Romanticism Definition A movement of the eighteenth and

Romanticism Definition: 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.

Romanticism ®Victor Hugo called Romanticism “liberalism in literature. ” It freed the artist and writer from restraints and rules. ®A current definition: a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.

Romanticism Characteristics: • Individualism of imagination over • Idealization of rural • The predominance reason and formal rules • Love of nature • An interest in the past • Mysticism life • Enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature • Enthusiasm for the uncivilized or “natural”

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

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

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage n semi-autobiographical n in two parts (cantos ) n It follows a hero who travels around to foreign lands n 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 n 'Bob Southey! You're a poet, poet laureate, / And representative of all the race. ‘ '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 Juan sold as a slave to a sultan n Sultan's wives in the harem wants to sleep with him n Escapes n He takes part in a battle against the Russians n 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.

n he ends up with the Russians and Catherine the Great n Catherine the Great sends him to England n 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 n Elizabeth Hitchener - 'Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem' William Godwin – freethinker & anarchist - mentor 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, '

'Ozymandias' I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. ‘ Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

'Ozymandias' I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. ‘ Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things

'Ozymandias' I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. ‘ Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. ‘ Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘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.

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

clouds 'angels of rain and lightning’ n water n 'Didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers‘ 'For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!'

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!'

'Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own? ‘ 'Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth‘ And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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

n Walter Scott n Robert Burns n Charlotte & Emily Bronte n Jane Austen