Page 105 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 13: The Eighteenth Century-Approach/Transition

Towards Romanticism (Progress of Education,
Philosophical Thought and Science)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
13.1 A Reaction
13.2 The Nature of the Revolt
13.3 Reaction Against Reason
13.4 Imagination, Feeling and Emotion
13.5 Diction and Metre
13.6 Revolt Against Social Authority
13.7 Summary
13.8 Keywords
13.9 Review Questions
13.10 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Define the nature of the revolt.
Explain reaction against reason.
Describe imagination, feeling and emotion.
Define revolt against social authority.

Introduction

It must be pointed out at the very outset that “romanticism” is a thoroughly controversial term, and
to define it is as hopeless a task as ever. F. L. Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal
(1948) counted as many as 11,396 definitions of romanticism. And none of them is completely off
the target A few of the most important definitions may be glanced at here.
According to Theodore Watts-Dunton, the’ Romantic Revival was equivalent to the “Renascence
of Wonder.” According to Walter Pater, romanticism means the addition of strangeness to beauty
(whereas classicism is order in beauty). Herford points out that the Romantic Movement was
primarily “an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. Cazamian observes:” The
Romantic spirit can be defined as an accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked or
directed by the exercise of imaginative vision, and in its turn stimulating or directing such exercise.”
The bewildering mass of such definitions has led some critics to recommend the very abolition of
terms like “romanticism” and “classicism” altogether. Let us quote one of such critics : “I ask you
to distrust the familiar labels,-’classical,’ ‘neo-classical,’ ‘pseudo classical’, ‘pre-romantic’ and all
the others. I sometimes doubt if we shall ever understand the poetry of this century [the eighteenth]
till we get rid of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ in one and all of their forms. Johnson, Coleridge,
and Hazlitt- perhaps our three greatest critics-did not find the need of them; nor should
we.” Likewise, F. L. Lucas finds romanticism a wholly wooly term fit only for slaughter.
Nevertheless, these terms have been retained in criticism because they are useful, even if not very
accurately definable.
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