THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT CHRONOLOGY 1783 End of the American War of Independence 1786 Burns: Poems 1789 The Storming of the Bastille Blake: Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel 1792 M Wollstonecraft: The Rights of Woman 1793 Execution of Louis XVI Beginning of the war between England and France Godwin: Political Justice Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1794 Blake: Songs of Experience A. Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho 1796 Lewis: The Monk 1798 Irish rebellion Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population 1801 Act of Union with Ireland 1802 Peace of Amiens between France and Britain 1803 The war stars again 1804 Napoleon becomes Emperor 1805 Trafalgar 1812 Byron: Childe Harold 1813 J. Austen: Pride and Prejudice 1814 W. Scott: Waverley 1815 Waterloo J. Austen: Emma 1816 Coleridge: Kubla khan, Christabel 1818 Keats: Endymion 1819 Peterloo massacre (dispersion of a Parliamentary reform meeting in Manchester) Byron: Don Juan Shelley: The Mask of Anarchy 1820 Accession of George IV Shelley: Prometheus Unbound 1821 Greek Declaration of Independence 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act The society These two generations of poets lived through the crucial period in which the rise both of democracy and of industry was affecting qualitative changes in society. The Romantic era was one of technical, political, and social revolutions and counter-revolutions, of industrializatio, urbanization. of increasingly massive industrial slums, of the first total war and postwar economic collapse, of progressive specialization in work, alternations in economic and political power and consequent dislocations of the class structures, of competing ideologies and ever imminent social chaos. 1 The immediate effect of the French Revolution was temporarily to abolish the French monarchy, to reduce for ever the rigid class divisions of French society, and to begin wars (lasting till 1815) which for the time being extensively altered the map of Eurpe. Its lasting effect was to inspire the European mind with the belief that change is historically inevitable and static order unnatural, and to imbue it with modern ideas of democracy, nationalism, and equality at least of opportunity. The effect on England was confusing, for many of the changes being brought about in France had already occurred in England in 17th C. especially the establishment of the sovereignty of the elected representatives of the people on Parliament in 1688. Such changes had occurred without the same mental upheavals, partly because English society and politics had always been more fluid than in the other larger states of Europe, and though unjustified privileges and inequalities existed, there were few definable barriers to be overthrown. Politicians were divided between the Whigs on the left who were neutral or sympathetic to the Revolution, and the Tories on the right who feared it from the start. Only when General Bonaparte took increasing charge of France and became Emperor Napoleon I in 1804 did Britain become united in fear of French agression. The two philosophers of this time who discussed about all these issues where Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke vilently concemned the French Revolution on the grounds that history is based on convention and inheritance, that it cannot suddently become a "blank page", that it is impossible to make a clean sweep of one´s past and follow abstract principles. "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement". 1 Paine answered him in the following way: "The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generation which are to follow."2 The Romantic Artist Literature was implicated in the Romantic revolution in many ways. It was the field of struggle for self-definition of the classes who produced and consumed literature, principally the professional middle classes 3. There have been few generations of creative writers more deeply interested and more involved in study and criticism of the society than the so-called romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. The general conception of the "romantic artist" is, however, one of an artist indifferent to politics and social affairs and devoted to natural beauty and personal feeling. Besides this reaction to the external situation and political changes, Romanticism is also an internal revolution, a radical change of attitude towards the value of intimate human experience. During the 17C and 18C scientific discoveries and analytical reasoning had been the intruments of the so called Enlightenment, when human beings were valued mainly as citicens playing a proper and fixed place in society. The Romantics reacted in particular against previous attitudes toward Individuality, Imagination and Nature. They believed than human beings are individuals, not merely members of a society, and that they are linked to nature more than they are to urban artificiality. They did not accept religious or social ideas defended as the only truth, but search a freer concept of truth, based in individual experience and what is more important, based in imagination 4. Art for them is subjective and organic. They tend to mirror external reality seeking its 1 Reflections on the Revolution in France. (1790) 2 The Rights of Man. (1791) 3 Gary Kelly. Romanticism between Fact and Fiction. 4 Both David Hume and Kant coincide in affirming that "knowledge should begin with an understanding of experience", 2 perfect form, "by leaving out particular and retaining only general ideas" 5. They also tend to elevate the unconscious as opposed to the conscious powers of the mind, the intensity of the vision rather than the artistic powers of a writer. "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of personal feeling... produced by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply" (Wordworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads. pp. 27-43)6 "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart´s affections, and the truth of Imagination". (Keats) "Cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration" (Blake:Prophetic Books) The romantic writers were individualists, and did not cohere in a movement. It is true that the influence of Wordsworth to some extent affected all the others except Blake, that Wordsworth and Coleridge were closely associated in their most vital years, and that a friendship existed between Shelly and Byron, but there was, over the whole period, more disagreement and even dissension amongst the six than collaboration or even sympathy. These poets did not think of themselves as romantic, and would probably not have appreciated the term; Byron, commonly regarded as an extreme romantic, was a strong admirer of the 18th-C poet Pope, one of the most "classical" of all English poets, and, writing in 1820, expressed his dispproval of the "classical versus romantic" controversies that he found going on in Germany and Italy. On the other hand, it is to be admitted that these six poets had certain qualities in commmon, which set them apart at least from their predecessors of 18th century. * They cultivated imaginative freedom, though in various ways, and this encouraged them to use a variety of sometimes very loose poetic forms. * Each tended to express the feelings of man in solitude as opposed to those of man in society (but this was also true of some 18th-C so called "romantic precursors" such as Collins) * They shared a tendency to be "inward turning" rather than outward-looking: but again the extent of this tendency varied greatly from Coleridge at one extreme to Byron whose best poetry -the satires- are as outward-looking as (though more individualistic than) any 18C work. * All, except perhaps Blake, responded vividly to natural environment. * They tended to use language with more freedom and informality than the 18C poets. * They were all, but in different ways, profoundly affected by the great historical fact of the French Revolution, and by its various immediate consequences, especially the career of Napoleon; Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge began as warm revolutionary sympathizers, but the Napoleonic wars caused Blake to withdraw and turned the other two into convinced Conservatives; Byron and Shelley were aristocratic revolutionaries, and Keats was non-political but radical in his sympathies. * All these poets were deeply interested in problems of growth and process, both in life and in art; it has been said that the most interesting poems of the period were about writing poetry. Some of these qualities eg. looseness of form, reliance on the imagination, and introversion, are commonly accepted as "romantic", but the term is more darkening to the understanding than enlightening as a general description of these six poets. "understanding of the mind comes first". The action of the mind in apprehending conditions of experiences works first combining and sythesing the elements into a single act of knowledge which Kant identified as Imagination. Emerson and Nietzsche continue in this line. 5 Sir Joshua Reynolds. Discourses on Art. 6 Para Abrams este "overflow" al que Wordworth hace mención parece llevar implícitos tintes de catarsis. 3 Romantic criticism The history of criticism is one of oscillation between periods of "imaginative freedom" and periods when moral and social prescriptions laid upon literature. The decline of Neoclassical canons of proportion and moderation in the 18th-century and its substitution by the Longinian cult of "feeling" whose emphasis laid in the subjective state of the reader and then of the author himself ilustrates these shifts. Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical demands upon literature.