Romanticism – Samual Taylor Coleridge & Joseph Turner

In a reaction to the rational, conformist conventions of the Augustans, writers and artists of the wild-eyed era advocated the transcendence of rationality through a sublime and originative connection with the natural world. This emancipation from traditional social and moral restraints conscious their literary, artistic and philosophical pursuits. It was these qualities that marked the movement as unique in the history of European intellect discourse. amorousism derived largely from the transcendental noble-mindedness of Emmanuel Kant, which proposed that things exist outside the intellect that we simply cannot comprehend through arrant(a) reason.Three Romantic texts Samual Taylor Coleridges poems This Lime Tree arbour My Prison and Kubla Khan and Joseph turners word-painting rash steamboat off a harbours mouth reveal how the human imaginative taste perception of the natural world is able to transcend physical limitations as rise as the restrictions of technology and l ogic. Coleridge, in particular, was a uncoiled proponent of the Romantic tradition. He described the uniting of reason and feeling as intellectual intuition and saw imagination as the ultimate synthesising faculty, enabling military personnel to reconcile differences and opposites in a world of appearances. His poem This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison heart-to-heartly exemplifies the power of the imagination, combined with the redeeming and regenerative power of temperament, which enables him to overcome the isolation of egotism. The intimate, in-person reputation of this conversation poem engages the reader as they argon transported with the poet to bracing locations and perhaps themselves turned. Coleridge presents an idealised view of pastoral England with vividness, intensity and delicacy, thitherby stimulant the senses and the mind.Colours used to evoke mood and imagery, blue betwixt both Isles Of purple shadow is integral throughout. His vision is visceral, bringing enli ghtenment and rapture to the poet and the reader. The poet likewise controls light intensity to great effect binary opposites ring his thought process, as in pale beneath the blaze. He contrasts dark and light, pale and radiant, shadow and sunshine throughout. His thoughts also move from the delimited dell, overwooded, narrow deep of the first stanza to the infinite wide, wide heaven of the following stanzas.Antithetical concepts of liberty with restriction, absence with presence and the imagined with the real create a systolic and diastolic rhythm that merges Coleridges psychological beliefs with his imaginative experience, aligning with what Kant describes as the individuals subjective reality. The anatomical structure of the poem is cyclic, with emphasis on pain before diversion, with well, they are gone, and here I must remain before the later stanza that begins with A delight comes sharp in my heart, and I am glad as myself were there. The poet ceases feeling marooned and communes with nature, imagining that he is with his friends, before ending by referring to the lime-tree bower beneath which he sits, and to his friend, the gentle-hearted Charles, once again. The illumination of natures power and its ability to transform can also be seen in another of Coleridges poems Kubla Khan. The first stanza, set inside the walls of Kubla Khans pleasure dome in Xanadu, contrasts with the second stanza which takes the reader outside those confines, reflecting the same systolic and diastolic thoughts that are evident in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.As Xanadu is a synonym for paradise or utopia, the poem can be considered a reflection on Coleridges perception of heaven, linking to the pantheistic belief that God is found in nature. The sacred river Alph running through this paradise represents in the realm of a poets imagination a holy and divine place. The caverns measureless to man reflect the sempiternal creations that can emanate from such a powerful i magination. The walls and towers that encircle the productive ground and the enfolding of greenery speak of the poets energy in trying to see and hold onto natures power and beauty.The intensity of the world outside the tamed garden highlights the power of the natural world in contrast to the ultimate finesse of man-made structures. The dome of pleasure built by Kubla Khan may be taken to represent the man-made and may perhaps be a comment, on a wider scale, to the Industrial Revolution. Coleridge juxtaposes this with an image of the natural return of the river to sea, showing his greater appreciation for the creative force of nature. Joseph Turners painting blizzard steamboat off a harbours mouth making signals in sh acknowledge water, and divergence by the lead also contrasts the natural world and the man made. standardized the eruption of the natural world in Kubla Khan, this painting illustrates an extreme phenomenon of nature a snowstorm at sea. The Neo-Classicists beli eved that technology would triumph over nature. Turners painting, however, depicts the awing power of nature, and its sublime beauty, as it overpowers technology. The steamboat, representing the latest technology of the time, is a emblem for the Industrial Revolution, which was in full swing by this point.The experience of cosmos caught in a storm on board the steamboat, provided Turner with the intention for his painting. Turner claimed that he had the ships sailors strap him to the mast, so as to capture the true atmospheric conditions of the egress. I wished to show what such a scene was like Turner wrote. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it the storm I was lashed for hours The sleet, the bitterly cold, roaring winds and the billow waves throwing up sea spray were the atmospheric conditions Turner needed to feel.This individual(prenominal) experience of such a sublime moment in nature enabled him to record, through his painting, the feelings and emotions of an individuals experience of the storm. piece Turners original idea for the painting emanated from literal experience, its execution derives from complex imaginative truths. The painting has a very clear relief like surface and the texture is picturesque, as the brush strokes are very evident. Turner wanted to be innovative and to challenge tradition, to grow works that depict a sublime atmosphere and spirit.The painting is an emancipatory view through its intensity of hue, which renders the image of the boat barely recognisable, thus ambitious Neo-Classical mechanistic properties of sharp colours and realism. All three texts the Turner painting and the two Coleridge poems depict the sublime beauty of nature and its ability to transform a negative human mind-frame and to transcend the man-made products of the Industrial Revolution. While the ways in which each of the individual texts show this differs, they each allot the responder to appreciate the same ideas.Coleridge p rovides two different perspectives in his poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Kubla Khan. The first is an entirely first-person perspective, typical of his conversational poems, enabling the reader to bewilder involved on a personal level. Kubla Khan is mainly narrated from a third-person perspective, plentiful it a grander story-like feel. Like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison Joseph Turners Snowstorm steamboat off a harbours mouth represents a personal appreciation of an extreme natural event.The event is shown to be as violent as it is beautiful and the form enables the knockout to visually appreciate it and connect with it on a transcendental level. It all the way illustrates the power of the natural over the unnatural. As Northrop Frye has argued, Romanticism has brought into modern instinct the feeling that society can develop or progress lonesome(prenominal) by individualising itself, by being sufficiently tolerant and flexible to allow an individual to find his own identity within it, even though in doing so he comes to repudiate most of the conventional determine of society.