The Romantic Era

Костанайскийсоциально-технический университет имени З. Алдамжарова
Реферат
Тема:“Romanticism”
 
Проверила: Гейко Н.Р.
Выполнила: Иншибаева А. ПД 41
Костанай2011

Содержание
1) Whatis Romanticism
2) Howdid Romanticism appear
3) Whatwere 3 main trends in Romanticism
4) Whatis the difference between “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”
5) Whatthing unites authors in Lake School
6) Whatauthors belonged to London Romanticism

1. Romanticism
 
Romanticism (or the Romantic Era) was anartistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second halfof the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to theIndustrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social andpolitical norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against thescientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in thevisual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,education and natural history.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic sourceof aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation,horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confrontingthe sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both newaesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to somethingnoble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu),and argued for a «natural» epistemology of human activities as conditionedby nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist idealmodels to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrativeperceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines ofpopulation growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted toembrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed inByronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively followingthe dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporarysociety. Although the movement wasrooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition andemotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the FrenchRevolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and theCounter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution alsohad their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modernrealities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, «Realism»was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.[6] Romanticism elevated theachievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whosepioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individualimagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classicalnotions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and naturalinevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
Ask anyone on the street: «what is Romanticism?»and you will certainly receive some kind of reply. Everyone claims to know themeaning of the word romantic. The word conveys notions of sentiment andsentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality. It connotes fantasyand fiction. It has been associated with different times and with distantplaces: the island of Bali, the world of the Arabian Nights, the age of thetroubadours and even Manhattan. Advertising links it with the effects oflipstick, perfume and soap. If we could ask the advertising genius who, fiftyyears ago, came up with the brilliant cigarette campaign, «blow some myway,» he may have responded with «it's romantic.»
These meanings cause few problems in everyday life — indeed,few of us wonder about the meaning of Romanticism at all. Yet we use theexpression freely and casually («a romantic, candle-lit dinner»). Butliterary historians and critics as well as European historians have beenquarreling over the meaning of the word Romanticism for decades, as Lovejoy'scomment above makes abundantly clear. One of the problems is that the Romanticswere liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Some werepreoccupied with God, others were atheistic to the core. Some began their livesas devout Catholics, lived as ardent revolutionaries and died as staunchconservatives.
The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time,roughly 1780-1850. However, even within its own period of existence, fewRomantics would have agreed on a general meaning. Perhaps this tells ussomething. To speak of a Romantic era is to identify a period in which certainideas and attitudes arose, gained currency and in most areas of intellectualendeavor, became dominant. That is, they became the dominant mode ofexpression. Which tells us something else about the Romantics: expression wasperhaps everything to them — expression in art, music, poetry, drama,literature and philosophy. Just the same, older ideas did not simply witheraway. Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of 18thcentury Enlightenment thought. For the most part, these ideas were generated bya sense of inadequacy with the dominant ideals of the Enlightenment and of thesociety that produced them.
romanticism intellectual innocence experience
2. How did Romanticism appear
 
Romanticism appeared in conflict with the Enlightenment.You could go as far as to say that Romanticism reflected a crisis inEnlightenment thought itself, a crisis which shook the comfortable 18th centuryphilosophy out of his intellectual single-mindedness. The Romantics wereconscious of their unique destiny. In fact, it was self-consciousness whichappears as one of the keys elements of Romanticism itself.
