set more
appropriate context for students to experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a
communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on significance over form, and
secondly, motivation and involvement are enhanced by means of new technologies. Hence
literary productions and the history of the period may be approached in terms of reading novels,
watching films and performing drama representations in class so as to find the link between Scott’s
Rob Roy (I8I8) and Ivanhoe (I820), or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (I8I8), among others.

8. CONCLUSION
This topic has aimed to provide a relevant framework for Romanticism in Great Britain and its influence
on the poetry and prose, that is, the main novels of the period.

Romanticism information is relevant for language learners, even 2nd year Bachillerato students, who
do not automatically establish similarities between British and Spanish literary works. So, learners need
to have these associations brought to their attention in cross-curricular settings. As we have seen,
understanding how literature genres developed into the ones we know today (through novels, films, theatre
plays) is important to students, who are expected to be aware of the richness of English literature.