The Self Nature and the Nature of Self:
• The River Wye has become an essential part of the education as reported by a British magazine writer in 1798.
• In the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, America had a loosely knit group known as the Transcendentalist, whom sought to discover the “transcendent” order of nature.
• Nature itself was viewed as the greatest teacher to poets, painters, essayists, and composes of these times.
• Romantic artist revolted against the classical values of order, control, balance, and proportionality of the neoclassical artists.
• Instead, approaching the world with an outpour of feelings and emotional intensity that was to be called Romanticism.
• Originally coined in 1798 by German writer/poet Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1892), “Romanticism” was an overt reaction against he Enlightenment and classical culture.
• Schlegel was deeply influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and by Johann Winckelmann’s perspective of Greek art.
• Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement.
• The Romantic artists felt that the emotional side of all things was just ass or more important that the logical or thinking mind.
The Early Romantic Imagination:
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850), visited Wye Valley with his sister Dorothy. His experience lead him to write “Tintern Abbey,” which embody the very idea of romantic for his entire generation.
• “Tintern Abbey” can be taken as one of the fullest statements of the romantic imagination.
• Wordsworth suggests in his poem that the mind is an active participant in the process of human perception rather than a passive vessel.
A Romantic Experiment: Lyrical Ballads
• Lyrical Ballads a book of poems co-written by Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was published anonymously.
• Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” resulting from