The Hay Wain, 1821. John Constable. National Gallery, London, UK

The Hay Wain, 1821. John Constable. National Gallery, London, UK.

692 National Gallery Collection; By kind permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London/CORBIS

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h of ROMANTICISM 1750-1837

Looking Ahead Toward the end of the 1700s, industrial and political revolution overturned traditional ways of life in Europe. Bold, new ideas were beginning to challenge the belief in reason associated with the Enlightenment. In time, many of these ideas would form part of Romanticism, a broad movement in art and thought that valued feeling and imagination over reason. British Romantic writers found inspiration in nature, folk culture, the medieval past, and their own passions.

Keep the following questions in mind as you read: What were the essential features of Romanticism? How did Romantic writers respond to nature? What conception of the imagination did Romanticism express?

OBJECTIVES In learning about the age of English Romanticism, you will focus on the following: • analyzing the characteristics of the literary period and the issues that influenced the writers of that period • evaluating the influences of the histori cal period that shaped literary characters, plots, settings, and themes • connecting literature to historical contexts, current events, and your own experiences

693

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 693693 11/9/07/9/07 10:59:2710:59:27 AMAM TIMELINE 1750-1837 BRITISH LITERATURE 1750 1790

1751 1765 1792 1798 Thomas Gray’s “Elegy First gothic novel, Horace Mary Wollstonecraft William Wordsworth and Written in a Country Walpole’s The Castle of publishes A Vindication Samuel Taylor Coleridge Churchyard” is published Otranto, is published of the Rights of Woman publish Lyrical Ballads anonymously 1786 1794 1799 1765 Robert Burns publishes Ann Radcliffe publishes William Wordsworth begins Bishop Percy publishes Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish The Mysteries of Udolpho The Prelude Reliques of Ancient English Dialect 1794 Poetry 1786 William Blake publishes William Beckford Songs of Innocence and publishes Vathek Experience

BRITISH EVENTS 1750 1790

1753 1776 ▲ 1795 1798 Britain and its colonies American colonists declare Mungo Park explores Niger Thomas Malthus publishes celebrate January 1 as New their independence from River in Africa An Essay on the Principle Year’s Day for the first time Britain; Adam Smith publishes of Population The Wealth of Nations 1769 1802 James Watt invents modern 1781 British purchase Elgin high-pressure steam engine British surrender at Yorktown Marbles ends American Revolution 1771 1805 Sir Richard Arkwright builds 1788 British defeat Napoleon’s first water-powered cotton mill British establish first colony naval forces at Trafalgar in Australia 1807 WORLD EVENTS Britain outlaws slave trade 1750 1790

1752 1789 1793 First U.S. hospital opens in French Revolution begins Eli Whitney invents the Philadelphia with storming of the Bastille cotton gin in the U.S. prison 1752 1793 Benjamin Franklin proves French King Louis XVI that lightning is electricity executed by revolutionaries 1804 1754 1794 Napoleon Bonaparte French and Indian War Toussaint L’Ouverture proclaimed emperor begins in North America leads Haitian revolts against of France France and Spain 1755 Moscow University established in Russia Timeline Visit www.glencoe.com for an interactive timeline.

694 UNIT 4 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM (t)The Art Archive/British Museum, (c)Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY, (br)Bettmann/CORBIS, (bl)The Art Archive/Musée du Nouveau Monde La Rochelle/Dagli Orti

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 694694 11/29/07/29/07 12:44:3012:44:30 PMPM Frigate Macedonian captured by frigate United States, 1812. rsailles/Dagli Orti e du Château de V

Archive/Musée 1810 Art

The 1813 1817 1818 1824 Jane Austen publishes Pride Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s George Gordon, Lord Byron George Gordon, Lord Byron and Prejudice Biographia Literaria is publishes Childe Harold’s publishes Don Juan ▼ published Pilgrimage 1814 First historical novel, 1818 1818 Bolivar Caracas/Dagli Orti, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, John Keats publishes First science fiction novel, is published Endymion ▼ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is published 1815 Archive/Museo

Art Jane Austen publishes Emma 1820 Percy Bysshe Shelley

(bcr)The publishes Prometheus Unbound

1810 1811 1814 1819 1830 Prince of Wales becomes George Stephenson designs Peterloo Massacre takes First public railway line regent first steam locomotive ▼ place opens in Britain 1811 1824 Luddites destroy machinery England purchases Singapore and Malaya 1812 War between United States and Great Britain begins

1810

1810 1814–1815 1819 Father Hidalgo leads Congress of Vienna meets Simón Bolívar leads Mexican revolt against Venezuelan revolt 1817 Spain against Spain In Africa, Shaka becomes 1812 chief of Zulus 1821 1830 Grimm brothers publish Greece revolts against France occupies Algeria Children’s and Household Turkey and declares its Tales Napoleon independence 1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo, ending Reading Check Napoleonic Wars Analyzing Graphic Information What new types of fiction first appeared during the Romantic Period?