The philosophies were too objective — they chose to see humannature as something uniform. The philosophies had also attacked the Churchbecause it blocked human reason. The Romantics attacked the Enlightenmentbecause it blocked the free play of the emotions and creativity. The philosophyhad turned man into a soulless, thinking machine — a robot. In a commenttypical of the Romantic thrust, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) asked, «Forthe better part of my life all I did was think.» And William Godwin(1756-1836), a contemporary of Hazlitt’s asked, «what shall I do when Ihave read all the books?» Christianity had formed a matrix into whichmedieval man situated himself. The Enlightenment replaced the Christian matrixwith the mechanical matrix of Newtonian natural philosophy. For the Romantic,the result was nothing less than the demotion of the individual. Imagination,sensitivity, feelings, spontaneity and freedom were stifled — choked to death.Man must liberate himself from these intellectual chains. Like one of their intellectualfathers, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Romantics yearned to reclaimhuman freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilizationgrounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. «Man is born freeand everywhere he is in chains,» Rousseau had written. Whereas the philosophiessaw man in common, that is, as creatures endowed with Reason, the Romantics sawdiversity and uniqueness. That is, those traits which set one man apart fromanother, and traits which set one nation apart from another. Discover yourself-- express yourself, cried the Romantic artist. Play your own music, write yourown drama, paint your own personal vision, live, love and suffer in your ownway. So instead of the motto, «Sapere aude,» «Dare toknow!» the Romantics took up the battle cry, «Dare to be!» TheRomantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to march to the tune of adifferent drummer — their own. The Romantics were passionate about theirsubjectivism, about their tendency toward introspection. Rousseau’sautobiography, The Confessions (1781), began with the following words:
I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedentand which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows thelikeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myselfalone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like anyof those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of thosewho are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Romanticism was the new thought, the critical idea and thecreative effort necessary to cope with the old ways of confronting experience.The Romantic era can be considered as indicative of an age of crisis. Evenbefore 1789, it was believed that the ancient regime seemed ready to collapse.Once the French Revolution entered its radical phase in August 1792 (seeLecture 13), the fear of political disaster also spread. King killing,Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic armies all signaled chaos-- a chaos which would dominate European political and cultural life for thenext quarter of a century.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution in full swing in Englandsince the 1760 s — spread to the Continent in the 1820 s, thus adding entirelynew social concerns (see Lecture 17). The old order politics and the economyseemed to be falling apart and hence for many Romantics, raised the threat ofmoral disaster as well. Men and women faced the need to build new systems ofdiscipline and order, or, at the very least, they had to reshape older systems.The era was prolific in innovative ideas and new art forms. Older systems ofthought had to come to terms with rapid and apparently unmanageable change.
In the midst of what has been called the Romantic Era, an eraoften portrayed as devoted to irrationality and «unreason,» the mostpurely rational social science — classical political economy — carried on theEnlightenment tradition. Enlightenment rationalism continued to be expressed inthe language of political and economic liberalism. For example, JeremyBentham’s (1748-1832) radical critique of traditional politics became an activepolitical movement known as utilitarianism. And revolutionary Jacobinisminundated English Chartism — an English working class movement of the 1830 sand 40 s. The political left onthe Continent as well as many socialists, communists and anarchists alsoreflected their debt to the heritage of the Enlightenment.
The Romantics defined the Enlightenment as something to whichthey were clearly opposed. The philosophies oversimplified. But Enlightenmentthought was and is not a simple and clearly identifiable thing. In fact, whathas often been identified as the Enlightenment bore very little resemblance toreality. As successors to the Enlightenment, the Romantics were often unfair intheir appreciation of the 18th century. They failed to recognize just how muchthey shared with the philosophies. In doing so, the Romantics were similar toRenaissance humanists in that both failed to perceive the meaning andimportance of the cultural period which had preceded their own (see Lecture 4).The humanists, in fact, invented a «middle age» so as to definethemselves more carefully. As a result, the humanists enhanced their ownself-evaluation and prestige in their own eyes. The humanists foisted an erroron subsequent generations of thinkers. Their error lay in their evaluation ofthe past as well as in their simple failure to apprehend or even show a remoteinterest in the cultural heritage of the medieval world. Both aspects of theerror are important.
