Romantic age

Towards the end of the 18th century, the neo-classical mode of writing was worn out and a new trend in literature became imminent. The new trend became visible in the mid-eighties. When the French revolution took place in 1789, the ground of the new kind of creative writing had already been prepared in the United Kingdom.

William Blake published two volumes of this new kind of poetry. In 1798, William Wordsworth and S T Coleridge published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, and with it began the new age know as the Romantic age. The other famous poets of this age were PB Shelly, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were the novelists of the period.

Writers of this age preferred common people and common language to sophisticated urban people and their grand language. A strong desire for improving the condition of man was a driving force of the literature of this age. The features of the age were high imagination, liberalism, love of nature, Hellenism, and the use of supernatural powers.