The Romantic spirit

Performer Shaping Ideas

Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella, Margaret Layton © 2020

The Romantic spirit

1. A new sensibility The Romantic Age
The period in which new ideas and attitudes arose
in reaction to the dominant 18th-century ideals of order, calm, harmony, balance,
and rationality.
C. Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

2. Romanticism vs Enlightenment
Enlightened trends:
• emphasised objectivity and reason;
• focused on impersonal material;
• elevated subjects;
• interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends:
• emphasised imagination and emotion;
• valued subjective and irrational parts of human nature;
• relationship with nature. Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

3. The first generation of Romantic poets
The poets of the first generation were W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge also known as
Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18th century in the
district of the Great Lakes in Northwestern England.
View of Lake Windermere in the English Lake District.
In 1798 they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

4. The manifesto of English Romanticism The ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1800)
the poet themes language
linked to nature, emotions, feelings
interested in the lives of the humble
nature, memory, children
simple, common
used to liberate imagination
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

5. The second generation of Romantic poets
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats:
• died very young and away from home;
• experienced political disillusionment reflected in their poetry;
• were linked to individualism, escapism. Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

6. The Romantics’ new interests
• Interest in humble and everyday life;
• focus on the countryside, as a place where man could find his soul in close contact with
nature;
• exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect;
• a new taste for the desolate as a revival of the past;
• fascination with the irrational,
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection. the mysterious, the
exotic.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

7. A new concept of nature
• Opposed to reason;
• a real and living being;
• a vehicle for self-consciousness;
• a source of sensations;
• an expressive language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about
human feelings
J.M.W. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay,
and the self.
about 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

8. The emphasis on the individual • The natural, unrestrained, impulsive behaviour was
good;
• the individual was seen in a solitary state;
• the atypical, the outcast, the rebel were exalted;
• cult of the exotic, of what was far away both in space and in time.
C. Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

9. Imagination and childhood
• An inward eye superior to reason;
• a dynamic, active, rather than passive power;
• new interest in the experience of childhood;
• the child was purer than an adult because he was unspoilt by civilization;
• childhood was a state to be admired and cultivated.
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –
The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery.
Performer Shaping Ideas

The Romantic spirit

 10. Rejection of poetic diction
Enlightened poets adopted the poetic diction, based on the imitation of the classics and used
periphrasis and uncommon words, often derived from Latin.
The Romantic poets rejected this poetic diction in favour of simple, spontaneous language
and used symbols to express the creative mind.