1st GENERATION ROMANTICS
2nd GENERATION ROMANTICS
Songs of Innocence: Holy Thursday (William Blake) /
Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday (Wiliam Blake) /
Tyger (William Blake)/
The Sick Rose (William Blake) /
London (William Blake) /
Lines Written in Early Spring: William Wordsworth)/
Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth) /
Ode: Intimations of Immortality (William Wordsworth) /
Lines Inscribed upon a skull formed from a Cup (Lord Byron) /
So We’ll go no more A roving (Lord Byron)/
On This Day I Complete My Thirty Sixth Year (Lord Byron) /
‘The cold earth slept below’ (Percy Shelley) /
Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples (Percy Shelley)/
Ode to the West Wind (Percy Shelley) /
The Question (Percy Shelley)/
Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)/
Ode to a Grecian Urn (John Keats) /
Ode on Melancholy (John Keats) /
Sonnet on the Sea (John Keats) /
Past Paper Q: FOR KEATS, OTHER BOOKLET, KEATS ONLY, can be ref. to
Explore the ways in which the power of the creative mind is portrayed in Ode on a Grecian Urn by
John Keats and one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
Explore the ways in which a sense of place is presented in ‘Songs of Experience: London’ by William
Blake and one other poem. You must discuss relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which unhappiness is portrayed in ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’
by Lord Byron and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
(30 marks)
Explore the ways in which the natural world is portrayed in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by William
Wordsworth and one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30
marks)
Explore the ways in which death is presented in ‘The cold earth slept below’ by Shelley and in one
other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which childhood is presented in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’
and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which human nature is presented in Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday (‘Is this
a holy thing to see…?’) by Blake and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant
contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which personal reflection is presented in Sonnet on the Sea by Keats and in one
other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which suffering is presented in ‘Songs of Experience: London’ by William Blake
and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which the poet’s vision is presented in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Shelley and in
one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which personal reflection is presented in Sonnet on the Sea by Keats and in one other
poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
,Themes:
➔ Nature and Sublime
➔ Subjectivity
➔ Imagination
➔ Social change
➔ Politics
➔ Spirituality
➔ The divine
➔ Past
➔ Mortality
➔ Interest in the common man
➔ Poet’s power
➔ Creation
Soundbites per poet:
Samuel Johnson (an C18th Enlightenment figure) “The age of High Romanticism made
the word a focus for hopes of revolution and social change in the future. It became a
political term.”
Rousseau: traverse the Alps alone on foot, Romantic impressions in autobiography
Confessions(1781 - 88)
Buttons Anatomy of Melancholy 1628
Blake: ‘Blake was an instinctive Libertarian’ (Peter Ackroyd)
Imagination attacks the ‘Mind forg’d manacles’
Reality is a ‘Mental construction’
Wordsworth:
‘Love of nature lead to love of mankind’ Duncan Wu
Preface to Lyrical Ballads ‘A selection of the real language of men’ ‘choose incidents and
situations from real life.’
Byron:
‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’
‘English Bards and Scottish Reviewers’
‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’
Lord Byron was a materialistic poet (carpe diem, and therefore arguably ant romantic)
He deplored ‘lake school” poets
Disillusioned against first gen like wordsworth
Paradox of ‘Byronic hero’ - Don Juan
Shelley:
‘The act of creating poetry is a pleasurable one’ (for the 2nd generation poets Critic Stafford)
“heaven and earth filled him with deep emotion” (Mary shelley)
‘fading coal’ (P Shelley)
‘spent his life in the contemplation of nature’ (M Shelley)
The Necessities of Atheism- anarchist
A Defence of poetry
Keats:
“I am certain of nothing (...) truth in imagination” (Keats)
“Pleasure in not knowing” (Keats)
, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
‘Cockney school’ / ‘tadpole of the lakes’ classism
Context By Theme:
Romantic Irony:
The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) -The dominant figure in the foreground has attained the
heights literally in the painting and metaphorically: he has attained the heightened awareness of the
Romantic visionary. YET, there is an unabridged gulf between him and the sublime world he observes.
Nature and the Sublime;
- Romantic belief in subjective truth and the notion of the sublime, the incomprehensible
characteristic of nature which makes it so key to morality and humans. “a sacred terror or
a severe delight”
- Struggle between the subject & Object
- Pastoral- Perfect countryside setting
- Reflects the disenchantment with the new urban, industrial experience/ secondly Nature
was seen as a mirror into eternal powers.
- Pantheism -nature is equivalent to God
Subjectivity:
- Paradox through the ‘who owns Imagination’
- Came after the ‘Age of Enlightenment’
- The French Revolution 1789- idea of subjectivity and justice
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Romanticism
- Kant and Phenomenal and Noumenal
- Greek Mythology taps into this.
- Pathological science
Imagination:
- Kant - phenomenal and Noumenal
- Age of Enlightenment
- Biblical Allusions and creation
- Idea of power through imagination and free thought
- William Blake had hyperphantasia and saw the human imagination as essential to human
understanding of the world; he saw reality as a "mental construction".
- Locke: The Enlightenment- human mind as a tabula rasa or a ‘blank slate’ did not see the
importance of it.
Social Change / Politics:
➢ Rousseau and the Social Construct- “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains”
➢ Blake and Institutionalism
➢ 80,000 prostitutes in London in the 1800
➢ Organised Religion
➢ Peterloo Massacre 1817
➢ War of American Independence 1776
➢ French Revolution 1789
○ Bourgeoisie were forced to use direct action, rather than intellect. Stormed the
Bastille in 1789.
