Experiencing Poetry – The Romantics

One good way of beginning to understand these great early nineteenth century British Romantics is to see them as rebelling against the Neo-classicism that preceded them–praise of reason, commonsense, public matters and issues, city life, the general, poetic diction. Wordsworth and Coleridge turned the poetry world of their time upside down, becoming an early part of the stupendous Romantic movement in all of the arts for decades. They and their followers emphasized emotion, feeling, sentiment, sensibility, the country life, the so simple country people and the often simple but profound quality of nature. They also enshrined imagination, inspiration, creativity, the ideal, unusual feelings and actions, satire on the usual ways, and above all love. Finally, and this is often overlooked, the dealt with and accepted the cycles of nature, so that for instance, joy will change to melancholy, beauty to age, youth and glory and success to the loss of ability and dying.

You are to pay good attention to figurative language as opposed to literal language, the presence of imagery enforcing meaning in a poem, verse form and how the poem under consideration may very well be a product of the thought of the times – for instance, what subject matter and ideas and style make a romantic poem, the poem that it is.

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