Big six in the romantic literature of England
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The Big Six of English romantic literature pertains to the six figures who are historically supposed to have formed the core of the Romantic movement of late 18th and early 19th century England. The term, though widely used as an easy term for the canonical Romantic poets, is just as widely known to be both anachronistic and unduly exclusive. The six poets differ greatly from one another, and in certain cases might have positively rejected such a grouping. During the period, critics identified what are now called "romantic" features in a number of groupings. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey were labelled (prejudicially) as the Lake School by the Edinburgh Review; Shelley and Byron were described (by Southey) as the Satanic School; Keats was associated with the "Cockney School" that was centered around Leigh Hunt. Although chronologically earliest among these writers, William Blake was a relatively late addition to the list; prior to the 1970s, romanticism was known for its "Big Five."
The term, then, did not originate within the period, but emerged during the succeeding Victorian era as a canonical denomination of its predecessor. Arguably, it represents an unduly narrow focus on the literature of the period. For some critics, the term establishes an artificial context for disparate work and removing that work from its real historical context: the result, it is often complained, is a distorting stress on certain "Romantic" themes (such as "organicism") at the expense of equally valid themes (particularly those related to politics.) The term has also been cited as evidence of a gender bias in criticism of the period. For feminist critics, exclusive interest in these six male poets bespeaks an ignorance of, or indifference to, the burgeoning of literature by women during the same decades.
The six authors are, in order of birth:
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- William Wordsworth, The Prelude
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
- John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, associate of many of the writers above and wife of Percy Shelley, was also a major influence on the movement.
[edit] Sources
Hume, Robert (1999). Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 66.
McGann, Jerome (1985). The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mellor, Anne (1992). Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge.
Wu, Duncan and David Miall (1994). Romanticism: An Anthology. London: Basil Blackwell, xxxvi.
[edit] See also
| Romanticism | |
|---|---|
| 18th century - 19th century | |
| Romantic music: Beethoven - Berlioz - Brahms - Chopin - Grieg - Liszt - Puccini - Schumann - Tchaikovsky - The Five - Verdi - Wagner | |
| Romantic poetry: Blake - Burns - Byron - Coleridge - Goethe - Hölderlin - Hugo - Keats - Krasiński - Lamartine - Leopardi - Lermontov - Mickiewicz - Nerval - Novalis - Pushkin - Shelley - Słowacki - Wordsworth | |
| Visual arts and architecture: Brullov - Constable - Corot - Delacroix - Friedrich - Géricault - Gothic Revival architecture - Goya - Hudson River school - Leutze - Nazarene movement - Palmer - Turner | |
| Romantic culture: Bohemianism - Romantic nationalism | |
| << Age of Enlightenment | Victorianism >> Realism >> |
