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What Is Pre Romantic Poetry

Pre-romantic poetry commenced in the mid-1700s and ran briefly until the early 1800s. It is a subset of the larger body of poetic literature known as the Enlightenment literature and it is considered the introductory movement to the later Romanticism period. Pre-romantic poetry focuses on ideas, rationalism and objective truth rather than emotions and subjectivity and is notable for its stylistic clarity and conciseness.

Impact of the Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment, running from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, greatly influenced the development of pre-romantic poetry. A major philosophical trend of the Enlightenment was rationalism, which posited that reason and logic should be used to interpret the world and acquire knowledge. Writers and poets during this period were heavily inspired by the scientific thought of the day and the advancements in mathematics and philosophy.

In light of the Enlightenment, pre-romantic poets used reason and science as their primary modes of expression rather than emotion and feeling. While this didn’t necessarily make their work less meaningful or insightful, it certainly rendered them more distant from their audience as most of the concepts being presented were not on the same level of accessibility.

Characteristics and Features of Pre-Romantic Poetry

Pre-romantic poetry strived for accuracy and fairness when it came to depicting the world and human emotions. Therefore, it had a tendency to be quite ‘dry’ and factual in presentation. These writings were also heavily reliant on ideals such as objectivity, common sense and the rejection of traditional authority, which is a marked contrast from the era of the Middle Ages where faith and myth were dominant aspects of the artistic landscape.

When it comes to the features of pre-romantic poetry, there is a tendency towards an emphasis on meter and rhyme. Additionally, there was a focus on imagery and symbolism over abstract concepts. Many of the great poets of this era such as Alexander Pope and John Dryden were proponents of neoclassicism which relied heavily on the works of classical writers such as Homer and Virgil.

Significance of Pre-Romantic Poetry

Pre-romantic poetry had a significant impact on later Romantic era writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although Romanticism was a return to the idea of emotional and subjective truth-seeking, it was built upon the foundation of the earlier Enlightenment period which pre-romantic poetry was a part of.

The attention to structure, rhyme schemes and similes that were developed in this era served later writers in their attempts to express emotions and feelings more effectively. Even in the modern day, pre-romantic poetry continues to be an important part of the study of literature, serving as both a historical artifact for comparison, and a valued continuance of the human experience.

Subgenres of Pre-Romantic Poetry

The emergence of pre-romantic poetry saw a distinct divide between the various genres of writing, with each genre having its distinct and unique features. In the realm of drama, writers such as William Congreve and George Farquhar created witty and sophisticated comedies which focused on social and political issues of the day. On the other hand, there was the emerging subgenre of sentimentalist writing which was a direct response to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Writers such as John Gay and Laurence Sterne wrote works which had a distinct focus on emotion and feeling.

Change In Writing Style

Comparing pre-romantic poetry with the writings of earlier eras such as the Elizabethan and ‘Restoration’ periods, it is clear to see that there was a significant and sweeping change in the way in which writers presented their works. Pre-romantic poetry developed a certain level of intricacy and sophistication due to the more technical elements of meter, rhythms and rhymes that came into play. This made poetry more structured and organized, setting the tone for the later romantic period.

The development of stylistic devices such as hyperbole and irony, concrete imagery, and personal anecdotes also began to appear in the works of the great pre-romantic writers. While these devices would later be used to great effect in the romantic era, they were first developed during the pre-romantic period and set the tone for the greater poetic discourse of later eras.

The Relationship Between Nature and Human Experience

A tenet of pre-romantic poetry was the idea of the relationship between nature and human experience. This concept asserted that man is part of and at the mercy of nature, and that nature is an all-encompassing force that is ever-present in our lives and has a great impact on our state of being. For many poets of the period, this idea served as a foundation for writing and was a recurring theme in much of the works produced at the time.

Alexander Pope, one of the great pre-romantic poets, often wrote about the elements of nature in his works such as “An Essay on Man”. His use of imagery and device such as extended metaphor and personification to further convey his ideas was a defining aspect of his work. Virgil, the Latin poet, has also been cited as being a major influence on the development of pre-romanticism as his works often focused on the inextricable relationship between nature and man.

The Role of Politics

Pre-romantic poetry was greatly impacted by the politics of the day and the writings of this period paint a vivid picture of the social and ideological struggles of the age. From the moralistic poetry of William Cowper which tackled issues such as crime and poverty to the works of Swift which critiqued the Anglican church and the rights of the lower classes, pre-romantic writers used their skills to solicit political change.

George William Curtis, an editor and poet of the pre-romantic period, used his pen to criticize the political systems of the day and to promote the idea of free and fair government. His works have been credited with being some of the earliest pieces to tackle the ills of the period and as a result, his words remain as some of the most accurate records of the struggles and unfairness of the era.

The Influence of the Past

Pre-romantic writers were heavily influenced by the works of their predecessors, whether directly or indirectly. This is especially true for the writers of the neoclassical period who often reverted back to the works of writers such as Virgil, Homer, and Horace for inspiration. This can be seen in the works of Alexander Pope, who revisited the classical concept of the “Heroic couplet”, a poetic form rarely seen after the Elizabethan era.

Other pre-romantic poets such as John Dryden and Robert Burns also took influence from their predecessors, albeit in a less obvious manner. Although their works did not follow the same style as the classical works they had studied, they did take elements such as the use of themes and the exploration of emotion, and use them to create their own unique styles.

Science and Nature in Pre-Romantic Poetry

Science and nature served as major themes in pre-romantic poetry. Writers of the period often used their works to explore the relationship between mankind and the natural world, and to confront the conflicts between the logical and the supernatural.

William Cowper, in his works such as The Task, explored the idea of a benevolent God and the human condition. Other authors such as Robert Burns and William Wordsworth wrote about the beauty of nature and its importance to their lives. The works of these and other pre-romantic writers contributed to the greater body of literature dedicated to scientific reasoning and nature appreciation.

Modern Relevance and Legacy

Despite being a brief period of time in the grand scheme of literature, the works of the pre-romantic period have had a lasting impact on the literary world. These works serve as a crucial history lesson, providing valuable insight into the changes that have taken place since their writings first appeared and allowing us to draw comparisons to the present day.

The works of pre-romantic writers also remain relevant in terms of modern literature. Certain techniques and techniques and themes developed in this period have been carried into the modern day, with many authors such as W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot drawing influence from their work.

Dannah Hannah is an established poet and author who loves to write about the beauty and power of poetry. She has published several collections of her own works, as well as articles and reviews on poets she admires. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a specialization in poetics, from the University of Toronto. Hannah was also a panelist for the 2017 Futurepoem book Poetry + Social Justice, which aimed to bring attention to activism through poetry. She lives in Toronto, Canada, where she continues to write and explore the depths of poetry and its influence on our lives.

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Pre-Romanticism in William Collins's Poetry

This study seeks to address William Collins (1721 – 1759) as a Pre-Romantic poet. It regards mid-eighteenth century poetry as prophetic; that is to say, mid-century poetry predicts and precedes Romanticism, and consequently to be called as Pre-Romanticism. In the Pre-Romantic period, rigid notions about style and the absolute authority of religion and science began to yield to an emphasis on personal thoughts and feelings, often triggered by the observation of nature. The search for meaning led to the probing of the mind and a focus on the inner self, and to an individual, personal interpretation of the world. The most important characteristics of Pre-Romanticism are: primitivism, individualism, simplicity, sentimentality, exaltation of imaginative power, and spontaneity, natural religion, the taste for the sublime, exaltation of Classics, and originality. The close analysis of Collins’s poems, Specifically Ode to Evening and Ode Written in Beginning of the Year 1746, discloses that he can be considered as a Pre-Romantic poet: Collins’s feelings are intense when he contemplates abstractions, and he is concerned with the role of imagination in poetry. He believes that imagination rather than reason, an Augustan concern, is the essential quality of the poet. Moreover, the vast majority of his poems manifest a close affinity with nature in correspondence with the intense feelings of the poet and with the passage of time. He depicts landscape, death, grandeur, patriotism, nature, emotion, and individualist thought which can be perceived in the Romantic poetry in its full growth.

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This research work focuses on “The Romantic Philosophy in the poetry of William Wordsworth. The Romantics focus on landscape because of its natural essence and its spiritual composition. The Romantics aim at fighting for the masses and educating the public on how nature can be better treated and appreciated. He present the beauty and enjoyment of life in which he find himself as imaginary and visionary. This work examined the theory of romanticism in romantic poetry using William Wordsworth. Wordsworth own most of his poetic resources and characters to nature as he strongly believe in the power of nature that brings all that is good to life.

Modern Language Review, 2011

This article examines the eighteenth-century reception and editorialising of William Collins's poems, devoting particular attention to the editions that John Langhorne and Anna Barbauld published in 1765 and 1797, respectively. Discussing editorial practices and the ways in which Collins's poems were contextualised in aesthetic but also in literary-historiographical terms, the essay introduces an unpublished edition of the poet's productions by William Hymers. The exploration of this edition-in-the-making focuses on Hymers's attempt at making sense of Collins's descriptive-allegorical mode, his mythopoeia, and the ways in which he could embed the poet's works within an emerging tradition of literary progress.

