17 pages • 34 minutes read
The Solitary Reaper
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Background
Literary Context: Romanticism
At the end of the 18th century and into the early decades of the 19th century, a cultural movement swept across much of Europe. This movement, later known as Romanticism, was paradoxically both a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and a reaction against it. Like many prominent Enlightenment thinkers, many Romantics had a deep interest in the dignity of the individual, and they tended to idealize revolutionary ideas. They often questioned or outright rejected the social, religious, and political norms that seriously curtailed or oppressed the rights of the average person, and they championed freedom of feeling and expression.
However, unlike their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics tended to strongly favor feeling and instinct over the more methodical, calculating rationality of figures like Voltaire or David Hume. To this end, Romantic works were often emotionally turbulent—from Goethe’s famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, to the odes of transcendent experiences through art and nature penned by Wordsworth and Keats. Romanticism and political revolution often went hand-in-hand: As a young man, Wordsworth himself had been deeply interested in the French Revolution, although he later became disillusioned and more conservative in his beliefs. Lord Byron, one of the “second generation” of English Romantics, died fighting for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s friend and poetic contemporary, was outspoken against social hierarchies and openly promoted controversial ideas such as atheism and free love.
Romanticism’s legacy endures in many popular conceptions surrounding art and poetry even to this day. The valorization of individuality and the idea that lyric poetry often reflects a poet’s genuine, private feelings and experiences is one of the lasting marks of Romanticism’s influence, as is Romanticism’s tendency to celebrate the artist as a solitary—and sometimes tortured—genius. The belief that many of the English Romantics shared in the worth and dignity of the “common” man/woman is likewise something that has helped to shape modern conceptions of individual worth, both politically and culturally, well into the 21st century.
Socio-historical Context
Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics lived during profound social and political change. On a social level, the world was rapidly moving towards a more industrial and urban-centric way of life, thanks to advances in technology and a shift away from the slower, agrarian traditions of the countryside. The Romantics are distinctive in the sense that while they often embraced radical political change, they were often more ambivalent about the social changes that broke away from the natural world in favor of the more industrial and urban. As a result, one of the defining features of many of the major English Romantics is a stubborn belief in the enduring superiority of the natural world, and the insistence upon idealizing rural life. Many iconic Romantic works show open fascination with the wonders of nature and a championing of her beauties.
Politically, the French and American Revolutions had an enormous influence upon Romanticism and shaped many of its broader ideals. Chief among these was the celebration of the individual, and a general promotion of greater freedom for the average subject/citizen—who was, by and large, still living under powerful monarchy in much of Europe. The political ideologies of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism helped to bring about a shift in thinking about social hierarchies, human rights, and representative government that would pave the way for the modern era.
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