From Andrew Marvell's "The Garden":
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
I love the British Romantic poets of the early 19th century; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley are among my favorite reads. However, as I look back at other poetry, I keep seeing the threads of the Romantics: love of nature, celebration of the imagination, joy of solitude. While I find the Romantics brilliant, I must delve harder to find just what it is that made the Romantics romantic. Was it something new, or was it a stronger point of emphasis? Was it a matter of style?
But so, too, with all intellectual or literary eras--the threads go back far.
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Who originally defined these writers as Romantics?
ReplyDeleteUsually the era directly after defines the era directly before; if I had to guess, it was the Realists and Victorians who called the Romantics "the Romantics." Still, there are general trends in the particular time--reading Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats often seems like looking through different windows of the same house (and inside the house is Milton!). There is something unique in the Romantics, but I recognize that their big themes were but major points of emphasis that had been developed earlier.
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