The Encounter :

1
The Encounter

• Romanticism
• Realism

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• Authors of Romanticism
• - William Wordsworth
• - William Blake

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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• British poet, who spent his life in the Lake
  District of Northern England. William Wordsworth
  started with Samuel Taylor Coleridge the English
  Romantic movement with their collection LYRICAL
  BALLADS in 1798. When many poets still wrote
  about ancient heroes in grandiloquent style,
  Wordsworth focused on the nature, children, the
  poor, common people, and used ordinary words to
  express his personal feelings. His definition of
  poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feelings arising from "emotion recollected in
  tranquillity" was shared by a number of his
  followers.

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William Blake (1757-1827)

• British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and
  engraver, who illustrated and printed his own
  books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the
  imagination over the rationalism and materialism
  of the 18th-century. He joined for a time the
  Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in
  London and considered Newtonian science to be
  superstitious nonsense. Misunderstanding shadowed
  his career as a writer and artist and it was left
  to later generations to recognize his importance.

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What is

• Romanticism

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definition

• Romanticism dominated cultural thought
• from the last decade of the 18th century
• well into the first decades of the 20th
• century.

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• 1) The Romanticists' own aspiration and ideals
  are in sharp contrast to the common sordid daily
  life under capitalism. Their writings are filled
  with strong-willed heroes or even titanic images,
  formidable events and tragic situations, powerful
  conflicting passions and exotic pictures.
  Sometimes they resorted to symbolic methods, with
  the active romanticists, symbolic pictures
  represent a vague ideal of some future society
  while with the passive romanticists, these
  pictures often take on a mystic colour.

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• 2). The romanticists paid great attention to the
  spiritual and emotional life of man. Personified
  nature plays an important role in the pages of
  their works. Terror, passion, and the Sublime (an
  idea associated with religious awe, vastness,
  natural magnificence, and strong emotion which
  fascinated 18th-cent. literary critics and
  aestheticians) are essential concepts in early
  Romanticism as is the sense of primitive mystery
  rediscovered in the Celtic bardic verse of
  Macpherson's 'Ossian', the folk ballads
  collected by Percy, and the medieval poetry
  forged by Chatterton (whom Southey edited). 
  Foreign sources were also vital Goethe's The
  Sorrows of Young Werther 1774) the ghostly
  ballads of Burger (Lenore, 1773) the verse
  dramas of Schiller (The Robbers, 1781) and the
  philosophical criticism of A. W. Schlegel.

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• 3) The tone of Romanticism was shaped by the
  naked emotionalism of Rousseau's Julie, ou la
  nouvelle Heloise (1761), and the exotic legends
  and mythology found in Oriental and Homeric
  literatures and 17th-cent. travel writers. The
  stylistic keynote of Romanticism is intensity,
  and its watchword is 'Imagination'. Remembered
  childhood, unrequited love, and the exiled hero
  were constant themes.

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• 4) Romanticism expressed an unending revolt
  against classical form, conservative morality,
  authoritarian government, personal insincerity,
  and human moderation.  The Romantics saw and felt
  things brilliantly afresh.  They virtually
  invented certain landscapes the Lakes, the
  Alps, the bays of Italy.  They were strenuous
  walkers, hill-climbers, sea-bathers, or
  river-lovers.  They had a new intuition for the
  primal power of the wild landscape, the spiritual
  correspondence between Man and Nature, and the
  aesthetic principle of 'organic' form (seen at
  their noblest in Wordsworth's Prelude or J. M.
  W. Turner', paintings).  In their critical
  writings and lectures they described poetry and
  drama with new psychological appreciation (the
  character of Hamlet, for example) they discussed
  dreams, dramatic illusion, Romantic sensibility,
  the process of creativity, the limits of
  Classicism and Reason, and the dynamic nature of
  the Imagination. 

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• 5) The second generation of Romanticists absorbed
  these tumultuous influences, wrote swiftly,
  travelled widely (Greece, Switzerland, Italy),
  and died prematurely their life-stories and
  letters became almost as important for
  Romanticism as their poetry. They in turn
  inspired autobiographical prose-writers such as
  Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb while the
  historical imagination found a champion in Sir W.
  Scott.