English Studies, 2011

The Soul in British Romanticism provides a history of the modern concept of the human and the nascence of the human sciences during the long eighteenth century as well as a theory of Romantic poetry. The book investigates the forms and functions of the human soul from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century: during the Enlightenment, the traditional notion of an immortal and immaterial soul was replaced by immanent concepts such as vitalism, the nervous system and the brain. In the course of this development, the key faculties associated with the soul – transcendence, immortality and imagination – were increasingly negotiated in poetry. Thus, the transformation of the soul, leading to a fundamentally new and different understanding of what it is to be human, also created a new conception of the medium of literature. Romantic poetry tries to recapture the lost qualities of the human soul in and through the creative imagination whichbecomes the essence of poetry and a warranty of art’s transcendence and immortality. On the other hand, this triggers a reflection on the immanent and material basis of poetry because, paradoxically, the constant reference to transcendence in immanence ultimately leads to a profound reflection on language, texture and on the materiality of the medium of poetry. Through this medial self-reflexivity, Romantic poetry becomes the first form of modern literature.

Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities, 2021

Abstract The emergence of three schools in English Romantic brought change of the new ideas. The research is aimed to present prominent ideas of three schools – Lake school, Cockney school and Satanic school – in revealing the natural beauty and human dignity represented from the ideas. These all signify the English Romantic works of the time. The writer carried out language based approach and used descriptive qualitative method in his analysis of the selected works of the three schools. This research was written based on primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected from the poem of the three schools; Tintern Abbey, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and Ozymandias. The secondary data were taken from various books, articles, website on internet, and PDF. Then, the data were analyzed by structural approach through intrinsic and extrinsic elements. The result shows that romantic human dignity and beauty of nature of Romantic period greatly influence the Romantic works at that time. The three schools of English Romantics were known as the pioneer of such significant ideas. They introduced the terms of human dignity and beauty of nature from their literary works mostly in poems. The poems then emerged in Romantic period as the product of these new terms or newly innovative poetic system in poetry. Key words: Three schools, poems, human dignity, natural beauty

Traditionally, classicism and romanticism are conceived as peculiar and mutually exclusive literary movements with distinct literary styles and stylistic characteristics. This paper aims to trace some prominent writing traits of the Romantic era like spontaneity, preoccupation with imagination and subjectivity and focus on highlighting emotions and feelings in poetry as evident in the works of poets writing before the Romantic era. A close examination and in-depth reading of selected works showed that romantic traits are not confined to the Romantic era only but also appear to be recurring in the writings of Chaucer, Spenser and other poets who were writing much before Wordsworth proposed the characteristics of romantic poetry in The Prelude. This study, therefore, traces romantic traits in the works that do not fall into romantic era

IASET Publications, 2020

This Research paper attempt to elaborate the literary contribution of William Wordsworth in Romanticism. The aim of this paper is to show the literary contribution of William Wordsworth in English Romantic poetry of 19th century and the brief discussion on what is romanticism. William Wordsworth is known as the master of romantic poetry. According to him romanticism is depictions of emotions, personifying human life with nature, and propagation of a way of living which called everyone back to nature. He believes that individual can best understand themselves and their world when they are isolated from it, apart from it. 'Romanticism is an important literary movement which began in west Europe during 17th century against Neoclassical, the age preceding the Romantic Movement. The Neoclassical age was also called the 'The Age of Enlightenment', which focused on reason, logic and scientific facts. Romanticism saw the birth of new genre of poetry ,which glorify the delicacy and beauty of nature , emotions, and past, imagination , which was later christened as the 'Romantic poetry'. The 'Romantic Age' was defined as the period between the late 1780s and 1790s and the 1850s. The famous poets, apart from William Wordsworth, of the Romantic age include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, john Keats, Percy Shelley etc. The first instance of 'Romantic poetry' as a distinct genre dates from 1798, when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their famous collection of poetry named 'Lyrical Ballads'. From then until the 1850s, the genre enjoyed a flamboyant reign, and a number of great poets emerged, William Wordsworth is still the most wellknow of them all.

RESEARCH SCHOLAR, 2016

According to A.C. Bradley, " there have been greater poets than Wordsworth but none more original. " The originality of Wordsworth makes the relation between his work and age peculiarly complex. However with the emphasis on the importance of imagination, predominance of feeling and emotion, spontaneity, nature and common man, the Lyrical Ballads simply eulogizes Wordsworth's subtle engineering and delicate art craft ship in his works. This paper makes an attempt to rediscover and re-frame the phrase of Romantic appeal of common creativity in today's language of literature. Romantic Movement in literature was a vehement reaction against the eighteenth century rationalism. It was a deliberate and sweeping revolt against the literary principles of the Age of Reason. Just as Dryden and Pope had rejected the romantic tradition of the Elizabethans as crude and irregular and had adopted classical or more correctly neo-classical principles of French literature in their writing so, now Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their turn, rejected the neo-classical principles in favor of the romantic. Now what is that distinguishes the classic from romantic? Simply put, classical writing is characterized by reason or commonsense, expressed in a restrained style, that is to say, which has order, proportion and finish. Reason dominated life and literature. Emotion and imagination were pushed to the background. Romantic writing, on the other hand, is characterized by imagination, expressed in a style more or less free of restraint-a style, that is to say, which may be simple or grand, picturesque or passionate, depending on the mood or temperament of the writer. In other words, classicism subordinates matter to form; romanticism subordinates form to matter. Classicism stands for regimentation, regulation and authority. The causes and character of the Romantic Movement have been subjects of endless debate and discussion. And to justify all the features of this movement, we have to delve deep into the great product of the age-Wordsworth`s Preface To Lyrical ballads-which gave a new orientation to literary ideals. It is a critical document of abiding significance.

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Your Complete Crash Course to Romantic Poetry

General Education

The Romantic Era is famous for its poetry--in fact, Romanticism is one of the most influential periods in the history of English poetry.

It’s a pretty safe bet that you’ll have to tackle Romantic poetry at some point, whether it’s in your English classes or on the AP Literature and Language exam . That’s why we’ve whipped up a crash course on the Romantic Era for you! We’ll explain the following in our crash course:

• Answer the question, “What is Romanticism?” by providing a Romanticism definition and describing the historical context of the era
• Explain Romanticism characteristics that are unique to the period’s philosophy and literature
• Give an overview of the key traits of Romanticism literature and poetry, including Romanticism examples
• List the six most important Romantic poets you need to know
• List five books for further reading if you want to learn more about the Romantic Era!

There’s a lot to cover about Romanticism, so let’s get started!

Feature image: Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix (1827)

What Is Romanticism? Definition, Historical Context, and Key Characteristics

So what exactly is Romanticism? Let’s start by defining it in one sentence: Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement spanning the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries that emphasized the individual mind, spirit, and body; the emotional, irrational, imaginative, and spontaneous.

In other words, when people talk about Romanticism, they aren’t just talking about a period in history or a type of literature. They’re also talking about a particular attitude toward humans, ideas, and the world. Additionally, the ideas of Romanticism were presented to the world through the visionary works of literature, art, music, and philosophy.

To fully define Romanticism, we also have to think about where it began. The Romantic Era is often referred to as a “movement.” And that makes sense! This Romantic movement began in western Europe, but eventually spread throughout Europe and to different parts of the world as more people heard the ideas of Romanticism and saw them represented in art. For example, the United States, Russia, and South America eventually contributed their own literary, musical, and artistic interpretations of Romanticism during the era.

What Caused Romanticism?

So why did the Romantic Era start? The answer to this question is where some historical context comes in. Like a lot of intellectual movements throughout history, Romanticism was partially a reaction to the ideas of the era before it. The Enlightenment period (1715-1789), which preceded the Romantic Era, placed a heavy emphasis on rationalism, science, and empiricism. In other words, the Enlightenment Era was about facts and rational thinking!

The Enlightenment Era came to an end because of two major events: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789.

When t he Industrial Revolution began in Europe, the world changed almost overnight. (Which is why we call it a “revolution,” of course!) New powered machinery was developed in the 1780s, factories popped up all over cities, and mass production began. To access the new jobs and opportunities created by industrialization, people began moving away from rural areas and into the increasingly crowded cities.

A second event that influenced the beginning of the Romantic Era was the French Revolution of 1789. The working classes in France staged a revolt and overthrew the French monarchy to pursue freedom and equality. The revolutionary spirit in France sparked an interest in rebellion throughout Europe and played a big role in setting the tone of the Romantic Era.

The Enlightenment Versus The Romantic Era

The great thinkers of the Romantic Era had something to say in response to the Enlightenment, industrialization, and the French Revolution. First, Romantic Era thinkers reacted to the cold, hard rationalism of the Enlightenment by reviving a connection to emotion and feeling, the irrationality of the natural world, and a belief in the freedom and genius of the individual thinker.

Second, in response to the mass production and urbanization fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, the Romantics emphasized the tranquility of rural landscapes, the power and grandeur of natural phenomena, and the need to honor and preserve the wildness of nature.

Finally, the ideals of freedom, independence, and equality that characterized the French Revolution spread throughout Europe and became hallmarks of the spirit of Romanticism as well. Romantic Era thinkers resisted the idea that society could control the individual mind, creativity, and imagination, and rebelled against any forces that tried to confine them.

