Romantic literature

First phase of English Romanticism

Romanticism in English literature is said to have begun with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge that included Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” as well as many controversial common-language poems by Wordsworth, such as “The Idiot Boy.” Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry.

Blake was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England, although many of his significant works preceded the publication of Lyrical Ballads. Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (c. 1784–85). He then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). Blake’s desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1787 as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. His affirmation in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “a new heaven is begun” announced a significant shift in English literature.

The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. The main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesperson of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having the conveyance of “truth” as the end point. Conversely, the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy (1769–91) expresses the Romantics’ position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” In Romanticism, the poet was seen as an individual distinguished from others by the intensity of the poet’s perceptions, taking as basic subject matter the workings of the poet’s own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.

The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Scottish poet Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of Pre-Romanticism’s “cult of sensibility.” But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric.

Another key quality was its new stress on imagination. Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Blake wrote, “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the so-called “childlike” or “primitive” view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked (and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase originated in the 17th century from the poet John Dryden).

A further sign of the diminished stress placed on pure intellectual judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum. It led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. The notion of the sublime was central to Romantic literature and was explored in both poetry and prose by first- and second-generation English Romantics.

Other writers of the early phase include the poets Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Batten Cristall, Robert Southey, and George Crabbe.

Second phase of English Romanticism

The second phase of Romanticism, encompassing the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was marked in Britain and other parts of Europe by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. In England, the revived historical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir Walter Scott, who is often considered to have invented the historical novel. At about this same time English Romantic poetry reached its zenith in the works of Keats, Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments. Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardor caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervor burns throughout his poem Queen Mab (1813) and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. His poetic stance adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behavior evinced and approved by society.

Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his early work, such as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. However, he was determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820, when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to live (he died of tuberculosis the following year at age 25). He devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity and experimented with many kinds of poems. Keats’s epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) showed a new spareness of imagery, but he soon found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called “other sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819, Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement.

Byron differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner but was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “exotic” or “Mediterranean” topics. Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of sensibility, Byron developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), provided alternative personae for himself, one a bitter and melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of amorous adventures. Gloomy, dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821) helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but Byron is remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there became a formidable device in Don Juan, his masterpiece.

Other important poets of the later era include John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Thomas Hood, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans. Meanwhile, the novel flourished as a form of entertainment during the Romantic era. Scott can in the fullest sense be called a Romantic novelist. After a successful career as a poet, he switched to prose fiction in 1814 with the first of the “Waverley novels.” Initially, he wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern world in a series of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), The Antiquary (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) are among the masterpieces of this period. Beginning with Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. With Quentin Durward (1823), he added European settings to his historical repertoire. Combining a capacity for comic social observation with a Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, Scott enlarged the scope of the novel in ways that equipped it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Gothic classic Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction. The epistolary novel follows a scientific genius who brings to life a terrifying monster that torments its creator. Romanticism’s focus on subjectivity and the emotions of the individual are apparent in both the creator, Victor Frankenstein, and his monster. The novel describes with great vividness the great expanse of European nature, which induces feelings of elation in the scientist. Furthermore, the monster fits the Romantic convention of the “noble savage.”

Other significant Romantic writers in English literature include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë. The great novels of the Brontë sisters arrived relatively late—Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre were all published in 1847—after Romanticism had begun to give way to the Victorian era. But their works undeniably reflect Romantic sensibility. With the characters of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters gave literature two of the most memorable examples of the “Byronic hero.” The term describes a brooding, rebellious male character that is a trademark of Byron’s work.

First phase of German Romanticism

The early years of German Romanticism have been aptly termed the theoretical phase of a movement whose origin can be traced back to the Sturm und Drang era and, beyond Germany itself, to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An interest in individual liberty and in nature as a source of poetic inspiration is a common thread in the sequence of the movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism, which from one perspective can be regarded as separate phases in a single literary development. Within this framework, the German Romantics forged a distinctive new synthesis of poetry, philosophy, and science.

In the years after Friedrich Schiller’s death in 1805, Goethe developed a style that was in some ways Romantic, but he nevertheless maintained a distance from the younger generation of Romantics. He shared their interest in Greek antiquity but not their nationalist politics, their inclination toward Roman Catholicism, or their idealization of the Middle Ages. Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), with its emphasis on the supranatural and spiritual as well as on the sainthood of the female protagonist, is an example of this new style. Another example is Part II of his Faust drama. This sprawling cosmic allegory dramatizes the magician’s career at the emperor’s court, his ventures into classical Greece and union with Helen of Troy, and his final salvation in a scene of mountain gorges, replete with Catholic saints, including the Holy Virgin.

Goethe’s poetry of this period was characterized by exoticism, an assimilation of foreign genres and styles, such as those of Chinese or, especially, Persian poetry. His West-östlicher Divan (1819; Poems of the West and the East) is a collection of poetry in imitation of Ḥāfeẓ and other Persian poets. Sharing this exoticism with the Romantics, Goethe nevertheless was able to adapt the mode to his own expressive needs. With his continuation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) as a bildungsroman in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821; published in final form, 1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Travels), Goethe approached 20th-century Modernism.

Jean Paul (the pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), Hölderlin, and Kleist also belong to this post-Classical period but are often referred to as Romantics. Both Hölderlin and Kleist shared Goethe’s interest in Greek antiquity. Jean Paul was opposed to Goethe and Schiller as well as to the Romantics, and with his humor and eccentric and discursive novels he tried to maintain a middle path between the opposing schools of literature. Neither of his two major novels, Siebenkäs (1796–97) and Titan (1800–03), qualifies as a bildungsroman. Siebenkäs is the story of a poor man’s lawyer who attempts to escape his marital problems by simulating death, and Titan has a number of protagonists with titanic ambitions defying the very model of balanced Bildung (“formation”) in the Goethean sense.

