• Shift from agricultural to industrial society, uprooting people
• women began to rival men as writers in their sales and in their literary reputations
• Revolutions, both social and scientific, shake up the social milieu.
• Tendency of manufacturing towards mechanization.
• The enclosure movement creates a large poor urban class.
• Meanwhile, social mores and laws remain static.
• Repression of increasingly disenfranchised lower class results in a wellspring of emotional poetry.
• Many Romantic poets are women (limited in their options).
• The mind expands in the romantic period in its capacity

•  Writers saw themselves as individuals and their writing reflected changes that were taking place
• Most Romantic writers were preoccupied with the French Revolution and revolution more generally.
• The lyrical poem became a major Romantic Form with the use of the First Person, "I"
• The poets set out to change or invigorate the traditional belief in Biblical redemption. Poets sought to provide hope of a renewed humanity.

 

• Poetry should arise from a "spontaneous overflow of feelings"
• Poetry should express feelings and emotions
• The poet acts "unconsciously" and poetry should come naturally

Spontaneity  8
Composition must be spontaneous, it should come from impulse, free from rules and "artful manipulation"

Romantic "Nature Poetry" 9-10

• Poems register emotion and a crisis
• Objects respond to an inner world beyond the tangible
• Poets view Nature as Life-Like not just an Object.
• Poets give Nature a personality that can interact with man.(Example: William's "Peru")
• Nature both immortal or spiritual and mortal (human, animalistic).
• Glorification of the Ordinary and the Outcast.
• Poets "Assimilated to their poems the subject matter of everyday life."
• The ordinary isn't so ordinary.

• Coleridge: "special function [of poetry] is to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events in poems of which 'the incidents and agents are to be, in part at least, supernatural.'"
• Poetry explored visionary states of consciousness "that violate our sense of realism and the natural order"
• Use of metaphysics, the supernatural, and the fantastic.
• Noted poets went outside the rational mind in order to get readers to think outside their normal mind set.

• The Romantic Period was an "age of boundless revolutionary hope" and reflected a high estimation of human powers.
• The mind has access beyond the transcendent and the infinite.
• Importance of Reason
• Importance of Imagination (the mind's eye)

• Transfer of vision from political to individual
• Biblical concepts important to Romantic writers:
• Prophecy of a return of the earthly kingdom
• Change from apocalyptic mass action to the individual
• the French and American revolutions signaled that the world had already fallen and the apocalyspe was now

•     In 1820, London Magazine began the flourishing trend of strong, original, and competitive essay writing by printing the works of 3 great essayists- Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey.
•     The essay subject matter became more intriguing, dealing with chimney sweeps, poor relations, and murderers.  Writing styles "revived" and enhanced new prose styles and structures.
•     Drama did not work well because of ill-lighting, noisy and unruly audiences and poor writing.  Because of the lack of experience of the practical theater of Elizabethan and Jacobean models, none of the writings are used today.  Writings only survive in "limbo" of scholarly monographs in history of the theater.

• Gothic Novel: set in Medieval Castles with dank dark dungeons; explored the darker side of human nature.
• Novel of Purpose: political tool with gothic elements; social commentary; Major Author-- Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
• Romantic Novel:  related to everyday social lives of the hierarchy;  typical themes of morals, social and financial pressures;  Major Authors-- Bronte and Austen