Romanticism Values Synthesis

In order to hone your skills of identifying themes and creating a central argument via writing, do the following prompt:

1. Choose one of the values of romanticism we discussed: emotion over reason, nature over human-made, impermanence of humanity, the individual over the collective, valuing rural life. writing sparked by individual emotion instead of borrowing from other genres or overthinking writing.

2. Choose three literary works from the Romantic Unit. How does the Romantic value you chose come out in these three literary works.
Ozymandias
London
The World Is Too Much With Us
3. Incorporate at least two direct quotations from these works to support your assertion. Use "/" to indicate breaks in lines

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away"
(Shelley.712)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
(Wordsworth. 694)

4. Remember to explain the why's and how's surrounding your assertions/claims i.e. how does this or that literary work represent the value you choose or why do you think the Romantics focused on these values in their writing over others? Why were the Romantics drawn to such themes?

5. As always, solid topic sentences and varied sentence structure are always helpful.

The romantics believed in a lot of things that were uncommon for people to think of in their day. They were very in touch with nature and with their own feelings, and their poetry reflected this. One very important theme of poetry of the romantic era was valuing nature of things that are human made. Percy Byshe Shelley gives a great insight of why he thought nature was better than human-mane in this exerpt from Ozymandias.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away"
(Shelley.712)
Shelley was drawn to this theme because he realized that no matter what nature will always win out because it controls everything.
Another poem which displays the theme of nature over man made is London. While there are very many great things going on in the city and the people are making great things, they are depressed because they are all stuck in the gloominess of the city and they aren't able to appreciate being in the countryside at all. This poem ties into the third poem described, The World Is Too Much With Us. Wordsworth gets right to the point with the opening four lines of the poem.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
(Wordsworth. 694)
Wordsworth obviously feels that people are spending too much time trying to gain money and they aren't spending enough time taking in the beauty and innocence of nature. He feels that people are wasting their lives working and toiling in the city trying to buy man-made things that can make humans happy, but he feels the only thing that can make people happy is appreciating nature. The theme of appreciating nature over man-made is a good lesson for all people to learn and that true happyness is achieved from doing things and going and seeing different things in nature instead of working all the time and trying to buy happyness.