The Most Influential Events Of Late Eighteenth-And Early Nineteenth-Century

The French Revolution is widely recognized as one of the most influential events of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, with far reaching consequences in political, cultural, social, and literary arenas. It affected first- and second-generation Romantics in different ways.
First-generation poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, the most well-known members of the “Lake District” school of poetry, initially sympathized with the philosophical and political principles of the Revolution.

A common theme among some of the most widely known romantic poets though is their acceptance and approval of the French Revolution, if not in the means entirely, the ideas and concepts were valued. William

Wordsworth’s everyday language and subject choices is by itself a revolution, by breaking down the boundaries that separated poetry - with its elevated characters, plots, and diction - from ordinary representation.

While first-generation Romantics saw their revolutionary fervor tempered by the gruesome turn of the revolution from the execution of
Louis XVI through the Reign of Terror, second-generation Romantics such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley held to the Revolution’s principles in a more idealistic, but cautious way.Shelley, for instance, portrays rebellious events in poems such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), and Hellas (1822), yet he avoids direct representation of revolutionary action.

The emergence of Romanticism in Britain also coincided with a dramatically increased awareness of Continental literature. According to Wordsworth’s
1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, writers and critics of the time had to contend with the presence of‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ whose baneful