Water in Romantic Poetry: An Analysis of Robert Burns and the Big Six

Abstract The Romantic Age (Early Nineteenth Century) of English Literature was held together by a general belief in the close connection between Nature and human beings, and featured an uncannily suggestive multitude of instances of individuals breaking off from society and encountering the natural world by themselves. It was not merely a literary movement but a complete cultural revolution that questioned the old reason, order, and rationality of the Enlightenment Period (Eighteenth Century). Amidst and along the Industrialisation, French and American Revolutions, Rapid Urbanisation and Mechanization of Life, this movement naturally embraced a distinctive, personal voice, away from the pretensions and prosaicness of the previous age, and tried to recultivate a way to make sense of the natural world in an intuitive manner. The Romantic Poets believed the necessary insight would come from depths of feeling, emotion, imagination, and individual experience, and the spontaneity of the imagination rather than from cold logic, and practicality and reason. Romantic Poets celebrated the sublime — the overwhelming power of nature which terrifies, while at the same time elevates the human spirit. They explored nature not merely as a backdrop but as an active, symbolic force reflecting and impacting their life, their morality, and the fundamental, existential concerns of the human condition