How long did romanticism last

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Instead, poets and authors were inspired to write in their own individual and creative voices. Watch this video featuring professor Charles Robinson of the University of Delaware discussing the imagination in Romantic literature. The Industrial Revolution was a transformation for Britain in the 18th century. In terms of economic growth and technological advances, England was the first country to become industrialized. Machines were changing the agricultural economy of the past that relied on manual labor to this new industrial economy.

It led to larger cities, new products, and a better manufacturing process. At first it meant only "like the old romances" but gradually it began to carry a certain taint. Romantic, according to L. Smith in his Words and Idioms , connoted "false and fictitious beings and feelings, without real existence in fact or in human nature"; it also suggested "old castles, mountains and forests, pastoral plains, waste and solitary places" and a "love for wild nature, for mountains and moors.

The word passed from England to France and Germany late in the seventeenth century and became a critical term for certain poets who scorned and rejected the models of the past; they prided themselves on their freedom from eighteenth-century poetic codes.

In Germany, especially, the word was used in strong opposition to the term classical. The grouping together of the so-called Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey with Scott, Byron, Keats, and Shelley as the romantic poets is late Victorian, apparently as late as the middle s. And it should be noted that these poets did not recognize themselves as "romantic," although they were familiar with the word and recognized that their practice differed from that of the eighteenth century.

The reaction to the standard literary practice and critical norms of the eighteenth century occurred in many areas and in varying degrees. Reason no longer held the high place it had held in the eighteenth century; its place was taken by imagination, emotion, and individual sensibility.

The eccentric and the singular took the place of the accepted conventions of the age. A concentration on the individual and the minute replaced the eighteenth-century insistence on the universal and the general. Wordsworth primarily wrote about nature.

He felt it could provide a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual understanding. This poem praises the beauty of music and shows the outpouring of expression and emotion that Wordsworth felt was necessary in poetry.

Conversational poetry was the literary genre most commonly used by Wordsworth and Coleridge, with the latter writing a series of eight poems following the genre structure of conversational verse and examining higher ideas of nature, man, and morality. Coleridge and Wordsworth were very good friends and the two often influenced each other.

While Wordsworth was much more meditative and calm, Coleridge was the opposite and lived a more uncontrolled life. Of his three major poems only one is complete: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The sailor is cursed by supernatural powers and is only able to return home when he appreciates the animals and nature around him.

He is forced to wander the Earth sharing his story due to his earlier mistakes. His two other long form poems are Kubla Khan and Christabel According to Coleridge, his poem Kubla Khan came to him in an opium-induced dream after reading a work about Chinese emperor Kublai Khan. He was never able to finish the work. Ignoring the supernatural signs, Christabel rescues and takes her home, but it appears that the stranger is not normal. Coleridge was only able to finish two out of his five intended parts to the poem.

Succeeding Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth was a new generation of poets, each following the pattern of Romanticism of those before them. John Keats is still one of the most popular of these poets, with his work continually read and analyzed today. Keats aimed to express extreme emotion in his poetry, using natural imagery to do this. He is well known for his odes , lyrical stanzas that are typically written in praise of, or in dedication to, something or someone that the writer admires.

These odes followed the genre of lyrical poetry and focused on intense emotion using personal narrative. Keats was preoccupied with death and aging throughout his life, which is shown in each of these two odes. Percy Bysshe Shelley was seen as a radical thinker for his religious atheism and largely ostracized by his contemporaries for his political and social views. He construed the development of the state as part of a historical process, or "teleology". He is particularly famous for outlining a concept of the dialectic: the mind makes progress by creating opposites, which are then combined in a synthesis.

Hegel tied his philosophy into nationalism by arguing for a German national dialectic that would result in synthesis into a state. Hegel's work increased the emphasis people put on historical studies, and German history writing boomed.

Partially as a result of Hegel's influence, the idea developed that Germany's role was to act as a counterbalance to France. Seeing themselves as such, Germans began to feel that liberalism was not appropriate in Germany. The French had their Romantics too, though not in the same profusion as Germany. For instance, Romantic painting is always associated with Eugene Delacroix, who prized the emotional impact of color over the representational accuracy of line and careful design.

Delacroix painted historical scenes, such as "liberty Leading the People" which glorified the beautiful spectacle of revolution, perhaps construing it as part of the French national character. After , Romanticism fell into decline.