"Eternity" BBC Romantics - Notes

Romantics: Late 18th Century

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

• opium inspiration + alcohol = addiction + crazy?

John Keats:

• Surgeon, felt patient's pain as his own pain
• The power of empathy! --> decided to heal through words and became a poet
• Romantics: the study of the human soul through poetry
• explain the purpose of life and the earth
• lost his father at 8 years old --> poetry is a journey into his own soul
• greater love of life for tragedy, but still died of tuberculosis at 26
• final days writing poetry and looking at immortal art ruins, his poetry achieved immortality

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

• expelled from Oxford
• wrote atheism pamphlet
•  atheism = freedom
• a god made by man needs men to be heard by men
• cheated on wife with Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women)
•  believed in freedom of action b/c of no punishment from religion
• violator of social conventions: "free love"
• questioning his existence - only in death would he be a true poet
• died in a storm in the ocean, found a book of his poems in his pocket
• his heart was preserved with a manuscript

Lord Byron:

• fanatism of romanticism - celebrity
• bestseller poetry: chose to embrace public life as to give meaning to his own existence
• no worship of god, but yes worship of Byron
• romantics: dissatisfied, yearning for new sensations - scandalists!
• mobs followed him when news came of possible homosexuality; left home to Venice

Romantic Movement:

• Anatomy: Romantics against it "The body could not be understood in scientific terms"
• imagination = soul itself. unconscious = true identity
• religion is not the center of existence, but each person's mind and body
• a poet has no identity because it is expressing other's feelings
• life guided by individual will and desire guided by no external god or laws: no solid afterlife!
• no immortality = liberation from the pains of a corporeal existence
• poetry can achieve immortality by trapping the author's emotions in his words
• poetry became a substitute for religion "poetry is something divine, the center of all knowledge" -PBS
• desire of experience and celebration of originality
• rockstars and celebrities + liberty = romantic
• INDIVIDUALITY makes us all romantics

Response: 
The Romantics are people who, throughout poetry, are trying to find the liberty of a world with no constraints. According to romantics, the human soul and human life should be analyzed through the work of literature. Atheism is strongly related to romanticism, as no God was good enough for romantics to be worth constraining their lives. Individuality, and the search for knowledge on one's own experiences is what characterizes the romantic movement. Without realizing it, many of us might be romantics, guided by the desire of controlling our own lives with personal experiences and glad to let out our emotions through our writing.