WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2018/12/william-wordsworth-5c-linguistico.html

THE ROMANTIC AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism

https://www.thoughtco.com/romanticism-definition-4777449

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-romantic-age.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/10/romanticism-5c-linguistico.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-romanticism.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/12/romanticism-in-literature-and-art.html

https://spunkynotes.com/characteristics-of-the-romantic-age/

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-romantic-age.html

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life. 

The poem talks specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form.  Read here. 

WILLIAM BLAKE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key figures of English Romanticism, and some of his poems are universally known thanks to their memorable phrases and opening lines. Read here.

"One thought fills immensity."
William Blake 

https://www.thehistoryofart.org/william-blake/poetry/

THE ROMANTIC AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

The Romantic period began roughly around 1798 and lasted until 1837. The political and economic atmosphere at the time heavily influenced this period, with many writers finding inspiration from the French Revolution. There was a lot of social change during this period. Calls for the abolition of slavery became louder during this time, with more writing openly about their objections. After the Agricultural Revolution people moved away from the countryside and farmland and into the cities, where the Industrial Revolution provided jobs and technological innovations. Romanticism was a reaction against this spread of industrialism, as well as a criticism of the aristocratic social and political norms and a call for more attention to nature.

Click here to read my previous post about the Romantic Age.

THE ROMANTIC SPIRIT

The Romantic period was largely a reaction against the ideology of the Enlightenment period that dominated much of European philosophy, politics, and art from the mid-17th century until the close of the 18th century.  Whereas Enlightenment thinkers valued logic, reason, and rationality, Romantics valued emotion, passion, imagination and individuality. Chris Baldick provides the following description: “Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration.” Read here.

WILLIAM BLAKE'S ILLUMINATED PRINTING

"A method of printing which combines the painter and the poet." William Blake

Read here.

https://www.skoletorget.no/abb/eng/blake/ill_print.html

LORD BYRON, MANFRED AND THE BYRONIC HERO

"We are all the fools of time and terror: Days steal on us and steal from us; yet we live, loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”

Manfred is a dramatic poem written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Romantic closet drama. It was adapted musically by Robert Schumann and later by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it.  

To say that Manfred is a Byronic hero in the Promethean mold is not new: not only the text of Manfred, but also Byron himself, as well as literary critics from his time until now, suggest it.  Read here. 

Here you can find a detailed analysis of the figure of the Byronic hero.

LORD BYRON - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Lord Byron was the Romantic poet whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24).  Read here.               

He created the concept of the "Byronic hero" - a rebellious, moody, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. 

Lord Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.

THE BYRONIC HERO

The character type of the Byronic hero was first developed by the famous 19th-century English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Most literary scholars and historians consider the first literary Byronic hero to be Byron's Childe Harold, the protagonist of Byron's epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. However, many literary scholars and historians also point to Lord Byron himself as the first truly Byronic hero, for he exemplified throughout his life the characteristics of the sort of literary hero he would make famous in his writing.

A Byronic hero can be conceptualized as an extreme variation of the Romantic hero archetype. Traditional Romantic heroes tend to be defined by their rejection or questioning of standard social conventions and norms of behaviour, their alienation from larger society, their focus on the self as the centre of existence, and their ability to inspire others to commit acts of good and kindness. Romantic heroes are not idealized heroes, but imperfect and often flawed individuals who often behave in a heroic manner.

According to many literary critics and biographers, Lord Byron developed the archetype of the Byronic hero in response to his boredom with traditional and Romantic heroic literary characters. According to critics and biographers, he wanted to introduce a heroic archetype that would be not only more appealing to readers but also more psychologically realistic.

The archetype of the Byronic hero is similar in many respects to the figure of the traditional Romantic hero. Both Romantic and Byronic heroes tend to rebel against conventional modes of behaviour and thought and possess personalities that are not traditionally heroic. However, Byronic heroes usually have a greater degree of psychological and emotional complexity than traditional Romantic heroes.

Byronic heroes are marked not only by their outright rejection of traditional heroic virtues and values but also their remarkable intelligence and cunning, strong feelings of affection and hatred, impulsiveness, strong sensual desires, moodiness, cynicism, dark humour, and morbid sensibilities.

Byronic heroes also tend to only seem loyal to themselves and their core beliefs and values. While they often act on behalf of greater goods, they will rarely acknowledge doing so.

Byronic heroes tend to be intelligent and arrogant. Read more here.

