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(1789-1832)
--Epistemology (How do we know?): imagination, emotion, intuition, instinct, psychological, mystical, spiritual, prescience, subjective, in addition to empirical and logic (Enlightenment)
--Role of artist: creator (romantic), craftsman (enlightenment). Goes from being a mirror up to nature to being a lamp that illuminates knowledge.
--Religion: pantheism (romantic): God inside nature, alive with presence of God, love of nature = love of nature = love of self = love of others. Deism (Enlightenment): God created personal and rational world and walked away, everything screwed up by us. To know reason is to know God. |
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(single greatest influence on romantics)
--Essay on Origin of Inequality (all enlightenment leads up to this social contract: social contract between people and government, people have right to break contract if government becomes tyrannical. “Men are born free but are everywhere in chains”)
--polarity between nature and civilization: go to country to be purified. Civilization has negative effect on us--put us out of touch with ourselves and primal instincts, all evil comes from civilization, hatred learned through civilization, in nature we are good, happiest when living through nascent society (villages, collective living, pottery, language, music, arts, sciences). primal sympathy destroyed through ownership “mine.” We are feeling “bipeds” feeling makes us moral and have empathy.
--confessional autobiographies: childhood, past, psychology, (connect with Wordsworth and Coleridge) importance of development. |
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| Sorrows of Young Werther. First Romantic Hero: cannot move on and commits suicide. Goes against rational behavior. Nature isn’t rational, it is rational, violent, awesome. Sturm and Drang. |
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(long, impulse, not formal)
-crisis
- informal/personal
- starts with description
moves to meditation mixed with associative thinking
-silent auditor |
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William Wordswoth;It also has significance as the terminal poem of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and crossing the Wye, and not jotting so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. Although never overt, the poem is riddled with religion, most of it pantheistic. Wordsworth styles himself as a "worshipper of Nature" with a "far deeper zeal / Of holier love",[5] seeming to hold that mental images of nature can engender a mystical intuition of the divine.
The poem is written in tightly-structured blank verse and comprises verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas. It is unrhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains elements of all of the ode, the dramatic monologue and the conversation poem.
starts with a memory, hermit: experience nature in isolation. Feeling and imagination, bonding with nature makes us be kind: primal sympathy. Active relationship between nature and poet: evolves from animal to moral to spiritual, as you evolve nature evolves with you. Goes beyond nature to spirit that impels “both what they half create, and what perceive” Line: nature is the “guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.”
The subject of “Tintern Abbey” is memory—specifically, childhood memories of communion with natural beauty. Both generally and specifically, this subject is hugely important in Wordsworth’s work, reappearing in poems as late as the “Intimations of Immortality” ode. “Tintern Abbey” is the young Wordsworth’s first great statement of his principle (great) theme: that the memory of pure communion with nature in childhood works upon the mind even in adulthood, when access to that pure communion has been lost, and that the maturity of mind present in adulthood offers compensation for the loss of that communion—specifically, the ability to “look on nature” and hear “human music”; that is, to see nature with an eye toward its relationship to human life. In his youth, the poet says, he was thoughtless in his unity with the woods and the river; now, five years since his last viewing of the scene, he is no longer thoughtless, but acutely aware of everything the scene has to offer him. Additionally, the presence of his sister gives him a view of himself as he imagines himself to have been as a youth. Happily, he knows that this current experience will provide both of them with future memories, just as his past experience has provided him with the memories that flicker across his present sight as he travels in the woods.
“Tintern Abbey” is a monologue, imaginatively spoken by a single speaker to himself, referencing the specific objects of its imaginary scene, and occasionally addressing others—once the spirit of nature, occasionally the speaker’s sister. The language of the poem is striking for its simplicity and forthrightness; the young poet is in no way concerned with ostentation. He is instead concerned with speaking from the heart in a plainspoken manner. The poem’s imagery is largely confined to the natural world in which he moves, though there are some castings-out for metaphors ranging from the nautical (the memory is “the anchor” of the poet’s “purest thought”) to the architectural (the mind is a “mansion” of memory).
The poem also has a subtle strain of religious sentiment; though the actual form of the Abbey does not appear in the poem, the idea of the abbey—of a place consecrated to the spirit—suffuses the scene, as though the forest and the fields were themselves the speaker’s abbey. This idea is reinforced by the speaker’s description of the power he feels in the setting sun and in the mind of man, which consciously links the ideas of God, nature, and the human mind—as they will be linked in Wordsworth’s poetry for the rest of his life, from “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free” to the great summation of the Immortality Ode. |
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| “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” |
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Wordsworth; completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
Lines: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy; (lines 58–70)
Lines: Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (lines 164–170)
The children on the shore represents the adult narrator's recollection of childhood, and the recollection allows for an intimation of returning to that mental state.
