The Romantic period was largely a reaction against the ideology of the Enlightenment period

that dominated much of European philosophy, politics, and art from the mid-17th century until
the close of the 18th century. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers value logic, reason, and
rationality, Romantics value emotion, passion, and individuality. Chris Baldick provides the
following description: Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical,
impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal
experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration (222-3).
These values manifested themselves in literature in several important ways, listed below. It is
important to keep in mind that nothing on this list describes all Romantic literature or all
Romantic writers. These general ideas, however, provide a reasonable description of tendencies
which would have been fairly commonplace amongst Romantics.

Art, as the product of individual creation, is highly prized. Many Romantics found
admirers read to hero-worship the artist as a genius or prophet (Baldick 223).

Nature, rural life, and pastoral imagery make common subjects for poetry.

Individual achievements are highly prized. This notion applies both to actual people
(artists, writers, military heroes, explorers, etc.) and also to fictional characters. This
tendency produces the notion of the romantic hero and the Byronic hero (see below).

Many Romantic writers, especially the poets, believed all people, regardless of wealth or
social class, should be able to appreciate art and literature, and artists should create art or
literature accessible to everyone. (Their success in this endeavor is debatable.)

Famous Romantic Writers:

Definitions of the canon of any period are constantly in flux, but for the Romantic Era in
England, there are six writers who will doubtless find their way into any such definition. They
are listed here in chronological order based on birth:
William Blake (1757 1827):
Blake is famous not only for his poems, but for the illuminated plates on which he printed them.
An excellent example (the title page to Songs of Innocence and of Experience) appears at the
right. His poetry is highly visual, and reading only the text of the poems without medium of the
illuminated plate is an incomplete experience, much like trying to reconstruct an entire football
game based only on the box score. An excellent (and free!) compilation of these plates is
available here: The William Blake Archive. Blakes personal spirituality and his views of
theological issues frequently filter into his work, perhaps most famously in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell and in Jerusalem. His most famous works are likely those in Songs of
Innocence and of Experience. The poems often function in pairs, one from the perspective of

childlike innocence, the other from the perspective of disillusioned experience. Several of
these poems, with the accompanying plates, appear on this brief slideshow.
William Wordsworth (1770 1850):
Wordsworth is one of the domineering figures of British Romanticism. He was good friends
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the two of them (along with some other writers who are no
longer as well known as these two) settled in the Lake District in northwestern England. The
group is often referred to as the Lake Poets. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge anonymously
published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads. Many critics cite the publication of this
volume as the true beginning of the Romantic Period. In the 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads (now
published under Wordsworths name), Wordsworth added a preface which outlines his aesthetic
theory and his views on what makes for good poetry. This preface is often considered as a
manifesto of Romantic ideology.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 1834):
Coleridges role in Lyrical Ballads is often overshadowed by Wordsworth, but Coleridges poetic
skill stands on its own. Though not as prolific as Wordsworth, many of Coleridges works
resonate with readers in ways few other poets are able to match. Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is a narrative poem that is a mix of traditional ballad form, adventure story, and tale of spiritual
redemption. Kubla Khan is slightly less famous as a poem, but its backstory is notorious:
Coleridge fell asleep while high on Laudanum (which is basically opium dissolved in alcohol),
had a crazy dream in which he wrote a few hundred lines of poetry, woke up claiming to
remember everything he had written in the dream and started writing it in real life, only to be
interrupted by a knock on his door after recording about 50 lines. The knock on his door caused
him to forget everything else.
Lord Byron (1788 1824):
Byron is one of the few British Romantic writers to achieve widespread fame during his
lifetime. Byron was good friends with Percy Shelley, but very much disliked (and was disliked
by) Wordsworth and Coleridge. In fact, Byrons poetry bears little resemblance to that of the
Lake Poets; its style and form is much more similar to British poetry of the 18th century. His
contribution to the period comes in the form of the Byronic hero, a boldly defiant but bitterly
self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed
sin (Baldick 31).
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822):
Percy Shelley was in many ways a stereotypical degenerate artist. He was constantly in debt
(despite his familys wealth), often on the move, and deliberately provocative in the face of
established traditions and social norms, prizing artistry and social rebellion above stability and
acceptance.

John Keats: (1795 1821):

Keats was the prodigy of the Romantics. Though dead at age 25, he was enormously prolific.
During his brief career, he was stubbornly (tough fairly successfully) insistent on maintaining his
artistic independence and originally, even going so far as to refuse to befriend Percy Shelley out
of fear that the slightly older, more established poet might influence his writing. As a result,
Keats's poetry, though distinctly Romantic in flavor, is unlike any of his contemporaries. He is
best known for his sonnets and odes, particularly "Ode to a Nightingale" and Ode on a Grecian
Urn." He is also well-known for his love of the classics of antiquity, which often filters into his
poetry.

N.B.: This page is a basic introduction to the period. Many important aspects of Romanticism
have been deliberately left out for the sake of brevity. These include female Romantic poets (e.g.
Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld), American Transcendentalists (e.g. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau), continental European Romantics (e.g. Goethe, Friedrich
Hlderlin) and the politicis of the era. Anyone interested in a fuller understanding of
Romanticism should research these areas.

In 1789, William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850) wrote an influential sonnet sequence, Fourteen
Sonnets, a sign of brighter times ahead for the form. As rational, witty, neoclassical seventeenth
century poems written in heroic couplets gave way to major works in more open forms, the
sonnet was somehow adapted to accommodate the literary values of this period. In many of these
works one can sense the new worth placed on intuition and spontaneity.
Second, perhaps, only to Shakespeare, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is generally considered
one of the greatest sonneteers. Writing over five hundred sonnets (mostly the early ones are still
read), he ushered the form back into widespread use and also revived the sonnet sequence.
Wordsworth continued the work of Milton in freeing the sonnet's subject matter from the
conventional and treated the sonnet as a subjective "verse essay" in which to explore his
emotions (White & Rosen).
Among the well known poets of the Romantic period, John Keats (1795-1821) and Percy Shelley
(1792-1822) wrote the sonnets most commonly anthologized--"Bright Star" and "Ozymandius",
respectively. Other notable poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Lord
Byron (1788-1824), wrote a few sonnets but did their best work in other forms.

Here, perhaps even more than elsewhere, the chronological division of sonneteers is arbitrary,
with Thomas Hood chosen as the Victorian to begin the next section. Also, a few of the earlier
poets here might have been more comfortable in the diverse Sonnet Central group preceding.
I highly recommend the recently published anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era
Revival, edited by Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson, to anyone interested in this period.

Characteristics of Romantic Literature

Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and
imagination; a shift from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and
natural; a shift from public, impersonal poetry to subjective poetry; and from
concern with the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and
infinite. Mainly they cared about the individual, intuition, and imagination.
1. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules;
imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience and truth.
2. Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on natural feelings as a guide
to conduct are valued over controlled, rationality.
3. Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for
primitivism, and a valuing of the common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize
country life and believe that many of the ills of society are a result of
urbanization.
a. Nature for the Romantics becomes a means for divine revelation
(Wordsworth)
b. It is also a metaphor for the creative process(the river in Kubla Khan).
4. Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the supernatural, the
mystical, the gothic, and the exotic;
5. Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution, especially concerned
with human rights, individualism, freedom from oppression;
6. There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness.
The art often dealt with death, transience and mankinds feelings about these
things. The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose creative spirit
was more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional
procedures.
a. The Byronic hero
b. Emphasis on the individual and subjectivity.