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 personality is more than a retentiveness of youth (And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy / Of elevated thoughts a experience sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, ) was coming from a man whose social and intellectual moorings reflected non just rustic roots. More particularly, the poem renders philosophical and meditative aspects of the sophisticated thinker often comprise in cultural and urban centers, which consequently finds ways to go back to the original sources of inspiration, mystery and awe, strip the layers of stale customs and traditions to reveal the workings of nature or even the supernatural, (as portrayed by Coleridges The match of the Ancient Mariner). The Lyrical Ballads, objectively speaking could be said to a political statement take a firm stand the primacy of the individuals feelings and imagination, and it has done so, mo reso in intent. Execution-wise it was a bit too grandstanding, as other writers of other periods could also be called amorous. 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 poetry 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 supply of poets to change society and awaken the masses Poets ar the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present the speech which express what they understand not the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire the influence which is go not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The poets, fit in to Shelley, belong to those classes of men in which the excitability 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 poetry 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 timbre of poetry as a mover of mankind and society, primarily in they way that this spirit moves them, the poets. In Mutability, the endurance of human beings, rooted in natures unchanging mutability, day in and day out is upheld. In Mont Blanc, Shelley 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