The Romanticism art movement praised imagination over reason, emotions over logic, and literature over science. The Romanticism artists were known for replacing the classical 18th century literature heroes with much more complex and passionate characters. Romanticism focuses on self-expression and individual uniqueness that does not lend itself to be defined nor controlled by society. The landscape on Romanticism was commonly displayed in cool rich colors and untamed peaceful surroundings. In Romanticism, nature was used to represent the extension of the human personality, the capability of feeling love, serenity, and sympathy.
The Romantic Period centered on creative imagination, nature, mythology, symbolism, feelings and intuition, freedom from laws, impulsiveness, simplistic language, personal experiences, democracy, and liberty, significant in various art forms including poetry. The development of the self and self-awareness became a major theme as the Romantic Period was seen as an unpredictable release of artistic energy, new found confidence, and creative power found in the writings of the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, who made a substantial impact on the world of poetry. Two of the Romantic poets, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley rebelled against convention and authority in search of personal, political and artistic freedom. Blake and Shelley attempted to liberate the subjugated people through the contrary state of human existence prevalent throughout their writings, including Blake’s “The Chimney Sweepers,” from “Songs of Innocence”, “London,” from “Songs of Experience” and Shelley’s A Song: “Men of England.”
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged
Many authors in the 1800s wrote poems about nature in the world and human nature.
Comparing Wordsworth and Keats’ Romantic Poetry. Both Wordsworth and Keats are romantic Poets, they express ideas on nature and send us the message to respect it. They say we have to admire the beauty of nature in different ways. Wordsworh uses simpler language in his poems wether to express simple or complex ideas, by which we understand he aimed his poems to lower classes. Keats instead, uses much more complex language to describe and express his ideas, so we know he aimed his poems to the educated.
To the Romantics, the imagination was important. It was the core and foundation of everything they thought about, believed in, and even they way they perceived God itself. The leaders of the Romantic Movement were undoubtedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his close friend, William Wordsworth. Both were poets, and both wrote about the imagination. Wordsworth usually wrote about those close to nature, and therefore, in the minds of the Romantics, deeper into the imagination than the ordinary man. Coleridge, however, was to write about the supernatural, how nature extended past the depth of the rational mind.
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were published in 1789, with no preface as an “advertisement.” Another Lyrical Ballads, this time with two volumes, a preface, and no poetic diction, was published in 1800. In 1802, another Lyrical Ballads was published with two volumes and a preface. Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas are an internalization of epic. Nature, memory and imagination all play a huge role in the poem, as does imagination’s relationship with knowledge. Wordsworth talks about imagination as an absolute ideal, although that is dangerous because it divorces us from the rest of the world.
Qualities of "reality," the divine, or divinities may be reflected in nature in Romanticism and we can sense God or the gods through our sensing of nature.While in Neo_classicism there is a concern for "nature"--or the way things are (and should be). This relates back to the distrust of innovation and inherent conservatism of neoclassicism. The artistic rules of old, for instance, Pope describes as having been "discovered, not devised" and are "Nature methodized"; so too, "Nature and Homer" are "the same" (Essay on Criticism 88ff., 135). This belief in "nature" implies a conviction that there is a permanent, universal way things are (and should be), which obviously entails fundamental political and ethical commitments. The focus on natural feeling over conventional rules led to an emphasis on the self over the earlier neoclassical emphasis on society. The individual becomes the source of wisdom and morality, displacing the received set of rules and norms given by society. As a result, emphasis is paced on understanding the individual's subjective state, especially as it relates to the outside world. Works ranging from Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker to Wordsworth's Prelude, Coleridge's «conversation» poems, «Dejection», «Frost at Midnight», «Lime Tree Beauty» are examples of the romantic exploration
Romanticism is a style of art or literature during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that emphasizes a love for nature, distrust of society, organized religion, celebration of the child or individual, and emotion over reason. In William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” Wordsworth speaks about how society is so materialistic while speaking on the significance of nature. Ironically the title of this sonnet exemplifies one of the Romantic ideas and expresses one of Wordsworth’s main points regarding nature. Wordsworth uses a connection to nature as well as religion to emphasize Romanticism in his work.
