1. Romanticism: Cultural movement of the early 19th century
White horse, Constable

2. A Growing Distrust of Reason
Early 19c
Enlightenment
Romanticism
Society is good, curbing violent impulses!
Civilization corrupts!
The essence of human experience is subjective and emotional.
Human knowledge is a puny thing compared to other great historical forces.
“Individual rights” are dangerous efforts at selfishness  the community is more important.

3. Romanticism; basics Revolt against classicism and the enlightenment
Classicism: too many rules, structure
Enlightenment: Too much emphasis on the rational approach to truth
Primarily concerned with expressing new forms of feeling and thought
Influence of Rousseau and the French Revolution
Brought into question all traditional beliefs and institutions. The youth of the early 19th century felt it had to build something new or perish. This urge was the essence of the romantic temperament.

4. Romantic basics, cont.
Characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance
Unrestrained imagination and spontaneity
Tremendous emotional intensity
Suicides, duels to the death
Bohemian lifestyle-long, unwashed hair, no visible means of support
Driven by a sense of the unlimited universe and by a yearning for the unattained, the unknown, the unknowable.
Nature was portrayed as awesome and uncontrolled-not pristine as classics saw it.

5. Romantics, basics, cont. Idealized the middle ages
Idealized untouched and exotic lands.
Untouched example-the Lake District in England
Exotic lands example-Morocco
Romanticism can be seen in the literature, art and music of the early 19th century

6. Romantic Literature- English poets
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of immortality from the recollections of early childhood
Daffodils
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Don Juan
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn

7. William Wordsworth
WW sought inspiration from the Lake District of England
Defied classical rules
Abandoned flowery poetic conventions for the language of ordinary speech
Wrote of love of nature in very democratic form which could be appreciated by everyone.
Poetry was the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility”

8. Daffodils, Wordsworth 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 ……
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

9. Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood-WW
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The Earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and freshness of a dream”

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley expressed the desire of many English romantics for art itself to become more “natural”
Ode to a skylark
Hail to thee, blythe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of premeditated art.

11. George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824
In Don Juan, Byron exhibited another side of the romantic temperament: the restless and aimless hero
Through Byron the romantic’s continued the loss of faith in old ideas, the boredom with conventional civilization into a flirtation with life and death.
The concept of the Byronic hero.
“On this day I complete my 36th year”
“Prometheus unbound”
“she walks in beauty”

12. Form:
irregularly rhyming
Composition Date:
July 1816 1.
The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, in which Prometheus, chained to the Caucasian mountains and fed on by a vulture, suffers for his gift of fire to man and his defiance of Zeus, was one of Byron's favourite books.
Titan. The Titans belonged to the faction of Saturn, whom his son Zeus replaced as chief of the gods. Defeated but unsubmissive, the Titans (and Prometheus in particular) were popular in the nineteenth century as symbols of revolution or resistance to tyranny

13. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, 36       To render with thy precepts less 37       The sum of human wretchedness, 38   And strengthen Man with his own mind; 39   But baffled as thou wert from high, 40   Still in thy patient energy, 41   In the endurance, and repulse 42       Of thine impenetrable Spirit, 43   Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, 44       A mighty lesson we inherit: 45   Thou art a symbol and a sign 46       To Mortals of their fate and force; 47   Like thee, Man is in part divine, 48       A troubled stream from a pure source; 49   And Man in portions can foresee 50   His own funereal destiny; 51   His wretchedness, and his resistance, 52   And his sad unallied existence: 53   To which his Spirit may oppose 54   Itself--and equal to all woes, 55       And a firm will, and a deep sense, 56   Which even in torture can descry 57       Its own concenter'd recompense, 58   Triumphant where it dares defy, 59   And making Death a Victory.

14. 1     She walks in beauty, like the night 2         Of cloudless climes and starry skies; 3     And all that's best of dark and bright 4         Meet in her aspect and her eyes: 5     Thus mellow'd to that tender light 6         Which heaven to gaudy day denies. 7     One shade the more, one ray the less, 8         Had half impair'd the nameless grace 9     Which waves in every raven tress, 10       Or softly lightens o'er her face; 11   Where thoughts serenely sweet express 12       How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. 13   And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, 14       So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, 15   The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 16       But tell of days in goodness spent, 17   A mind at peace with all below, 18       A heart whose love is innocent!
Composition Date:
June 1814 1.
"She" is Byron's cousin, Mrs. Wilmot, whom he met at a party in a mourning dress of spangled black

15. John Keats
Represented romantic belief that truth could best be discovered through intuition and that aesthetic truth was the highest kind of truth
Keats believed in spirit as the source of poetic inspiration and identified it with the spontaneous creative power of language
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

16. William Blake 1757-1827 The chimney sweeper
A critique of industrial England
When my mother died I was very young
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry “weep, weep, weep”
So your Chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep

17. Victor Hugo- French 1802-1885 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Exemplified romantic fascination with fantastic characters, strange settings and human emotions

18. Romantic literature potpourri
The love of the grotesque
Victor Hugo-Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mary Shelley- Frankenstein

19. Characteristics of Romanticism
The Engaged & Enraged Artist:
The artist apart from society.
The artist as social critic/revolutionary.
The artist as genius.

20. Wandering Above the Sea of Fog Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

21. Romantic Art- French Delacroix 1798-1863
Massacre at Chios
Liberty leading the people
Death of Sardanapalus
Delacroix was fascinated with remote and exotic subjects; lion hunts, Sultans harem
Gericault
Raft of the Medusa

22. Delacroix
“Liberty leading the People”

23. Delacroix, Death at Sardanapalas 1828
Death of Assyrian King

24. Delacroix Algerian apartment

25. The Raft of the Medusa 1819 Gericault
In 1816, a French naval vessal (La Meduse) sank en route to West Africa. The captain and senior officers took the life boats and left a makeshift raft for the 150 passengers and crew. During 13 days adrift in the Atlantic, all but 15 people died.
Man vs. Nature

26. Gerricault
“Raft of the Medusa”

27. Delacroix
“Massacre at Chios”

28. Francisco Goya Third of May 1808

29. Romantic Art-English Joseph M.W. Turner 1775-1851
Depicted natures power and terror
John Constable
Painted Wordsworthian landscapes

30. Turner “Snowstorm”

31. John Constable “White Horse”

32. John Constable, “Rainstorm”

33. Joseph M.W. Turner “Rain, Steam, Speed”

34. Romantic Music Medium in which romanticism was most fully realized
Classical music had held to structures
Mozart
Romantics used range of forms-broke rules
Berlioz-The creator of Romantic music
Frederick Chopin “Revolutionary etude”
Franz Liszt Great Pianist
Beethoven- Bridge between classical and romantic music.

35. Romantic music Music built around themes Played up nature
Interest in death
Interest in the supernatural