The Romantic Movement (Romanticism) The term 'romanticism' was coined in England in the 1840s but evolved in the late 1700s. The basic idea of romanticism is that reason cannot explain how and why everything happens and romantics search for a deeper meaning to life. An example of this is that those who saw themselves as being part of the 'enlightenment' movement saw the middle ages as being quite a dark period of history whereas romantics would say those it was a time of spiritual depth and adventure whereby people searched within themselves for a deeper meaning of life. Noted English romantic writers are Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth and Keats.
John Keats Some may say that John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring love poems of all time. By the time he was 24 he wrote a 'sequence of six lyric odes' which are deemed to be his greatest acheivements. He was born in 1795 to a low class family in London and lost his parents when he was very young. When he was 23 he moved to Hampstead where he fell in love with a girl called Fanny Brawne, This is the time were he started writing creatively at a frantic rate and produced the best poems of his life. He died in 1820 in Italy of TB. Keats was and still is an important figure in the Romanticism movement. His work included 'the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. His odes do not obviously link together however if you study them hard enough there are a number of 'suggestive interrelations'. They all explore and develop the same idea and themes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coledridge is said to be the leader of the Romantic movment. He was born in 1772 and was the youngest of 14 children. In 1791 he started studying at Cambridge University however in 1994 he met a man named Robert Southey and together they 'constructed a vision of pantisocracy' which involved them moving to the 'New World' with ten other families along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Southey soon became engaged to a woman named Edith Fricker and Coleridge decided to get engaged to her sister as being married was needed in order for the 'communal living in the New World'. Their marriage was an unhappy one and Coleridge spent a lot of his time away from his wife. He spent the next few years writing and never returned to Cambridge. Both Southey and Coleridge were heavily influenced and inspired by Plato' 'Republic'. In 1798, 2 years after publishing his first volume of poetry, Coleridge collaborated with his friend William Wordsworth on a joint volume of poetry called 'Lyrical Ballads' which is considered to be the first great work of the Romantic movement. It contains Coleridge's most famous poem 'The Rime of the Ancicent Mariner'.