The Age of Romanticism - Essay Example

– I was about a minute late getting this to you. I’d greatly appreciate it if you would extend the original deadline so I am not penalized. Student name Instructor name Course name Date The Age of Romanticism Rather than being full of moon-eyed gentlemen worth little more than spouting flowery phrases all the time, the Romantic period was actually very concerned with a new liberalism in all things, making it a difficult term to pin down. “Walter Pater thought the addition of strangement to beauty (the neoclassicists having insisted on order in beauty) constituted the romantic temper.

An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism)” (Holman & Harmon, 2001). Characteristics of the genre identified by Welleck (2003) include a “revolt against the principles of neo-classicism criticism, the rediscovery of older English literature, the turn toward subjectivity and the worship of external nature slowly prepared during the eighteenth century and stated boldly in Wordsworth and Shelley” (196).

The period idolized the imagination as the highest of human capacities due largely in part to its creative abilities and as a means of reacting to sweeping change in every aspect of life. It also esteemed nature not only because of the creative element inherent in it, but also because of the manifestation of the imagination that could be found within it in the sense that we create what we see. The world was full of symbols and signs that would portend future events and actions which were knowable through their relationship to the myths and legends of antiquity.

According to Rene Welleck (2003), discussion of the new type of literature under the term Romantic began in the 1700s with its use by Schiller and the Schlegel brothers. It was the elder Schlegel brother who, in his lectures across Europe into the early 1800s, promoted the use of the term ‘Romantic’ to include “the German heroic poems such as the Nibelungen, the cycle of Arthur, the Charlemagne romances and Spanish literature from El Cid to Don Quixote” (Welleck, 2003: 189). In terms of the writers who exemplify this style of writing, most did not associate themselves with the Romantic movement, but are easily classified within this genre today.

“Thomson, Burns, Cowper, Gray, Collins and Chatterton are honored as precursors, Percy and the Wartons as initiators. The trio, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, are recognized as the founders and, as time progressed, Byron, Shelley and Keats were added in spite of the fact that this new group of poets denounced the older for political reasons” (Welleck, 2003). These writers, in turn, were heavily influenced by the events that were taking place in their worlds. A study of Romantic poetry, especially the work of Wordsworth, reveals traces of all of these concerns.

In light of the changes occurring around him, many of them recognized as having a dehumanizing effect upon the population and an unnatural effect upon the landscape, many of Wordsworth’s poems demonstrate a concern with the passing of time and the loss that accompanies age. This concept is illustrated in the first stanza of his “Intimations of Immortality” in which he states: “There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light” (Wordsworth, 1888: 1-4).

Nature informs a great portion of Wordsworth’s work, often linking the surrounding environment to his inner sentiments and exterior observations. The suggestion in this poem is that he has grown beyond such innocent joys and can no longer appreciate them in the same carefree way he had before. In other words, something special has been irrevocably lost through the passage of time and the aging of the poet. This sense of loss of something immensely precious is lamented in a push not only to remember the past and the images it represented, but also fostering an attempt to capture something of the present, through lengthy and detailed descriptions of the landscape to the emotional connection such vistas provided to the human spirit to the workings of the human spirit itself.

Works Cited Holman, C. Hugh & Harmon, William. “Definitions from A Handbook to Literature, 6th Ed.” On American Romaticism. (August 18, 2001). July 17, 2009 Wellek, Rene. “Romanticism in Literature.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, (2003). Wordsworth, William. “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan and Company, 1888.