The eighteenth century was known, among other possessions, as the neo-Classical Age of Reason. Thinkers admired all things Classical, from architecture to literature, and logical thinking was highly prized. Broadly speaking, Romanticism was a reaction against neo-Classicism. Writers and artists of the Romantic period considered that reason and logical thinking were all very well, but that these things did not value the emotional side of human responses highly enough. In modern terms, they might have said that the importance of the right hand-side of the brain, which deals with emotions, had been ignored.

For instance, the writer, printer and painter William Blake (1757-1827) despised the clinical Classicism which was filling the new Royal Academy under the auspices of its founder, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), finding there no place for the imagination. In a famous painting of Sir Isaac Newton, Blake shows the great scientist absorbed in a calculation but apparently unaware both of his own natural nakedness and of the beauty of the world symbolized by the wonderfully colored rock upon which he is sitting.

The second generation of Romantic poets, Keats, Shelley and Lord Byron were also revolutionaries. All grew up under a repressive, reactionary Tory government which had been quick to point out what ‘power to the people’ had led to in France. Shelley’s crusade in the name of liberty led him to fall out with his father, an MP and minor baronet, and to be expelled from Oxford University for writing The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a deliberately provocative pamphlet given that in those days most dons were churchmen. In 1818 he exiled himself for good, settling in Italy.

From there, upon hearing of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 when troops attacked a gathering of 60,000 Manchester civilians meeting to hear speeches advocating parliamentary reform, he wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, arguably the most vicious satirical poem ever written. No publisher dared to print it until after the 1832 Reform Act, and long after Shelley’s death. And although Keats is, on the face of it, the least political of these three poets, it is surprising for us to find out that his experiments with meter were seen as a challenge to the social order, and that this is one of the reasons why right-wing critics attacked his work.

Second Generation Romantic Poets: The second generations Romantic Poets are slightly different in their thoughts. They are very much pessimistic and melancholic to observe the bad influence of the French Revolution. The groups which it has become usual to use in distinguishing and classifying ‘movements’ in literature or philosophy and in describing the nature of the significant transitions which have taken place in taste and in opinion, are far too rough, crude, undiscriminating — and none of them so hopelessly as the category is the second generation Romantic Poets.

Many scholars say that the Romantic period began with the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in 1798. The volume contained some of the best-known works from these two poets including Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey. Of course, other Literary scholars place the start for the Romantic period much earlier (around 1785), since Robert Burns’s Poems (1786), William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” (1789), Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” and other works already demonstrate that a change has taken place — in political thought and literary expression. Other “first generation” Romantic writers include: Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. A discussion of the period is also somewhat more complicated, since there was a “second generation” of Romantics (made up of poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats).

Of course, the main members of this second generation — though geniuses — died young and were outlived by the first generation of Romantics. Of course, Mary Shelley — still famous for “Frankenstein” (1818) — was also a member of this “second generation” of Romantics. While there is some disagreement about when the period began, the general consensus is… the Romantic period ended with the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837, and the beginning of the Victorian Period. So, here we are in the Romantic era. We stumble upon Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats on the heels of the neoclassical era.

We saw amazing wit and satire (with Pope and Swift) as a part of the last age, but the Romantic Period dawned with a different poetic in the air. In the backdrop of those new Romantic writers, penning their way into literary history, we are on the cusp the Industrial Revolution and writers were affected by the French Revolution. William Hazlit, who published a book called “The Spirit of the Age,” says that the Wordsworth school of poetry “had its origin in the French Revolution… It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world — and of letters. Instead of embracing politics as writers of some other eras might have (and indeed some writers of the Romantic era did) the Romantics turned to Nature for self-fulfillment. They were turning away from the values and ideas of the previous era, embracing new ways of expressing their imagination and feelings. Instead of a concentration on “head,” the intellectual focus of reason, they preferred to rely on the self, in the radical idea of individual freedom. Instead of striving for perfection, the Romantics preferred “the glory of the imperfect. ” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Life and Works:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, with one brother and four sisters, he stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather’s considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament. He attended Eton College for six years beginning in 1804, and then went on to Oxford University. He began writing poetry while at Eton, but his first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi.

