While the word “romanticism” may stir thoughts of love, fantasy, or chivalry for a reader, these themes were originally associated with chivalric romances from the 12th-15th centuries; works such as Sir Gawain and Green Knight or The Faerie Queene come to mind. Chivalric romances feature knights in love, adventures and trials, and Arthurian elements including figures like King Arthur himself and Sir Lancelot.
Romanticism proper, instead, marks a revival of those themes during the late 18th century, when creatives and intellectuals began rejecting the rigid constraints of the Enlightenment and began embracing individualism, emotion, and imagination. This moment in literary history also marks a time of increased mediation on the beauty of the natural world and reflections on mortality, the mysterious, and the strange.
What Is Romanticism?
The literary period called the “Romantic Period” encompasses literature from around 1785-1832 and reflected creative and ideological shifts towards individualism, spontaneity, and emotion. This shift stemmed from a desire to deviate from ways of thinking that emphasized order and rationalism. The Romantic movement ultimately aimed to explore man’s inner world more fully and emphasized an engagement with things deemed irrational, like emotion, imagination, love and so on. Narratives during this period explored the extremes of the psyche, the depths of human emotions, and reflected heavily on beauty. This resulted in narratives perfumed by sublime natural landscapes, focused on introspection and emotion, and haunted by strange and gothic themes. Rather than being named after a monarch or century, like “Victorian” or “Nineteenth Century,” the Romantic period of literature was specifically named after these emerging creative and intellectual attitudes.
5 Notable Writers from the Romantic Period
Romantic period literature gave special importance to a few recurring ideals: the assertion that humans could gain knowledge by exploring the depths of our emotions, an emphasis on the value of beauty and nature, and a focus on both individuality and man’s imaginative capacity. Essentially, this period is marked by its rejection of ideals that championed reason and logic as our primary source of authority and knowledge as humans, and aimed to explore the value of things deemed irrational like the emotions and spontaneity. Many romantic texts also grapple with mortality, which, in its extreme, manifests in depictions of strange and curious creatures like the vampire and the immortal.
From this period, you will find texts that romanticize the ordinary while praising the spontaneous rise of emotions. At the same time, you’ll encounter excavations of man’s psychological and emotional depths, and reactions to both one’s inner world and to the external world.
William Wordsworth is one of the most well-known Romantic poets and is recognized in particular for his nature poetry. His works often reflected on beauty and the spontaneity of emotion, as well as the sublime nature of the natural world. His works, along with the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to set the Romantic Period into motion.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another founder of the Romantic Movement alongside Wordsworth, is best known for his poems Kubla Kahn and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. These poems reflect on man’s inner world and spirituality; the exploration of nature; and particularly on man’s relationship with nature. His works influenced many other great writers including William Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emmerson.
Lord Byron was one of the most reputable poets of his era and had a profound influence on other artists such as Balzac, Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. Byron’s image as a literary figure is marked by two important fictional figures: the Byronic hero, and the vampire. The Byronic hero was a character trope that first appeared in his text Childe Harold and then in many of his other works. The Byronic Hero appears as a brooding, mysterious, and intensely emotional personage, often shaken and disoriented by their own intense emotions. This character trope was imitated throughout texts during this period, including in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” whose brooding, bloodsucking main character was based on Byron himself.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” Her mother wrote extensively on an effort to defend the rights of women, though during this time period her sentiments we’re regarded with distaste and criticism. Mary Shelley went on to become a writer of her own and wrote the gothic novel “Frankenstein”, along with her novels Matilda, The Last Man, and others. Her works often focus on psychological catastrophe, the troubles of human isolation, and social rejection, which reflected her own rather difficult and catastrophic life.
John Keats is probably best known for his odes and his passionate love poems that bordered on obsessive. He was sentimental, urgent, and deeply thoughtful in his poems, most of which depict natural imagery and intensity of emotion. During his lifetime, his poems were often received with disinterest or scorn due to their scandalous and sensual nature. In the modern era, however, Keats is embraced as one of the great Romantic poets and cherished for his feverish and excitable nature.
Conclusion
As Romanticism developed, we see clear delineations between different generations of Romanics, as well as different genres. English Romantic writers from this period are often classified into 3 different schools, the Lake School, the Cockney School, and the Satanic School. While these schools were for categorization purposes based on motifs, styles, and themes, they were also used as a system of hierarchy and criticism. This post focused on English Literature in particular, but the Romantic Period was influenced by writers from all across Europe. In our next post we will expand on the three different schools, and then begin exploring Romantic period literature from all corners of Europe and North America.