INTRODUCTION 695 (t)Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/ Art Resource, NY, (tcl)Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library, (tcr)The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY, (bcl)Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 695695 66/22/06/22/06 9:23:249:23:24 AMAM BY THE NUMBERS

BRITISH COTTON CONSUMPTION, 1800–1900

800 790 700 775 600 610 500

400 490 480 300 275 210 200 110 100 50

Cotton Consumption (in tons) 0 10 60 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 Source Historical Statistics of the United States The Cost of Gentility In the late 1700s, the word genteel TRAVEL EXPENSES times as fast as during the referred to a well-bred person. preceding fifty years. One reason Gentility, which made a family A genteel young Englishman’s was falling mortality rates socially acceptable, was closely education was not complete from epidemic diseases such related to economic status and life- until he had experienced the as plague. style, and was reflected in the num- Grand Tour, a European trip that ber and quality of one’s servants, could last three to four years. POLICING LONDON horses, carriages, and houses. The Money went much further on the following list presents what a family Continent than in England. One In 1829 Parliament passed could afford at various income British traveler of the late 1700s the Metropolitan Police Act, and levels. estimated that a tourist could Sir Robert Peel set up a constab- live better on 100 pounds a year ulary for London. London’s first in Italy than on 500 pounds a police (called “Bobbies” or 100 pounds per year year in England. “Peelers” after Sir Robert) were • One ill-paid servant required to be younger than 35, at least 5 feet 5 inches tall, in 300 pounds per year MILITARY EXPANSION good health, and able to read Two servants Between 1793 and 1815, • and write. They were required to England spent 1,650,000,000 400 pounds per year walk a beat of twenty miles a pounds on warfare. By the time Three servants (including day, seven days a week. • of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), a cook) the British army had grown to GROWTH OF RAILROADS 500 pounds per year about 250,000 men, more than • Gentility on a tight budget six times its size at the time of The first public railway line the French Revolution (1789). opened in 1830 and extended 700–1,000 pounds The British navy had grown even 32 miles between the British cit- per year faster, from 16,000 men to more ies of Liverpool and Manchester. • A carriage than 140,000. Pulling a 40-ton train, the loco- motive sped along at 16 miles More than 4,000 pounds per hour. Within 20 years, loco- per year POPULATION BOOM motives were able to reach A second house in London Between 1760 and 1815, • 50 miles per hour, an incredible for the social season England’s population grew five speed at the time.

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00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 696696 66/22/06/22/06 9:24:359:24:35 AMAM BEING THERE

In the late 1700s, manufacturing began to assume a larger role in the British economy. As a result, industrial towns began to spread over England’s landscape. To escape what they saw as a growing blight of factories and slums, many Romantic writers fled to remote areas such as the Lake District.

A Hungerford Stairs, c.1810. George Shepherd. Guildhall Library, Corporation of London.

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B London’s Royal Exchange, 1809. Thomas Edinburgh Rowlandson. Glasgow

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Maps in Motion Visit www.glencoe.com for an interactive map.

Reading Check 2. At top speed, how long would it have taken the first train to travel from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830? Analyzing Graphic Information: 1. About how many times larger was the British navy 3. In what part of England is the Lake District located? in 1815 than it had been in 1789?

