Romanticism Weighed

The idea

The Romantic period as a whole made imagination, feeling and the individual the centre of literature. The first generation set the terms: Blake's contraries, Wordsworth's recollection of nature, Coleridge's supernatural and his theory of imagination. The second generation pressed them further. Byron made a public self out of poetry: the brooding Byronic hero of Childe Harold and Manfred, and the mocking narrator of Don Juan, whose ottava rima ends each stanza with a deflating couplet. Shelley, radical and idealist, called on the West Wind to scatter his words, saw a tyrant's statue ruined in "Ozymandias," freed Prometheus, mourned Keats in Adonais and called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Keats, who died at twenty-five, defined Negative Capability, the power to remain in uncertainty, and wrote odes that test beauty against mortality, from the nightingale's song to the urn whose message, beauty is truth, critics still dispute, to the calm acceptance of "To Autumn." Women writers held the market: Hemans outsold almost everyone, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a frame of nested narratives, gave the creature a voice. Austen's irony and free indirect style judged the gentry from inside, Scott invented the historical novel, and Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey made the essay personal. The poets died young and abroad, and the period closed in the mid-eighteen twenties. To answer a question on the Romantics, identify the poet by form and theme, separate speaker from author, and ask what the work claims for imagination.