Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley

Abstract

Towards the end of the 18th century a growing disgust among writers with the rationalistic bias of their predecessors can be discerned. The wit that was once so fresh and vigorous in the writings of Pope and Swift had become dull and predictable. The edge had gone off it. For inspiration writers began to turn towards more mysterious or numinous aspects of experience and towards the world of their dreams, territories which had been out of bounds to the Augustans. The Gothic novelists gave a further impulse to the writer to follow the impromptu, ‘irrational’ leading of his imagination and to body forth in words the images of his deepest fantasy, however grotesque and horrible these might be.