INTRODUCTION 697 (t)George Shepherd/Guildhall Library, Corporation of London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library, (c)Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS, (b)The Art Archive/Tate Gallery London/John Webb

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 697697 11/29/07/29/07 12:44:4412:44:44 PMPM The Trium
h of ROMANTICISM 1750-1837 Historical, Social, and Cultural Forces The Industrial Revolution The American and French Beginning in Britain in the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolutions Revolution brought a shift from economies based on The late 1700s was a period of growing political farming and handmade goods to economies based on unrest that culminated in a series of revolutions. In manufacturing by machines in industrial factories. 1776 Britain’s American colonists declared their Coal and steam replaced wind and water as new independence, resulting in a long war before the sources of energy and power. Cities and towns grew as United States of America won its freedom in 1781. people moved from the country to work in factories. The French Revolution began in 1789 as a demo- This process produced wealth for a few factory owners cratic protest against royal despotism and an idealistic but widespread misery for their workers, who strug- assertion of human equality. Yet, once in power, the gled with long hours, bad working conditions, pov- revolutionary government in France resorted to bru- erty, slums, and disease. tality, leading to the execution of thousands during the Reign of Terror.

Latin American Revolutions In the early 1790s, the ideals of the American and French Revolutions began to spread throughout Latin America. In France’s colony of Saint Domingue (pres- ent-day Haiti), enslaved Africans took up arms under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, winning independence in 1804. Beginning in 1810, a wide- spread series of revolts took place against Spanish rule in Latin America. By 1824, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia had become independent.

The Napoleonic Wars

The Hero of Trafalgar, 1898. Orford Smith. Color lithograph. In 1793 revolutionary France declared war on Britain. From that point until 1815, with no more than a brief respite, Britain and France were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon Bonaparte—a brilliant

698 UNIT 4 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM Fine Art Photographic Library/CORBIS

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 698698 66/23/06/23/06 10:23:5910:23:59 AMAM young Corsican and one of the most successful mili- tary commanders in history—first championed the “It is the addition of strangeness to French Revolution and then seized power himself, becoming emperor of France in 1804. The British beauty that constitutes the romantic naval commander Horatio Nelson became a national character in art.” hero when he shattered Napoleon’s fleet at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Britain continued to fight —Walter Pater Napoleon on land and sea until his defeat at the cli- mactic Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Romantic poets were particularly suspicious of the Romanticism Enlightenment view of nature: that it obeyed mechanical laws and that it could be mastered. In Romanticism sprang from a reaction against Enlight- Romanticism, nature is always active, vital, and enment values. While the Enlightenment praised spontaneous. For many Romantics, true enlighten- reason and its limits, the Romantics were fascinated ment came not from isolating oneself in bookish by extreme physical sensations and mental states— studies, but rather from nature. “Nature” for the even terror and madness. Romantic works are filled Romantics included scenery, especially wilderness, not with moderation and social cohesion but with and an interest in the natural state of people. For exotic extremes, whimsy and caprice, nightmares and instance, the simplicity of common people—the visions, innocent children, lone wanderers, and quests songs they sang and the stories they told—inspired after the unattainable. The skeptical intellectual is poets, as did children. Imagining what primitive peo- the representative figure of the Enlightenment; for ple might have been like in a state of nature gave rise the Romantics, it is the sublimely inspired poet. to the Romantic ideal of the “noble savage,” a Unlike Enlightenment thinkers, the Romantics did human being of instinctive goodness. Above all, not view feelings as untrustworthy or distracting. On Romantic writers placed their trust in instinct and the contrary, they valued expressions of feelings as the power of the imagination. authentic. Someone who was capable of feeling deeply demonstrated a natural human sympathy both to nature and to the feelings of others.

PREVIEW Big Ideas of The Triumph of Romanticism

The Quest The Stirrings of Nature and the for Truth 1 Romanticism 2 Imagination 3 and Beauty

During the later 1700s, dissi- As the Industrial Revolution A second generation of dent voices began to chal- began to transform Britain English Romantics succeeded lenge the rule of rationalism into a nation of cities and the first, inheriting many of and the values of civilization factories, Romantics sought the enthusiasms and values that underpinned the inspiration in the beauty of of their predecessors. During Enlightenment. New move- the natural world, the simple their tragically brief lives, Lord ments in literature, which lives of ordinary workers, Byron, Percy Shelley, and would soon develop into the innocence of childhood, John Keats each actively pur- Romanticism, emphasized and the mysterious and sued the elusive Romantic the importance of feelings supernatural. ideals of truth and beauty. and imagination over reason. See pages 702–703. See pages 704–705. See pages 700–701.

