About Romantic literature and poetry: (Suppler med FOV1, s. E114-117)

A intellectual and artistic movement in the late 18th early 19th century expressed through literature and the arts.

18th century society starts a new era of industrial progress and breaks away from the primitive past.

Poverty and poor work conditions end social environments meant that many had an urge to escape the brutal new industrial world and think about the pre-industrialised world ~ The Romantics in the late 18th century were a revolt against this society.

The new industrial world has created a spiritual and creative problem for many writers, who see emotional values go down the drain. Industrial society neglects the need for spirituality, imagination and the need for personal fulfilment rather than just being a part of the huge industrial “machine” of society.

How is this expressed in literature and the arts?

The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form."

Nature plays a big part in the themes used by the romantics. Showing that man has to find his own identity, creativity and truth in nature and not in civilised society.

Poems, novels, short stories etc. all describe nature and man’s relationship with nature in some form.

Examples of where the romantics put their creative emphasis:

Romantics: Nature Feeling Individual Man I I I I
Industrial society: Civilisation Thinking Collective Machine

Primary examples of Romantic poets:

English poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats

American poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman