Page 22 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 2: Major Literary Terms-II

Revolution. The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic Notes
sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim “I must create a system or be enslaved by another
man’s.” Blake’s artistic work is also strongly influenced by medieval illuminated books. The painters
J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and John Clare constitute another phase of
Romanticism in Britain.
In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany
and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. François-René de Chateaubriand
is often called the “Father of French Romanticism”. In France, the movement is associated with the
19th century, particularly in the paintings of Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix, the plays,
poems and novels of Victor Hugo, and the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Stendhal.
Modern Portuguese poetry definitely develops its outstanding character from the work of its
Romantic epitome, Almeida Garrett, a very prolific writer who helped shape the genre with the
masterpiece Folhas Caídas (1853). This late arrival of a truly personal Romantic style would linger
on to the beginning of the 20th century, notably through the works of poets such as Cesário Verde
and António Nobre, segueing seamlessly to Modernism. However, an early Portuguese expression
of Romanticism is found already in the genius of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, especially in
his sonnets dated at the end of the 18th century.
In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving’s
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by
the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and
their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by “noble
savages”, similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of
the Mohicans. There are picturesque “local color” elements in Washington Irving’s essays and
especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were
more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as
does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her
own time—and Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic
literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism
in the novel.

2.3.2 Nature

The subject of the relationship of Romanticism to nature is a vast one which can only be touched on
here. There has hardly been a time since the earliest antiquity that Europeans did not celebrate nature
in some form or other, but the attitudes toward nature common in the Western world today emerged
mostly during the Romantic period. The Enlightenment had talked of “natural law” as the source of
truth, but such law was manifest in human society and related principally to civic behavior. Unlike
the Chinese and Japanese, Europeans had traditionally had little interest in natural landscapes for
their own sake. Paintings of rural settings were usually extremely idealized: either well-tended gardens
or tidy versions of the Arcadian myth of ancient Greece and Rome.
Here again, Rousseau is an important figure. He loved to go for long walks, Climb Mountains, and
generally “commune with nature.” His last work is called Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire.
Europe had become more civilized, safer, and its citizens now felt freer to travel for the simple
pleasure of it. Mountain passes and deep woods were no longer merely perilous hazards to be
traversed, but awesome views to be enjoyed and pondered. The violence of ocean storms came to
be appreciated as an esthetic object in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written
descriptions, as in the opening of Goethe’s Faust.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 15