Napoleon and Romanticism - Essay Example

INDEX Is napoleon the creature of French revolution or its nemesis Romanticism Characteristics Why "The Beggar woman of Locarno" is considered a Romantic text Give examples Napoleon and Romanticism Is napoleon creature of French revolution or its nemesis The poetic spirit rebels against the constraints of tradition and customs and seeks to modify the world in a new image. Thus, conservative poets are generally bad poets. The later writings of Wordsworth are proof enough of this assertion. But not all those poets who set out as revolutionaries deserted the cause. Lord Byron died in Greece, where he had fought for the cause of national liberation. Shelley, whom Marx greatly admired, remained a consistent revolutionary democrat until his death. And the great national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns, also remained a fierce opponent of monarchy and religion. Of the three, it was Byron (1788-1824) who made the biggest impact during his lifetime. His poems acted as a major source of inspiration for generations of Romantics. Unfortunately, his verses have not lasted well. His most famous poems are very long and belong to a more leisurely age when people had the time to read such things. But Don Juan still sparkles with a wit that is most un-English and the shorter lyrical verses can still give much pleasure. The defeat of Napoleon brought no improvement in the condition of the masses. After 1815 there was a deep fall, which paralyzed trade and brought a wide unemployment and poverty. The ranks of the unemployed were swelled by a flood of discharged soldiers and sailors. The victors of Waterloo and Trafalgar were forced to beg for crusts of bread in the streets of London, Manchester and Portsmouth. In an analogy to Stalin, Napoleon, the gravedigger of the French Revolution, was seen by many as the continuator of the revolutionary traditions of 1789-93. Wherever his armies set foot, they set about smashing the old order in Europe, and therefore, in a distorted form, they stood for revolution. On the other hand, the armies of England everywhere defended the forces of reaction. Nelson, the national hero, hanged the patriots of Naples and delivered them over to torture and murder at the hands of the reactionaries. Inside England, the reactionaries went on the rampage, smashing printing presses and beating up suspected radicals. One might say that occasionally the pose seemed more important to him than the idea itself. But this was entirely characteristic of the Romantics in general. It was also characteristic of many Romantics to admire, even worship - Napoleon, the Corsican upstart who had hijacked the French Revolution in its period of decline. The attraction felt for the person of Bonaparte among the Romantics bears a certain resemblance to the attitude of many foreign intellectuals to Stalin. Sincerely sympathizing with the cause of the Russian Revolution and the USSR, they lacked the Marxist understanding to be able to analyze the real nature of Stalin's regime or see any difference between it and the regime of workers' democracy established by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917. Therefore, napoleon is considered just the gravedigger of the French revolution and not the nemesis. Romanticism Romanticism was name given to the new tendency. According to "Walter pater", 'it is the addition of curiosity to the desires of beauty' , the eagerness for new impression and new pleasure, to be sought where the hard work of nature or the artist had been most cunning. More than this it was in revolt against authority, tradition and convention, whether political, social, religious or literacy. For over a century, classical conventions were applied to English poetry with, within their limitations, striking success. They established a rule of law in literature by which writers were taught to think naturally and express forcibly. A literature technique was evolved, which in the words of pope was nature methodized, but just as the metaphysical has abused the Elizabethan ideal of liberty, the followers of Dryden and Pope abused the classical ideal of order and restrain. Art degenerated into artifice. In the hands of the great master, the balance between the two had been judiciously maintained, but the lesser lights dealt in stock phrases and allusion and lapsed into an arid formalism. It became clear that the classic mode had its day and needed to be replaced. The signs of revolt became clear when James Thomason published the first part the second seasons elegy written in the country churchyard. If classicism had kept too closely to the beaten track, romanticism struck out in a bewildering number of direction. It expressed a new delight in simplicity of theme, feeling and expression, in the work ship of nature, and in familiarities with the lives and thoughts of humble men and women, but at the sometime it was fascinated by the morbid and the supernatural, by whatever was remote in time, like the pagan world and the middle ages, and by the exotic legends and splendors of the East. It was essentially a movement of liberation. The age of reason was not as is sometimes asserted, an age of acceptance and lack of curiosity, it was also an age of inquiry. But the romantics had a vitality and fervor a free onward impulse, that their predecessors had not know or had restrained Characteristics A reaction against rule of custom: Victor Hugo says romanticism is liberalism in literature Return to nature and simple life: ex: Words worth, Coleridge and Southey Variety and individuality: ex Keats, Shelley and Byron favoured subjectivity and emotionalism, impulse and odors rather than line. Their works were characterized by individualism and couldn't be mistaken one for the other. Even on choosing identified subjects, approach and techniques differs The return of the lyric: Poetry became musical, non-intellectual, sensuous and impassioned. Interest in the middle ages: Fascinated by the art and culture of the middle ages came the primitive morality and the revival of the ballad form. Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it had swept through Europe, conquering at last even its most stubborn foe, the French. It traveled quickly to the Western Hemisphere, and in its musical form has triumphed around the globe, so that from London to Boston to Mexico City to Tokyo to Vladivostok to Oslo, the most popular orchestral music in the world is that of the romantic era. After almost a century of being attacked by the academic and professional world of Western formal concert music, the style has reasserted itself as neoromanticism in the concert halls. When John Williams created the sound of the future in Star Wars, it was the sound of 19th-century Romanticism--still the most popular style for epic film soundtracks. If the Enlightenment was a movement which started among a tiny elite and slowly spread to make its influence felt throughout society, Romanticism was more widespread both in its origins and influence. No other intellectual/artistic movement has had comparable variety, reach, and staying power since the end of the Middle Ages Why "The Beggar woman of Locarno" is considered a Romantic text Give examples. The text reveals superstitious situations to us but more than this it is a romantic novel. The one main reason for the novel being called a romantic text is that it goes with the definition given by Walter pater i.e., the addition of curiosity to the desire of beauty and also has all the key elements of romanticism Bibliography: 1) a glossary of literary movements-M.H.Abrahams, 1993 Read More