The Romantic Movement in English Literature

 Romantic Movement in English Poetry as a revolt against tradition and social authority

•  Walter Pater views that 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

• The Romantic Movement was a revolt against literary tradition. Schlegel defined romanticism as "liberalism in literature." Most of the romantic poets were for the liberation of the individual spirit from the shackles of social authority as well as literary tradition.

• The bondage of rule and custom in science and theology as well as literature of Neo-Classicism tended to fetter the free human spirit and the romantic movement was marked as a strong reaction and protest against such domination and suppression.

• The neoclassicists were champions of common sense and reason, and were in favour of normal generalities against and were in favour of normal generalities against the whims and eccentricities of individual genius.Much of the satire of the eighteenth century was directed against fancy and the absence of reason and sanity.

• The romantics starting with Blake rebelled against the curbing influence of reason which could variously manifest itself as good sense, intellect or just dry logic-chopping. Most of the romantic poets believed in a kind of transcendentalism, intuition or mysticism and none believed in the dictum that poetry is an intellectual exercise to be out in an effective expression.

• In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth highlighted poetry "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Neo classical poets favoured wit as the real poetic inspiration and were a product of intellect whereas the romantic poets believed poetry is something inner and spiritually enlightening. William Blake represented reason as clipping the wings of love and Keats declared that Philosophy will clip and angel's wings. 

• The romantics revolted against the neoclassical exaltation of wit. They gave the place of wit to imagination and that of intellect to feeling and emotion. Wordsworth emphasized the role of feeling and emotion in poetry. For him, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." The neoclassical poetry neglected love as a theme of poetry; their poetry was didactic, often in the form of satire. Whereas Romantics appealed primarily to the emotions and took a generous help from imagination. Some romantics were didactic too but they were not just intellectual or rhetorical. 

• the romantics stressed on imagination to be away from the humdrum world of actuality and its pressing problems. This escape took different forms. In Coleridge, it took the form of love of the supernatural, in Shelley, of that of dream of a golden age to come; in Keats, a striving after ideal beauty and the effort to recall the ancient Hellenic glory; in Walter Scott it was manifested by his escape to the hoary Middle Ages; in Byron it took form of a haughty disdain of all humanity and absorption in his own self and lastly in Wordsworth it appeared in his insistence on giving up the mechanical and spirit-throttling civilization and escaping into the untainted company of Nature.

• The Romantic Movement was a revolt not only against the concept of poetry held by the neoclassicists, it was also a revolt against traditional measures and diction. To express their fervent passions the Romantics used a more supple and more lyrical form than that of Pope. They used a language without any convention, metres unlike the prevailing couplet. They renounced the poetical associations of words, and drew upon unusual images and varied forms for which they found models in the Renaissance and the old English Poetry. They sounded the death-knell of the heroic couplet. 

•  Most of the romantics were radical in their political views and crusaders for the freedom of the individual. The French Revolution affected all the romantic poets, though in different ways. The young Wordsworth and Coleridge were thrilled with joy at the fall of Bastille, which signified for them the cracking of tyrannic chains which had kept in bondage the human spirit for so long. Later, however, with the reign of terror, the Lake Poets ( Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) turned conservative and Wordsworth earned the censure of Browning as "the lost leader." The later romantics ---Shelley, Keats, and Byron were stronger and more consistent radicals than the earlier ones. Shelley revolted against even God and earned his dismissal from Oxford with his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. On account of their rebellious notions, most romantics proved misfits in society and some were dubbed insane by it.