The romantic spirit

Performer - Culture & LiteratureMarina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,

Margaret Layton © 2012

The Romantic spirit

1798, publication of the Lyrical Ballads

The Romantic spirit

Performer - Culture&Literature

the period in which new ideas and attitudes arose

in reaction to the dominant 18th-century ideals of order,

calm, harmony, balance,rationality

1. The word ‘Romantic’

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

The Romantic AgeThe Romantic Age

The Romantic spirit

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Enlightened trends• Emphasised reason and judgement.• Focused on society as a whole.• Followed authority.• Interested in science and technology.

Romantic trends• Emphasised imagination and emotion.• Valued individuals.• Looked for freedom.• Represented common people.• Interested in the supernatural.

2. Romanticism vs Enlightenment

The Romantic spirit

Performer - Culture&Literature

3. English Romanticism

English Romanticism

influenced by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution.

a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason.

The Romantics:•expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions;•placed the individual at the centre of art;•argued that poetry should be free from all rules.

The Romantic spirit

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• Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being.• Use of creative imagination.

• Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect.

• A new view of the artist as an individual creator. • Fascination with the irrational, the past, the

mysterious, the exotic.

4. The Romantics’ key ideas

John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection

The Romantic spirit

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• Opposed to reason.• A substitute for

traditional religion.• A vehicle for

self-consciousness.• A source of sensations.• A provocation to a state

of imagination and vision. • An expressive

language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self.

5. The Romantic nature

J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay, c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Romantic spirit

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• A creative power superior to reason.

• Shaped the poets’ fleeting visions into concrete forms.

• A dynamic, active, rather than passive power.

• Allows human beings to ‘read’ nature as a system of symbols.

6. The Romantic imagination

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery

The Romantic spirit

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Wordsworth and Coleridge were 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.

In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.

7. The Lake poets

The Romantic spirit

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8. The manifesto of English Romanticism

Linked to nature,

emotions, feelings

Interested in the lives

of the humble

Nature, memory, children

Simple, common

used to liberate imagination

Themes LanguageThe poet

The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 1798

The Romantic spirit

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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.

9. The second generation of Romantic poets

The Romantic spirit

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10. The Romantics on nature

NATURE

Wordsworth Coleridge Byron Shelley Keats

a source of joy

inspiration and knowledge

a mother and a moral guide

a universal force

the representation of God’s will and love

the companion of his loneliness

the counterpart of his stormy feelings when it was violently upset

a source of enjoyment and inspiration

pervaded by a guiding power leading man to love

the creative mind benefits from the beauty of the natural landscape

a kind of muse to the poet’s artistic quest

The Romantic spirit

Performer - Culture&Literature

In the Napoleonic era:• the British navy dominated

the sea; • the French army dominated

the European continent;• the great hero of the British

navy was Admiral Horatio Nelson

defeated the French-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain in 1805.

11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)

The Romantic spirit

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The total defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium where the British troops, commanded by Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.

Their consequences

1.the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and Malta was of strategic interest;

2.enormous financial costs;

3.Britain was on the verge of starvation, bankruptcy and evolution.

11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)

The Romantic spirit

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12. The Luddites

They caused so much alarm that the government made machine-breaking punishable by death.

Deteriorating working

conditions

Mechanical looms and spinners

replacing skilled craftsmen

Poverty

led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of 1811-1812.

The Romantic spirit

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In 1819, during a peaceful public meeting in Manchester, soldiers fired into a crowd and eleven people were killed the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’.

12. The Luddites

The Romantic spirit

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The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency.

The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted as monarch during the illness of his father George III (1760-1820).

In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the new age of reforms.  

13. The Regency