ROMANTICISM

ROMANTICISM

Much importance was attached (given) to the role of imagination in the creative process. English Romantic poets believed the imagination was a faculty of the mind which was capable of penetrating the surface of reality of human life and apprehending a kind of through which lay behind the powers of reason and rational intellect. In exercising the imagination, the individual gives access to an infinite world of spiritual reality. A kind of supernatural order whose essential, true and reality is far removed from the world of simple sense impressions.

The imagination, they claimed is a source of spiritual energy and in drowning on its special powers of perception, the poet partakes of an almost divine activity in his recreation and modification of the eternal world.

This new subjective vision of reality went hand in hand with a much stronger emphasis on individual thought and feeling. Indeed there is a greater freedom and intensity of feeling in the verse of poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley.

Poetry became more introspective and meditative. Poets took as their main subject the workings of their own mind. Those introducing a clear autobiographical element that for many years had been considerated inappropriate. Some of the Romantics chose to isolate themselves from society believing that solitude was necessary to the fulfilment (riempimento) of their vision. In this they anticipated the idea of the artist as a non-conformist and the feeling of alienation showed by many writers of the modernist age. In turning their attention to the more irrational aspects of human life as "the subconscious mystery" and the supernatural magic and superstition they enlarged the field of human experience in art and demonstrating the range and affectiveness of poetry as a vehicle of feelings and perceptions which were difficult to define under more national forms of investigation.

Some  poets felt themselves attracted to the exotic. Distant time and places becomes a sort of refuge from the more unpleasant aspects of contemporary society. The Middle Age in particular served as a source of inspiration (ballads became a popular verse from once again) and subject matter, continuing a tradition, which had begun earlier in the century.

The significant attached to nature in romantic poetry varied from poet to poet. Nature no longer represented something to be tamed (addomesticato) and brought within the precise confines of early Georgian man's love of symmetry and landscape gardens. In was instead interpreted as representing the real home of a man and beneficial source of comfort and morality and also the religious embodiment of the life source. Nature had became an important subject for poets of the period, it was seen as a providing stimulus for thought and meditation or as reflecting the inner moods (stati d'animo) and sentiments of man.