Romantic Poetry
The Romantic era entails a movement in both literature and art of nearly every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America that lasted from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. It is characterized by a shift from the structured, intellectual, reasoned approach of The Enlightenment Era to use of the imagination and intuition, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. Common Romantic themes include libertarianism, nature, exoticism, and supernatural. Romantic poets reiterated the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects. Thus, as romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science.
British Romantic Era Poets Some of the major British poets during the Romantic era include William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron. |
Victorian Poetry
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 to 1901). During this time, England was undergoing a tremendous cultural upheaval; the accepted forms of literature, art and music had undergone a radical change during the Romantic Movement which often portrayed the human pursuit of knowledge and power as a beautiful thing. During the Victorian era, however, there was a lot of radical social change, and as such, many poets of this time didn't like the romanticized version of society.
The most important and obvious characteristic of Victorian Poetry was the use of sensory elements. Most of Victorian Poets used imagery and the senses to convey the struggles between Religion and Science and ideas about Nature and Romance.Another characteristic was sentimentality. Victorian Poets wrote about Bohemian ideas and furthered the imaginings of the Romantic Poets. The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical and medieval literature of England. Victorian Poetry, thus, marks an important era in the history of poetry, providing the link between the Romantic Movement and the Modernist Movement (Pre-Raphaelitism) of the 20th Century. |