That same year, Shelley and another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a pamphlet of burlesque verse, “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson,” and with his sister Elizabeth, Shelley published Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire. In 1811, Shelley continued this prolific outpouring with more publications, and it was one of these that got him expelled from Oxford after less than a year’s enrollment: another pamphlet that he wrote and circulated with Hogg, “The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley could have been reinstated with the intervention of his father, but this would have required his disavowing the pamphlet and declaring himself Christian. Shelley refused, which led to a complete break between Shelley and his father. This left him in dire financial straits for the next two years, until he came of age. That same year, at age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, sixteen. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem.

The poem emerged from Shelley’s friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin’s freethinking Socialist philosophy. Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe. After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England. In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, and in February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later. The following January, Mary bore another son, named William after her father.

In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics, including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly “seances,” Byron proposed that each person present should write a ghost story. Mary’s contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein. That same year, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. In December 1816 Harriet Shelley apparently committed suicide.

Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married. Shelley lost custody of his two children by Harriet because of his adherence to the notion of free love. In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that, because it contained references to incest as well as attacks on religion, was withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed “The Hermit of Marlow. Then, early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron. On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan. John Keats’s Life and Works: English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London.

The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital.

In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude. ” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it.

Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published.

Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews. Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion,” a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth.

He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence. ” In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.

The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale. ” The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion.

The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn.

He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. Compare and Contrast of their works: Though P. B. Shelley and John Keats were mutual friends, but they have possessed the diversified qualities in their creativity. These two are the great contributors of English Literature, though The eighteenth century was known, among other possessions, as the neo-Classical Age of Reason. Thinkers admired all things Classical, from architecture to literature, and logical thinking was highly prized. Broadly speaking, Romanticism was a reaction against neo-Classicism.

Writers and artists of the Romantic period considered that reason and logical thinking were all very well, but that these things did not value the emotional side of human responses highly enough. In modern terms, they might have said that the importance of the right hand-side of the brain, which deals with emotions, had been ignored. For instance, the writer, printer and painter William Blake (1757-1827) despised the clinical Classicism which was filling the new Royal Academy under the auspices of its founder, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), finding there no place for the imagination.

In a famous painting of Sir Isaac Newton, Blake shows the great scientist absorbed in a calculation but apparently unaware both of his own natural nakedness and of the beauty of the world symbolized by the wonderfully colored rock upon which he is sitting. The second generation of Romantic poets, Keats, Shelley and Lord Byron were also revolutionaries. All grew up under a repressive, reactionary Tory government which had been quick to point out what ‘power to the people’ had led to in France.

Shelley’s crusade in the name of liberty led him to fall out with his father, an MP and minor baronet, and to be expelled from Oxford University for writing The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a deliberately provocative pamphlet given that in those days most dons were churchmen. In 1818 he exiled himself for good, settling in Italy. From there, upon hearing of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 when troops attacked a gathering of 60,000 Manchester civilians meeting to hear speeches advocating parliamentary reform, he wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, arguably the most vicious satirical poem ever written.

No publisher dared to print it until after the 1832 Reform Act, and long after Shelley’s death. And although Keats is, on the face of it, the least political of these three poets, it is surprising for us to find out that his experiments with meter were seen as a challenge to the social order, and that this is one of the reasons why right-wing critics attacked his work. Second Generation Romantic Poets: The second generations Romantic Poets are slightly different in their thoughts. They are very much pessimistic and melancholic to observe the bad influence of the French Revolution.