And that pretty much sums up the main elements in the emergence of Romanticism! Next, we’ll talk about one of the main forms of expression that helped define the characteristics of Romanticism and really brought about the spirit of the age: Romantic poetry.

Romantic Poetry: The Superstar of the Romantic Era

It’s difficult to define Romanticism without talking about poetry! If you asked an English major what comes to mind first when you mention “Romanticism,” they’ll probably say poetry. As a genre, Romantic poetry has its own defining characteristics and aesthetic, and the poetic works written during this era have many shared thematic elements that make them “Romantic.”

In general, the Romantic poets explored three main topics in their poetry:

• the relationship between humans and nature,
• the gothic and the surreal (more on what that means later), and
• what the purpose of poetry is and how the identity of the poet should be understood.

The Romantic poets believed that the inner world of humans provided endless possibilities for new ideas and ways of thinking and living, which is exemplified in much of the poetry of the era. We can look more closely at the three main topics of Romantic poetry to see how this spirit of freedom and creativity was expressed throughout the Romantic Era.

Theme 1: The Relationship Between Humanity and Nature

A major theme in Romantic poetry is the relationship between humans and their emotions and the natural world. The Romantic poets felt that humans’ internal lives and the exterior, natural world had a lot in common: they could both be mysterious, open and vast, wild and free, and sometimes a little bit terrifying.

Romanticism’s focus on the relationship between humanity and nature was at least partially inspired by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which we mentioned earlier.

Enlightenment thinkers sought to rationalize natural phenomena. Similarly, industrialism depended on humanity’s ability to harness natural forces, like water power and fossil fuels, and put them to work. The new industrial society also required a big human workforce. People’s lives were increasingly caught up in working long, harsh hours in grimy factories for low wages...which also forced them to move into dirty, crowded cities.

So how did the Romantic poets respond to the ways that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution used and controlled nature and human beings? By portraying and praising nature’s power to inspire awe and terror in humans instead.

Here’s what we mean: think of a time when you heard a booming clap of thunder. It probably startled you, even though it was a pretty cool thing to hear, right? That’s what we’re talking about when we say nature can be both awe-inspiring and scary at the same time!

To the Romantics, those moments of awe and terror in response to grand natural phenomena were a spiritual experience. This spiritual connection to nature came to be known as “ the Sublime .” In the midst of industrialization, the Romantic poets felt they bore the responsibility of reinvigorating that spiritual connection to nature by portraying the Sublime in their poetry.

Want to see this in action? The glorification of nature and its wildness can be seen in William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger,” and in William Wordsworth’s poem, “The Prelude.”

Theme 2: The Gothic and the Surreal

When most people think of the gothic and the surreal in literature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the first thing that comes to mind. And guess what? It’s a Romantic novel! While the Gothic and surreal are more commonly associated with fiction and novels from the Romantic Era, these themes also come up in a lot of Romantic poetry, too.

The Gothic can be thought of as portrayals of terrifying or horrifying phenomena that readers find thrilling. It’s kind of like that rush of adrenaline you get when you go through a haunted house or watch a scary movie. Part of the theory behind the Gothic in literature is that people like being scared.

Surrealism and the Gothic often go hand-in-hand. Surrealism’s goal is to subvert--or challenge--normal life by tapping into people’s unconscious imagination. Think of a weird dream you had recently where what you were experiencing wasn’t quite real. Whether you were floating above your desk in math class or riding in a car with a long-lost friend, dreams often blend bits of reality with your imagination. That, dear readers, is surrealism at work!

In poetry from the Romantic Era, the Gothic conveys a sort of mysteriousness through the setting and characters, and it often relies on supernatural forces and the unruliness of nature to create the sense of the surreal. If you’re reading a book or poem and there are cobwebs, dark, decaying passageways, or mysterious women who seem capable of putting you under a spell--and you’ve got goosebumps!--it’s possible you’re reading a piece of Gothic literature and experiencing the surreal.

So where can you find this in Romantic poetry? Pretty much everywhere! One good example is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Romantic poem “Christabel ,” which portrays dark scenery, damsels in distress, and alludes to the presence of supernatural forces. For the Romantics, using gothic imagery was just another way to explore the vast possibilities for human emotion and feeling , and to emphasize the ways that nature has the power to do things that are beyond human control.

Pretty spooky, huh?

A handwritten poem by Mary Wollstonecraft (1804)

Theme 3: Odes, Lyrics, and Sonnets

Every literary era is known for creating or putting its own twist on different literary forms. For instance, early twentieth century novels are known for popularizing the stream of consciousness style, where the author basically writes whatever pops into their head. Additionally, the unique rhyme scheme of the English sonnet was developed during the Renaissance in the 1500s!

The Romantic poets also used specific poetic forms: odes, lyrical ballads, and sonnets were popular among the Romantics. Let’s quickly define these three poetic forms.

Odes are long, stately, and lyrical. They’re written in stanzas of varied metrical patterns. In terms of theme, odes are often fixated on paying tribute to some kind of divine or supernatural creative power that the poet admires and even seeks to possess.

Lyric Poems

Lyric poems are briefer than odes. They’re often highly emotive and written in the first person, so the reader gets an intimate look at the feelings of the narrator of the poem who, in Romantic poetry, is often the poet themselves. Lyric poetry emphasizes sound and pictorial imagery instead of a long narrative or dramatic tales.

Sonnets , or poems with 14 lines and patterned end-rhyme schemes, were often used by women poets during the Romantic period to portray the feelings and moods experienced in romantic relationships. Some poets during the era would write sonnet sequences to portray an extended drama between lovers.

How These Forms Work in Romantic Poetry

So what does the use of these poetic forms have to do with the dominant themes of the Romantic Era? Well,  the Romantic poets were extremely interested in understanding how poetic genius works. In other words, they wanted to figure out what made someone a poetic genius!

Thus, it makes sense that Romantic poets would write odes lauding the creative genius of divine beings. Actually, Romantic poets saw themselves as creators, and they were constantly searching for inspiration for the creative genius within themselves.

The Romantic poets also wanted to explore the complexity of how they responded emotionally to their experiences in the natural world. Lyric poetry allowed them to express these emotional reactions in first-person by describing the sounds and visual images that caused them. It was a way for poets to share their feelings with their readers.

Finally, sonnets also provided an ideal form for expression of feelings exchanged between people. The form of the sonnet was used to move away from the logic and rationality of the Enlightenment and more toward mood and feeling. Just take a look at Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” to see what we’re talking about!

Poetic Genius: Philosophizing About Poets and Poetry

We’ve already mentioned that the Romantic poets were kind of obsessed with poetry and the people who wrote it. In fact, they loved to philosophize about where and how poets got their inspiration and what exactly “poetic genius” means. In general, the Romantics sought to answer the question, “What is a poet?” And they had some pretty specific ideas about how that question should be answered.

The Romantics defined “genius” as the state of being like a visionary or a seer. It wasn’t a skill to them, but more like having the capacity to view things in a way that others could not. William Wordsworth described the creative genius as one “ who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to common among mankind. ” The Romantics saw poets as individuals who just had a greater intellectual and emotional capacity for interpreting the world than everyone else.

Wordsworth also coined the phrase “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” during the Romantic Era. For the Romantics, that phrase pretty much summed up their understanding of how that creative genius played out in writing poetry. Writing poetry wasn’t a calculated, meticulously planned process. At its purest, poetic inspiration occurred when the writer was so overcome with emotion in response to something witnessed or experienced that, when they sat down to reflect on that experience in a quiet moment later on, a poem flowed forth freely.

But this kind of poetic genius wasn’t just about seeing things that others couldn’t—it was also about putting that vision into words that everyday people could understand. The Romantic poets lauded the ability to use the language of everyday people to capture everyday events, too.

Top 7 Romantic Era Poets You Definitely Need to Know

If you’re taking AP English in high school, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Romantic Era poets will come up on your reading lists and possibly even the AP exams. We’ve picked out the six major Romantic poets that you’ll probably need to be familiar with for the AP exam, and we’ve given you an overview of who they were, why they’re important, what their major works are, and which Romanticism characteristics you can find popping up in their poetry.

A caveat here: there are other poets who were important to the era, and our list provides a small circle of representation based on one Romanticism definition (for example: all six poets on our list are from England...but Romantic poetry was not confined to England!). That’s because the AP exams and reading lists for high school English courses have been known to pull works most regularly from this list of poets. We want you to know that there’s a lot more out there, but that it’s almost guaranteed you’ll need to be familiar with the folks on this list when exam time rolls around.

William Blake

Blake didn’t get much recognition for his poetry during his lifetime (his contemporaries kind of thought he was a weirdo), but in the years since, literary scholars have praised his work for its embodiment of the aesthetic of the Romantic Era: his poetry is creative, highly expressive, mystical, and philosophical. Blake believed totally in freedom and equality—for the sexes, different races, the individual, and, perhaps most of all, for the mind of the artist and poet.

Because of that, his poetry was some of the most influential of the period, and references to it frequently appear in literature today!