Lines:
The poem concludes with an affirmation that, though changed by time, the narrator is able to be the same person he once was:[33]
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (lines 203–206)
a-priori assumption: soul has preexisting state then into empirical (opposite of Tintern). Start with conundrum: preexisting state of the soul and move from top--down (instead of down (empirical) up (spiritual). No sense of place in Ode. Two contrary states: Intimations: vague sense and recollection: remembering childhood. crisis: learning behavior (“little actor cons another part”) society teaches us how to act and forget. Childhood remembers the immortal soul before birth (Platonic) becomes a religion (Map of childhood: immortal sea to shore (children come out of the sea). Being one with nature isn’t enough anymore: nature is a homely nurse and a prison. Nature still instigates the process but eventually we move to recollections of childhood because that is when we are the closest to immortality. “to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” |
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| “Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind" |
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Wordsworth; is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his widow Mary.
internal epic poem: journey into the self, confessional, being drawn by something larger (nature: “divine mind”). two characters: hero: imagination and the mind. Book one: imagination fails to perceive nature. Book six: imagination too big, has high expectations for the crossing of alps, peasant: “that we had crossed the alps.” Nature won’t fulfill what the mind can see (protagonist is the mind, nature is the antagonist). Book fourteen: epiphany in the moonlight and transcends into one mind, beyond the self, beyond what your mind can do. Start of epiphany moment. “Divine Mind:” your mind can only go so far, go beyond into the divine mind, no flux, everything is about permanence in nature (ideal forms, transcendence) moon symbol of imagination, point: to see the force of imagination created through love. Universal spirit of love.
Whilst Milton (mentioned by name in line 181 of Book One) in Paradise Lost rewrites God's creation and The Fall of Man so as to "justify the ways of God to man," Wordsworth chooses his own mind and imagination as a subject worthy of epic.
This spiritual autobiography evolves out of Wordsworth's "persistent metaphor [that life is] a circular journey whose end is 'to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time'
The Prelude narrates a number of later journeys, most notably the crossing of the Alps in Book VI and, in the beginning of the final book, the climactic ascent of Snowdon. In the course of the poem, such literal journeys become the metaphorical vehicle for a spiritual journey—the quest within the poet's memory [...]". |
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Lord Byron; Second Generation Romantics; a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.
The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811.
In Canto 3, Byron drops the pose of writing as Childe Harold and speaks in his own voice. He offers a defense of himself based on the hope that time will be the great vindicator. Throughout this Canto and Canto 4, we see Byron's outline of the tragic nature of the universe: man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain.
Examples: CXIII.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee, -
Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
CXIV.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me, -
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, - hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, nor weave
Snares for the falling: I would also deem
O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem, -
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.
Also, it introduces the Bryonic Hero as a type |
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| Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron provided the first example of the Byronic hero. The idea of the Byronic hero is one that consists of many different characteristics. The hero must have a rather high level of intelligence and perception as well as be able to easily adapt to new situations and use cunning to his own gain. It is clear from this description that this hero is well educated and by extension is rather sophisticated in his style. Aside from the obvious charm and attractiveness that this automatically creates, he struggles with his integrity, being prone to mood swings or bipolar tendencies. Generally, the hero has a disrespect for any figure of authority, thus creating the image of the Byronic hero as an exile or an outcast. The hero also has a tendency to be arrogant and cynical, indulging in self-destructive behaviour which leads to the need to seduce women. Although his sexual attraction through being mysterious is rather helpful, this sexual attraction often gets the hero into trouble. The character of the Byronic hero has appeared in novels, films and plays ever since. |
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Author: Lord Byron; Published anonymously in 1819 and criticized for its immoral content.
General Summary: a satiric poem[1] by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire". Modern critics generally consider it Byron's masterpiece, with a total of over sixteen thousand individual lines of verse.
Canto I Summary: Don Juan lives in Seville with his father Jóse and his mother Donna Inez, a well-read scholarly woman in an unhappy marriage. Donna Julia, 23 years old and married to Don Alfonso, 50, begins to desire Don Juan when he is 16 years old. Despite her attempt to resist, Julia begins an affair with Juan. Julia falls in love with Juan. Byron remarks that "such things are more common in sun-drenched climes." Don Alfonso, suspecting that his wife may be having an affair, bursts into their bedroom followed by a "posse concomitant" but they do not find anything suspicious upon first searching the room, for Juan was hiding in the bed. However, when Alfonso returns on his own, he comes across Juan's shoes and a fight ensues. Juan escapes, however. In order to avoid the rumors and bad reputation her son has brought upon himself, Inez sends him away to travel, in the hopes that he develops better morals. He then makes love to Julia.
Structure: The poem is in eight line iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ab ab ab cc - often the last rhyming couplet is used for a humor comic line or humorous bathos. There are mostly 10 syllables per line. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is known as ottava rima. In Italian, because of the common rhymed endings, the effect of ottava rima is often highly comedic or highly tragic. Because of its few rhymed endings, the effect of ottava rima in English is often comic, and Byron chose it for this reason |
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Author: John Keats; Second Wave Romantics; Written 1819, as were most of Keats' great poems, which are called the 1819 odes.
The moment that Cupid and Psyche are revealed is an example of "Keatsian intensity" as they are neither in a state of separation nor are they united; they exist in a state somewhere in between[16] in a similar manner to the figures depicted in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". The narrator's ability to witness the union is unique to Keats's version of the Psyche myth because the lovers in the original story were covered in darkness. Regardless of the narrator's state of consciousness, he is able to relate himself to Cupid as he believes himself to be in love with Psyche, representing the mind. the narrator's claim that Psyche was neglected since she became a goddess later than the other Greco-Roman deities.[18] As such, the narrator serves as a prophetic figure who is devoted to the soul. Worship towards the soul is through use of the imagination, an idea that shows the influence of William Wordsworth upon the poem's themes. To serve Psyche, the narrator of "Ode to Psyche" seeks to worship her by thoroughly exploring the regions of his mind. However, the temple dedicated to the goddess within his mind does not yet exist. the speaker has become preoccupied with creativity, but his imagination is still directed toward wholly internal ends. He wants to partake of divine permanence by taking his goddess into himself; he has not yet become interested in the outward imaginative expression of art.