The beauty of nature is often overlooked and underappreciated in today’s society. The neglect and lack of respect given to such a beautiful creation by members of society is widely reflected in Romantic poetry. The romantic era began in 1798, where writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed their opinions and feelings towards nature. Overall such writers typically express a positive outlook on the natural world around them, however some stray the other way. Specifically Coleridge and Wordsworth began to express the feeling of disconnect towards nature. Both writers began to feel as though they could not understand nature and cannot connect with the beauty it gives off as expressed in poems such as “Dejection”, “London 1802”, and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”. Not only did some of these writers begin to feel a disconnect but a select few also begin to feel as though people are disrespecting the balance of nature and are trying to disrupt the balance and manipulate it. Writers such as Mary Shelley, author of the novel Frankenstein, expresses the concern of people taking the laws of nature and twisting them. Writers and people living during this time period not only express an appreciation for nature but also the truth about the human relationship with nature. The relationship between humans and nature is on of mistreatment.
Unlike the Enlightenment era, the Romantic period had no order and turned away from given religions, like Christianity. Romantic expressivism is the creation of the poet’s, or expressivists, own meaning of truth and order, since they are turning away from all known religion. Similarly, they fill these holes by writing about non-religious ideas and making them religious instead. For example Early Wasserman in “Sources of the Self” says that “within itself the modern poem must both formulate its own cosmic [order] and shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic [order] permits” (Wasserman and Taylor 31). Instead of having the uniformness he also explains that, “the Romantic poet has to articulate an original vision of the cosmos” (Wasserman and Taylor 31). This created the opportunities for Romantic expressivist, like William Wordsworth and John Keats, to start from a blank slate with everything that they turned away from, including religion. Wasserman’s emphasis on how the Romantic expressivist was placed with, not a burden, but a responsibility to create their own order and incorporate theoretical spirits or presence into their poems.
John Keats did not have the luxury time that Wordsworth had to look to the past and reminisce about things that were because he knew he did not have long to live. Even from a young age Keats felt his life would be a short one and he so "he applied himself to his art with a desperate urgency". Keats died at twenty-six years old and managed to leave behind some of the greatest poetry ever written. He didn't bother to look toward the future because he knew that he wouldn't live to see it and he didn't look to the past because he decided that it was more important to live in the moment.
The beginning of the nineteenth century was also the start of a legendary movement in literature, known as Romanticism. Authors during this period created their own worlds by using their imaginations. Individuals no longer saw themselves a measure of everything around them, but rather as one more component of the great source of life and creativity: nature. The Romantics placed emphasis on emotions such as apprehension, terror, and awe as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, as well as the feelings that accompany confronting the sublimity and beauty of nature, especially. Supernatural elements are not present in all Romantic literature; however, the supernatural approach was an important and arguably crucial strategy for Romanticism to achieve its purposes.
The only similarity between these two poets is the romanticism in Wordsworth’s poems and Yeats’ early work. Wordsworth was in love with nature and his environment. He admired simplicity and believed, throughout his poems that nature gave out major messages when looked at closely. Yeats’ early work was based on his love for Ireland and its countryside. Yeats always tried to revive the lost importance of Ireland in its people. This can mainly be seen in the poem “September 1913.”
One of the most popular themes for Romantic poetry in England was nature and an appreciation for natural beauty. The English Romantic poets were generally concerned with the human imagination as a counter to the rise of science. The growing intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries placed scientific thought in the forefront of all knowledge, basing reality in material objects. The Romantics found this form of world view to be restrictive. They felt that imagination was crucial to individual happiness. The imagination also provides a common human bond; a means of sympathy, of identification. However, the absence of imagination, the Romantics felt, would lead