Le romantisme (document en anglais)

Romanticism I

I. The Age of Revolutions

a. Political Revolutions

- American Independence

- French Revolution

- Cf. Wordsworth’s quote

b. Poetic Revolutions

- Wordsworth (Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

- The poet = “a man speaking to men”

(Cf. quote 2)

- Poetry should be written in “language really used by men”

- Romantic poetry = a revolution in style and in content

c. A Revolution in the Relation of the Poet to his/her Readers

Sense of alienation of the poets due to:

- Decline of patronage (=mécénat)

- Growing dependency on unknown readers and critics

- Readers: more and more numerous = fickle tastes

II. The First Generation of Romantic Pets

a. William Blake (1757-1827)

A profoundly original artist, a poet and an engraver

- A radical who condemned the imprisoning forces of laws and rules (=Church and State)

- High hopes in the French Revolution (cf. His Songs of Innocence (1789))

- Disappointed (Cf. Songs of Experience (1794))

- His own neo-Christian mythology (with Urizen, the vengeful God the Father, a symbol of authority, and Orc, Cf. Christ, embodying freedom)

- Blake advocated the reign of imagination, intuition and inspiration

b. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

- Revolutionary youth

- “Glorious Decade” (1798-1807)

- Loss of inspiration and return to the establishment

- Long verse autobiography entitled The Prelude (1805-1850)

- It describes his childhood in the Lake District + his special bond with Nature

- A cornerstone in literary history: since the poet becomes his own subject

c. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

- A theorist as much as a poet

- Poor health and drug-addiction

- Medieval themes (Cf. “Christabel”)

- The realms of dreams and the imagination (“Kubla Khan”, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

- Published Lyrical Ballads in 1798 with Wordsworth

III. Essential Romantic Themes

a. Nature

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