Romanticism in literature, began around 1750 and lasted until 1870. Different from the classical ways of Neoclassical Age(1660-1798), it relied on imagination, idealization of nature and freedom of thought and expression. Two men who influenced the era with their writings were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both English poets of the time. Their edition of “Lyrical Ballads”, stressed the importance of feeling and imagination. Thus in romantic Literature the code was imagination over reason, emotion over logic, and finally intuition over science.
All of these new ways discouraged and didn’t tolerate the more classic way of iterature. Other significant writers of the Romantic Age are noted still as shaping an age of open-mindedness and freedom. Lord Byron was one of these authors, he wrote “Don Juan”. Another is Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in terza rima, a three line iambic pentameter set up of bcb, cdc, ded, and so on. Johan Keats created his own fairy tale land in the lyrical poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Nature and the natural surroundings were important in romanticism.
Taking pleasure in untouched scenery and the innocence of life was the basis and theme of “The Seasons” by the Scottish poet James Thomson. This nspired the nature tradition present in English literature, such as the works by Wordsworth. Another aspect in romantic writings, most times connected with the nature feel, was the look on rural life as being almost a romantic melancholy. This was sensing that change was looming, and the way of life they had been adapted to was being endangered.
References to this can be found in “Ode to Evening” by William Collins, and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray. With the freedom that Romanticism brought came the broadening of the writers horizons. The Middle Ages became topic of many stories and settings. The nostalgia of more Gothic times put more exotic ideas into the author’s minds. The supernatural became a substantial part of the literature. Outcomes of this new idea were “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, by Wordsworth, and “The Castle of Otranto”, written by Horace Walpole.
The world of the supernatural and exoticness was reinforced by two main things. One was pure rebellion against the standards of the eighteenth-century rationalism, such as the structure of neoclassical society. The second was the rediscovery of folk tales and ballads, particularly the ones collected by Facob nd Wilhelm Karl Grimm, also know as the Brothers Grimm. These gave an inspiration to write many of the pieces of a supernatural nature for the writers of the Romantic Age.
The Romantic Age started to lose it’s glitter by the middle of the nineteenth-century. Literature started to get serious again focusing on issues such as problems of religion and faith and politics of the English democracy. Now instead of journeying to mythical places through the reading people wanted and writers wrote about truth. Yet through the years literature of the English Romantic Age will never even now be forgotten as it still impacts some of our authors of today.