Final Stanza:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane 50
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains steep by steep; 55
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, 60
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win, 65
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in! |
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a poem by John Keats written in May 1819; one of the 1819 odes.
The poem begins suddenly, marked by use of heavy sounding syllables ("My heart aches" line 1), as it introduces the song of a hidden bird. Immediately, the narrator is overcome with such a feeling that he believes he has either been poisoned or is influenced by a drug. It is soon revealed that the source of this feeling is a nightingale's song. The narrator empathises with it[14] and finds it has paralyzed his mind:[15]
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (lines 5–10)
The song encourages the narrator to give up his own sense of self and embrace the feelings that are evoked by the nightingale. No longer a poison, the narrator wants to experience more of the feeling and escape from reality:[16]
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
* * * * *
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: (lines 11–13, 19–20)
The narrator uses metaphorical wings to join the nightingale. It is at this moment that the poem moves into a deep, imaginative state, and the narrator cries out:[17]
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! (lines 31–35)
The state that the narrator wants is seemingly a state of death, but it is one that is full of life. The paradox expands to encompass the night, a tender presence that allows some light to shine through:[18]
tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (lines 35–40)
In the new state, the narrator's senses change. He loses his sense of sight, but his ability to smell, taste, and hear allow him to experience the new world, the new paradise that he has entered:[19]
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;(lines 41–45)
The narrator describes a world of potential, and empathizes with the creatures of that world. He is soon called to the sounds of insects just as he heard the nightingale before. This is then replaced by a new sound:[20]
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath; (lines 51–54)
The narrator has blinded himself to better connect to the nightingale. This theme appears before, in the blind John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, where Book III describes the nightingale's song coming out of darkness. The world is no longer present in the poem, as the imagination has taken over. What separates life and death, self and nothingness, are removed:[21]
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. (lines 55–60)
Death serves as a muse within the poem. It is, to the narrator, soft and comes upon the narrator as he composes the poem. He seeks death, wants to die, and wants to be with the nightingale because he experienced the height of life and nothing else would be worth experiencing. To live after that point would be a living death to the narrator. He desires to be like the nightingale, able to constantly give himself up in song and transcend life and death. However, he soon realizes that he will always be different from the bird:[22]
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: (lines 61–64)
The world of imagination is not a place that a man could ever live in.[23] This knowledge causes the narrator to become disheartened as the imaginary world is destroyed. The narrator cannot have the imaginary land. He is not just separate from the bird, but from poetry and imagination in general. The narrator mourns in the final lines of the poem as he realizes that he has been abandoned by his art:[24]
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? |
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a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819; one of the "Odes of 1819"
Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".
The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.[20] The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1–2)
The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it is created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and ageing is such a slow process that it can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:[21]
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 3–10)
The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed: there is a pursuit with a strong sexual component.[22] The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[23]
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–14)
There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a sound is desired by the soul. There is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:[23]
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:[23]
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)
Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra
A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.[24] To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.[24] The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice to Apollo, and Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lystra[25][A 1]
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. (lines 31–40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real. The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:[26]
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41–45)
The audience is limited in its ability to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak to them. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes with the urn's message:[27]
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. |
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| Songs of Innocence and Experience: Concepts |
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Songs of Innocence and Experience: Don’t confuse Songs of Experience with the states of experience. Both collections are about both states. Two contrary states of the soul/mind. Innocence is a superficial conception.
Experience is about the failure of imagination.
Innocence: Energy, Imagination, Rebellion, Emotion, and Instinct -- Children are closer to the immortal soul, because they are close to imagination. Children are in the state of innocence = Tiger.
States of Experience: Reason, passivity, conformity, and repression = Lamb.
Nature is a result of our fallen state. It is a trap that tricks is into believing that nature is all that there is--that there is no divinity in the self.
