In addition,
aspects of Romantic writing not considered so
worthy of notice before - its political and historical
engagement, its questioning or deploying of gender
stereotypes, its ecological preoccupations, its
imperialist or anti-imperialist leanings, its
interest in class and social justice, or its collusion
with hierarchy - have been highlighted.
‘Romanticism’ as a term denoting a
body of ideas informing a distinct movement has
been much debated. Romantic writers are often
said to celebrate the natural world, passion,
authentic feeling, states of mind or experiences
deemed ‘irrational’, human creativity,
and rebellion against oppressive convention; but
as much recent critical work has shown, many of
the Romantics were fascinated by new philosophical
and scientific ideas, interested in classical
learning, involved in political debates and campaigns,
and several - Wordsworth and Coleridge being the
most famous examples - were pro-revolutionary
as young men, but conservative defenders of establishment
hierarchies in their later years. Again, Romantic
writing is often defined as literature in revolt
against the Augustan style of Pope and Dryden;
yet several prominent Romantic-period writers
continued to be influenced by the Augustans and
by neo-classicism. ‘Romantic’ at the
time had a cluster of associated meanings which
survive in our contemporary colloquial understanding
of the word: it meant things associated with romance,
such as mediaeval enchantments, wild scenery and
mysterious goings-on. Most of the writers we now
consider ‘Romantic’ would not have
been flattered by the term (nor would they have
thought themselves part of a coherent ‘movement’
- even when they collaborated, as in the case
of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
project, they were anxious to establish where
they differed in their theories of what poetry
could and should be).
A very selective list of important poetic texts
of the Romantic period might include:
William Cowper, The Task;
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell and Songs of Innocence and of
Experience; William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Religious Musings’,
‘Effusion XXXV’ (later revised as
‘The Aeolian Harp’), ‘Frost
at Midnight’, ‘Fears in Solitude’
and ‘Dejection: An Ode’; William
Wordsworth, The Prelude (versions of
1799 and 1805), and ‘Intimations Ode’;
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Corsica’,
‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’
and ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’;
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage and Don Juan; John Keats, ‘I
stood tip-toe’, ‘Sleep and Poetry’,
‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the Odes
(to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn,
on Melancholy, on Indolence, and to Autumn);
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’,
‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘The Mask
of Anarchy’ and Prometheus Unbound.
Susan Manly is Lecturer in English at the University
of St Andrews. She received her M.A. degree
from Cambridge University and her D.Phil. from
Oxford. Her areas of specialisation include
literature of the 1790s and Maria Edgeworth.
| If
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There are numerous websites dedicated to Romanticism.
Two good places to start investigating are:
Romanticism on the Net’s ‘sites’
page
http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/sites.shtml
Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id+2750
Also see:
The Blake Archive
http://www.blakearchive.org
Lyrical Ballads electronic edition,
which allows comparison between early and later
editions
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/
Lyrical Ballads Bicentenary Project
http://www.dal.ca/~etc/lballads/welcome.html
Romantics Unbound: A Hypertextual Learning
Space
http://iris.nyit.edu/~dhogsett/romanticsunbound
Romantic Chronology
http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono
Women Romantic-Era Writers
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/%7Eaezacweb/wrew.htm
British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832
http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/English/BWRP
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