Romantics - Context

Question 1

Wordsworth

Answer 1

• Style – believed in and advocated a simple, sincere use of language in poetry – hence why a lot of his work comes across as conversational.
• Key concerns – nature, memory, humanity, morality, transcendence, religion.
• In the early 1790s William lived for a time in France, then in the grip of the violent Revolution; Wordsworth’s philosophical sympathies lay with the revolutionaries.
• He was deeply troubled by the rationalism he found in the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, which clashed with his own softer, more emotional understanding of the world.
• Explicit emphasis on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric, ornament, and formality.
• His later years were marked by an increasing aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired.

Question 2

Blake

Answer 2

• Style: transgressive and non-conformist nature, often critiqued an aspect of society or humanity. Embodies an attitude of rebellion against the abuse of class power, deeply profound and complex symbolism. Introspective viewing of one self and discourse on one’s inner mind
• Key concerns – Opposition, repression, sexuality, religion, innocence/experience, imagination, youth.
• Raised during Georgian Era (King George I-IV), characterised by the emergence of Romantic poetry, immense social change like the Industrial Revolution which began to intensify class divisions, and the emergence of political rivalries like the Whigs and Tories.
• He rejected formal religion, seeing Christianity as a distortion of man’s spiritual life.
• He was equally critical of the Enlightenment’s flouting of religion, seeing this as disenchanting and cold, with a notion of the planet as a ‘gigantic machine’.
• Blake’s insistence that imagination was the most vital aspect of humanity stood in direct opposition to the Enlightenments ideals of rationality and reason
• Saw the body as an extension of the soul

Question 3

Byron

Answer 3

• Style – He mostly wrote epics and lyric poems. Byronic hero- defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt. He championed liberty and expressed his personality through satire, ode, lyric and tragedy. Emphasis on ‘sensation’.
• Key Themes – Liberty, sexuality, power of nature, the folly of love, the power of art, divine reckoning.
• Aristocratic, educated at Harrow and Cambridge.
• Controversial and notorious figure; he had scandals regarding his failed marriages, affairs, debts and incestuous relations with sister Augusta that resulted in illegitimate children. Not to mention his bisexuality.
• Moved to Italy where he started an affair with Teresa Guiccioli.
• Byron left Italy to join Greek rebels who were fighting to liberate themselves from the Ottoman Empire.

Question 4

Shelley

Answer 4

• Style – Shelley’s joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics. He also flouted notions of religion and actually actively wrote against it, believing atheism to be necessary to society’s progression.
• Key Themes – passion, beauty, love, imagination, political liberty, creativity and hope.
• Born into wealth; his father was an MP and a country gent.
• He attended Eton school.
• Deeply admired William Godwin, who was a more rational thinker in contrast to the Romantic movement.
• Embraced ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution.
• He was an atheist and was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism; countercultural poet.
• Was close friends with Byron.
• He drowned off the coast of Italy.
• He belongs to the ‘younger generation of English Romantics’ following Wordsworth and Coleridge’

Question 5

Keats

Answer 5

• Style – How mankind comes to terms with the imperfections of existence, the relationship of ‘real’ life to art, the search for truth in the real life of a poet. Contrast between the tragic message of his work, but the beautifully sensuous expression.
• Key concerns – transient sensation or passion, joy / melancholy, mortal / immortal, life / death, separation / connection.
• Keats believed that everything of beauty carried with it the seeds of its own decay, the nature of his vision is inevitably tragic.
• Born into a lower middle-class family.
• Orphaned very young; mother died of tuberculosis, as did his brother, as did he, later on.
• Keats was influenced by the Greek writers and artists because he believed they addressed similar issues.
• He went to medical school.
• Fell in love with Fanny Brawne from Hampstead, which ignited creative fire in him.