Introduction: Background to the Romantic Movement
The
beginning of the Romantic Movement has been considered from different dates by
different critics. It is said to have begun from 1789, when the French
Revolution was lunched by some critics and it is also said to have begun in
1798, when Wordsworth and Coleridge published their combined effort, Lyrical Ballads. Many historians of
English Literature have designated the period from 1798 to 1832 (the year Sir
Walter Scott died). The Romantic Movement
was originated in Germany and spread to England and France.
It was
an artistic, literary and intellectual movement, a revolt against aristocratic
social and political norms of the age of enlightenment and a reaction against
the scientific rationalization of 18th century. The Romantics
rejected reason as being an inadequate tool for deeper and complete knowledge.
The faculty of mind called imagination was more important for romantics. It was
imagination which substituted the neoclassical reason and became the chief
instrument of comprehension. Coleridge, the most philosophic poet of the
English Romantic Movement, defined imagination which is different from fancy in
the thirteenth chapter of Biographia
Literaria(1817). Thus, the romantic imagination is more creative rather than
critical, penetrating rather than observing.
Among
the forms of literature during the years of the Romantic period poetry was the
most important. As drama was the dominant form during the Renaissance, prose
during the Neoclassical period, so was the poetry the most representative form
of expression during the Romantic period. Major English writers of the period
are considered to be the group of poets including Wordsworth(1770-1850), S.T.
Coleridge(1772-1834), Robert Southey(1774-1834), John Keats(1795-1821), Lord
Byron(1788-1824), P.B. Shelley(1792-1822), and the much older William
Blake(1757-1827), followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare(1793-1864);
also such novelists as Walter Scott(1771-1832) from Scotland, Jane Austen(1775-1817)
and Mary Shelley(1797-1851), and the prose writers William Hazlitt(1778-1830), Charles
Lamb(1775-1834, Thomas De Quincy(1785-1859) and Leigh Hunt(1784-1859).