With the Romantics, it shows first how men make an identityfor themselves by defining an enemy, making clear what they oppose, thus makinglife into a battle. Second, it is evident that factual, accurate, subtleunderstanding makes the enemy mere men. Even before 1789, the Romantics opposedthe superficiality of the conventions of an artificial, urban and aristocraticsociety. They blurred distinctions between its decadent, fashionableChristianity or unemotional Deism and the irreligion or anti-clericalism of thephilosophies. The philosophies, expert in defining themselves in conflict withtheir enemy — the Church — helped to create the mythical ungodlyEnlightenment many Romantics so clearly opposed.
It was during the French Revolution and for fifty or sixtyyears afterward that the Romantics clarified their opposition to theEnlightenment. This opposition was based on equal measures of truth andfiction. The Romantics rejected what they thought the philosophies represented.And over time, the Romantics came to oppose and criticize not only theEnlightenment, but also ideas derived from it and the men who were influencedby it.
The period from 1793 to 1815 was a period of European war.War, yes, but also revolutionary combat — partisanship seemed normal.Increasingly, however, the Romantics rejected those aspects of the FrenchRevolution — the Terror and Napoleon — which seemed to them to have sprungfrom the heads of the philosophies themselves. For instance, William Wordsworth(1770-1850) was living in Paris during the heady days of 1789 — he was, at thetime, only 19 years old. In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he revealshis experience of the first days of the Revolution. Wordsworth read his poem toSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in 1805--I might add that The Prelude isepic in proportion as it weighs in at eight thousand lines. By 1805, the blissthat carried Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790 s, had all but vanished.
But for some Romantics, aristocrats, revolutionary armies,natural rights and constitutionalism were not real enemies. There were newenemies on the horizon, especially after the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815).The Romantics concentrated their attack on the heartlessness of bourgeoisliberalism as well as the nature of urban industrial society. Industrial societybrought new problems: soulless individualism, economic egoism, utilitarianism,materialism and the cash nexus. Industrial society came under attack by newcritics: the utopian socialists and communists. But there were also men likeBenjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) who identified thethreat of egoism as the chief danger of their times. Egoism dominated thebourgeoisie, especially in France and in England. Higher virtues and socialconcerns were subsumed by the cash nexus and crass materialism of an industrialcapitalist society. Artists and intellectuals attacked the philistinism of thebourgeoisie for their lack of taste and their lack of an higher morality.Ironically, the brunt of their attack fell on the social class which hadproduced the generation of Romantics.
Romanticism reveals the persistence of Enlightenment thought,the Romantic’s definition of themselves and a gradual awareness of a new enemy.The shift to a new enemy reminds us that the Romantic Age was also an eclecticage. The Enlightenment was no monolithic structure — neither was Romanticism,however we define it. Ideas of an age seldom exist as total systems. Our labelstoo easily let us forget that past ideas from the context in which new ideasare developed and expressed. Intellectuals do manage to innovate and theirinnovations are oftentimes not always recombination’s of what they haveembraced in their education. Intellectual and geographic contexts differ fromstate to state — even though French culture seemed to have dominated theContinent during the early decades of the 19th century. England is the obviousexception. Germany is another example — the movement known as Sturm und Drang(Storm and Stress) — was an independent cultural development.
National variations were enhanced when, under the directeffect of the Napoleonic wars, boundaries were closed and the easyinternational interchange of ideas was inhibited. But war was not the onlyelement that contributed to the somewhat inhibited flow of ideas. Profoundantagonism and the desire to create autonomous cultures was also partiallyresponsible. This itself grew out of newly found nationalist ideologies whichwere indeed characteristic of Romanticism itself. And within each nation state,institutional and social differences provided limits to the generalassimilation of a clearly defined set of ideas. In France, for example, theacademies were strong and during the Napoleonic era, censorship was common.Artists and intellectuals alike were prevented from innovating or adopting newideas. In Germany, on the other hand, things were quite different. The socialstructure, the heavy academism and specific institutional traits blocked anypossibility of learning or expressing new modes of thought.