INTRODUCTION 699

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he bold attempts of Enlightenment Sensibility and the Emotions thinkers to find reason and order Young writers increasingly wanted to reduce the in the world—indeed, in the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. One solution whole universe—inspired an was to replace it with a kind of sympathetic feeling equally bold reaction against those qualities. The called “sensibility.” While seventeenth-century phy- reaction became Romanticism. T sician William Harvey might have discovered that the source for the circulation of the blood was the heart, the Romantics were far more interested in the “Man was born free, and everywhere he way the heart represents the origin of emotion than is in chains.” in its mechanics. This cult of sensibility first empha- sized the physical reactions we have when our hearts —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract are moved—blushing, turning pale, and fainting. They read these visible movements of the blood as signs of inner moral sympathy and virtue.

The “State of Nature” The Imagination Interested in getting at the root causes of things, Another warm, Romantic antidote to the cool rea- including human nature, several Enlightenment son of the Enlightenment was the imagination, thinkers speculated about what humans in a “state which blends sensory impressions with fantasy. of nature” might be like. One of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers had tended to dismiss the of these thinkers was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a imagination, either because they wanted to analyze Swiss who spent much of his adult life in France. He pure experience in their scientific experiments or believed that humans were born naturally good, because they were interested in purely logical argu- curious, and content with satisfying just their basic ments in their philosophical searches for fundamen- needs. According to Rousseau, society corrupts us so tal truths. Romantic writers valued precisely that that we instead desire status, idleness, and luxuries. quality of the imagination that Enlightenment writ- Can we ever regain the primitive innocence and ers had despised: its ability to fuse sights and sounds happiness of the “noble savage”? Rousseau thought from wildly different kinds of experience in ways that not, but he did believe in educating children in a defy sense. In fact the Romantics embraced the irra- more natural way. His ideal education would be more tional ecstasies and horrors of the imagination. The “natural” in two ways, both by allowing the child to poet William Blake (see page 754), for example, be outside in nature and by attending to the unfold- believed that imagination, rather than science, held ing of each child’s inner nature as he or she develops. the secrets of the universe. As he asserted, “Vision or He believed such education would produce upstand- Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally ing citizens who would be confident in their own Exists, Really and Unchangeably.” abilities and opinions. Rousseau became an impor- tant catalyst for the new generation of Romantic writers. The Pre-Romantics The early years of this era saw several writers who straddled both Enlightenment values and the emerg- ing ideals of Romanticism. Thomas Gray used Neoclassical techniques in his poetry, such as ele- vated language and classical forms, while embracing

700 UNIT 4 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 700700 66/22/06/22/06 9:25:269:25:26 AMAM A proverb is a short statement that expresses a truth. Blake wrote the following proverbs as a counterpart to the book of Proverbs in the Bible.

from Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. A dead body revenges not injuries. The most sublime act is to set another before you. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. Folly is the cloke of knavery. Shame is Pride’s cloke. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The Ancient of Days. Frontispiece, plate 1, from Europe, The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. a Prophecy, 1794. William Blake. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for a love of nature and a belief in the common man— the eye of man. important ideals of later Romantic poets. Despite his acceptance in high society, Robert Burns wrote of the lives of common people in Scottish dialect characteristic of peasants and farmers. Perhaps the most famous pre-Romantic writer of all, William Blake was not content with the prevailing Neo- classical values of his day and focused on supernatural elements and imaginative experimentation thereby Reading Check forging a style all his own. Comparing and Contrasting How do Blake’s ideas oppose Enlightment values?