Songs of Innocence are ironic, because you have to look really hard to find the subversive message in songs of Innocence. Blake didn’t want the state of innocence to be overwhelmed by experience. For all the other Romantics, these stages are linear. Blake thinks that you can maintain both innocence and experience. Blake is about extremes, not compromise. Innocence is where we find imagination, but it is tempered by experience. |
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| "Chimney Sweeper" (Songs of Innocence) |
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Author: Blake Genre: poem
Summary: In the poem, the little boy is compared to the lamb--the soot of the city blackens his hair; it stains him. All the boys have the same dream, meaning its not their dream, but society’s dream (the Anglican dream, so pervasive that it even rules in the unconscious states). Everyone tells you how to act and behave in the world. The boys are being initiated into the state of experience. They are being taught to be passive and to repress their emotion, rebellion, and anger. The final stanza is the vision we want, but we can’t just say the boys can go to heaven and call it good. Failure of imagination-they cannot imagine a way out. They just wait for death and defer the divine. |
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| "Holy Thursday" (Songs of Innocence) |
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Author: Blake Genre: poem
Summary: On Holy Thursday (Ascension Day), the clean-scrubbed charity-school children of London flow like a river toward St. Paul’s Cathedral. Dressed in bright colors they march double-file, supervised by “gray headed beadles.” Seated in the cathedral, the children form a vast and radiant multitude. They remind the speaker of a company of lambs sitting by the thousands and “raising their innocent hands” in prayer. Then they begin to sing, sounding like “a mighty wind” or “harmonious thunderings,” while their guardians, “the aged men,” stand by. The speaker, moved by the pathos of the vision of the children in church, urges the reader to remember that such urchins as these are actually angels of God. |
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| "Nurse's Song" (Songs of Innocence) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre: poem
Summary
The scene of the poem features a group of children playing outside in the hills, while their nurse listens to them in contentment. As twilight begins to fall, she gently urges them to “leave off play” and retire to the house for the night. They ask to play on till bedtime, for as long as the light lasts. The nurse yields to their pleas, and the children shout and laugh with joy while the hills echo their gladness.
Poem:
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still
Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Come come leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies
No no let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep
Besides in the sky, the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep
Well well go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills ecchoed |
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| "The Clod and the Pebble" (Songs of Experience) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre Poem
“The clod and the Pebble”: The clod is selfless love, but it gets stepped on. The pebble shows the possessiveness of love. The trick to recognize love as both as find a balance.
Poem: "Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite." |
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| "Holy Thursday" (Songs of Experience) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre Poem
Poem:
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.
Summary
The poem begins with a series of questions: how holy is the sight of children living in misery in a prosperous country? Might the children’s “cry,” as they sit assembled in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Holy Thursday, really be a song? “Can it be a song of joy?” The speaker’s own answer is that the destitute existence of so many children impoverishes the country no matter how prosperous it may be in other ways: for these children the sun does not shine, the fields do not bear, all paths are thorny, and it is always winter. |
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| "The Sick Rose" (Songs of Experience) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre: poem
Poem: “The Sick Rose”
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Summary
The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible” worm has stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night. The “dark secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life. |
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Term
| "The Tyger" (Songs of Experience) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre Poem
Summary
The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb? |
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| "London" (Songs of Experience) |
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Definition
Author: Blake Genre Poem
Summary: The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the monarch’s residence. The nighttime holds nothing more promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the “Marriage hearse.”
“London”: Blake is probably the speaker (one of the few poems that he is). He uses monosyllabic words. He wanders through each chartered streets--every street is broken up and divided. Even the Thames is chartered and controlled. Man is marked by their environment (with woe). He goes from seeing to hearing. Marriage bans that are called out are a pun on actual societal bans. Mind forged manacles = men allow themselves to be victims. Hapless soldiers = sense that men have no control over their destiny. Final stanza conflates the legal state of marriage (loveless), with prostitution, with the Infant’s tear. Everything points to death. This is the state of experience. Woe and mindless passivity. |
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| Marriage of Heaven and Hell |
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Definition
Author Blake: Genre: manifesto
“Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: It is a satire. It inverts heaven and hell, using the Bible, metaphorial parable and comic elements. It is his manifesto (it re-envisions everything and because it is radical); it the only text Blake didn’t attach his name to, making it seem divinely inspired. The state of being is that it is a marriage; there is a fluidic dynamic between heaven and hell. There is a fluctuating oneness. Everything needs an opposite to exist; without contraries there is no progression (Monist). Man has no body distinct from the soul. The body is merely the outer membrane of the soul. Energy is eternal delight, violence is misdirected energy. Mental realities are the only realities. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “Good is a passive that obeys reason; evil is the active that springs from energy” (the tiger). |
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Author: ST Coleridge Genre: Greater Romantic Lyric
Summary: In “The Eolian Harp” (1795), Coleridge struggles to reconcile the three forces. Here, the speaker’s philosophical tendencies, particularly the belief that an “intellectual breeze” (47) brushes by and inhabits all living things with consciousness, collide with those of his orthodox wife, who disapproves of his unconventional ideas and urges him to Christ. While his wife lies untroubled, the speaker agonizes over his spiritual conflict, caught between Christianity and a unique, individual spirituality that equates nature with God. The poem ends by discounting the pantheist spirit, and the speaker concludes by privileging God and Christ over nature and praising them for having healed him from the spiritual wounds inflicted by these unorthodox views.
Eolian Harp: Compare to Tintern Abbey; first greater romantic lyric. This is a undirected journey. It has the same movement as Tintern: Place, Free Verse, Association, Crisis (Honesty), Turn (Moral), Comes back (Recalled by Sarah), ends with a duality of consciousness. Silent Auditor= Sara. Starts with empirical description and proceeds to vision, like TIntern Abbey. He has Romantic Doubt (the end). He does sex better than Wordsworth (when describing the music). The Eolian Harp as symbol: It allows him to have a vision of love and connection. The harp become the mind of the poet, and the wind imagination: Art is completely uncensored and unpredictable; nothing can control the whim that comes out the other side. Relate to “Mad Song”. God/nature becomes the presence that moves it all (connect to Emerson). That is dangerous, because it redefines morality and God (makes it almost Neo-Platonic).
