Reading Pointers for Sharper Insights

The Romantic Movement was a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It began as a reaction against the rigid conventions—artistic, social, and political—of the Enlightenment and asserted the power and the value of the individual.

Romanticism stressed strong emotion and the individual imagination as the ultimate critical and moral authority. The Romantic poets, therefore, felt free to challenge traditional notions of form. They likewise found themselves abandoning social conventions, particularly the privileges of the aristocracy, which they believed to be detrimental to individual fulfillment.

Because Romanticism is, at its core, a rebellion against rigid standards of form, taste, and behavior, it is difficult to establish a set of standards to define Romanticism. It is possible, however, to point out some common motifs that offer an overview of what the Romantic poets believed and tried to accomplish in their poetry.

The politics of the Romantics:

• The Romantics were, for the most part, disheartened liberals.

• The successful revolution of the American colonies against the oppressive British crown and the developing revolution in France were exciting to the Romantics.

• Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley all lost heart, however, because of the Reign of Terror in France and the rise of Napoleon as the French Emperor.

• The Romantic focus on the imagination was a direct response to eighteenth-century rationalism.

The psychology of the Romantics:

• The nature of experience: its duality and fleeting quality were of great interest to the Romantics. Notice Blake's contrast between Innocence and Experience, the role of memory in Wordsworth's work, Shelley's lamenting the passing of an experience, and Keats' assertion that the imagined experience is better than the actual, in that it will never end.

• Beauty was to be found in Nature, not in man-made objects or concepts.

• The Romantics sought solitude in Nature, believing that the key to all emotional healing could be found in Nature.

• Nature imagery is the most predominant feature of Romantic literature.

• The concept of a pantheistic Nature (God exists in all things) became almost a religion for Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.

• In the “religion” of the Romantics, virtue was exemplified by being true to one's nature while “sin” occurred when denying one's own nature or forcing someone else to conform to a foreign code of principles or behavior (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote: “One law for the Lion and Ox is oppression”).

The Romantic Sense of Beauty

• While the literature of the Enlightenment focused on the hero and the high-ranking socialite, the Romantics celebrated the commoner, the laborer, and the “underprivileged.”

• Eighteenth-century esthetics had favored the highly ornate and artificial (as epitomized by Baroque music and architecture), but the Romantics strove to emphasize beauty in simplicity and plainness.

The Byronic Hero

Taking into consideration the personal traits the Romantics found most admirable—passionate conviction, absolute individualism and independence, a disregard for restrictive authority and the outmoded or unjust laws it represents—it follows that the Romantic notion of the hero would be just such a person. Byron's most famous characters, Manfred, Childe Harold, and Don Juan, typify this type of hero, as did Byron himself. Thus, the Romantic hero came to be known as the Byronic Hero.