INTRODUCTION 701 The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY

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erhaps the most profound The Child and the Common Man disagreement between Who led the most natural life? One answer for the Enlightenment and Romantic Romantics was children, because they had not yet writers was their differing reac- been educated by school or society. Long before the tions to nature. What is it for? Is it good or bad? Enlightenment, thinkers had viewed children as defi- What should we do with it? P cient adults precisely because they had not yet been transformed by education. The Romantics, however, What Is Nature? saw in children innocence and imagination rather To Enlightenment thinkers, disorderly nature seemed than ignorance. Another group whose lives and cul- meant for humans to tame. Nature could be made ture had not been distorted by civilized values was more productive in farms run on rational principles. the common people. Writers of the period became Nature could be made more rational by being ana- interested in imagining the experiences and impres- lyzed and studied in laboratories. Nature could be sions of ordinary folk. made more beautiful in orderly gardens with straight In 1798, two young poets, William Wordsworth and paths and clear views. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see page 799), decided to The answers to these questions seemed more compli- publish a book of poetry, called Lyrical Ballads, that cated to writers a few generations later when the face experimented with these new ideas. Their poems for of nature was literally changing. Cities and towns the most part are written in the simple verse form of were sprawling into the countryside, railroads began folk ballads or hymns. They use informal vocabulary, to crisscross the landscape, smoke-belching factories not ornate language. Their subjects, too, are drawn were springing up. Had human intervention really from the lives of uneducated people: a little girl whose made nature more rational or more beautiful? And brothers and sisters have died, an old Indian woman, what did these changes say about the humans who a mentally deficient boy, an old sailor, a father going had caused them? for a walk with his young son. Dreams and Nightmares “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Many Romantic writers shared a critical attitude toward the methods and promised benefits of science. —William Wordsworth Wordsworth, for instance, was concerned about our motivations in studying nature: “Our meddling intel- lect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; /— Romantics preferred their nature wild and untamed. We murder to dissect.” This Romantic indictment of Their landscape gardens, for example, kept a space how science deforms nature took life in the gothic for wilderness, with winding paths through tangled novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (see page 833). woods leading to sudden, startling views. Instead of As a result of views like these, many Romantics were the arranged prettiness of an ornamental garden, they fascinated by subjects that science could not explain. preferred the sublime experience of the Swiss Alps, Coleridge contributed a long poem to Lyrical Ballads where the overwhelming scale of nature inspires awe that includes nightmarish scenes set among the rather than mere appreciation. In his poem “The icebergs of the Antarctic. He later claimed that his Tables Turned,” William Wordsworth (see page 780) famous poem “Kubla Khan” appeared to him in a recommended that we shut our books and lift our drug-induced dream vision. By focusing on the irra- eyes to the natural world around us: “Enough of tional and unnatural, Romantic writers hoped to science and of art; / Close up those barren leaves; / embrace the full scope of human experience, includ- Come forth, and bring with you a heart / That ing the pains and pleasures of the heart and the dark watches and receives.” recesses of the mind.

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00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 702702 66/22/06/22/06 9:25:519:25:51 AMAM Cloud Study, Horizon of Trees. John Constable. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth

The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a these poems was to choose incidents and situations state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be from common life, and to relate or describe them, more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly com- throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of lan- municated; because the manners of rural life germinate guage really used by men; . . . Low and rustic life was from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential character of rural occupations, are more easily compre- passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can hended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a that condition the passions of men are incorporated with plainer and more emphatic language; because in that the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Reading Check Analyzing Cause and Effect How did Wordsworth and Coleridge’s interest in common life influence their poetry?

INTRODUCTION 703 John Constable/Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library

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or the Romantics, the deepest away places. Literature with exotic settings—whether human experiences were often experienced or imagined—proved very popular with moments of intense communi- Romantic writers and audiences. Other remote and cation between their inner beautiful spots appealed to them as well. The high- selves and the world around them. They sought these lands of Scotland and the Swiss and Italian Alps, for experiencesF by falling in love, writing poetry, and example, with their rough peaks and raging torrents, fighting for causes they believed in. provided the settings for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The past, too, offered exotic surprises. Many Romantic The Revolutionary Spirit writers bypassed the familiar, sunlit eras of Greece In 1789 the French Revolution seemed to offer young and Rome for darker, more mysterious periods. In par- people a chance to realize these dreams. Wordsworth ticular, the medieval “Dark Ages” appealed to them. and Coleridge, among many others, responded to the The Romantics were inspired by the same qualities ideals of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and were of the Middle Ages that the Enlightenment thinkers infused with enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause. despised—Gothic wildness, age-old ritual, and strange As Wordsworth exulted (in lines later included in his beliefs. Beginning in 1765 with Horace Walpole’s The long autobiographical narrative poem The Prelude), Castle of Otranto, literature with medieval settings, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be such as weird landscapes and haunted castles, created young was very heaven!” When these ideals seemed a literary form, the gothic novel. betrayed by the bloody excesses of the Reign of Terror, both men slipped into conservative views. The next generation of Romantics, such as Percy “Much have I traveled in the realms Bysshe Shelley (see page 850), who had been inspired by Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s youthful of gold . . .” political radicalism, felt betrayed and continued to —John Keats support revolt both at home and abroad. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” The Spirit of Nationalism The Romantic interest in folk culture had important political as well as literary consequences. Many The Poetic Quest English Romantics, whose education had been It is not surprising that in an age so conscious of its steeped in the classics, were particularly stirred by the own rebellion, Romantic poets above all reflected on struggles of the Greek people to win independence their role in culture. Many poets in this period, most from Turkish rule. The Romantic poet George notably Wordsworth and Shelley, wrote manifestos Gordon, Lord Byron (see page 842) donated money declaring the supremacy of poetry. Others wrote to the Greek cause, founded an artillery unit, and poems that seem to be allegories of the grand poetic died en route to fight beside the Greeks. quest for beauty and truth that guided many Romantic poets. One such poet who sought to cap- ture exuberance and beauty was John Keats (see page Exotic Places and Times 865). In his brief life, he traveled far in his imagina- For the Romantics, a great part of the attraction of tion. Some of his most famous sonnets are about the foreign lands was the glamour of their cultures. Such ability of books to transport him to the magical places held the allure of the unknown and the exotic. realms of the imagination. Sublime thoughts demand Actual travel was not always necessary. The sublime forms of expression, Romantic poets thought. Romantics could feed their imaginations with the They were thrilled to take on this challenge. writings of travelers to the Near East and other far-

