5Aa - The romantic period

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• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

The romantic period

Which sonnet does Shakespeare often use?

1. Italian sonnet
2. Petrarch sonnet
3. English sonnet
4. French sonnet

Which motto embodies the Renaissance?

1. momento mori
2. carpe diem
3. Dum spiro spero
4. Veni vidi vici

How did humanism affect the arts?

1. It shifted focus towards godly creatures
2. It make people realise the cruelties of the past
3. Nature started playing a big role in literature
4. human desires became more prominent in poetry

What are themes often used in the renaissance

1. nature, feelings
2. love, beauty
3. loyalty, honour
4. human desires

The world has to answer for the monstrosities of men

1. metaphor
2. simile
3. personification
4. alliteration

Your sonnets

Let's listen to your creative writing

Romanticism  - 1789-1848

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves  to a tree, it had better not come at all.” (Keats)

The Nineteenth Century

• Late 18th/early 19th century: great changes!

• Society - industrial cities; poverty among workers
• Nature - large-scale environmental pollution
• Great changes outside Britain:

The Nineteenth Century

• 1776 Declaration of Indepence
• French Revolution (1789)
• Inspiration for many British intellectuals (liberty, equality, fraternity)
• Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)
• Gave rise to great patriotism
• Trafalgar: French navy defeated - Lord Nelson
• Waterloo: Napoleon defeated - Duke of Wellington

Characteristics Romanticism

1. individual, personal
   
2. feeling / Imagination
   
3. common life
   
4. spontaneity
   
5. ordinary language
   
6. pleasure
   
7. nature as background and inspiration
   

Romantic themes in art/literature

• liberty 
  
• nature 
  
• the exotic 
  
• the supernatural 
  
• creative process / imagination 
  

Romantic period

beauty and value of nature

distant and exotic cultures

innocence of children

The supernatural

God as the centre

Scientific knowledge

Clasical influences

Feelings

courtly love

The Romantic Period

• the beauty and value of nature
• idealization of the countryside and country people
• the (idealized) past
• distant and exotic cultures
• children (innocent, not yet corrupted by the world)
• the supernatural

How does a Romantic poet write?

• Poet’s own feelings important (personal, subjective, individual) 
•  Poem is composed spontaneously cf. Wordsworth: poetry is “the spontaneous  overflow of powerful feelings, taking its origin  in emotion recollected in tranquility.” 
• Keywords: inspiration, imagination, originality 
  

Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case;

I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace

To me, that feel the like, thy state descries

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die

poem 1

Poem 2

Romantic

Renaissance

Romanticism: Friendship instead of social status 

• The most important form of loyalty was friendship (you choose friends based on same character)
• Choice of friends/partners became important vs  Social status obtained through friends/partners

Freedom of choice was also freedom to reject a partner. Not everyone could handle rejection

William Blake (1757 – 1827) 

• Poet, painter, illustrator during the Romantic period

• Famous for his expressiveness and creativity, 
• Philosophical and mystical undercurrents in his work
  

•  Hostile to the Church of England  (to almost all forms of organised religion) but reverent of the Bible
  
• Influenced by the ideals & ambitions of the French and American Revolutions
  
• His poetry rebels against the abuse of class power 
  
• Famous work:  Songs of Innocence and  of Experience (1794)
  
• Imagination is the most important element of human existence
  
• He experienced visions of beautiful religious themes and imagery
•  Believed in racial and sexual equality. Several poems and paintings express universal humanity:                                                         "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)".