Essays on Romanticism

When attending an orchestra, it has a very serious tone on how you must dress and behave. It is not a rock or hip hop concert where it is more casual and most of the time loud as well. Attending an orchestra can actually be...

In their Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth experimented with traditional forms by interpreting them in a fresh manner. Although they garnered little attention upon their publication, the Ballads stepped outside of the established boundaries concerning not only meter and form but subject...

Despite the popular conception that Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim, is merely a fanciful tale about sea-faring adventurers, this carefully crafted novel reaches far beyond its oceanic setting. Conrad’s tale is a bittersweet portrayal of the romantic idealist, which dives into the complex and oftentimes...

Wordsworth’s pastoral poem “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” eloquently expresses the poet’s feelings of ambivalence regarding maturation, nature, and modern society. The poem is formatted in a distinct approach that serves to highlight the poet’s own conflicting emotions. Wordsworth initiates the composition...

Stride Toward Freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a civil rights era memoir detailing the importance of love in revolution, and the necessity to revolt non-violently and with understanding towards others that are in different cages than your own. King sites Thoreau, Hegel,...

A theme that is immediately apparent in Pushkin’s The Shot is “the noble man with a romanticized view of life”. This theme was common during the Romantic Era, the period in which Pushkin wrote, but is important for more than historical reasons; in many ways,...

Aesthetic critics and writers of the 18th century wrestled with a number of questions regarding beauty, nature, mimesis, art, and the sublime and how they all related to one another. One of these queries concerned mind and matter – that is, whether beauty is a...

Wordsworth’s “I travelled among unknown men” appears at first to be a tribute to a woman he loved and a poem of patriotism. It is initially unclear how Lucy and England are similar beyond being things that are ultimately important to him. Through further interpretations,...

William Wordsworth and William Blake were both distraught by the plight of man in the early nineteenth century. Their separate but somewhat unified visions of man’s problems are displayed in their poems “Lines Written in Early Spring,” (lines 5-24) and “London,” respectively. They both make...

Despite being published in 1798, William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” gracefully tackles many topics still controversial today in the 21st century. Themes such as pregnancy out of wedlock, murder, abortion, and ghosts are presented and addressed. Wordsworth uses detailed scenery as well as character ambiguity to...

A past attitude is reverted to and revised in Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” and “Elegiac Stanzas.” Employing geographic metaphors, both celestial and earth-bound, the poems climb over rocky Wordsworthian terrain that details his reconciliation between past and present and implications of the future. Though vastly...

Although scholars classify both William Wordsworth and William Blake as “romantic poets”, their writing styles and individual perspectives differ tremendously. Wordsworth, though he is not so blind as to ignore the strife that is prevalent in everyday society, tends to focus on more positive aspects...

The first volume of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) was published, as Wordsworth states in Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), “…as an experiment.” (482). The introduction to Lyrical Ballads by William Richey and Daniel Robinson suggests that the experiment contested the valued literature of the...

The romantic view of a seamanship is that the crew keeps with the ship through all types of weather and troubles. Yet in 1880, an event happened that shook this romantic belief throughout the world. The abandonment of the steamship Jeddah, along with its approximately...

The era of Romantic music is defined as the period of European classical music that runs roughly from 1820 to 1900, as well as music written according to the norms and styles of that period. It was the start of a new set of ideas....

A Romantic poet, Wordsworth often draws from nature to describe his subjects or his narrator’s outlook on the world. In his poem “Resolution and Independence,” which employs twenty septets with an ababcc rhyme scheme, Wordsworth expresses his concerns and anxiety with a topic that can...

It is not often that one would consider gossip, rumor, fear, and slander to be a part of nature, and yet it is; at least, of human nature. And as William Wordsworth is a poet of nature, one might ask of which form of nature?...

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...

Having surfaced from the of the Classical period, the romantic period in music came into existence, going against musical limits and increasing orchestral powers to exemplify extra ideas in music that had never been embodied before. Musical romanticism came into existence by political and societal...