The turn: Sara, who judges him for the vision of God that he has. God is incomprehensible and to attempt to define him is pride. Toe the line; accept yourself as shameful sinner. What do we make of the ending? |
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Definition
Author: Coleridge Genre: poem
Summary
The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a green hill, occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.” The river ran five miles through the woods, finally sinking “in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” Amid that tumult, in the place “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing to her demon-lover,” Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a miracle of rare device,” the speaker says, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”
The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.” He says that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with “holy dread,” knowing that he had tasted honeydew, “and drunk the milk of Paradise.”
Kubla Kahn: construction of poem is archetypal: has opium dream, but interrupted by someone, cannot return to same vision. psychoanalysis: unconscious truths: id=sexuality and unconscious. Romantic chasm as the deeper and deeper the more primal nature is and the more it defies physics--”sunny dome” “Fire and water” mix together, sense of demonic. Poem opens up poetry to be about the wild, even Coleridge doesn’t think this is a “poem” but “fragment of dream.” “Greatest short form poem about the process of art.” Movement is from chaos to meaning, out of chaos is born meaning (phallic fountain) comes from the center of earth to create opposites (sunny pleasure dome in a cave of ice). Art process is about letting go, cannot be controlled. Prelapsarian state, nature is a complete mental landscape and projection of the imagination (afraid others will be afraid of him). |
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Author: Shelley Genre: Poem
--“Mont Blanc”: Variation on Tintern Abbey, but WW only gives you part of the story about nature (the positive, nurturing side), and Shelley wants to give you the whole story about the terrible grandeur of nature. Starts with an abstract assumption (“The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind , and rolls its rapid waves”)and moves to the physical detail = opposite than the GRL. Describes Mont Blanc, Shelley starts with small tribute, which builds, and builds and becomes the waterfall and then the ravine, then River Arve--fueled by melting glaciers. He sympathizes with the Ravine--he loses touch with empirical reality. He is trying to capture the forms but it is too grand and too awful to understand. Looking down=chaos, destruction and flux. Looking up=permanent, beautiful, and the forms.
Anti-Wordsworth (Counter-Romanticism)- nature is indifferent, and cold, and dangerous, and demonic, freezing side of nature, born of fire and ice. Nature teaches doubt, not certainty. Nature teaches him that power in inaccessible. All of the process comes together in the mind and in the river--it plays over his mind: ...The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
Other notes: In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the “spirit of beauty” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in “Mont Blanc.” This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelley’s delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side. The speaker of “Mont Blanc” encounters ghosts and shadows of real natural objects in the cave of “Poesy.” Ghosts are inadequate in both poems: the speaker finds no ghosts in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and the ghosts of Poesy in “Mont Blanc” are not the real thing, a discovery that emphasizes the elusiveness and mystery of supernatural forces. For Shelley, Mont Blanc—the highest peak in the Alps—represents the eternal power of nature. Mont Blanc has existed forever, and it will last forever, an idea he explores in “Mont Blanc.” The mountain fills the poet with inspiration, but its coldness and inaccessibility are terrifying. Ultimately, though, Shelley wonders if the mountain’s power might be meaningless, an invention of the more powerful human imagination. |
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Auhtor: Shelley Genre: Poem, lyric?
Summary
The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,” and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him.
The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind’s “wandering over heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud—he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.
The speaker asks the wind to “make me thy lyre,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
The West Wind symbol:
Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the West Wind.” While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change. Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.
Wind = breath and inspiration. Different stanzas connected to different aspects of nature; stanza IV was about the self; he keeps invoking the West Wind and he wants to be the lyre, but nature is a bit indifferent to him. He wants his thoughts to be like the leaves upon the wind, and stoke up the fire of thought and inspiration in the world. Sees himself as a prophet “moral imagination” leads to power of love then social change. |
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Author: Jane Austin Genre: Novel of manners
Characters: Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane Bennet, Charles Bingly, Mr. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, George Wickham, Lydia Bennet, Mr. Collins, Miss Bingley, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr and Mrs Gardiner, Charlotte Lucas, Georgina Darcy, Mary Bennet, Catherine Bennet.
Summary: The news that a wealthy young gentleman named Charles Bingley has rented the manor of Netherfield Park causes a great stir in the nearby village of Longbourn, especially in the Bennet household. The Bennets have five unmarried daughters—from oldest to youngest, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia—and Mrs. Bennet is desperate to see them all married. After Mr. Bennet pays a social visit to Mr. Bingley, the Bennets attend a ball at which Mr. Bingley is present. He is taken with Jane and spends much of the evening dancing with her. His close friend, Mr. Darcy, is less pleased with the evening and haughtily refuses to dance with Elizabeth, which makes everyone view him as arrogant and obnoxious.
