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Tweet:
Kyle‏ @mindfulmadne55 Mar 5
Napoleon claimed to be the emperor of Europe and caused the Napoleonic wars which spanned from 1803-1815. #en2490

Kyle's Tweet is referring to the beginning of the Romantic Period. The Romantic Period began in 1789 with the French Revolution. After the revolution, Napoleon made himself emperor of France, and thus was the perpetrator and responsible for starting huge battles between the French and the British.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"Keats was famous by 21... what have you done lately?

...but he died in his later 20's of TB. Still more famous than we'll ever be
#en2490"

Keats, a writer that we explored later in the period, became a famous writer when he was only 21 years old. This would be impressive if other writers weren't doing the same thing. We later learn that in the Victorian Period, writers were beginning their run up to fame at only age 13! makes us think "what the hell are we doing wrong..." In fact, mostly all of the other writers that we looked at in class started young like William Blake, and Percy Shelly.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"Opium was the solution for EVERYTHING. Crying baby? Boom opium. Pregnant woman? Boom opium. Back pain? Boom opium.
#en2490"

Out of the writers in the romantic period, Thomas DeQuincey had to have the worst opium addiction. He ran away from home at a young age and lived in the brothels, later getting married, having children, struggling financially, and the whole time was brutally addicted to the drug. He wrote his familiar essay (another popular literary form in the RP) called, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, on his struggle. For most of the piece, he was high and wanted to document the experiences through writing. He also explores how it makes him feel, and the pains associated with it both mentally and physically. This picture explains how this epidemic started. Opium and Laudanum was prescribed for EVERYTHING, hence the tweet. Even restless babies. The English were literally perpetuating their own opium problem.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"5. Would not call Blake a Gothic writer because of lack of explicit supernatural elements like haunting and extreme darkness
#en2490"

The Gothic genre started in the restoration period and morphed into something more intense in the romantic period. The Gothic genre focuses mostly on the presence of supernatural elements and tones of darkness. The mood and tone of darkness needs to be uniform throughout the entire piece in order to be considered Gothic, and this is why we would not consider Blake a Gothic artist. He makes stabs at it, but never writes anything that will fully depress you... just a little bit here and there.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"Calling all of the east "the orient" completely dismisses the different cultures. E.x. China is waaay different than India
#en2490"

Orientalism was based on an ideology in Britain at this time that existed on the premise of thinking that those from the east (i.e. anyone east of Europe) was both exotic and demonic at the same time. This is known as demonic othering and exotic othering. My tweet here is exploring the criticisms of Orientalism. Their grouping all eastern civilizations into one stereotype is preposterous considering China and India have VERY different cultures, but would be considered the same in the Romantic Period. The period ended in 1837 with the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne.
http://ocherartgallery.blogspot.com/2016/07/orientalism-unique-genre-of-art.html

Example:
In Thomas Dequincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater,  he introduces a Malaysian man and describes him as a demonic alien with "slavish" body language and gestures. This is an example of demonic othering.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"Mary Robinson: Has a baby in prison, loved acting, had a sugar daddy who never pays her who just so happens to be the future king of England, gets another sugar daddy who DOES pay her, is paralyzed from the waist down, and becomes a famous writer... damn you go girl
#en2490"

Mary is one example among many more like Charlotte Smith and Anna Letitia Barbauld, who really took off and started a new age of women writers in this period. These women sort of paved the way from more women to make their "bad ass" stories into great poetry and novels. Another example from a discussion in class is Mary Shelly, the wife of Percy Shelley. Although men did dominate the period, women have started to take their rise.

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Another building block for the Romantic Period was ironically the presence of a lack of form... if that makes sense. Romantic writers created new forms that are designed to criticize and reform the previous ones from the Restoration Period. Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads  says that literature and poetry should be by the common people, for the common people, and in the language of the common people .This was bold considering this movement was on the tail end of neoclassicism from the previous period that focused on robust and complex language intended only for the most educated audiences.

Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"5. Focus on the individual
6. Romantic Lyric- poetry in the first person
7. Anti-form=poetry from the heart rather than the brain
8. Trees and flowers nature
9. Lot of revolutions
10. Peterloo masacre
11. Shift from ag to industry=child labor and awful working conditions
#en2490"
I mentioned in this tweet that the romantics focused on "anti-form", and in class discussions, we noticed that romantic poetry as a genre is from the heart rather than from the mind which levels the playing field for those with lower literary comprehension skills. We mentioned this too in our "dinner party" exercise.

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Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"I wandered lonely as a cloud plot:
I saw some daffodils, and then I remembered it later
#en2490"

The Egotistical Sublime is one of the building blocks for the Romantic Period, and certainly for the work of William Wordsworth, the author of  I wandered Lonely as a Cloud. The main point of this tweet is to accentuate the embarrassingly egotistical poetry that was written in these years between 1789 and 1837. The Egotistical Sublime revolves around the idea that everything in nature eventually reverts back to the "me", the poet/first person narrator of the poem who was usually the poet him/herself. Many poets did this, but Wordsworth did it the most in his works like this, Tintern Abbey, and To a Butterfly. He even has brief slips in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Tweet:
Griffin Nyhan
"hashtag of the day: #woeisme

#en2490"