Works You Should Know:

• “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
• “The Tyger,”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is considered a founder of the Romantic Movement (along with his BFF, William Wordsworth), and his belief that deeply profound poetic ideas can be expressed using common, everyday language had a tremendous influence on the poetry of the Romantic Era.

Coleridge was known by his contemporaries to be a wordsmith through and through—he was meticulous in his crafting and revision of his poems, and his fellow poets and philosophers were often inspired by his approach to poetic language and philosophy.

• “ Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
• “Kubla Khan”

William Wordsworth by William Shuter

William Wordsworth

Perhaps the most familiar poet of the Romantic Era, William Wordsworth also helped to establish the movement with his joint publication of Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge. Wordsworth was England’s poet laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850, which means he was kind of a big deal.

Wordsworth loved to venture about in the natural world, and his frequent travels and excursions across Europe’s most breathtaking landscapes frequently influenced the imagery in his poems . Wordsworth also gave what might be considered the Romantic Era’s most famous definition of poetry, which he called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”  

Works You Should Know

• The Prelude (It’s book length, so we recommend reading one section to get a sense of it. Just remember: it’s his most famous work!)
• “Tintern Abbey”
• “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Known simply as “Lord Byron,” this Romantic poet lived fast and died young—at the age of 36 from a fever he contracted in Greece while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. Though his years were short and his contemporaries often rolled their eyes at his aristocratic excesses and frequent romantic scandals, Lord Byron is still known as one of the most influential Romantic poets.

• Don Juan (Also book length, and also Byron’s most famous work. The Romantics loved long poems!)

Percy Shelley by Alfred Clint

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley achieved fame and recognition for his poetry posthumously, when people began praising the genius of his long, philosophical and lyric poetry. Shelley also ran around with some famous friends—Lord Byron and John Keats were part of his inner circle—and he was even married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley’s philosophical ideas about nonviolent resistance have influenced many political thinkers and civil rights activists in the years since his death.

• Prometheus Unbound (widely considered Shelley’s masterpiece)
• “Ozymandias”

Like Lord Byron, Keats died far too young—at the age of 25—from an unfortunate bout of tuberculosis. His poetic works only saw publication in the four years leading up to his death, and he slowly began receiving praise for his works after he died.

Keats is known for writing odes that are filled with sensual imagery from the natural world and heavy emotion. As a result, he’s now known as one of the foremost poets of the Romantic Era...and of the English language in general!

• “Ode to a Nightingale”
• “To Sleep.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

You’ve probably noticed that there aren’t very many women on this list. That’s because during the Romantic period, poetry was considered a masculine art! But that’s not to say that women weren’t writing poetry at all. One of the most famous poets of the Romantic period was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Browning’s poetry often confronted social injustices of the period, including the subjugation of women, child labor, and slavery. While that made her unpopular with some readers, her brave confrontation of those issues is what makes her work widely read today.

• “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43)
• “The Cry of the Children”
• Aurora Leigh (which is actually a novel written in verse)

The Ozymandias Colossus in Egypt (Christopher Michel/ Flickr )

2 Romantic Poems, Explicated

“Explicating a poem” sounds like doing surgery, and that’s kind of what it’s like. What it really means to explicate a poem is to simply look at all of the different literary elements that make up the poem and analyze their meaning. Explicating poetry can also help you discover new Romanticism definitions that you hadn’t thought of before!

To help you see how the poetry of the era exemplifies Romanticism characteristics, we’re going to briefly explicate, or analyze, two Romantic poems for you below.

“Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Before getting into a sample explication, let’s start with the poem itself. You can read the poem below and look back at it as we analyze it afterward!

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

We aren’t going to explicate every single line of Ozymandias, but we are going analyze Shelley’s use of a historical allusion and strong imagery to get an idea of what the major theme of the poem is.

First, we’ll start with Shelley’s historical allusion to Ozymandias. (Remember: an allusion is a reference that doesn’t name the object specifically. Think of it as an implied mention.) Here, the poem alludes to Ozymandias. Ozymandias was the Greek name of a powerful pharaoh from ancient Egypt. While we can’t know for sure, it’s likely that Shelley is alluding to the real, historical person.

Most of the poem is made up of the narrator’s description of a giant, broken, stone statue of Ozymandias through imagery. The traveler describes Ozymandias’s face in the statue as frowning, sneering, and cold. In text engraved on a pedestal at the bottom of the statue, Ozymandias himself speaks to those who might view the statue of him in the future, saying, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Ozymandias seems to be speaking to all kings and rulers who might follow him to let them know that, no matter how great they become, they’ll never surpass his greatness. And, yet, despite the grandeur of the statue of Ozymandias, the traveler tells readers it has fallen into total decay.  

So how does all this imagery of a decaying statue in the desert exemplify Romanticism characteristics? Well, you probably remember that the Romantic poets were really interested in thinking about the tension between human power and the power of nature. Shelley points out how even the most powerful people in history still cannot stand up to nature’s power over time. In the end, everybody—even the mighty, like Ozymandias—return to the dust to be a part of nature again.

 “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” by William Wordsworth

Here’s a second poem we can explicate for you—a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. Give it a read, then check out our brief analysis below!

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

In Wordsworth’s poem, the narrator—also a poet—is doing what the Romantic poets loved to do best: reveling in the beauty and grandeur of nature. Most of the poem is made up of rich visual imagery: the poet is describing a long line of daffodils that stretch along the bay of a lake. While the sparkling waves of the lake are beautiful to the poet, they can’t compare to the lighthearted swaying of the daffodils in the breeze.

The lake and the daffodils aren’t the only images of nature that the poet describes, though. At the beginning of the poem, he uses a simile to compare himself to a process that happens in the natural world: the movement, or “wandering,” of a single cloud in the sky. Like a lonely cloud, the poet wanders alone through nature...until he stumbles upon the daffodils. The narrator then uses personification to make the daffodils seem somewhat human or supernatural: he describes them as “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

While the poet is delighted by the sight of the dancing daffodils during his walk, he ends the poem by expressing how the memory of the daffodils fills him with pleasure over and over again when he is back home, alone, away from nature.

So here’s how Wordsworth’s poem exemplifies some characteristics of Romanticism. Remember that idea about the Sublime? The poet in Wordsworth’s poem is definitely experiencing sublime awe in response to nature when he sees the daffodils dancing.

The poet also experiences the “oneness” with nature that the Romantic poets relentlessly pursued. The internal spirit of the poet is at one with the external spirit of nature as he sees it on his walk: both are lighthearted and happy. Nature revitalizes him in a way that urban, industrial life can’t.

Finally, Wordsworth implies that the poet’s memory of the daffodil’s sprightly dance itself embodies a poem. We mentioned earlier that Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” That’s exactly what Wordsworth describes in the final stanza of the poem. When the poet is alone, tranquilly resting, he is overcome by a recollection of the daffodils’ dance, and re-experiences the same powerful feelings he felt that day on his walk by the lake.

4 Best Books To Build Your Knowledge of the Romantic Era

If you want to learn more about the Romantic Era and Romantic poetry, there are lots of books out there that can help supplement your knowledge. We’ve selected four books that we think could help you learn more about Romanticism, depending on what you want to explore. Check out the four books for additional reading on Romanticism in our list below!

The Penguin Book of American Poetry

This book provides a collection of literary works from the Romantic period. It includes poetry and essays written by the famous poets listed above—Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats—but it also includes works by some lesser-known writers, too.

Additionally, the structure of this book is also extremely user-friendly : the book’s editors have divided up the included works into sections based on dominant Romanticism characteristics, including the era’s main themes and literary forms, like “Romantic Solitude, Suffering, and Endurance,” “Ennobling Interchange: Man and Nature,” and “The Gothic and Surreal,” to name just a few. If you’re looking for quick access to writings on a particular theme of Romanticism, this book will come in handy.

Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology

If you find Romantic poetry confusing and are looking for a reading and analysis guide, this book is definitely one to look into. Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology takes an in-depth look at a selective list of poems written mostly by the “big names” of poets we listed earlier. Its examinations of individual poems are highly detailed, and they break down the literary elements you want to become familiar with for explication and analysis, like theme, genre, structure, rhyme, form, and imagery.

Another plus with this text is that it provides contextual and background info about each poem as well, so if you need to be able to talk about how a poem fit into the historical context or the Romantic Era more generally, these annotations can give you a place to start.

Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives

One of the big themes of the Romantic Era was a fascination with the identity and freedom of the poet. Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives explores that theme in a narrative-style by describing the relationships among a talented, passionate, and close-knit group of writers: the Shelleys, Byron, Keats, and other young writers and intellectuals who were included in the group.

If you need help interpreting the relationship between some of the Romantic poets’ personal lives and their writing, this book will provide you with a unique perspective. Young Romantics is also a great option if you want to learn more about how women fared during the Romantic period.

Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction

If you’ve made it to the end of this guide and you’re still asking, “What is romanticism?” then Michael Ferber’s Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction could be a good resource for you. Ferber’s book is exactly what it says it is: a very short introduction to Romanticism as an intellectual movement and era of philosophical thought.

This book doesn’t limit itself to discussion of literature or a single country and instead explores the birth, development, and decline of Romanticism across regions and artistic mediums. If you want a bird’s eye view of the Romantic Era, Ferber’s book is a great choice!

