History
The Romanticism Movement is arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s. The movement's influence was felt across the continents and every artistic discipline through the mid 19th century. You can't exactly pinpoint the origin of the movement because its beginnings have been traced to several past events: an interest of folklore in the mid- late 18th century with the work of the Grimm brothers, reactions versus the neoclassicism and the English Augustan poets, and political events/uprisings that sparked nationalistic pride. Romanticism poets cultivated individualism, natural world reverence, idealism, emotional and physical passion, and the interest in mystic and supernatural. The German poets included Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The British poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, and John Keats started the English Romantic Movement. Victor Hugo was also so named a Romantic poet, causing the movement to cross the Atlantic through the works of Walt Whittman and Edgar Allen Poe. The Romantic era produced stereotypes and poets that are still around today. Romantic ideals in poetry never specifically died out, but were absorbed largely into the perceptions of other movements. Romanticism traces lived on through French symbolism and surrealism and through prominent poets' work such as Charles B. and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Friedrich Schiller- ArchimedesTo Archimedes once a scholar came,
"Teach me," he said, "the art that won thy fame;-- The godlike art which gives such boons to toil, And showers such fruit upon thy native soil;-- The godlike art that girt the town when all Rome's vengeance burst in thunder on the wall!" "Thou call'st art godlike--it is so, in truth, And was," replied the master to the youth, "Ere yet its secrets were applied to use-- Ere yet it served beleaguered Syracuse:-- Ask'st thou from art, but what the art is worth? The fruit?--for fruit go cultivate the earth.-- He who the goddess would aspire unto, Must not the goddess as the woman woo!" |
Poem AnalysisThe narrator is explaining how a scholar wants to be taught the way of Archimedes. It is a classic student and teacher situation where the student wants to be on the level of wisdom as the teacher/master.
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