In this post, let’s compare two Romantic poems: William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798) (its full title is the cumbersomely diaristic ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798’) and John Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ (1820). And this, of course, is what makes it a continual area of study for English students.Ĭomparing Wordsworth and Keats’ visions of nature Romantic poetry is kind of like marmite: some people find it sentimental to a fault, while others find it inspirational and transcending.īut in any case, there’s no denying that Romanticism, with its unwieldy but impressive range of concerns, bears great emotional power and intellectual depth. There’s the celebration of Nature as a pantheistic force (the idea that Nature and God are one and the same), the prioritisation of the Self as the locus of all human experience, and the irresistible urge to find immortality in the mortal world – and many more. As such, it is unrelated to the word ‘romance’ in the sense of affection or love. While poets such as Wordsworth and Blake are representatives of English Romanticism, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, and Johann von Goethe, the German writer-cum-statesman, belong to the Continental European Romantic tradition. That said, when it comes to poetry, there are often unmistakable markers of what makes a ‘Romantic poem’, well, ‘Romantic’.Ī quick note on the word ‘Romantic’: in the context of literature, this term refers to the cultural/literary movement which spanned the late 18th century to mid-19th century in Europe. It’s about nature, beauty, love, transcendence, the individual, the soul, the ‘sublime’. Romanticism is one of those terms that seem to mean everything and nothing at the same time.
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