What’s Next?

Background information—like the stuff we talk about in this post!—is important to understanding literature . But you need more tools in order to analyze it properly. Here’s a list of the 31 literary devices you must know in order to really understand and talk about literature. (Oh, and here’s a look at the 9 literary devices that you’ll find in every piece of literature ever. )

When it comes to textual analysis, practice makes perfect. Why not pick up a good book and test out your skills? Added bonus: the books on this list are great choices for the AP Literature exam , too!

Speaking of the AP Literature exam, here’s an expert guide to the exam and tips and tricks for tackling the multiple choice section .

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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Romantic Literature (1820–1860)

The romantic period, 1820–1860: essayists and poets, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some twenty years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing  Lyrical Ballads . In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the American Renaissance.”

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one’s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of “self”—which suggested selfishness to earlier generations—was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.”

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime”—an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)—produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates—were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of nineteenth century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world—a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village thirty-two kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston’s lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle, “Concord Hymn,” has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist’s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine,  The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861–65) that American writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for thirty years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting “as if God were dead” and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.

Emerson’s philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson remarks: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas—the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation—are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past…? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne’s, “full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.” He complained that Alcott’s abstract style omitted “the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s spoon.”

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with “going to heaven in a swing.” Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the  Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: “Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma.”

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the nineteenth century had been Wordsworth’s poems and Emerson’s essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau’s masterpiece,  Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called “Economy,” he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.

In  Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: “I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind.”

Thoreau’s method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the nineteenth century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” while Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the twentieth century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His  Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all creation,  Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson’s writings, especially his essay “The Poet,” which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through “Song of Myself” like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me . . . I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman’s birds are not the conventional “winged spirits” of poetry. His “yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs.” Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, “Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any.” But he is equally the suffering individual, “The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on….I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs….I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken….”

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem.” When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the “open road.”

Whitman’s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay “Democratic Vistas” (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism’s “Gilded Age.” In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry” that mask an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population (“Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does”). Yet ultimately, Whitman’s main claim to immortality lies in “Song of Myself.” Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Whitman’s voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of “experimental,” or organic, form.

The Brahmin Poets

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the three thousand lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the  North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly .

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They were pillars of what was called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost one hundred years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858).

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled  Outre-Mer , retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving’s Sketch Book . Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854), “My Lost Youth” (1855), and “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” (1880) continue to give pleasure.

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the  Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review , Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: “There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

Under his wife’s influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women’s suffrage and laws ending child labor. His  Biglow  Papers, First Series (1847–48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial “character” tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table , 1858), novels ( Elsie Venner , 1861), biographies ( Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1885), and verse that could be sprightly (“The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”), philosophical (“The Chambered Nautilus”), or fervently patriotic (“Old Ironsides”).

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and human nature.

Two Reformers

New England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman’s. He was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for anti-slavery poems such as “Ichabod,” and his poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.

Whittier’s sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem “Snow Bound,” vividly recreates the poet’s deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England’s blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book  Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller’s  Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women’s role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of “self-dependence,” which women lack because “they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within.”

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:

. . . Let us be wise and not impede the soul. . . . Let us have one creative energy. . . .Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the nineteenth century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects – a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense – To a discerning Eye – Much Sense – the starkest Madness – ‘Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you’re straightway dangerous And handled with a chain –

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson’s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R. P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson’s poetry sometimes feels as if “a cat came at us speaking English.” Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

• The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets. From Outline of American Literature. Authored by : Katherine VanSpanckeren. Located at : http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ENGL405-1.1.1-The-Romantic-Period-1820-to-1860-Essayists-and-Poets.pdf . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Literary Theory and Criticism

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Romantic Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorian and modern literature. (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake’s major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.)

Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature— partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition of romanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802–73), “Protestantism in arts and letters” (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism ). Protestantism was a protest against the fetters of the past (even romanticism itself)—against rule and convention, as Vitet realized—and therefore was also an analogue to the Protestant Reformation. In this sense, romanticism is the analogue in the literary sphere of the freedom brought by the Enlightenment in the political, moral, and philosophical world—according to Vitet, “the right to enjoy what gives pleasure, to be moved by what moves one, to admire what seems admirable, even when by virtue of well and duly consecrated principles it could be proved that one ought not to admire, nor be moved, nor enjoy.” Wordsworth, too, spoke of his object in Lyrical Ballads as giving pleasure to his readers, rather than conforming to rules: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction . . . because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.” That pleasure is Protestant in its deference to the judgment and poetic conscience of the individual soul: “[T]his necessity of producing immediate pleasure . . . is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; . . . it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (preface to Lyrical Ballads , 1800).

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Romanticism is therefore to be defined negatively, perhaps, as a principled protest against classicism. Since the French were the earliest to identify it as a movement, we can recur to the incisive definition one of the great French romantics, Victor Hugo, who (in the preface to his 1830 play Hernani ) wrote, “Romanticism, so often badly defined, is . . . viewed wholly under its militant aspect, nothing but liberalism in literature . . . a literary liberty [which] is the daughter of political liberty.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest purveyors of the term in English, but again he was describing French literature when he wrote in 1837:

The stateliness and conventional decorum of old French poetic and dramatic literature, gave place to a licence which made free scope for genius and also for absurdity, and let in new forms of the beautiful was well as many of the hideous. Literature shook off its chains, and used its liberty like a galley-slave broke loose; while painting and sculpture passed from one unnatural extreme to another, and the stiff school was succeeded by the spasmodic. This insurrection against the old traditions of classicism was called romanticism: and now, when the mass of rubbish to which it had given birth has produced another oscillation in opinion the reverse way, one inestimable result seems to have survived it—that life and human feeling may now, in France, be painted with as much liberty as they may be discussed, and, when painted truly, with approval.

Mill’s account shows the extent to which romanticism was central to Victorian literary attitudes, even as the heyday of what came to be called high romanticism came to an end in England with the beginning of the Victorian period. Indeed, the Victorian parody of the continued influence of romanticism identified what it called the “spasmodic school” of poetry.

These quotations show the extent to which romanticism is regarded as a revolutionary rejection of the past—of Mill’s classicism—which might be regarded as the literary equivalent of the French Revolution. Indeed, the first generation of English romantics were admirers of the French Revolution before its descent into destruction and terror. For this reason as well, the romantics saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a Promethean figure who promised liberty but ended up besotted with despotic power. Wordsworth, who celebrated the death of the French revolutionary Robespierre in The Prelude, nevertheless began that work with an ode to liberty. For the English romantics, that liberty was at once a break with Enlightenment rationalism and (as we have seen) a continuation of the Enlightenment’s intensely humanistic project of rejecting religious superstition and arbitrary law on behalf of the human soul’s freedom and primacy.

It is important not to make the mistake that some critics fall into of thinking of romanticism as essentially an irrational egotism. Romanticism is far more the inheritor of Enlightenment ideas than their displacer. It shares with the Enlightenment an intense focus on the powers of the human mind. For Enlightenment philosophers, that focus was often on its rational and analytic powers, whence the flowering of modern science. But such Enlightenment figures as the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau paid equal or greater attention to the mind’s subjective experience. Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) as well as his novel Julie (1761) were forerunners of intense influences on (respectively) such works as Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s T he Triumph of Life . In Immanuel Kant and the German idealists, and in Coleridge, much of whose work is uncomfortably close to plagiarism of the idealists, the relationship between its objective and subjective powers is central to a philosophical account of the mind. Kant saw that relationship forming in the faculty of judgment, of which aesthetic judgment was the most vivid example. The half-creation, half-perception of the world which takes place in judgment is the theme of romanticism, explicitly in such poems as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Sometimes the difference between subjective and objective attitudes manifested itself as a sense of self-division within the soul, a sense that could be traced back to the philosophy of John Locke (1632– 1704), which was repugnant but therefore powerfully influential, to such figures as Blake and Wordsworth.

Self-division, solitude, subjective longing—all of these are aspects of the subjectivity which romanticism took as its starting point and theme (in part inheriting it from the more sentimental mode of 18th-century sensibility, though sensibility was far more an overtly social phenomenon than romanticism). Because of its intense interest in subjectivity as well as its rejection of superstition, it is possible to see romanticism as a kind of religious sensibility without religious belief. The soul, or self, experiences itself as fallen in a fallen world (often represented as the world of childhood or the world most closely present in childhood). In Romanticism, by rejecting the doctrines of religion—that the biblical Fall is punishment for some derogation from a state of grace—the soul also rejects the consolations of religion; accordingly, it has no hope of salvation except within itself and its own experience. That salvation is therefore primarily aesthetic and philosophical (the distinction between the two is one of emphasis, which is why so many romantic poems are so intensely philosophical). The romantics took to heart Satan’s claim in John Milton’s great 17th-century work Paradise Lost (the poem most essential to the English romantics) that “The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of hell, a Hell of heaven (1, l. 254).” Our sense of ourselves as fallen, as having a destiny and home “with infinity,” as Wordsworth says, makes the finite world a negative measure of our own subjective intensity. When this intensity is represented as a claim to greatness of soul, it can look egotistical; but what counts is the intensity of experience measured by the failure as well as by the intermittent success of the outside world at matching it.