At social functions over subsequent weeks, however, Mr. Darcy finds himself increasingly attracted to Elizabeth’s charm and intelligence. Jane’s friendship with Mr. Bingley also continues to burgeon, and Jane pays a visit to the Bingley mansion. On her journey to the house she is caught in a downpour and catches ill, forcing her to stay at Netherfield for several days. In order to tend to Jane, Elizabeth hikes through muddy fields and arrives with a spattered dress, much to the disdain of the snobbish Miss Bingley, Charles Bingley’s sister. Miss Bingley’s spite only increases when she notices that Darcy, whom she is pursuing, pays quite a bit of attention to Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth and Jane return home, they find Mr. Collins visiting their household. Mr. Collins is a young clergyman who stands to inherit Mr. Bennet’s property, which has been “entailed,” meaning that it can only be passed down to male heirs. Mr. Collins is a pompous fool, though he is quite enthralled by the Bennet girls. Shortly after his arrival, he makes a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth. She turns him down, wounding his pride. Meanwhile, the Bennet girls have become friendly with militia officers stationed in a nearby town. Among them is Wickham, a handsome young soldier who is friendly toward Elizabeth and tells her how Darcy cruelly cheated him out of an inheritance.
At the beginning of winter, the Bingleys and Darcy leave Netherfield and return to London, much to Jane’s dismay. A further shock arrives with the news that Mr. Collins has become engaged to Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend and the poor daughter of a local knight. Charlotte explains to Elizabeth that she is getting older and needs the match for financial reasons. Charlotte and Mr. Collins get married and Elizabeth promises to visit them at their new home. As winter progresses, Jane visits the city to see friends (hoping also that she might see Mr. Bingley). However, Miss Bingley visits her and behaves rudely, while Mr. Bingley fails to visit her at all. The marriage prospects for the Bennet girls appear bleak.
That spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte, who now lives near the home of Mr. Collins’s patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is also Darcy’s aunt. Darcy calls on Lady Catherine and encounters Elizabeth, whose presence leads him to make a number of visits to the Collins’s home, where she is staying. One day, he makes a shocking proposal of marriage, which Elizabeth quickly refuses. She tells Darcy that she considers him arrogant and unpleasant, then scolds him for steering Bingley away from Jane and disinheriting Wickham. Darcy leaves her but shortly thereafter delivers a letter to her. In this letter, he admits that he urged Bingley to distance himself from Jane, but claims he did so only because he thought their romance was not serious. As for Wickham, he informs Elizabeth that the young officer is a liar and that the real cause of their disagreement was Wickham’s attempt to elope with his young sister, Georgiana Darcy.
This letter causes Elizabeth to reevaluate her feelings about Darcy. She returns home and acts coldly toward Wickham. The militia is leaving town, which makes the younger, rather man-crazy Bennet girls distraught. Lydia manages to obtain permission from her father to spend the summer with an old colonel in Brighton, where Wickham’s regiment will be stationed. With the arrival of June, Elizabeth goes on another journey, this time with the Gardiners, who are relatives of the Bennets. The trip takes her to the North and eventually to the neighborhood of Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. She visits Pemberley, after making sure that Darcy is away, and delights in the building and grounds, while hearing from Darcy’s servants that he is a wonderful, generous master. Suddenly, Darcy arrives and behaves cordially toward her. Making no mention of his proposal, he entertains the Gardiners and invites Elizabeth to meet his sister.
Shortly thereafter, however, a letter arrives from home, telling Elizabeth that Lydia has eloped with Wickham and that the couple is nowhere to be found, which suggests that they may be living together out of wedlock. Fearful of the disgrace such a situation would bring on her entire family, Elizabeth hastens home. Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Bennet go off to search for Lydia, but Mr. Bennet eventually returns home empty-handed. Just when all hope seems lost, a letter comes from Mr. Gardiner saying that the couple has been found and that Wickham has agreed to marry Lydia in exchange for an annual income. The Bennets are convinced that Mr. Gardiner has paid off Wickham, but Elizabeth learns that the source of the money, and of her family’s salvation, was none other than Darcy.
Now married, Wickham and Lydia return to Longbourn briefly, where Mr. Bennet treats them coldly. They then depart for Wickham’s new assignment in the North of England. Shortly thereafter, Bingley returns to Netherfield and resumes his courtship of Jane. Darcy goes to stay with him and pays visits to the Bennets but makes no mention of his desire to marry Elizabeth. Bingley, on the other hand, presses his suit and proposes to Jane, to the delight of everyone but Bingley’s haughty sister. While the family celebrates, Lady Catherine de Bourgh pays a visit to Longbourn. She corners Elizabeth and says that she has heard that Darcy, her nephew, is planning to marry her. Since she considers a Bennet an unsuitable match for a Darcy, Lady Catherine demands that Elizabeth promise to refuse him. Elizabeth spiritedly refuses, saying she is not engaged to Darcy, but she will not promise anything against her own happiness. A little later, Elizabeth and Darcy go out walking together and he tells her that his feelings have not altered since the spring. She tenderly accepts his proposal, and both Jane and Elizabeth are married. |
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The House of Mirth is a novel about the personal struggle to fit into society and, ultimately, to get married. This places the book in a long-standing literary tradition known as the novel of manners, a form developed most notably by Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are pioneer works of this literary genre. The tradition developed in England throughout the 19th century, as authors such as George Eliot and Henry James explored the place of women in society and the social effect of marriage, showing in particular the problems that come with marriage and conforming to society. In America, the novel of manners genre has included works such as Hannah Foster's The Coquette, the novels of James, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and even Kate Chopin's The Awakening.
