ROMANTIC POETRY Romanticism A movement of the

ROMANTIC POETRY

Romanticism A movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics to the formalism of the preceding (Neoclassic) period. The Neoclassic period valued reason, formal rules, and demanded order in beauty.

the birth of Romantic poetry n n the late 18 th century the Age of Enlightenment - emphasis on science, reason and being intellectual the French Revolution (1789) industrialization - the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment

Major characteristics of the Romantic Movement n n n n regular language focus on emotions and feelings freedom from rules solitary life rather than life in society the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason devotion to beauty love of and worship of nature subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism

Celebration of Nature n n n Nature often presented as a work of art from the divine imagination Nature as a healing power Nature as a refuge from civilization Nature viewed as “organic, ” (alive) rather than “mechanical” or “rationalist” Nature viewed as a source of refreshment and meditation

regular language 'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill, But, of the two, less dang'rous is th'Offence, To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense‘ Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism

regular language I have a boy of five years old; His face is fair and fresh to see; His limbs are cast in beauty's mould, And dearly he loves me. ‘ William Wordsworth Anecdote for Fathers

Major Romantic Poets Lake poets (first generation of Romantic poets ) William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge second generation of Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley John Keats Lord Byron

and William Blake ? ? ?

n n n n n 2 d of 5 children - the son of a humble but decent tradesman - His father was a hosier had religious visions drawing school (11) began writing poetry (12) apprenticed to a London engraving (14) 1779 – began study in the Royal Academy; commercial engraving for bookseller 1782 – married Catherine Boucher 1787 – died his younger brother Robert relief etching, illuminated printing

Important !!! n radical thinker, idealistically revolutionary: The French Revolution (1791), America: A Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) n n n enthusiastically religious had interesting ideas about marriage and women (Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life ) pioneer of the free love movement

Major works – Blakean style n The Songs of Innocence (1789) and Experience (1793) – 1794 (subtitle, Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul) n n The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) Jerusalem (1820)

The Songs of Innocence and Experience Innocence and experience are essentially opposites that together form a whole. n Songs of Innocence. Most of the poems are about children n focus on a naïve, pure and inexperienced worldview: the world can be scary, and a lack of experience can lead to being taken advantage of in some cases. n In these poems, God is always a protective force, although children don't really fully understand him. n

Songs of Experience focus on adults n the world is exposed as a dark place where the Church, politics and society can be constraining n poems deal with jealousy and corruption n also suggest that these forces exist in the world among the innocent - but they're too naïve to see them. Experience has some advantages; you're able to see what's really there n

prototypical Romantic work contemporary, accessible language n tend to take place in natural settings (nature as a place where you can get an authentic experience, rather than in a city). n capture the contrast between instinct and reason or nature and civilization - like nature and instinct a lot better than reason and experience. n

1788 – associated with Emmanuel Swedenborg - scientist n Milton, Paradise Lost n “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it. ” n 1810 - Milton: A Poem

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost n it's about Hell: since the Romantics weren't such huge fans of organized religion, Hell's actually a really cool place - people can relax. n Blake suggests that Heaven is too authoritarian and too stuffy and guided by rules. n 'I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. ' n

Lyrical Ballads, 1798 the most influential book of poetry in English literature – the birth of the Romantic Poetry Movement is the publication of this book. Ballads are poetry of the folk. They do not, historically, have single authors but are the products of a communal voice. n The ballad revival also marked a desire to return to cleansing simplicities, away from the industrialization, institutionalization, and bureaucratization that were transforming the world. n

was born in the Lake District n was “allowed to run wild in nature” - pantheistic: God inheres in the natural world around us. God is in nature. n grammar school, attended Cambridge University n In the early 1800 s - settled in the Lake District, met Samuel Taylor Coleridge n extraordinarily introverted: Loneliness and creativity are at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry, and loneliness, for him, is a creative state. n

n n n born in 1772 in a country town in England His father was the vicar of a local church and headmaster of a local school in London at Jesus College - befriended the writer Robert Southey a plan to create a pantisocracy - a utopian society where everyone is equal in status and role (Pennsylvania ) 1795 - met William Wordsworth, huge influence on him (leaders of this blossoming Romantic Movement in poetry )

Major Works n 1798 – poem Frost at Midnight (conversation poem: talks about his upbringing in the city and he worries and hopes that his son will get to really experience nature; importances of nature vs. the city; based on life) conversation poems: The Eolian Harp n This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison n The Nightingale n

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' 1798 adventure, horror, and mystery + zombies Romantic themes that come up in the poem: n nature (the idea of the natural world), n supernatural forces (zombies), n strong human emotions, n the idea of sin and restoration (you do something bad but you can be redeemed for it). n accessible, modern language – NO!!! n fairly antiquated language deliberately n

n Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after an opium-induced dream n Got interrupted, couldn’t finish n three important facets of Romantic poetry: imagination celebrated, nature and mysticism.