This intermittent success tends to come with a sense of the grandeur of nature, which is why so much great romantic poetry is about nature in its most intense aspects: those of beauty, solitude, and most of all, the sublime. Nature’s wildness, partly imaged in ruined castles and abbeys, which had been a staple of gothic fiction in the 18th century were particularly appropriate settings for romantic thought. But nature is itself a projection—it is the place the mind makes of it, as in the last two lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where it is the human mind’s imaginings that transfigure vacancy into silence and solitude.

The general mode of a romantic poem is one of crisis—a crisis that leads to its own solution. The very fact of crisis is a sign that the intensity of feeling and thought at risk is still there. Romantic poets worry about the loss of intensity that seems the inevitable course of human experience, but they reimagine that loss of intensity as the intensity of loss. Loss becomes, as the 20th-century literary critic Paul de Man put it somewhat skeptically, “shadowed gain.” The gain for the soul is in its apprehension of its own capacity to measure its losses, and therefore to rise above them. Loss within the soul comes to be figured as the loss of poetic vocation. The poetry inspired by this loss is a sign that poetic vocation is intensified in its own undoing, rather than dissipated— for a while at least. Romanticism reimagined poetry as an intense analysis of human subjectivity, and in doing so it lent splendor to the universal human experience of loss and decline. What more can poetry do?

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1973. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. ———, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Deane, Seamus. French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Furst, Lilian, ed. European Romanticism: Self-Definition: An Anthology. London: Methuen, 1980. Lovejoy, Arthur. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association) 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–253. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mill, John Stuart. “Armand Carrel.” In Dissertations and Discussions. Vol. 1. 237–308. Boston: Holt, 1882. Quinney, Laura. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Romanticism in England

Romanticism in France

Romanticism in America

Romantic Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

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The Romantic period

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As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics . Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel ’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.

Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake ’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley ’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats , referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth . Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England , was being extended to every range of human endeavor. As that ideal swept through Europe , it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.

The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.

The emphasis on feeling —seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination . Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked , and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man . A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.

Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction , however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centered not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen , a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas ), written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance . For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion ); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy , with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge . Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature . The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood .” In poems such as “ Michael” and “ The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “ The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “ Kubla Khan ” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism , theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “ Dejection: An Ode ” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon . In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy , was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse , “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott , by contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers ), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore , whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly colored narrative Lalla Rookh : An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “ Lake school ” of poetry. His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.

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• Pre-Romantic Poetry

Pre-Romantic Poetry

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• Vincent Quinn , Vincent Quinn is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex.
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Book description

Focusing on poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry investigates pastoral poetry and literary patronage in ways that shift prevailing notions of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic poetry.

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Frontmatter pp i-iv

Dedication pp v-vi, contents pp vii-viii, acknowledgements pp ix-ix, biographical outlines pp x-xii, abbreviations pp xiii-xiii, note on the text pp xiv-xiv, 1 - pre-romanticism and literary history pp 1-17, 2 - poetry and patronage pp 18-43, 3 - the occasions of poetry pp 44-72, 4 - homoeroticism and the pastoral pp 73-103, 5 - conclusion: the future of the pre-romantic pp 104-106, notes pp 107-116, select bibliography pp 117-121, index pp 122-125, full text views.

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Poetry Explained

How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

Unlock success in poetry essays with our comprehensive guide. Uncover the process to help aid understanding of how best to create a poetry essay.

While many of us read poetry for pleasure, it is undeniable that many poetry readers do so in the knowledge that they will be assessed on the text they are reading, either in an exam, for homework, or for a piece of coursework. This is clearly a daunting task for many, and lots of students don’t even know where to begin. We’re here to help! This guide will take you through all the necessary steps so that you can plan and write great poetry essays every time. If you’re still getting to grips with the different techniques, terms, or some other aspect of poetry, then check out our other available resources at the bottom of this page.

This Guide was Created by Joe Samantaria

Degree in English and Related Literature, and a Masters in Irish Literature

Upon completion of his degrees, Joe is an English tutor and counts W.B. Yeats , Emily Brontë , and Federico Garcia Lorca among his favorite poets. He has helped tutor hundreds of students with poetry and aims to do the same for readers and Poetry + users on Poem Analysis.

How to Write a Poetry Essay

• 1 Before You Start…
• 2 Introductions
• 3 Main Paragraphs
• 4 Conclusions
• 6 Other Resources

Before You Start…

Before we begin, we must address the fact that all poetry essays are different from one another on account of different academic levels, whether or not the essay pertains to one poem or multiple, and the intended length of the essay. That is before we even contend with the countless variations and distinctions between individual poems. Thus, it is impossible to produce a single, one-size-fits-all template for writing great essays on poetry because the criteria for such an essay are not universal. This guide is, therefore, designed to help you go about writing a simple essay on a single poem, which comes to roughly 1000-1200 words in length. We have designed it this way to mirror the requirements of as many students around the world as possible. It is our intention to write another guide on how to write a comparative poetry essay at a later date. Finally, we would like to stress the fact that this guide is exactly that: a guide. It is not a set of restrictive rules but rather a means of helping you get to grips with writing poetry essays. Think of it more like a recipe that, once practiced a few times, can be modified and adapted as you see fit.

The first and most obvious starting point is the poem itself and there are some important things to do at this stage before you even begin contemplating writing your essay. Naturally, these things will depend on the nature of the essay you are required to write.

• Is the poem one you are familiar with?
• Do you know anything about the context of the poem or the poet?
• How much time do you have to complete the essay?
• Do you have access to books or the internet?

These questions matter because they will determine the type, length, and scope of the essay you write. Naturally, an essay written under timed conditions about an unfamiliar poem will look very different from one written about a poem known to you. Likewise, teachers and examiners will expect different things from these essays and will mark them accordingly.

As this article pertains to writing a poverty essay, we’re going to assume you have a grasp of the basics of understanding the poems themselves. There is a plethora of materials available that can help you analyze poetry if you need to, and thousands of analyzed poems are available right here. For the sake of clarity, we advise you to use these tools to help you get to grips with the poem you intend to write about before you ever sit down to actually produce an essay. As we have said, the amount of time spent pondering the poem will depend on the context of the essay. If you are writing a coursework-style question over many weeks, then you should spend hours analyzing the poem and reading extensively about its context. If, however, you are writing an essay in an exam on a poem you have never seen before, you should perhaps take 10-15% of the allotted time analyzing the poem before you start writing.

The Question

Once you have spent enough time analyzing the poem and identifying its key features and themes, you can turn your attention to the question. It is highly unlikely that you will simply be asked to “analyze this poem.” That would be too simple on the one hand and far too broad on the other.

More likely, you will be asked to analyze a particular aspect of the poem, usually pertaining to its message, themes, or meaning. There are numerous ways examiners can express these questions, so we have outlined some common types of questions below.

• Explore the poet’s presentation of…
• How does the poet present…
• Explore the ways the writer portrays their thoughts about…

These are all similar ways of achieving the same result. In each case, the examiner requires that you analyze the devices used by the poet and attempt to tie the effect those devices have to the poet’s broader intentions or meaning.

Some students prefer reading the question before they read the poem, so they can better focus their analytical eye on devices and features that directly relate to the question they are being asked. This approach has its merits, especially for poems that you have not previously seen. However, be wary of focusing too much on a single element of a poem, particularly if it is one you may be asked to write about again in a later exam. It is no good knowing only how a poem links to the theme of revenge if you will later be asked to explore its presentation of time.

Essay plans can help focus students’ attention when they’re under pressure and give them a degree of confidence while they’re writing. In basic terms, a plan needs the following elements:

• An overarching answer to the question (this will form the basis of your introduction)
• A series of specific, identifiable poetic devices ( metaphors , caesura , juxtaposition , etc) you have found in the poem
• Ideas about how these devices link to the poem’s messages or themes.
• Some pieces of relevant context (depending on whether you need it for your type of question)

In terms of layout, we do not want to be too prescriptive. Some students prefer to bullet-point their ideas, and others like to separate them by paragraph. If you use the latter approach, you should aim for:

• 1 Introduction
• 4-5 Main paragraphs
• 1 Conclusion

Finally, the length and detail of your plan should be dictated by the nature of the essay you are doing. If you are under exam conditions, you should not spend too much time writing a plan, as you will need that time for the essay itself. Conversely, if you are not under time pressure, you should take your time to really build out your plan and fill in the details.

Introductions

If you have followed all the steps to this point, you should be ready to start writing your essay. All good essays begin with an introduction, so that is where we shall start.

When it comes to introductions, the clue is in the name: this is the place for you to introduce your ideas and answer the question in broad terms. This means that you don’t need to go into too much detail, as you’ll be doing that in the main body of the essay. That means you don’t need quotes, and you’re unlikely to need to quote anything from the poem yet. One thing to remember is that you should mention both the poet’s name and the poem’s title in your introduction. This might seem unnecessary, but it is a good habit to get into, especially if you are writing an essay in which other questions/poems are available to choose from.

