The Romantic Period English Romantic Poetry Characteristics

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The Romantic PeriodEnglish Romantic Poetry
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Characteristics

• Individual Person
• Nature
• Emotion
• Inspiration
• Imagination

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Individual Person

• Romantics believed the individual person was
  important and emphasized the needs of the
  individual over society as a whole
• Individual emotion was seen as valuable, unique
  and genuine (again it is the individual and his
  or her emotions that inspire)

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Nature

• Romantics found beauty in the natural worldthey
  respected the unspoiled beauty and genuineness of
  nature
• They felt that the individuals interactions with
  the natural world created the most genuine and
  powerful emotionsthese emotions then inspired
  the poetry

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Emotion

• The Romantic poets believed emotion to be
  essential to the creation of literature (poetry)
  and art
• They embraced emotion, explored it, and used it
  to inspire their writing

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Inspiration

• Inspiration resulted from the individuals
  interactions with the natural world
• Emotion and inspiration are synonymous
• Romantics believed that without inspiration
  poetry (true poetry) could not be created
• They believed any inspired writing to be
  poeticuninspired writing is just writing and is
  not a true form of art

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Imagination

• Romantics believed that it is the writers
  imagination that produces true poetry
• Inspiration invokes the imagination imagination
  creates poetry (product)
• This is one reason they embraced the spiritual
  (deeper level of existence) and the supernatural
  (forces at work that cant necessarily be
  explained)

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Read about it

• British Romantic Poetry

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William Blakes Poetry

• William Blake a poet and engraver seeking to
  break free from the patterns of thought that
  defined common experience
• Wrote
• Songs of Innocencewritten in his youth suggests
  that by recapturing the wonderment of childhood,
  self-knowledge can be achieved
• Songs of Experience--reflects disillusionment,
  explores the darker side of life

• The Lamb--innocence
• The Tygerexperience
• Religious connotations
• Companion Poems
• Symbolic

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Social Commentary

• Romantics rebelled against a political order that
  had become reactionary and repressive (reaction
  to French Revolution)
• They reacted to the pollution and noise of the
  cities (Industrial Revolution) and their poetry
  became an escapenatural beauty exotic
  locations imagination

• The Chimney Sweeper
• Infant Sorrow
• London, 1802
• The World Is Too Much With Us

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You will list all the romantic poems and texts we
read on this chart!
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William Wordsworth

• Father of English Romanticism
• Presented ordinary life and nature using common
  language
• This revolutionary approach to writing/poetry
  changed literature
• Inspired by his life in the Lake District of
  England
• Embraced the ideals of the French
  Revolutionsocial justice individual rights he
  was disillusioned with the violence that resulted
• Experienced depression
• Works Lyrical Ballads (published with
  Coleridge) The Prelude (autobiographical poem)

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Qualities of English Romantic Poetry

• Simplicity or directness of language
• The expression of spontaneous, intensified
  feeling
• Responses to nature that lead to a deeper
  awareness of self

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Lyric Poetry

• Expresses the personal thoughts and feelings of a
  single character
• Relatively short focus on a single
  subjects/effect
• Though no longer sung, they often have a musical
  feeling and songlike structure
• What qualities would give a poem a musical
  feeling and songlike structure?

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Types of Lyric Poems

• Ode a serious, often intensely emotional poem
  that pays respect to a person or thingspeaker
  directly addresses the subject
• Elegy a solemn and formal poem about death it
  may morn a person or a more abstract loss, such
  as the passing of youth
• Sonnet a fourteen-line poem with a specific
  meter and rhyme scheme

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Elements of Lyric Poetry

• Figurative Language (simile, metaphor,
  personification, oxymoron)
• Imagery
• Sound Devices (repetition, alliteration,
  consonance, assonance, rhyme, onomatopoeia)
• Defined on pages 774-775

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Narrative Poetry

• Tells a story
• Has all the elements of narrative fiction plot,
  theme, dialogue, characterization, etc.

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Narrativeliterary ballad
• Poetic Sound Devices alliteration, consonance,
  assonance, internal rhyme