The romantic period
... is claimed for poetry; there is no poetic code: poetry must be free. Somebody speaks of an organic view of poetry. This means that for Romantic poets, poetry is like a plant that grows and develops naturally according to its own laws. If Reason was the key word for the Enlightenment period, imagination is the key word for the Romantic period. In the Enlightenment period the poet had to be a very refined and educated man, while Wordsworth said that anybody could be a poet if he had the necessary qualities: deeper feelings than other people and imagination. And so here we can see another important idea of this period, that is equality. It is not necessary to belong to the upper class and to be very educated and refined to be a poet. The poet is not the spokesman of the upper classes anymore but he speaks to everybody and he is particularly interested in the life of humble people (in particular Wordsworth). Poets use ordinary language(in particular Wordsworth) so there is not a “poetic” language anymore. This is a period in which there is a predominance of poetry over prose, because the literature of this period has a strong imaginative quality: it is not realistic and so it is easier to use imagination in poetry than in prose. It is just the contrary of what happened in the Illuministic period because in the Enlightenment, reason was the way to understand the world and to do right things (for example Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders). The intellectuals of this period believe that reason cannot help you to understand the real quality of things and that only with imagination and intuition you can understand the real truth. Imagination is the only valid form of knowledge, because it is not through reason that you understand the ultimate truth but it is only through imagination that you can understand reality. Therefore, poetry is equal to truth because it expresses reality and the poet, who is the man who has more imagination than other people, is the one who can understand reality better than other people; so he is like a seer, a prophet (one who can see and understand reality beyond the surface). A great importance is also given to personal feelings and this is partly a result of this new individualistic feeling (the American Revolution and the French Revolution stressed the importance of the rights of the individual). There is also an individualistic view of economy (Adam Smith – laissez faire theory). Individualism was also a reaction against the effects of the industrial revolution, because men had become slaves of machines. It was also against absolutism. Another consequence of this reaction against industrialisation is the rediscovery of nature. Nature is the positive value opposed to the squalor of life in the mushroom towns. This reaction against the ugliness of the industrial world brings a need of escaping to nature, but also to the past, to the strange, the exotic and the supernatural. There is a great interest in the past which is at the same time a way of escaping from the ugly present and a sort of looking for the roots of modern civilisation. For England the roots of the national identity are to be found in the Middle Ages. The interest in the Middle Ages is an other particular feature of this period. There is an idealistic view of the Middle Ages. The third way of escaping from the ugly present is escaping to what is not real or normal, to what is fantastic or exotic or supernatural (particulary in the first period of Romanticism). Another feature that starts to be seen and that will become a charateristic of poets in both the 19th and the 20th centuries, is the estrangement of the artist from society. In the Romantic Period and also in the Modern Period the artist is often seen as different from the world around him, as if he were separated from society. The artist is isolated and lonely. Very often he is a rebel;...