As we mentioned earlier, you are unlikely to get a question that simply asks you to analyze a poem in its entirety, with no specific angle. More likely, you’ll be asked to write an essay about a particular thematic element of the poem. Your introduction should reflect this. However, many students fall into the trap of simply regurgitating the question without offering anything more. For example, a question might ask you to explore a poet’s presentation of love, memory, loss, or conflict . You should avoid the temptation to simply hand these terms back in your introduction without expanding upon them. You will get a chance to see this in action below.

Let’s say we were given the following question:

Explore Patrick Kavanagh’s presentation of loss and memory in Memory of My Father

Taking on board the earlier advice, you should hopefully produce an introduction similar to the one written below.

Patrick Kavanagh presents loss as an inescapable fact of existence and subverts the readers’ expectations of memory by implying that memories can cause immense pain, even if they feature loved ones. This essay will argue that Memory of My Father depicts loss to be cyclical and thus emphasizes the difficulties that inevitably occur in the early stages of grief.

As you can see, the introduction is fairly condensed and does not attempt to analyze any specific poetic elements. There will be plenty of time for that as the essay progresses. Similarly, the introduction does not simply repeat the words ‘loss’ and ‘memory’ from the question but expands upon them and offers a glimpse of the kind of interpretation that will follow without providing too much unnecessary detail at this early stage.

Main Paragraphs

Now, we come to the main body of the essay, the quality of which will ultimately determine the strength of our essay. This section should comprise of 4-5 paragraphs, and each of these should analyze an aspect of the poem and then link the effect that aspect creates to the poem’s themes or message. They can also draw upon context when relevant if that is a required component of your particular essay.

There are a few things to consider when writing analytical paragraphs and many different templates for doing so, some of which are listed below.

• PEE (Point-Evidence-Explain)
• PEA (Point-Evidence-Analysis)
• PETAL (Point-Evidence-Technique-Analysis-Link)
• IQA (Identify-Quote-Analyze)
• PEEL (Point-Evidence-Explain-Link)

Some of these may be familiar to you, and they all have their merits. As you can see, there are all effective variations of the same thing. Some might use different terms or change the order, but it is possible to write great paragraphs using all of them.

One of the most important aspects of writing these kind of paragraphs is selecting the features you will be identifying and analyzing. A full list of poetic features with explanations can be found here. If you have done your plan correctly, you should have already identified a series of poetic devices and begun to think about how they link to the poem’s themes.

It is important to remember that, when analyzing poetry, everything is fair game! You can analyze the language, structure, shape, and punctuation of the poem. Try not to rely too heavily on any single type of paragraph. For instance, if you have written three paragraphs about linguistic features ( similes , hyperbole , alliteration , etc), then try to write your next one about a structural device ( rhyme scheme , enjambment , meter , etc).

Regardless of what structure you are using, you should remember that multiple interpretations are not only acceptable but actively encouraged. Techniques can create effects that link to the poem’s message or themes in both complementary and entirely contrasting ways. All these possibilities should find their way into your essay. You are not writing a legal argument that must be utterly watertight – you are interpreting a subjective piece of art.

It is important to provide evidence for your points in the form of either a direct quotation or, when appropriate, a reference to specific lines or stanzas . For instance, if you are analyzing a strict rhyme scheme, you do not need to quote every rhyming word. Instead, you can simply name the rhyme scheme as, for example, AABB , and then specify whether or not this rhyme scheme is applied consistently throughout the poem or not. When you are quoting a section from the poem, you should endeavor to embed your quotation within your line so that your paragraph flows and can be read without cause for confusion.

When it comes to context, remember to check whether or not your essay question requires it before you begin writing. If you do need to use it, you must remember that it is used to elevate your analysis of the poem, not replace it. Think of context like condiments or spices. When used appropriately, they can enhance the experience of eating a meal, but you would have every right to complain if a restaurant served you a bowl of ketchup in lieu of an actual meal. Moreover, you should remember to only use the contextual information that helps your interpretation rather than simply writing down facts to prove you have memorized them. Examiners will not be impressed that you know the date a particular poet was born or died unless that information relates to the poem itself.

For the sake of ease, let’s return to our earlier question:

Have a look at the example paragraph below, taking note of the ways in which it interprets the linguistic technique in several different ways.

Kavanagh uses a metaphor when describing how the narrator ’s father had “fallen in love with death” in order to capture the narrator’s conflicted attitudes towards his loss. By conflating the ordinarily juxtaposed states of love and death, Kavanagh implies the narrator’s loss has shattered his previously held understanding of the world and left him confused. Similarly, the metaphor could suggest the narrator feels a degree of jealousy, possibly even self-loathing, because their father embraced death willingly rather than remaining with the living. Ultimately, the metaphor’s innate impossibility speaks to the narrator’s desire to rationalize their loss because the reality, that his father simply died, is too painful for him to bear.

As you can see, the paragraph clearly engages with a poetic device and uses an appropriately embedded quotation. The subsequent interpretations are then varied enough to avoid repeating each other, but all clearly link to the theme of loss that was mentioned in the question. Obviously, this is only one analytical paragraph, but a completed essay should contain 4-5. This would allow the writer to analyze enough different devices and link them to both themes mentioned in the question.

Conclusions

By this stage, you should have written the bulk of your essay in the form of your introduction and 4-5 main analytical paragraphs. If you have done those things properly, then the conclusion should largely take care of itself.

The world’s simplest essay plan sounds something like this:

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them
• Tell them what you’ve told them

This is, naturally, an oversimplification, but it is worth bearing in mind. The conclusion to an essay is not the place to introduce your final, groundbreaking interpretation. Nor is it the place to reveal a hitherto unknown piece of contextual information that shatters any prior critical consensus with regard to the poem you are writing about. If you do either of these things, the examiner will be asking themselves one simple question: why didn’t they write this earlier?

In its most simple form, a conclusion is there, to sum up the points you have made and nothing more.

As with the previous sections, there is a little more to a great conclusion than merely stating the things you have already made. The trick to a great conclusion is to bind those points together to emphasize the essay’s overarching thread or central argument. This is a subtle skill, but mastering it will really help you to finish your essays with a flourish by making your points feel like they are more than the sum of their parts.

Finally, let’s remind ourselves of the hypothetical essay question we’ve been using:

Remember that, just like your introduction, your conclusion should be brief and direct and must not attempt to do more than it needs to.

In conclusion, Kavanagh’s poem utilizes numerous techniques to capture the ways in which loss is both inescapable and a source of enormous pain. Moreover, the poet subverts positive memories by showcasing how they can cause loved ones more pain than comfort in the early stages of grief. Ultimately, the poem demonstrates how malleable memory can be in the face of immense loss due to the way the latter shapes and informs the former.

As you can see, this conclusion is confident and authoritative but does not need to provide evidence to justify this tone because that evidence has already been provided earlier in the essay. You should pay close attention to the manner in which the conclusion links different points together under one banner in order to provide a sense of assuredness.

You should refer to the poet by either using their full name or, more commonly, their surname. After your first usage, you may refer to them as ‘the poet.’ Never refer to the poet using just their first name.

This is a good question, and the answer entirely depends on the level of study as well as the nature of the examination. If you are writing a timed essay for a school exam, you are unlikely to need any form of referencing. If, however, you are writing an essay as part of coursework or at a higher education institution, you may need to refer to the specific guidelines of that institution.

Again, this will depend on the type of essay you are being asked to write. If you are writing a longer essay or writing at a higher educational level, it can be useful to refer to other poems in the writer’s repertoire to help make comments on an aspect of the poem you are primarily writing about. However, for the kind of essay outlined in this article, you should focus solely on the poem you have been asked to write about.

This is one of the most common concerns students have about writing essays . Ultimately, the quality of an essay is more likely to be determined by the quality of paragraphs than the quantity anyway, so you should focus on making your paragraphs as good as they can be. Beyond this, it is important to remember that the time required to write a paragraph is not fixed. The more you write, the faster they will become. You should trust the process, focus on making each paragraph as good as it can be, and you’ll be amazed at how the timing issue takes care of itself.

Other Resources

We hope you have found this article useful and would love for you to comment or reach out to us if you have any queries about what we’ve written. We’d love to hear your feedback!

In the meantime, we’ve collated a list of resources you might find helpful when setting out to tackle a poetry essay, which you can find below.

• Do poems have to rhyme?
• 10 important elements of poetry
• How to analyze a poem with SMILE
• How to approach unseen poetry
• 18 Different Types of Themes in Poetry

Home » Poetry Explained » How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

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Santamaria, Joe. "How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/how-to-write-a-poetry-essay/ . Accessed 26 September 2024.

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10 of the Best Poems by English Romantic Poets

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

English Romanticism tends to be dominated by a few names: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Here, we’ve tried to strike a balance and offer ten of the very best Romantic poems from English literature, which ensures that these canonical figures are well-represented, while also broadening that canon to include some important but slightly less famous voices.

We hope you like this short introduction to Romanticism told through ten classic Romantic poems…

1. William Wordsworth, ‘ My heart leaps up ’.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die …

This simple nine-line poem describes how the poet is filled with joy when he sees a rainbow, and how he hopes he will always keep that sense of enchantment with the natural world. Wordsworth observes a rainbow in the sky and is filled with joy at the sight of a rainbow: a joy that was there when the poet was very young, is still there now he has attained adulthood, and – he trusts – will be with him until the end of his days.

