Romanticism as Literary Period Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Romanticism as Literary Period - Essay ExampleEven Wordsworths Tintern Abbey, a confessional account of how nature is more than a memory of youth (And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy / Of elevated thoughts a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, ) was coming from a man whose social and intellectual moorings reflected not just country roots. More particularly, the poem renders philosophical and meditative aspects of the sophisticated thinker often found in cultural and urban centers, which consequently finds ways to go back to the original sources of stirring, mystery and awe, peeling the layers of stale customs and traditions to reveal the workings of nature or even the supernatural, (as portrayed by Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). The Lyrical Ballads, objectively speaking could be said to a political statement asserting the primacy of the exclusives feelings and imagination, and it has make so, moreso in intent. Execution-wise it was a bit too grandstanding, as other writers of other periods could also be called romantic. The way that Wordworths self-consciously and literally chose ordinary individuals and the rustic life as the worthwhile romantic subjects was an attempt to further drive down the point that poesy should be democratic (an offshoot of the influences of the French Revolution) and that it is the individual that matters, not custom and traditions.ShelleyIn the last two lines of A Defence of Poetry, Shelley sums up the power of poets to change alliance and awaken the masses Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present the words which express what they understand not the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire the influence which is moved not, that moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The poets, according to Shelley, belong to those classes of men in which the ex citability of passions is strongest, and which the impressions or going-ons of nature and society work their magic - the apprehensions of the formerly unapprehended, and consequently, this is communicated by the poets to society which is responsible for the continuity of language, and thus of society. Furthermore, according to Shelley, the great instrument of moral good is the imagination and song administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. It is not that poetry directs or points out the rights and the wrongs, but in as much it moves mankind to the pursuit of what are sublime and beautiful and the eternal, and these have been the common goal of poetry since the ancient times. Shelleys poetry in awe-inspired tones invokes this spirit of poetry as a mover of mankind and society, primarily in they way that this spirit moves them, the poets. In Mutability, the resolution of human beings, rooted in natures unchanging mutability, day in and day out is upheld. In Mont Blanc, Shel ley regards the mountain as containing the secret Strength of things / Which governs thought. More emphatically, Shelley in Ode to the West Wind, pleads for this