Most important were the progressive changes in the potentialaudience artists and intellectuals now faced — most of them now had to dependupon that audience. Where the audience was very small, as in Austria and partsof Germany, the results often ranged between the extremes of great openness torigid conservatism. Where the audience was steadily growing, as in France orEngland, and where urbanization and the growth of a middle class wastransforming the expectations of the artist and intellectual, there was room forexperiment, innovation and oftentimes, disastrous failure. Here, artists andintellectuals could no longer depend upon aristocratic patronage. Popularityamong the new and powerful middle class audience became a rite of passage.
At the same time, intellectuals criticized the tasteless andunreceptive philistine bourgeoisie. Ironically, they were criticizing the sameclass and the same mentality from which they themselves had emerged and whichhad supported them. In this respect, the Romantic age was similar to the age ofEnlightenment. A free press and careers open to talent provided possibilitiesof competitive innovation. This led to new efforts to literally train audiencesto be receptive to the productions of artists and intellectuals. Meanwhile, literaryhacks and Grub Street writers produced popular pot boilers for the masses. Allthese characteristics placed limits upon the activities of the Romantics. Theselimits could not be ignored. In fact, these limits often exerted pressures thatcan be identified as causes of the Romantic movement itself.
There were direct, immediate and forceful events that manyBritish and European Romantics experienced in their youth. The FrenchRevolution was a universal phenomenon that affected them all. And the Napoleonicwars after 1799 also influenced an entire generation of European writers,composers and artists. Those who were in their youth in the 1790 s felt a chasmdividing them from an earlier, pre-revolutionary generation. Those who had seenNapoleon seemed different and felt different from those who were simply tooyoung to understand. The difference lay in a great discrepancy in the qualityof their experience. Great European events, such as the Revolution andNapoleon, gave identity to generations and made them feel as one — a sharedexperience. As a consequence, the qualities of thought and behavior in 1790 wasdrastically different from what it was in 1820. In the Romantic era, men and women felt these temporal and experiential differences consciouslyand intensely. It is obvious, I suppose, that only after Napoleon could thecults of the hero, of hero worship and of the genius take full form. And onlyafter 1815 could youth complain that their time no longer offered opportunitiesfor heroism or greatness — only their predecessors had known theseopportunities.
The intellectual historian or historian of ideas always facesproblems. Questions of meaning, interpretation and an acceptance of aparticular Zeitgeist, or climate of opinion or world view is serious butdifficult stuff. Although we frequently use words like Enlightenment orRomanticism to describe intellectual or perhaps cultural events, these expressionssometimes cause more harm than good. There is, for instance, no 18th centurydocument, no perfect exemplar or ideal type, to use Max Weber’s word, which canbe called «enlightened.» There is, unfortunately, no perfect documentor ideal type of which we may pronounce, «this is Romantic.»
We have seen that one way to define the Romantics is todistinguish them from the philosophies. But, for both the philosophies and theRomantics, Nature was accepted as a general standard. Nature was natural — andthis supplied standards for beauty and for morality. The Enlightenment’sappreciation of Nature was, of course, derived wholly from Isaac Newton. Thephysical world was orderly, explicable, regular, logical. It was, as we are allnow convinced, a Nature subject to laws which could be expressed withmathematical certainty. Universal truths — like natural rights — were theobject of science and of philosophy. And the uniformity of Nature permitted aknowledge which was rapidly accumulating as a consequence of man’s rationalcapacity and the use of science to penetrate the mysteries of nature. TheEnlightenment defined knowledge in a Lockian manner-that is, a knowledge basedon sense impressions. This was an environmentalist psychology, if you will, apsychology in which men know only what their sense impressions allowed theirfaculty of reason to understand.
The Enlightenment was rationalist — it glorified humanreason. Reason illustrated the power of analysis — Reason was the power ofassociating like experiences in order to generalize about them inductively.Reason was a common human possession — it was held by all men. Even American«savages» were endowed with reason, hence the 18th century emphasison «common sense,» and the «noble savage.» Common sense — revealed by reason — would admit a groundwork for a common morality. As naturewas studied in order to discover its universal aspects, men began to acceptthat what was most worth knowing and what was therefore most valuable, was whatthey had in common with one another. Society, then, became an object ofscience. Society revealed self-evident truths about human nature — self-evidenttruths about natural rights.