If he loses this thrilling sense of wonder, what would be the point of living? In summary, this is the essence of ‘My heart leaps up’.

The poem contains Wordsworth’s famous declaration, ‘The Child is father of the Man’, highlighting how important childhood experience was to the Romantics in helping to shape the human beings they became in adult life. ‘My heart leaps up’ is a small slice of Romanticism which says more about that movement than many longer poems do.

2. William Wordsworth, ‘ I wandered lonely as a cloud ’.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze …

Often known simply as ‘The Daffodils’ or ‘Wordsworth’s daffodils poem’, this is also one of the most famous poems of English Romanticism, and sees Wordsworth (1770-1850) celebrating the ‘host of golden daffodils’ he saw while out walking. The poem was actually a collaboration between Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy (whose notes helped to inspire it), and Wordsworth’s wife, Mary.

On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they came upon a ‘long belt’ of daffodils, as Dorothy put it memorably in her journal.

Dorothy  Wordsworth wrote of the encounter with the daffodils , ‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.’

The influence of this passage from Dorothy’s journal can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem, which he did not write until at least two years after this, in 1804

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘ Frost at Midnight ’.

The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully …

So begins this great meditative poem. Wordsworth’s great collaborator on the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads was Coleridge.

Written in 1798, the same year that Coleridge’s landmark volume of poems, Lyrical Ballads (co-authored with Wordsworth), appeared, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a night-time meditation on childhood and raising children, offered in a conversational manner and focusing on several key themes of Romantic poetry: the formative importance of childhood and the way it shapes who we become, and the role nature can play in our lives.

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS …

Written in 1797-8, this is Coleridge’s most famous poem – it first appeared in Lyrical Ballads . The idea of killing an albatross bringing bad luck upon the crew of a ship appears to have been invented in this poem, as there is no precedent for it – and the albatross idea was probably William Wordsworth’s, not Coleridge’s (Wordsworth got the idea of the albatross-killing from a 1726 book, A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea , by Captain George Shelvocke).

The poem is one of the great narrative poems in English, with the old mariner recounting his story, with its hardships and tragedy, to a wedding guest.

Variously interpreted as being about guilt over the Transatlantic slave trade, about Coleridge’s own loneliness, and about spiritual salvation, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner remains a challenging poem whose ultimate meaning is elusive.

5. Charlotte Smith, ‘ Sonnet on being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland ’.

Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below …

English Romanticism wasn’t entirely dominated by men, although it’s true that names like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and so on tend to dominate the lists. But as Dorothy Wordsworth’s role in inspiring ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ demonstrates, Romanticism wasn’t quite an all-male affair.

This poem by Charlotte Turner Smith, a pioneer of Romanticism in England who was born before Wordsworth or Coleridge, is that rarest of things: a Gothic sonnet. This needn’t surprise when we bear in mind that the sonnet’s author, Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was associated with English Romanticism and was also a key figure in the revival of the English sonnet.

6. John Clare, ‘ The Yellowhammer’s Nest ’.

Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up, Frit by the cowboy as he scrambled down To reach the misty dewberry—let us stoop And seek its nest—the brook we need not dread, ’Tis scarcely deep enough a bee to drown, So it sings harmless o’er its pebbly bed …

John Clare (1793-1864) has been called the greatest nature poet in the English language (by, for instance, his biographer Jonathan Bate), and yet his life – particularly his madness and time inside an asylum later in his life – tends to overshadow his poetry.

Like Charlotte Turner Smith, Clare is still a rather overlooked figure in English Romanticism and nature poetry, but he’s been called England’s greatest nature poet and the best poet to have written about birds.

‘The Yellowhammer’s Nest’, although not Clare’s best-known poem, shows his wonderful sensitivity to vowel sounds, as he explores the patterns found within nature by focusing on the nest of the bird, which is described as ‘poet-like’.

7. Percy Shelley, ‘ Mont Blanc ’.

The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters …

The Romantics were greatly interested in a quality that Edmund Burke called ‘the Sublime’: that peculiar mixture of awe and terror we feel when confronted with great forces of nature. Percy Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is a classic example of Romantic poetry about the Sublime – an ode to nature as a powerful and beautiful force.

Shelley composed ‘Mont Blanc’ during the summer of 1816, and it was first published in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which – beating Frankenstein by a year – was actually Mary’s first book .

Immediately in the first two lines of ‘Mont Blanc’, Shelley foregrounds the key thrust of the poem: the relationship between the natural world and the human imagination. The ‘everlasting universe of things’, which recalls Wordsworth’s talk of the ‘immortality’ of the earth in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (which we’ve analysed here ); Shelley notes that this ‘universe of things’ flows through the (mortal) mind. These external influences are variously light and dark, vivid and obscure.

8. Percy Shelley, ‘ To a Skylark ’.

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art …

Shelley completed this, one of his most famous poems, in June 1820. The inspiration for the poem was an evening walk Shelley took with his wife, Mary, in Livorno, in north-west Italy.

Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.’ The opening line of the poem gave Noel Coward the title for his play Blithe Spirit .

Shelley asks the bird to teach him just half the happiness the bird must know, in order to produce such beautiful music. If the skylark granted the poet his wish, he – Shelley – would start singing such delirious, harmonious music that the world would listen to him, much as he is listening, enraptured, to the skylark right now. We have analysed this poem here .

9. John Keats, ‘ Ode to a Nightingale ’.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk …

From its opening simile likening the poet’s mental state to the effects of drinking hemlock, to the poem’s later references to ‘a draught of vintage’ and ‘a beaker full of the warm South’, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of the most drink-sodden poems produced by the entire Romantic period.

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is about the poet’s experience of listening to the beautiful song of the nightingale. Keats has become intoxicated by the nightingale’s heartbreakingly beautiful song, and he feels as though he’d drunk the numbing poison hemlock or the similarly numbing (though less deadly) drug, opium. He is forgetting everything: it’s as though he’s heading to Lethe (‘Lethe-wards’, as in ‘towards Lethe’), the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology.

The contrast between mortality and immortality, between the real world and the enchanted world the nightingale’s song seems to open a window onto (like one of those magic casements Keats refers to), is a key one for the poem. We have analysed this poem here .

10. Lord Byron, ‘ Darkness ’.

This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically altered the weather conditions across the world and led to 1816 being branded ‘the Year without a Summer’. The same event also led to Byron’s trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing competition, which produced Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein .

For Byron, the extermination of the sun seemed like a dream, yet it was ‘no dream’ but a strange and almost sublimely terrifying reality. Another example of the Romantic concept of the Sublime, brought to us by one of English Romanticism’s best-known figures. It begins:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day …

Discover more classic poetry with these uplifting spring poems , these hot summer poems , these poems for autumn and fall , and these snowy winter poems .

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10 thoughts on “10 of the Best Poems by English Romantic Poets”

There are several I need to read among these. I would add the Solitary reaper, by Wordsworth, and his sonnet Calm is all nature… (but really, selecting just a few of his is difficult – same as for Keats), Coleridge’s Dejection and some of keats’s sonnets, maybe What the lark said.

All excellent suggestions – this needs to be a top 20 list rather than top 10! I must blog about ‘The Solitary Reaper’ soon.

Byron’s ghost story competition produced not only ‘Frankenstein’ but ‘The Vampyre’ a novella by Dr John William Polidori (Byron’s personal physician) which if it did not invent,certainly introduced the Romantic Vampire (based on Lord Byron) to English literature, and was the origin of ‘Carmilla’, ‘Dracula’ and even possibly, sadly, Edward. I mention it because I feel poor Polidori never get the credit that was his due.

Indeed. I talk about Polidori’s short novel in my book, The Secret Library. One of a number of Gothic horror classics that have been somewhat written out of the history of the genre.

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I do so love “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”! My fav Keats poem is “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. It’s a fun one to teach.

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The selection is an interesting one but Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn would have been more representative entry of him. I like this blog for a fair and easy touch with literature.

Just want to tell everyone the rainbow is what God made for Noah as a token that he promised noah that he would never destroy the world by flood ever again

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3 (page 32) p. 32 The poet

• Published: September 2010
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In ‘The Poet’ the central position of poetry and the poet within the Romantic movement is discussed, and the place of poetry in everyday culture is surveyed. The various perceptions of poets, and the roles of poetry in society are outlined: poetry in the stead of, and in imitation of religion and religious leaders; poetry and political life; poets as anti-establishment figures; poets as individuals ignored by society and yet essential to it; poets as tragic figures, dying young and in poverty; and poets as repositories of genius and suffering. What was the place of women within the Romantic movement? Who were the female Romantic poets?

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Short Notes On The Romantic Period (1798-1832)

1 comments:

the great information obout the romanticism

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Ozymandias — Shelley’s Romanticism in Ozymandias

Shelley’s Romanticism in Ozymandias

• Categories: Ozymandias

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Published: Dec 12, 2018

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Related Essays on Ozymandias

Shelley, P. B. (1818). Ozymandias. The Examiner. Retrieved from doi:10.1353/vp.2015.0032

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