2nd GENERATION ROMANTICS
Songs of Innocence: Holy Thursday (William Blake) /
Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday (Wiliam Blake) /
Tyger (William Blake)/
The Sick Rose (William Blake) /
London (William Blake) /
Lines Written in Early Spring: William Wordsworth)/
Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth) /
Ode: Intimations of Immortality (William Wordsworth) /
Lines Inscribed upon a skull formed from a Cup (Lord Byron) /
So We’ll go no more A roving (Lord Byron)/
On This Day I Complete My Thirty Sixth Year (Lord Byron) /
‘The cold earth slept below’ (Percy Shelley) /
Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples (Percy Shelley)/
Ode to the West Wind (Percy Shelley) /
The Question (Percy Shelley)/
Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)/
Ode to a Grecian Urn (John Keats) /
Ode on Melancholy (John Keats) /
Sonnet on the Sea (John Keats) /
Past Paper Q: FOR KEATS, OTHER BOOKLET, KEATS ONLY, can be ref. to
Explore the ways in which the power of the creative mind is portrayed in Ode on a Grecian Urn by
John Keats and one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
Explore the ways in which a sense of place is presented in ‘Songs of Experience: London’ by William
Blake and one other poem. You must discuss relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which unhappiness is portrayed in ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’
by Lord Byron and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
(30 marks)
Explore the ways in which the natural world is portrayed in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ by William
Wordsworth and one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30
marks)
Explore the ways in which death is presented in ‘The cold earth slept below’ by Shelley and in one
other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which childhood is presented in Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’
and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which human nature is presented in Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday (‘Is this
a holy thing to see…?’) by Blake and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant
contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which personal reflection is presented in Sonnet on the Sea by Keats and in one
other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which suffering is presented in ‘Songs of Experience: London’ by William Blake
and in one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which the poet’s vision is presented in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by Shelley and in
one other poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors. (30 marks)
Explore the ways in which personal reflection is presented in Sonnet on the Sea by Keats and in one other
poem. You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.
,Themes:
➔ Nature and Sublime
➔ Subjectivity
➔ Imagination
➔ Social change
➔ Politics
➔ Spirituality
➔ The divine
➔ Past
➔ Mortality
➔ Interest in the common man
➔ Poet’s power
➔ Creation
Soundbites per poet:
Samuel Johnson (an C18th Enlightenment figure) “The age of High Romanticism made
the word a focus for hopes of revolution and social change in the future. It became a
political term.”
Rousseau: traverse the Alps alone on foot, Romantic impressions in autobiography
Confessions(1781 - 88)
Buttons Anatomy of Melancholy 1628
Blake: ‘Blake was an instinctive Libertarian’ (Peter Ackroyd)
Imagination attacks the ‘Mind forg’d manacles’
Reality is a ‘Mental construction’
Wordsworth:
‘Love of nature lead to love of mankind’ Duncan Wu
Preface to Lyrical Ballads ‘A selection of the real language of men’ ‘choose incidents and
situations from real life.’
Byron:
‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’
‘English Bards and Scottish Reviewers’
‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’
Lord Byron was a materialistic poet (carpe diem, and therefore arguably ant romantic)
He deplored ‘lake school” poets
Disillusioned against first gen like wordsworth
Paradox of ‘Byronic hero’ - Don Juan
Shelley:
‘The act of creating poetry is a pleasurable one’ (for the 2nd generation poets Critic Stafford)
“heaven and earth filled him with deep emotion” (Mary shelley)
‘fading coal’ (P Shelley)
‘spent his life in the contemplation of nature’ (M Shelley)
The Necessities of Atheism- anarchist
A Defence of poetry
Keats:
“I am certain of nothing (...) truth in imagination” (Keats)
“Pleasure in not knowing” (Keats)
, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
‘Cockney school’ / ‘tadpole of the lakes’ classism
Context By Theme:
Romantic Irony:
The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) -The dominant figure in the foreground has attained the
heights literally in the painting and metaphorically: he has attained the heightened awareness of the
Romantic visionary. YET, there is an unabridged gulf between him and the sublime world he observes.
Nature and the Sublime;
- Romantic belief in subjective truth and the notion of the sublime, the incomprehensible
characteristic of nature which makes it so key to morality and humans. “a sacred terror or
a severe delight”
- Struggle between the subject & Object
- Pastoral- Perfect countryside setting
- Reflects the disenchantment with the new urban, industrial experience/ secondly Nature
was seen as a mirror into eternal powers.
- Pantheism -nature is equivalent to God
Subjectivity:
- Paradox through the ‘who owns Imagination’
- Came after the ‘Age of Enlightenment’
- The French Revolution 1789- idea of subjectivity and justice
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Romanticism
- Kant and Phenomenal and Noumenal
- Greek Mythology taps into this.
- Pathological science
Imagination:
- Kant - phenomenal and Noumenal
- Age of Enlightenment
- Biblical Allusions and creation
- Idea of power through imagination and free thought
- William Blake had hyperphantasia and saw the human imagination as essential to human
understanding of the world; he saw reality as a "mental construction".
- Locke: The Enlightenment- human mind as a tabula rasa or a ‘blank slate’ did not see the
importance of it.
Social Change / Politics:
➢ Rousseau and the Social Construct- “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains”
➢ Blake and Institutionalism
➢ 80,000 prostitutes in London in the 1800
➢ Organised Religion
➢ Peterloo Massacre 1817
➢ War of American Independence 1776
➢ French Revolution 1789
○ Bourgeoisie were forced to use direct action, rather than intellect. Stormed the
Bastille in 1789.
