Romantic
What this domain covers
About 1789–1832. The exam samples lyric poetry and short prose and asks about the imagination as a faculty, the poet's relation to nature and to ordinary life, the ode and ballad forms, and how Romantic theory describes its own practice. Novels of the period - Austen, Mary Shelley, Scott - also appear.
Core rules and concepts
- Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth and Coleridge; Coleridge's supernatural 'Ancient Mariner' set against Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. The plan was to make the supernatural natural and the natural marvelous.
- Wordsworth's Preface (1800/1802). Poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … emotion recollected in tranquillity'; a selection of language really used by men; incidents of common life.
- Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817). Fancy (fixity, aggregation) versus imagination (esemplastic, shaping into one); primary and secondary imagination; the 'willing suspension of disbelief … which constitutes poetic faith'.
- Keats. Negative capability - the capacity to remain in uncertainties 'without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'; the 1819 odes; 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' is spoken by the urn, not simply by the poet.
- Shelley. 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' (A Defence of Poetry, written 1821); Prometheus Unbound; 'Ozymandias' is a Petrarchan sonnet with an ironic frame.
- Blake. Contraries rather than simple good and evil; Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794); private myth (Urizen, Los).
- Forms. The ten-line Horatian ode stanza Keats perfected, the ballad revival, blank-verse meditation.
Worked example
Question: what does Wordsworth's phrase 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' claim about poetic composition? Separate the stages: an original affective experience; its recession and mediation by memory; a new, kindred emotion arising in the poet's mind; and the poem's power to reproduce that emotion in the reader. The phrase describes mediated, second-order feeling, not confessional immediacy. An answer saying Wordsworth simply wrote straight from emotion misreads the theory and loses the point.
Traps that cost marks
- 'Romantic' is a retrospective label; it does not mean love poetry.
- The Preface speaks for Wordsworth, only partly for Coleridge, who later criticized it.
- Do not confuse Mary Shelley with Percy Bysshe Shelley.
- Frankenstein is epistolary and multiply framed, not a straight third-person Gothic tale.
- Careless answers invert Coleridge's fancy/imagination distinction.