The groups which it has become usual to use in distinguishing and classifying ‘movements’ in literature or philosophy and in describing the nature of the significant transitions which have taken place in taste and in opinion, are far too rough, crude, undiscriminating — and none of them so hopelessly as the category is the second generation Romantic Poets. Many scholars say that the Romantic period began with the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in 1798.

The volume contained some of the best-known works from these two poets including Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey. ” Of course, other Literary scholars place the start for the Romantic period much earlier (around 1785), since Robert Burns’s Poems (1786), William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” (1789), Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” and other works already demonstrate that a change has taken place — in political thought and literary expression.

Other “first generation” Romantic writers include: Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. A discussion of the period is also somewhat more complicated, since there was a “second generation” of Romantics (made up of poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats). Of course, the main members of this second generation — though geniuses — died young and were outlived by the first generation of Romantics. Of course, Mary Shelley — still famous for “Frankenstein” (1818) — was also a member of this “second generation” of Romantics. While there is some disagreement about when the period began, the general consensus is… he Romantic period ended with the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837, and the beginning of the Victorian Period. So, here we are in the Romantic era. We stumble upon Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats on the heels of the neoclassical era. We saw amazing wit and satire (with Pope and Swift) as a part of the last age, but the Romantic Period dawned with a different poetic in the air. In the backdrop of those new Romantic writers, penning their way into literary history, we are on the cusp the Industrial Revolution and writers were affected by the French Revolution.

William Hazlit, who published a book called “The Spirit of the Age,” says that the Wordsworth school of poetry “had its origin in the French Revolution… It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world — and of letters. ” Instead of embracing politics as writers of some other eras might have (and indeed some writers of the Romantic era did) the Romantics turned to Nature for self-fulfillment. They were turning away from the values and ideas of the previous era, embracing new ways of expressing their imagination and feelings.

Instead of a concentration on “head,” the intellectual focus of reason, they preferred to rely on the self, in the radical idea of individual freedom. Instead of striving for perfection, the Romantics preferred “the glory of the imperfect. ” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Life and Works: Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, with one brother and four sisters, he stood in line to inherit not only his grandfather’s considerable estate but also a seat in Parliament.

He attended Eton College for six years beginning in 1804, and then went on to Oxford University. He began writing poetry while at Eton, but his first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi. That same year, Shelley and another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, published a pamphlet of burlesque verse, “Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson,” and with his sister Elizabeth, Shelley published Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire.

In 1811, Shelley continued this prolific outpouring with more publications, and it was one of these that got him expelled from Oxford after less than a year’s enrollment: another pamphlet that he wrote and circulated with Hogg, “The Necessity of Atheism. ” Shelley could have been reinstated with the intervention of his father, but this would have required his disavowing the pamphlet and declaring himself Christian. Shelley refused, which led to a complete break between Shelley and his father. This left him in dire financial straits for the next two years, until he came of age.

That same year, at age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, sixteen. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem emerged from Shelley’s friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin’s freethinking Socialist philosophy. Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe. After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England.

In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, and in February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later. The following January, Mary bore another son, named William after her father. In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics, including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly “seances,” Byron proposed that each person present should write a ghost story. Mary’s contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein.

That same year, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. In December 1816 Harriet Shelley apparently committed suicide. Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married. Shelley lost custody of his two children by Harriet because of his adherence to the notion of free love. In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that, because it contained references to incest as well as attacks on religion, was withdrawn after only a few copies were published.

It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed “The Hermit of Marlow. ” Then, early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron.

On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan. John Keats’s Life and Works: English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians.

Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude. Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year.

Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.

Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on “Hyperion,” a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing “Hyperion” upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as “The Fall of Hyperion” (unpublished until 1856).

That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his “posthumous existence. ” In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished “Hyperion,” and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale. The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion. The fragment “Hyperion” was considered by Keats’s contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married.

Under his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. Compare and Contrast of their works: Though P. B. Shelley and John Keats were mutual friends, but they have possessed the diversified qualities in their creativity. These two are the great contributors of English Literature, though