March 2, 2012
Final Paper
Romantic and Victorian Literature and writers have an endless about of similarities that make both of them the overall most influential eras of literature. It is in following paragraphs I will attempt to bring together the most fascinating points and authors that built the road on which future writers try to compare their works to these masterminds. It is in the social issues, religious doubts and social prosecutions that have previously withheld society from free expression. It is the limitless boundaries of the imagination that have taken hold of literature, in contrast to realism of previous ages, as present throughout the Romantic and Victorian age.
Writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats began this new age of a new style of writing called Romanticism which lit the fuse to an explosion of imagination and witty literature. At the beginning of the Romantic age it was all about the naturalistic ideals and how nature and god are one. Before this time in literature and even partly the way through God itself was never questioned in its holiness. Literature of the Romantic era was the base for what can be called all literature nowadays, it was these authors, mentioned are only a few, that completely contrast the Victorian age as well as building off past centuries for newer and better literature. At the beginning of the list for the Romantics is William Blake, a genius among the Romantics, his works are still above most in the up most skills of using words to convey social and ideas of the time period. It was evident through his Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence in which Blake was able to show how different the mind thinks after unnamed amount of years living. To truly understand what Blake was writing about during this time one would have to step back and look at the time period, it was a time where parents would allow their
Cited: M.H. Abrams, General Editor (1916). The Norton Anthology of English Literature volume 2. New York: London