The+Romantic+Poets


 * The Romantic Poets: Late 18th – Mid-19th centuries **



"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." - William Wordsworth
== John Keats coined the phrase "negative capability." This is our capacity to live in doubt, sit with uncertainty, be confused. He believed -- as do many poets today -- that the most effective poems elude total comprehension. They may catch us in some vague way or make us wonder. They may allow us to feel a mood or have an epiphany about life that is triggered in some personal way, but not necessarily getting at the meaning the poet intended. ==

== "The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man." ==

--William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
===Romanticism was arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s. Its influence was felt across continents and through every artistic discipline into the mid-nineteenth century, and many of its values and beliefs can still be seen in contemporary poetry. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the Romantic movement, as its beginnings can be traced to many events of the time: a surge of interest in folklore in the mid- to late-eighteenth century with the work of the brothers Grimm, reactions against neoclassicism and the Augustan poets in England, and political events and uprisings that fostered nationalistic pride.===
 * [[image:Wordsworth.jpg width="121" height="177" align="left"]] ||
 * William Wordsworth ||

[[image:lord-byron.jpg width="159" height="200" align="right" caption="Lord Byron"]][[image:coleridge.gif width="185" height="232" align="left" caption="Samuel Taylor Coleridge"]]
===__Romantic poets cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world, idealism, physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural__. Romantics set themselves in opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace freedom and revolution in their art and politics. German Romantic poets included **Fredrich Schiller** and **Johann Wolfgang von** **Goethe**, and British poets such as **William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley,** George Gordon **Lord Byron**, **Robert Burns**, and **John Keats.**===



===**Victor Hugo** was a noted French Romantic poet as well, known more for his novels, //The Hunchback of Notre Dame// and //Les Miserables//, both of which featured poor, oppressed, and/or disabled protagonists who are victimized by those in power. Similarly, Mary Shelley (Percy's 2nd wife) penned the classic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his hideous monster during the early 1800s. (See the //Frankenstein// page of this Wiki for excerpts.)===

Romanticism eventually crossed the Atlantic and materialized through the work of American poets like **Walt Whitman** and **Edgar Allan Poe**, now referred to as Late Romantics or Transcendentalists.
===In music, **Beethoven's** swelling symphonies epitomize the Romantic spirit, while in art, the movement spawned the great Impressionists of the 19th century, such as **Monet** and **VanGogh**. (See paintings here.)===

= = =Timeline of Literary Movements=

http://www.online-literature.com/periods/timeline.php
= = = Here are some of the most well-known poems by the Romantic Poets: =

Taoism (had an influence on the Romantics)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/

==Here in the United States, the Romantic Movement was also felt throughout the worlds of literature and art. American Transcendentalism grew from the Romantic sensibility, wherein great thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau sought to escape the trappings of civilization and lead more simple, "true" lives of self-reliance in nature. Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe is most closely associated with the Romantics, with his ghost stories, eerie poems written to dead lovers or quoting ominous ravens hovering at the door, and this sonnet, which addresses Science:==



= To Science =

Here are some paintings from the Enlightenment (1700s), which are easy to contrast with the paintings of John Constable (above, early 1800s) or those of the Impressionists (late 1800s) who followed.
= = Link to Joseph Wright of Derby paintings