Social and political thought was individualistic andatomistic. As the physical universe was ultimately machinelike, so socialorganization could be fashioned after the machine. Science pronounced whatsociety ought to become in view of man’s natural needs. These needs were notbeing fulfilled by the past — for this reason, the medieval matrix and the ancientregime inhibited man’s progress. The desire was to shape institutions, tochange men and to produce a better society — knowledge, morality and humanhappiness. The intention was at once cosmopolitan and humanitarian.  The 18thcentury life of mind was incomplete. The Romantics opted for a life of theheart. Their relativism made them appreciative of diversity in man and innature. There are no universal laws. There are certainly no laws which wouldexplain man. The philosophy congratulated himself for helping to destroy the ancientregime. And today, we can perhaps say, «good job!» But after all thedestruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the dust had cleared,there remained nothing to take its place. In stepped the Romantics who soughtto restore the organic quality of the past, especially the medieval past, thepast so detested by the pompous, powdered-wig philosophy.
Truth and beauty were human attributes. A truth and beautywhich emanated from the poet’s soul and the artist’s heart. If the poets are,as Shelley wrote in 1821, the «unacknowledged legislator’s of theworld,» it was world of fantasy, intuition, instinct and emotion. It was ahuman world.
3. 3 main trends in Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement thatoriginated in the late 1700 s in Western Europe. Transcendentalism was a groupof new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged inthe United States of America in the 1800 s.
Romanticism emerged as a reaction to three important trendsin the 1700 s. One was the Age ofEnlightenment, the idea that reason was all important. The Romantics believedthat reason could only take you so far. To get a true understanding of life,you needed intuition and feeling.
The second was a reaction against classicism, whichemphasized order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality. TheRomantics thought that life was wild and even messy. They thought thatexperience could not be squeezed into something orderly and calm.
The last was a reaction against materialism, which was thepursuit of money and wealth. Materialism increased with the IndustrialRevolution. As factories were built in the cities to make wool get bettergrades into cloth, farmers were force off the land where they had lived andworked for generations. Work life in the factories was dirty and dangerous.Small children had to work twelve or more hours, six days a week. Many werekilled on the job and the factory owners did not care.
The terrible condition of life in the cities was one of themain reasons that the Romantics appreciated nature so much.
Romanticism in England is most commonly connected at firstwith the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Thesethree are known as the early Romantics. Later other great poets would comealong. The most important of the later Romantics were John Keats, Percy ByssheShelley, and Lord George Byron.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, who wrote the book «LyricalBallads» together in 1798, said in the preface of the book,
«The majority of the following poems are to beconsidered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertainhow far the language of...
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
It was a very important cultural phenomenon; an ideologicalorientation that characterized many aspects of life, all in fact. All kinds ofcultural manifestations were influenced by it. It started in Germany andextended all over Europe. It took place over a very long period from the late18th Century up to the first half of the 19th. Yet the Romantic influence canbe perceived throughout the whole of the Victorian Period (19th C.).
Romanticism is a rejection of the Neo-classical principles:hierarchy, balance, decorum, scale nature, rationalism, etc. It is a reactionagainst physical materialism.
In spite of being opposites, Neo-classicism and Romanticismshare many things. For instance, Benevolism, which was the seed of Romanticism,first appeared a bit before the first half of the 18th Century.
Romanticism emphasizes on individuals, the imaginative, thespontaneous, the spiritual. Among the most characteristic attitudes ofRomanticism are the following:
Strong appreciation of the beautiful: search for beauty istheir main aspiration. There is a strong appreciation of the beauties ofnature, which is the projection of perfection, it is a healing agent, somethingnecessary to enjoy life. This idea can also be found in the previous century.
Emotion is on top of reason: emotion is praised at theexpense of reason. The exaltation of senses over intellect is a constant itemin Romantic literature. Things apprehended by means of feeling were preferredto those acquired by reason.