WILLIAM BLAKE'S ARTISTIC TALENT AND PROFOUND POETRY

 

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-things-you-didn-t-know-about-william-blake

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/blake-william/artworks/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/nov/21/the-10-best-works-by-william-blake

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/artist-in-focus-william-blake

GIACOMO LEOPARDI - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Leopardi is considered the greatest Italian poet of the 19th century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the most  renowned Romantics; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition - of sensuous and materialist inspiration - has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century,  but generally compared to his older contemporary, Alessandro Manzoni,  despite expressing completely opposite positions. Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and through his own literary evolution, created a outstanding poetic work, related to the Romantic era. Read here.

His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are an amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, his  poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a “criticism of life.” 

Leopardi was a contemporary of the great English Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats and Byron who lived in Italy, though he never had the chance to meet them. Read here.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period. Read here. 

Here you can download a PDF presentation.

MADAME DE STAËL

French writer Madame de Staël was born in Paris on 22 April 1766 as Anne Louise Germaine Necker. She contributed to the diffusion of ideas in Europe through her travels and her Salon, where she received many European intellectuals.

Read here.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

On 8 July 1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley died in the Tyrrhenian Sea. He was sailing back from Livorno, where he had met with Leigh Hunt, who had come from England to help with the publication of a radical journal, "The Liberal", to which Byron was also going to contribute. It is likely that an unexpected storm took Shelley by surprise, together with his friend Edward Williams and a boatboy, none of whom were particularly experienced in navigation. When Shelley's body was washed ashore and found on the beach at Viareggio, it was cremated following a quarantine, and his ashes buried at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. On his gravestone there is a Latin inscription "Cor Cordium", Heart of Hearts, and a passage from Ariel's song in The Tempest, a reference to the circumstances of his death:

"Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change 

Into something rich and strange."

COMMEMORATING JOHN KEATS

"If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered."

John Keats died in Rome at just 25 years old  on 23rd February 1821. His grave is notable in that his name is not written anywhere on it. Believing he was dying unknown and forgotten he instead requested it say “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

WILLIAM BLAKE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key figures of English Romanticism, and a handful of his poems are universally known thanks to their memorable phrases and opening lines. Here you can find ten of his best poem, along with links to each of them.

"One thought fills immensity."
William Blake 

WALTER SCOTT - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Born in 1771 in Edinburgh, at the age of 1 year,  Walter Scott suffered from polio and lost the use of his right leg. In order to recuperate, his parents sent him to Sandyknowe, his grandfather’s sheep farm in the Borders, where he had an early exposure to Border myths and legends, and began a fascination with the Jacobite cause. After moving between the Borders, Edinburgh and Bath to improve his health, he finally returned to Edinburgh in 1778, where he was educated privately for admission to the High School of Edinburgh, which he entered the following year. At the age of 12, he matriculated at Edinburgh University, and entered his father’s legal practice at 15.

A talented and energetic person, Walter Scott became a lawyer, and pursued this profession all his adult life, in spite of his numerous social commitments and prolific writing. He made his first literary appearance with The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, but his first success as an author was in poetry with  The Lady of the Lake. Scott promoted an image of a wild, bloody, romantic, mysterious Scotland, which is still a valid stereotype of the country today. Abandoning poetry, he took to novel writing, and with his anonymous sequence of The Waverley Novels (Waverley, Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, Heart of Midlothian and others), he gained worldwide acclaim. 

He produced a new novel every year, and his appetite for money led him to a misinvestment. His subsequent bankruptcy Walter Scott faced with dignity and an ever increasing literary output. For six years, he wrote to clear his debts, at a terrible price to his health. He suffered a series of strokes, and died in 1832. 

Walter Scott is best remembered for his fiction, but he produced a great amount of poetry, biography, translations, and critical prose as well. 

He is the acknowledged master of the historical novel. 

As a matter of fact, Walter Scott gathered the different strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques into his own hands and connected them to his deep interest in Scottish history and traditions. The technique of the omniscient narrator and the use of regional speech, localised settings, sophisticated character delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by him into a new literary form, the historical novel. He had a huge influence on the Romantic movement worldwide. On the whole, his work is flawed by sentimentality and rhetoric, ponderousness and prolixity,  but his novels command the power to put modern readers in touch with men of the past. ... there are still plenty of reasons to read him! Read here. 

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

Here you can find my previous post about English Romanticism.
Here  you can download a PDF presentation.

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
William Wordsworth

ROMANTICISM - 5^C LINGUISTICO

"The heart is the only true source of art, the language of a pure, child-like soul. Any creation not sprung from this origin can only be artifice. Every true work of art is conceived in a hallowed hour and born in a happy one, from an impulse in the artist's heart, often without his knowledge."

Caspar David Friedrich

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the period from 1800 to 1850. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalisation of nature.

Here you can find my previous posts about Romanticism.