1. Agenda
Learning objective: Students will analyze Romantic poetry to draw connections between the movement and the poem.

2. The Romantic Poets

3. The Romantic Period
The Romantic age brought a more daring, individual, and imaginative approach to both literature and life.
The individual rather than society was at the center of Romantic vision.
Romantic writers tended to be optimists who believed in the possibility of progress and social and human reform.
As champions of democratic ideals, they sharply attacked all form of tyranny and the spreading of evils of Industrialism. Such as:
urban blight, a polluted environment,
and the alienation of people from nature and one another.

4. The French Revolution had a tremendous impact on the writers of this age.

5. Romanticism even changed fashion.
What is Romanticism?
In reaction to the rational poems and subjects of the Enlightenment; the Romantics were bold, energetic, full of emotion and reconnected with the natural world.
For most of the Romantic poets, nature was the principal source of inspiration, spiritual truth, and enlightenment.
The literature of the Romantic age has a sense of:
Uniqueness of the individual,
A deep personal earnestness,
A sensuous delight in both the common and exotic things of this world,
A blend of intensely felt joy and dejection,
A yearning for ideal states of being,
A probing interest in mysterious and mystical experience.
Romanticism even changed fashion.

6. The Romantic Characteristics
Seeking the unusual, haunting, and gothic;
Placing emotion over reason; “revolting” against science and logic and “worshipping” our feelings;
Celebrating the individual and individual rights and freedoms;
Liberating the unconscious; speaking our innermost thoughts freely;
Celebrating nature; “returning to nature” in the lives and songs of men.
Showing strong concern for society and politics and the freedoms of mankind.

7. On the back: How does this poem connect to the ideals of Romanticism?
Analysis – Round 2
On the back: How does this poem connect to the ideals of Romanticism?

8. Connection to Nationalism
Romanticism emphasized digging in to one’s own culture, folklore, language, and history.
Emphasis on one’s own experience, within that culture.
This often resulted in a celebration of one’s own nation as well.
Love of Homeland
Extends into the idea of one’s nation being best
Many Romantic works which celebrate culture became symbols of Nationalist movements.
German composer Wagner
The Ring Cycle; Flight of the Valkyries
English playwright Shakespeare became iconic
Beowolf – Anglo-saxon Epic

9. William Wordsworth
Born in Cockermouth, a scenic mountain region in
northwest England. He spent his childhood years
exploring a landscape of beauty and variety.
Attended grammar school for 8 years and went to Cambridge in 1787 as a scholarship student.
Beginning his poetic career in the flush of his youth, he was involved in radical political circles, but some scholars speculate that in travel in Germany he was a spy agent for the British Home Office.
Married in a childhood schoolmate 1802 and had 5 children.
His poetry was marked by feelings of guilt, loss, and inward reflection.

10. The Sublime (literary concept)
Wordsworth: the mind tries “to grasp at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining”
In trying to grasp the sublime, the mind loses consciousness and the spirit can grasp the sublime
(Brennan, Matthew. Wordsworth, Turner and Romantic Landscape. Camden House, 1987, p.52.)

11. The World is Too Much With Us
Paraphrase the first three lines. What does Wordsworth believe we are focused on lately?
Wordsworth says that the sea and the winds are “up- gathered now like sleeping flowers” but that we are “out of tune; it moves us not.”
Why don’t these things move us?
What is Wordsworth’s opinion on this lack of feeling?
What does Wordsworth say he would prefer for himself? Why?

12. Learning Objective
Learning objective: Students will analyze Romantic poetry to draw connections between the movement and the poem.