Hölderlin was able to revive with considerable success genres of Greek poetry—the Horatian ode, the elegy, and the Pindaric ode—in German literature and to fuse his love for his native land with the longing for ancient Greece. His epistolary novel Hyperion; oder, der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–99; Hyperion; or, The Hermit in Greece) integrates ideals of Platonic philosophy into a revolutionary concern for the restoration of the ancient poetical and intellectual grandeur of a Greece that had come under Turkish domination.

Kleist pushed beyond the borders of Weimar Classicism with his dramas on Greek subjects (Amphitryon in 1807 and Penthesilea in 1808) and his historical dramas (Die Hermannsschlacht, or “Hermann’s Battle,” dealing with the defeat of the Romans by Germanic tribes under Arminius [Hermann] in 9 ce, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a play about the conflict of Prussian military law and human compassion; both plays were posthumously published in 1821). His novellas (Erzählungen, 1810–11; Eng. trans. The Marquise of O– and Other Stories) are remarkable for their classical mastery of form and subject matter. Kleist was more affected by the violence of his period than any other German writer and made the display of violence a central topic of his works. In his drama Die Hermannsschlacht and his Erzählungen novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in Santo Domingo), the concept of violence as a just means in the fight against imperialism takes on strong anti-French overtones, reflecting the emergence of modern German nationalism.

Indeed, the French Revolution (1787–99) had had a decisive impact on German Romantic writers and thinkers. The Napoleonic Wars, beginning in 1792 and ending with the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, brought much suffering and ultimately led to a major restructuring of Germany. The upheavals of this period gave rise to a new desire for a uniquely German cultural movement that would explicitly oppose French rationalism.

German idealist philosophy played an important role in the genesis of Romanticism, which saw itself as grappling with a crisis in human subjectivity and laying the foundation for a new synthesis of mental and physical reality. The first step was taken by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794; “Science of Knowledge”), which defined the subject (“Ich,” or “I”) in terms of its relation to the object-world (“Nicht-Ich,” or “Not-I”). Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature) posited a reciprocal relationship between nature and mind: his famous formulation “Nature is unconscious mind, mind is unconscious nature” forms the groundwork for a great deal of German Romantic literature.

Schlegel’s philosophical writings continued this line of thinking by reevaluating the role of creative imagination in human life. Adapting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic (a posited interaction of opposite ideas leading to a synthesis), Schlegel developed his key concept of “irony,” by which he meant a form of thinking or writing that included its own self-reflection and self-critique. Ironic poetry, in Schlegel’s view, was a two-track form of literature in which a naive or immediate perception of reality is accompanied by a more sophisticated critical reflection upon it.

Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg) put Schlegel’s theory of irony into practice in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802; Henry of Ofterdingen), which depicts the development of a naive and mystical young man who is destined to become a poet. Heinrich’s untutored responses to experience are juxtaposed with a sequence of inset narratives that culminate in an allegorical “fairy tale” that was to be followed, according to the author’s notes, by the depiction of an “astral” counterreality. Each successive stage of the novel was to move toward a higher and more complex understanding of the world. Heinrich von Ofterdingen had a particular lasting influence. The central image of Heinrich’s visions, a blue flower, became a widely recognized symbol of Romantic longing among Novalis’s fellow Romantics.

Many of the German Romantics drew heavily on contemporary science, notably Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808; “Views About the Night Side of Science”). Schubert’s terms, the “night side” as opposed to the “day side” of reality, typified the Romantic movement’s reevaluation of the power of rational thinking, preferring instead more intuitive modes of thought such as dreams. In many ways, the German Romantics anticipated Sigmund Freud in their emphasis on the pervasive influence of the unconscious in human motivation. Characteristic Romantic motifs such as night, moonlight, dreams, hallucinations, inchoate longings, and a melancholic sense of lack or loss are direct reflections of this interest in the unconscious.

Second phase of German Romanticism

As in English Romanticism, lyric poetry was a dominant genre throughout the German Romantic period, with Tieck among the period’s earlier major practitioners and Brentano in the later period. Folk traditions such as the fairy tale, ballad, and folk song were also seen as ways of gaining access to preconscious modes of thought. Notably, fairy tales and folk poetry were the object of quasi-scholarly collections such as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household Stories,” commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales), assembled by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; “The Boy’s Magic Horn”), edited by Arnim and Brentano. At the same time, these genres were much imitated, as in Tieck’s sophisticated “art fairy tale” Der blonde Eckbert (1797; “Blond Eckbert”). The German Romantics were also intensely interested in the Middle Ages, which they saw as a simpler and more integrated time that could become a model for the new political, social, and religious unity they were seeking.

As the German Romantic Movement unfolded, its writers became increasingly aware of the tenuous nature of the synthesis they were attempting to establish, and they felt wracked by a sense of irreconcilable dualism. Later German Romanticism is perhaps best exemplified by Hoffmann, whose best-known tales, such as Der goldne Topf (1814; The Golden Pot) and Der Sandmann (1816; The Sandman), turn upon a tension between an everyday or philistine world and the seemingly crazed mental projections of creative genius. The poetry of Heine, with its simultaneous expression and critique of Romantic sentiment, is also characteristic of this later phase of the movement. Heine is best seen as a transitional figure who emerged from late Romanticism but had his most decisive influence during the 1830s. His essay “Die Romantische Schule” (1833–35; “The Romantic School”) presented a critique of Romanticism’s tendency to look to the medieval past.