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Authors of Realism

• - Robert Frost
• - John Milton

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Robert Frost(1874-1963)

• American poet, one of the finest of rural New
  England's 20th century pastoral poets. Frost
  published his first books in Great Britain in the
  1910s, but he soon became in his own country the
  most read and constantly anthologized poet, whose
  work was made familiar in classrooms and lecture
  platforms. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
  four times. Nature and Frost's rural surroundings
  were for him a source for insights "from delight
  to wisdom", or as he also said "Literature
  begins with geography."

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John Milton (1562? 1647)

• The phases of Milton's life closely parallel
  the major historical divisions of Stuart
  Britain--the Caroline ancien régime, the English
  Commonwealth and the Restoration--and it is
  important to situate his poetry and politics
  historically in order to see how both spring from
  the philosophical and religious beliefs Milton
  developed during the English Revolution.2 At
  his death in 1674, blind, impoverished, and yet
  unrepentant for his political choices, Milton had
  attained Europe-wide notoriety for his radical
  political and religious beliefs. Especially after
  the Glorious Revolution, Paradise Lost and his
  political writings would bring him lasting fame
  as the greatest poet of the sublime and an
  unalloyed champion of liberty.

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What is

• Realism

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definition

• Realism in art and literature may be
  described as an attempt to describe human
  behaviour and surroundings or to represent
  figures and objects exactly as they act or appear
  in life. Attempts at realism have been made
  periodically throughout history in all the arts
  the term is, however, generally restricted to a
  movement that began in the mid-19th century, in
  reaction to the highly subjective approach of
  Romanticism. The difference between realism and
  naturalism is harder to define, and the two terms
  are often used interchangeably. The distinction
  lies in the fact that realism is concerned
  directly with what is absorbed by the senses
  naturalism, a term more properly applied to
  literature, attempts to apply scientific theories
  to art. 

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In Fiction

• Realism's most important influences have been
  on fiction and the theater. It is perhaps
  unsurprising that its origins can be traced to
  France, where the dominant official neoclassicism
  had put up a long struggle against Romanticism.
  Since the 18th century the French have
  traditionally viewed themselves as rationalists,
  and this prevailing attitude in intellectual
  circles meant that Romanticism led an uneasy
  existence in France even when allied with the
  major revolutionary movements of 1789 and 1830.

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Literature 

• Realist literature is defined particularly as
  the fiction produced in Europe and the United
  States from about 1840 until the 1890s, when
  realism was superseded by naturalism. This form
  of realism began in France in the novels of
  Gustave Flaubert and the short stories of Guy de
  Maupassant. In Russia, realism was represented in
  the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov. The
  novelist George Eliot introduced realism into
  English fiction as she declared in Adam Bede
  (1859), her purpose was to give a "faithful
  representation of commonplace things". One
  realist author represented on this site is the
  American novelist Mark Twain. 

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In Music and Art

• As intellectual and artistic movements
  19th-Century Realism and Naturalism are both
  responses to Romanticism but are not really
  comparable to it in scope or influence.
• For one thing, "realism" is not a term strictly
  applicable to music. There are verismo
  (realistic) operas like Umberto Giordano's Andrea
  Chénier created in the last decade of the 19th
  century in Italy, but it is their plots rather
  than their music which can be said to participate
  in the movement toward realism. Since "pure"
  untexted music is not usually representational
  (with the controversial exception of "program"
  music), it cannot be said to be more or less
  realistic.
• In contrast, art may be said to have had many
  realistic aspects before this time. The still
  lifes and domestic art of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
  Chardin1 (1699-1779) anticipate many of the
  concerns of the 19th-Century Realists, and he in
  turn owes a debt to the Netherland school of
  still-life painting of the century before him,
  and one can find similar detailed renderings of
  everyday objects even on the walls of 1st-century
  Pompeii. Realism is a recurrent theme in art
  which becomes a coherent movement only after
  1850 and even then it struggles against the
  overwhelming popularity of Romanticism.
• In mid-19th century France, Gustave Courbet2 set
  forth a program of realistic painting as a
  self-conscious alternative to the dominant
  Romantic style, building on earlier work by the
  painters of the Barbizon School (of which the
  most famous member was Jean-François Millet),
  which had attempted to reproduce landscapes and
  village life as directly and accurately as
  possible. Impressionism can be seen as a
  development which grew out of Realism, but in its
  turn still had to battle the more popular
  Romanticism. Realism has never entirely displaced
  the popular taste for Romantic art, as any number
  of hotel-room paintings, paperback book covers
  and calendars testify. It became just one more
  style among others.