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. ” “Keatsianism”

n n George Noel Gordon George Gordon Byron 6 th Baron Byron Lord Byron

Lord Byron n n Harrow School Trinity College, Cambridge 1807 - Hours of Idleness - Augustan diction 1809 - English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1809 - Tour to Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage n n semi-autobiographical in two parts (cantos) It follows a hero who travels around to foreign lands characterizes the melancholy and disillusionment felt by Byron after the French Revolution and after the Napoleonic Wars

Byronic Hero ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Byronic Hero complicated soul, an intellectual, but also sensitive and moody. n He's a wanderer, which makes him isolated from society. n n ennui or world weariness: “No more, oh never more on me The freshness of the heart can fall like dew. ” misanthropy, a desire for solitude and a contempt for the world: “There is pleasure in the pathless woods…” n

She Walks in Beauty She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

n n n n In 1816, he leaves England He wanders around in Europe & then goes off to Italy fourth Childe Harold canto a supernatural poem called Manfred a closet drama (a drama that isn't meant to be performed) Cain - about Cain and Abel poem called Beppo - a satire masterpiece, Don Juan

Don Juan

Don Juan n n n n a little role reversal Long - a real epic at 16, 000 lines suppressed by the Victorians started - in the fall of 1818 in Venice written in serialized form - cantos (17) written in ottava rima (ottava - eight lines in each stanza) The rhyme (the 'rima') is a fixed pattern: A-B-A-B-C-C for eight lines Augustian wit!

dedicated to Robert Southey 'Bob Southey! You're a poet, poet laureate, / And representative of all the race. ‘ n 'And Coleridge too has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumbered with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation. I wish he would explain his explanation. ' n

Canto I n 'not a page of anything that's loose, / Or hints continuation of the species' n Don Juan - Donna Julia 'There was the Donna Julia, whom to call Pretty were but to give a feeble notion Of many charms in her as natural As sweetness to the flower, or salt to ocean, Her zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid (But this last simile is trite and stupid). '

Juan is on a ship sailing for Italy The ship sinks in a storm Juan is actually rescued by a woman named Haidee n Her father is a pirate who wants to sell Juan as a slave n n n Haidee's father is dead? ? Haidee suffers a brain hemorrhage

n n n n Juan sold as a slave to a sultan Sultan's wives in the harem wants to sleep with him Escapes He takes part in a battle against the Russians The war section actually gives Byron a chance to critique war - extreme violence, immorality, and horrors of the battle get described in really sharp detail. he ends up with the Russians and Catherine the Great sends him to England cantos about Juan interacting with all sorts of Lords and Ladies of England having affairs with a bunch of them

Don Juan n “I had not quite fixed whether to make [my hero] end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. ”

n Greece, involved in the independence movement from the Ottoman Empire. Byron died of a fever in 1824

Percy Bysshe Shelley n n n n n His father - Sir Timothy Shelley, served in Parliament His grandfather - Bysshe Shelley - a baron the oldest child in his family Eton College Oxford University Empiricist (believed knowledge should come from sensory experience and that evidence determines truth) Atheist 1811 pamphlet called 'The Necessity of Atheism'. (claims that there's no proof that God exists) expelled from Oxford

At 19 - eloped to Scotland with a 16 -year-old named Harriet Westbrook - the daughter of a local pub owner (a lower social standing) n Shelley's disinherited n William Godwin 1814 – Mary Godwin - Switzerland - Byron Shelley's first major poem - Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems n 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' (about the idea of feeling beauty through imagination. It includes nature imagery and spirits) n n Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century - The Revolt of Islam

'Ozymandias' 1818 n n n - sonnet, only 14 lines. ekphrastic poem. Ekphrastic - poem about another work of art ( about a statue) diction word choice imagery themes of the poem fleeting power, arrogance, the power of art

n Horace Smith - a sonnet-writing contest n 'On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below, '

Major works n Prometheus Unbound - 1820 - 'closet drama' n poems 'To a Skylark', 'Ode to the West Wind' 'The Cloud'. ‘Adonaïs, - elegy for John Keats - 1821

'Ode to the West Wind, ' 1820 n n n 1819 - Peterloo Massacre incited a lot of political outrage and revolutionary spirit 'Ode to the West Wind, ' - hope that his words will be carried, as if by the wind to those who need to hear them Ode is basically a type of lyric poem that addresses a subject five stanzas of 14 lines, four tercets and a couplet, terza rima, iambic pentameter

Final Two Stanzas 'If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!'