704 UNIT 4 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 704704 66/22/06/22/06 9:26:199:26:19 AMAM Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1845. Joseph Severn. Oil on canvas. Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome.

from A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of within their words. They measure the circumference and the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial sound the depths of human nature with a comprehen- change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods sive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves there is an accumulation of the power of communicating perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifesta- and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions tions, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this Poets are the hierophants [interpreters] of an unappre- power resides, may often, as far as regards many por- hended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows tions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence which futurity casts upon the present, the words which with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. express what they understand not; the trumpets which But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet com- sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influ- pelled to serve, the Power which is seated on the throne ence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the of their own soul. It is impossible to read the composi- unacknowledged legislators of the World. tions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns Reading Check Analyzing Cause and Effect In Shelley’s view, what links poetry with revolution?

INTRODUCTION 705 Joseph Severn/Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome, Italy/Bridgeman Art Library

00692-0706692-0706 UOU4-845482.inddUOU4-845482.indd 705705 11/29/07/29/07 12:45:0412:45:04 PMPM WRAP– UP Why It Matters Cultural Links Many of Romanticism’s core values, such as the spiri- Largely ignored in his own time, William Blake tual power of nature, the importance of the imagina- has had a great influence on modern writers, par- tion, and the dignity of the artist, have become a ticularly poets, including William Butler Yeats, permanent part of our civilization. Today’s environ- Theodore Roethke, and Allen Ginsberg. mental movements and creative arts programs are The gothic novel and the historical novel, types part of the cultural legacy of Romanticism. of fiction that remain very popular today, made The Romantics helped change the way our civiliza- their first appearance during the Romantic period. tion regards children. Before the Romantic period, Often cited as the first science fiction novel, Mary children were seen simply as immature adults. Shelley’s Frankenstein helped establish the image Romantics such as Rousseau, Blake, and Wordsworth, of the brilliant, but mad, scientist that is still a however, attached a central importance to what they feature of popular culture. As an artificial human saw as the unique experiences of childhood. made from flesh (not machinery, like a robot), Romanticism also shaped our vision of the medieval Frankenstein’s monster is perhaps the first android period. Since the Renaissance, most people had in literature. viewed the Middle Ages as a time of “Gothic” barba- You might try using this study organizer to keep track of the rism, but the Romantics saw the medieval past as a literary elements you learn in this unit. glamorous era of knights and ladies, fairies and wiz- ards, dragons and quests. BOUND BOOK When it spread to the United States, European Romanticism helped influence American literature, inspiring writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Reader- Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Response Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Journal

Big Ideas Link to Web resources to further explore the Big Ideas at www.glencoe.com.

Use what you have learned about the Connect to Today period to do one of these activities.

1. Speaking/Listening Neoclassicism valued tradition, society, and reason; Romanticism valued experiment, the individual, and emotion. Working with several other students, hold a panel discus- sion on which of these value systems is a better guide to life. 2. Visual Literacy Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has become one of the most familiar Romantic literary works. Create a visual collage showing the different ways in which Victor Frankenstein and his monster have been portrayed visually in such popular media as illustrated books, stage plays, movies, television programs, comic books, graphic novels, and video games.

OBJECTIVES • Hold a panel discussion. Study Central Visit www.glencoe.com • Create a visual collage. and click on Study Central to review English Romanticism.

706 UNIT 4 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANTICISM

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