The form developed some specific conventions in the 19th century. First, the protagonist is usually a single woman looking to get married. Second, socio-economic class must be a factor in determining whom the woman will marry. Third, the novel must include many scenes that portray the proper and improper way to act within high society, and also outline differences and relations between classes. And finally, the novel of manners usually ends with either the marriage or death of the female protagonist. Austen's Sense and Sensibility is a good example of this form. The protagonist, Elinor, is looking to get married, preferably to someone of a higher social class, and after many scenes of London society seen in dinner parties and elegant balls, Elinor marries Edward Ferrars. Foster's The Coquette has the same elements, but it ends in the death of the female protagonist.
During the late 19th century, the novel of manners was one of the most popular novel genres, but it was also a predominantly British form. Many people questioned whether such a genre could exist in America, where there are no official social classes. Wharton, as we can see, adapted the form in her own way to better suit the New York society. Instead of a legitimized aristocracy, Wharton creates a social circle comprised of elegant New York snobs. Class mobility, not present in most British manners novels, is a large factor in The House of Mirth, which shows the attempts of Lily to assimilate herself into the elite group, only to slide down the social scale into the working class before her death. In fact, Lily's primary goal is not to marry for happiness, as is seen in many Austen characters, but rather for social security. A marriage to Percy Gryce, Lily decides at the beginning of the novel, would be the best way to assure herself of good social standing and a steady income.
The House of Mirth also examines the long physical and mental decline of a young woman who, because of her own cowardice and indecision, slips out of social prominence into poverty and dinginess. The novel presents a very harsh dose of reality and ends rather pathetically. Instead of marrying and living happily ever after, or tragically dying during childbirth (the two most common endings in the genre), Lily fades away slowly and commits suicide, perhaps unintentionally, as a means of escaping from a lower-class world in which her upper-class sensibilities cannot survive. Lily's life is the antithesis of nobility or glory; she had every opportunity to live the type of life she dreamed about, but lost it all.
Wharton's manipulation of the genre makes the novel a good example of the American realism movement, which began roughly after Reconstruction (the late 1870s) and lasted until just after World War I (the early 1920s). The English novel of manners was developed during the Romanticism movement, which placed a literary emphasis on emotion rather than reason, and the ideal rather than reality. Realism, to which Wharton subscribed, grew out of Darwinist ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest. To Wharton, the existing novel of manners had not adequately dealt with the fall from society that many people in New York experienced if they ran out of money or did not marry well. The House of Mirth, then, can perhaps best be viewed as an attempt to add a very dark truth to an otherwise optimistic genre, an attempt consistent with the literary spirit of the time in which Wharton was writing. |
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| A Vindication of the Rights of Women |
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Definition
Author: M. Wollstonecraft Genre: non-fiction
Overview: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who did not believe women should have an education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.
Background
• Written in part as a response to the French Revolution, which did not extend equal rights to women
• Considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy
• Would argue with Blake at his house: Blake wanted sexual liberation for women, but Wollstonecraft saw the need for liberation of their minds first—agency.
• Argues that women are capable of reason and should be educated as rational creatures,
o so that they may contribute to society
o because the mind knows no gender
o and perceived defects in the character of women are a result of their current education
• Speaks directly to God and asks him if he has not created women for a better purpose than they currently are considered to have and first time woman is called equal to man; questions submission to man; “if they be moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent; and let love to man be only a part of that glowing flame of universal love, which, after encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God.”
Education of Associations
o Associations are ideas or impressions, either habitual or instantaneous, that have an effect on the character
o Inequities based on these associations that come from power and abuse are out there and shape us all
o Once established, we cannot control our associations
o Either this has caused a difference between man and man or nature has
o These associations can be “the essence of genius”
o But, education is necessary for giving variety and contrast to associations
o Habitual associations have a great effect on the moral character of man
o Causes slavery to the female who is enslaved by first impressions
o Produces sex-specific virtue and characters
• Result
o Women employ their sensibilities over reason
o Learn to prize a false notion of beauty over moral fortitude; try to inspire love (sex) instead of a “nobler ambition”
o Have a capacity for only a shallow brand of knowledge
o Obedience over independency of thought
o Their societal education is also their source of t their most bitterly criticized faults
o Women in an unnatural state
The Sentimental Novel
• Elevates sensations and passions to a metaphysical status; leads to vice
• No appeal to reason or understanding; a poor excuse for an education
• No concept of the general good
• Recommends superior reading—reading that engages and improves their capacity for reason |
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| Shakespeare Criticism and Biographica Literaria |
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Definition
Author: Coleridge Genre: Non-Fiction
Points:
-imagination: eternal act of creation: god-like (Reynolds). The imagination is never turned off, we are always imagining when we perceive anything. Not just empirical, now we are using imagination when we process perception and we are creating new things
-Content expresses form, form expresses content. Good art you will forget about the form, they become one.
-Vitality: Nature is vital and alive, art has to have an alive power and process. Everything is interacting more, Artist mirrors the interaction of nature--anticipated darwin. Unlike Wordsworth, nature is not static; nature is moving.
-Holism: Everything is connected, holistic connection between everything interacting. See beauty in the particulars. beauty is in harmony. beauty is intuitive. All the particulars should relate to the whole. Still has rules to follow, but are organic, not forced.
