Romantic Period -Williom Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s Romantic Values The Enlightenment, a period of reason, intellectual thought, and science, led some writers to question those values over emotion. Instead, as the Romantic movement gradually developed in response, writers began to look at a different approach to thought. The Romantic period, roughly between the years of 1785 to 1830, was a period when poets turned to nature, their individual emotions, and imagination to create their poetry. Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats rejected conventional literary forms, regular meters, and complex characters and experimented with emotion and nature subjects in their poems which marked a literary renaissance. Besides a response to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution also influenced the Romantic sentiments. Poets quickly reacted towards the widespread change from a predominantly agricultural society to a modern industrial one. For example, England’s landscape started to emerge of smoky factories and crowded cities. The effects of the industrial revolution fueled the return of basic human emotion found in Romantic poetry. Among the Romantics who were one of the most influential and accomplished was William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s most famous work is his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Lyrical Ballads published anonymously in 1798. Wordsworth wrote nineteen poems in Lyrical Ballads, and Coleridge wrote four including his famous “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. These poems are a collection of their experimental poetry that embarked Romantic literature. At first, the appearance of Lyrical Ballads did not receive positive acclaim from critics due to its controversial technique and subject matter. The Wordsworth and Coleridge executed an unadorned style of writing and basically opposed all conventional poetry standards of the eighteenth century. As a defense to his critics, Wordsworth wrote Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads to

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