Exaltation of childhood: because of the association withspontaneity, freshness, gaiety and innocence. Children should be our point ofreference. (Rousseau: man is good by nature and corrupted by civilization).
Exaltation of individual differences: the different mentalpotentialities that individuals have are very worth being taken into account.They are a source of inspiration for them. National and ethnic differences alsoare very interesting. They defend the different individual realities: exoticplaces, other countries customs, etc.
Exaltation on the figure of the hero: an exceptional humanbeing, a model to follow, a Byronic protagonist. They show a deep interest inthe hero's personal evolution.
Attraction towards the unsophisticated: the simple, the humble,the naïve. This goes hand in hand with philanthropy, with Benevolism.
The continuous presence of opposites, of apparent opposites,is very significant of this period.
A new concept of the writer: the artist was an individualcreator. His creative potential was more important than abiding the rules.Being original matters for the first time in history. Originality is the mostimportant thing. This brings with it a new idea of the work of art as well.Poetry or literature in general was no longer a mere reproduction of reality(Neo-classical literature was a mirror over nature). External reality doesmatter, but it is the way it is reproduced, the author's personalinterpretation, not the content, what is important.
Imagination is the gateway to reach the spiritual sphere.Experience is important too, but imagination is superior. It is the suprememental faculty par excellence. It allows the individual to go beyond the worldof experience in order to catch a glimpse of the divine.
There is also an obsessive interest in folk culture:something picturesque is something attractive because it is old and unspoiled.The past was something idealized because it would never come back. They foundtight connections between their thinking and the 'agricultural past'. They werealso very much interested in previous periods such as the Renaissance or theMiddle Ages, which for them were not so dark.
We can also find a predilection for the mysterious: theawkward, the occult, all in all, a predilection for the sublime. The sublime issomething very close to beauty, but they make you feel differently. Beautyinfers peace, attraction… and the sublime, like a storm for example, makes youfeel fear, which can also be very attractive. The sublime is the juxtapositionof both things: attraction and fear. According to the Romantics, the sublimeallows you to reach a vertical axis, to realize that we cannot control theUniverse. Another fantastic source for metaphor, for figurative language, forexcessive feelings, etc.
Romanticism can be divided into two different faces:
The first face corresponds to the early Romantic period whichwas mainly concerned with establishing the theoretical foundations of themovement. Poetry and Philosophical treatises are the main literary forms usedfor defining Romanticism and its concepts.
The second face develops from the 1830' s onwards and isconcerned with the spread of cultural nationalisms. As a consequence of this arenewed interest in the past, in origins sees the light. The past is idealized andrecreated. A new genre emerged: the historical Romance which makes an emphasison the imaginative component. The past is recreated with a touch ofimagination, a good example of this kind of literature is Sir Walter Scott'sWaverly Novels ('Ivanhoe').
The Romantic Movement had its own peculiarities in eachcountry but we can distinguish two main branches: the German Romanticism whichinfluences the whole of Europe except England, and the English Romanticism.
A third main influence upon Kant was exerted by Rousseau. Hewas a very different kind of thinker, a counter influence to the Rationalists,to the empiricists, to Hume. He rejected the predominance of reason overemotions (Emile). 'Man is good by nature, consequently, children should bebrought up in the country, surrounded by nature and learn from experience.Nature purifies and civilization corrupts. Nature is a model to imitate'.
These three philosophical trends are completely opposite toeach other but Kant uses the main ideas of each and innovates philosophicalthinking. Like Rousseau Kant believed that, although human reason cannotjustify the existence of a spiritual world, the spiritual world existed becausewe feel that God exists. Consequently Kant distinguishes two kinds of reason:theoretical or pure reason and practical reason.
