Lit202

Beethoven exact contemporary of Wordsworth.

Jean Jacques Rouceau


Romantics:


First Gen. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake. (Lake School)

Lord Byron (Demonic School)

Second Gen. Keats, Mary Shelley and Byron (Dominic School)

Yet they all fall under the Romantic School umbrella - even though they didn't know it at the time.

Chivalry (mediaevalism), obsession,

The romantics get fed up with the rationalism. They are obsessed with death and thus focus on the beauty in life because they truly understand just how important it is. Life is the only one we have. Thus they wish to be happy, ignorant and blissful. But they can't because they are too intelligent, they know the answers and thus there is a reaction to this - and that is to be melancholy.

Reason
Imagination
Irrational
Fancy
Pantheism
Beauty
Love
Wonder
Tragedy
Anti-Authoritarian
Anti-organised religion
Pseudo-Medieval
Modern
Supernatural
Preternatural
Horror
Revolution
Atheism
Prophecy
Rusticity
Sensation

Reason and imagination were praised by Wordsworth. Blake despised reason.

Reason was often set in opposition to feeling, emotion, imagination.

Modern society - a corruption of man's intrinsic nature, dignity, which is corrupted by systems. - Roceau.

The naked dignity of man in Frankenstein.



Chimney sweeps - children being over-worked was justified by the idea of them going to heaven for working.

Blake held a belief about the importance of poets in society. He sought to elucidate the hypocrisy of religious men and women. More than Wordsworth and Coleridge, however, he uses satire and irony to illuminate his ideas.

The reduction of religion to moral precepts. (Binding with briars) the garden of love, p.94.

Wordsworth - give freedom to reason - unrestrained by tradition. Able to take a critical view of religion - to assess it with the aid of pure reason.

Human kind a thread to nature. Romantic idea. Disruption of the harmony between man and nature.

Wordsworth believed, that instead of standing over nature - we should humble and awe in nature.

There is no horror in any of Wordsworth's poems.

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge attempted to restore a sense of spirituality to nature and humanity.

There is a religious question to the romantic movement.