Essays on Romantic Era

“In what sense is a child of that age a philosopher?” – Coleridge If philosophy is defined as ‘advanced knowledge or learning’, it can be argued that age is not central to this definition, but the idiosyncratic experiences that are felt by each individual. Throughout...

In Thomas Gray’s poem, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” he shares a story about a cat named Selima while also teaching a lesson to readers. Even though the poem is amusing, it is written and...

Her beauty defied comparison. Her joy in life’s simplest pleasures endeared her to all who knew her. Her insatiable curiosity drove her to constantly explore, examine, and engage in the world around her. All these qualities make her loss seem all the more tragic. She...

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a melancholic poem that considers the possibility of immortality for the people buried in the churchyard the speaker visits. Although previous sections of the poem explore different ideas, such as the speaker’s remorse for those who...

In his article On Reading Romantic Poetry, L. J. Swingle identifies the Romantic poet’s tendency to “think into the human heart” by using rustic description to explore “the naked dignity of man”. This analysis certainly holds true for William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Thomas Gray’s...

In the stichic passage from William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, the speaker, who represents Wordsworth himself, encounters unfamiliar aspects of the natural world. The passage is a bildungsroman in verse, a coming-of-age poem that chronicles the psychological growth of the speaker. In the passage,...

Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, London...

Dorothy Wordsworth, poetess, diarist, and sister of William Wordsworth, a well-known Romantic author, was not recognized as a notable literary figure until well after her death in 1855. Despite her close connection with her brother, her strong friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and her general...

From the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century, known as the Romantic period, there existed a shift in some cultural and artistic elements that leaned towards a revival of the Gothic. As well as a revival of the Gothic through architectural adaptations in England, writers in...