George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 -1824)

ROMANTICISM

• During the early 1800s the French situation dominated England’s foreign policy. The French Revolution had begun in 1789 as a protest against royal despotism. In its early phases the French Revolution had seemed to offer great hope for common people.

• Scientific achievements in the areas of geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy flourished during the Romantic Age, but they also did not improve the living conditions of the common working people.

The Romantic Age

• The Romantic Age brought a more daring, individual and imaginative approach to both literature and life. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of the most important English writers turned away from the values and ideas characteristic of the Age of Reason. The individual, rather than society, was at the center of the Romantic vision. The Romantic writers believed in the possibility of progress and social and human reform.

• In the period from 1786 to 1830 two generations of Romantic poets permanently affected the nature of English language and literature. Usually, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote most of their major works from 1786 to 1805, are regarded as the first generation of the English Romantic poets.