4. The difference between “Songs of Innocence” and“Songs of Experience”
William Blake was the son of a London hosier. He was born in 1757 in London. When he was fourteen, he apprenticed to the engraver James Basire. This is where hedeveloped his skills. He worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawingteacher. During this time, he also wrote poems. His Songs of Innocence waspublished in 1789 and Songs of Experience was published in 1793. In 1794 an edition that combined both of the two, Songs of Innocence and Experience, waspublished. In 1809, Blake had financial problems and became depressed, he shuthimself out from the rest of the world for the remainder of his live(Sparknotes).
The Lamb is one of the first of the poems in Blake’s Songs ofInnocence. In this poem, I take it as the Lamb symbolizing Jesus Christ. Jesusis the Lamb of God. The Lamb seems to be from a child’s perspective also. WhenI picture Jesus, I see him as interacting with children and having a specialfondness for them. There are many stories in the Bible about Jesus andchildren. A child in the poem is asking a question. He is asking who made him.In the second stanza, he attempts to answer the question. He says that he whomade him also calls himself a Lamb and we are called by his name.
The Songs from Experience starts out with Earth’s Answer.This is a sorrowful poem, full of dread. It can see no joy in the world. Eventhrough the most light-filled times here on earth, he seems to find somethingdark and dreary with it. He seems to think that the father of men is selfishand vain. Why would He create sorrow and sadness, when it would be much easierfor everyone to be happy?
Little Black Boy is the next poem. This poem is about alittle black child and his mother. The mother teaches her child about God andhow he loves everyone. He created everyone the way they are and loves them theway he made them. He doesn’t care if you are black or white, when he comes totake you up to heaven with him it makes no difference. As long as you liveaccording to his ways, he pays no attention to something such as skin color.
Holy Thursday is about many young orphans that are marchingthrough the town to the church. They are going to church to pay respects andacknowledge the holiday of Holy Thursday. Holy Thursday is the day that JesusChrist died for all of our sins. It is the day that we were forgiven and giventhe chance to have eternal life. They sang with great energy and loudness. Thiswas a day that they got all of their troubles and hardships and put that energyinto their praising God.
Many of these poems are hard to read because they are sad andnot many are uplifting at all.
 

5. The thing unites authors in Lake School
The group of poets who gathered first in Bristol in 1795 andlater in the Lake District introduced new accounts of the relationship of themind to nature, new definitions of imagination, and new lyric and narrativeforms. Their theories of creativity emphasized the individual imagination, buttheir practice of writing tells another story, one of collaborative writing.This practice originated in imagining a social community that Samuel TaylorColeridge and Robert Southey called pant isocracy, or government by all.Coleridge and Southey met in June 1794, planned to emigrate to Pennsylvaniawith a few friends to set up an ideal community based on abandoning privateproperty, and together composed poetry and delivered public lectures to raisemoney for their emigration. Pant isocracy proved utterly impractical, andSouthey withdrew from the plan in the summer of 1795. Their plans for acommunity of writers with shared property changed to a practice ofcollaborative writing, dialogic creativity, and joint publication.
 
6. The authors belonged to LondonRomanticism
1. Edmund Burke(1729-1797);
2. William Godwin(1756-1836);
3. John Thelwell (1764-1834);
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834);
5. Lord Byron (1788-1824);
6. William Cowper (17931-1800);
7. William Blake (1757-1827);
8. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823);
9. Robert Southey (1774-1843);
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822);
11. Thomas Paine (1737-1809);
12. Mary Robinson(1758-1800);
13. Mary Anne Lamb (1764-1847);
14. Charles Lamb (1775-1834);
15. John Clare (1793-1864);
16. Anna Barbauld (1743-1825);
17. Robert Burns (1759-1796);
18. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849);
19. William Hazlitt (1778-1830);
20. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835);
21. Hannah More (1745-1833);
22. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797);
23. William Wordsworth (1770-1850);
24. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859);
25. John Keats (1795-1821);
26. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806);
27. Joanna Baillie (1762-1851);
28. Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855);
29. Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828);
30. Mary Shelley (1797-1851);
31. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1827);
32. Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827);
33. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832);
34. Thomas DeQuincey (1785-1859);