-Organicism: Organic: poetry has organic form: takes material, breaks it down, and reconstructs new unities. in creating new unities gives it shape. Should not be mechanical (Unlike Pope), should not be prescriptive.
-No one can get shakespeare. has a deeper wisdom than our consciousness. Likes soliloquies of shakespeare, but still maintain unity in play. He is not saying Shakespeare’s soliloquies are the best part of Shakespeare’s work, but he’s using them to prove what he’s saying.
-“Great art has multeity in unity.”
-Symbols are both particulars and big, abstract ideas, so they unite the particulars
-Nature and poetry do not have to fit a certain form. Form and content after Coleridge will never be separated again
-Everything is connected in nature; Art should copy this. Every work of art has its own life of organicism
Biographia Literaria
Fancy vs. Imagination
• First to differentiate between fancy and imagination
• Fancy= you play with things and move them around; inferior to imagination
• Imagination=a living, organic power
o Primary= everyone has; all human seeing is imagination
o Secondary=different not in king but in degree; this is for the arts
Artists give us new unities of reality that are miraculous
Source of Vision
• Like Blake, vision leads to art
• But, unlike Blake, vision comes from buried forces in your unconscious mind (Aeolian harp), not from the divine |
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"Ode on Melancholy" is a poem written by John Keats in the spring of 1819. Also one of the Great 1819 odes. The narrative of the poem describes the poet’s perception of melancholy through a lyric discourse between the poet and the reader along with the introduction to Ancient Grecian characters and ideals. Something of Blake's notion that we need contrasts and contradictions. For Keats, beauty and death sit side by side; they need one another. According to Keats, "in the very temple of Delight / Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, /Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue /Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."
Important stanzas:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. |
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Definition
a long poem (42 stanzas) by John Keats, written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas.
Plot:
On a bitterly chill night, an ancient beadsman performs his penances while in the castle of Madeline's warlike family, a bibulous revel has begun. Madeline pines for the love of Porphyro, sworn enemy to her kin. The old dames have told her she may receive sweet dreams of love from him if on this night, St. Agnes' Eve, she retires to bed under the proper ritual of silence and supine receptiveness.
As we might expect, Porphyro makes his way to the castle and braves entry, seeking out Angela, an elderly woman friendly to his family, and importuning her to lead him to Madeline's room at night where he may but gaze upon her sleeping form. Angela is persuaded only with difficulty, saying she fears damnation if Porphyro does not afterward marry the girl.
Concealed in an ornate carven closet in Madeline's room, Porphyro watches as Madeline makes ready for bed, and then, beholding her full beauty in the moonlight, creeps forth to prepare for her a feast of rare delicacies. Madeline wakes and sees before her the same image she has seen in her dream, and thinking Porphyro part of it, receives him into her bed. Awakening in full and realizing her mistake, she tells Porphyro she cannot hate him for his deception since her heart is so much in his, but that if he goes now he leaves behind "A dove forlorn and lost / With sick unpruned wing".
Porphyro declares his love for Madeline and promises her a home with him over the southern moors. They escape the castle past insensate revelers, and flee into the night. The beadsman, "His thousand Aves told / For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold". |
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a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats; 1819. The work marks the end of his poetic career as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome.
Short summary: The poem has three eleven-line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists,[1] with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting.
"To Autumn" describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline. Through the stanzas there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter. Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day turning from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is missing in Keats's other. As the poem progresses, Autumn is represented metaphorically as one who conspires, who ripens fruit, who harvests, who makes music. The first stanza of the poem represents Autumn as involved with the promotion of natural processes, growth and ultimate maturation, two forces in opposition in nature, but together creating the impression that the season will not end.[12] In this stanza the fruits are still ripening and the buds still opening in the warm weather. Stuart Sperry emphasises the tactile sense here, suggested by the imagery of growth and gentle motion: swelling, bending and plumping. In the second stanza Autumn is personified as a harvester,[13] to be seen by the viewer in various guises performing labouring tasks essential to the provision of food for the coming year. There is a lack of definitive action, all motion being gentle. Autumn is not depicted as actually harvesting but as seated, resting or watching. The last stanza contrasts Autumn's sounds with those of Spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of Autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. Gnats wail and lambs bleat in the dusk. As night approaches within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside of the end of the year. The full-grown lambs, like the grapes, gourds and hazel nuts will be harvested for the winter. The twittering swallows gather for departure, leaving the fields bare. The whistling red-breast and the chirping cricket are the common sounds of winter. The references to Spring, the growing lambs and the migrating swallows remind the reader that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.Of all of Keats's poems, "To Autumn", with its catalog of concrete images,[16] most closely describes a paradise as realized on earth while also focusing on archetypal symbols connected with the season. Within the poem, autumn represents growth, maturation, and finally an approaching death. There is a fulfilling union between the ideal and the real. If death in itself is final, here it comes with a lightness, a softness, also pointing to "an acceptance of process beyond the possibility of grief."[26] The progress of growth is no longer necessary; maturation is complete, and life and death are in harmony. The rich description of the cycle of the seasons enables the reader to feel a belonging "to something larger than the self", as James O'Rourke expresses it, but the cycle comes to an end each year, analogous to the ending of single life. O'Rourke suggests that something of a fear of that ending is subtly implied at the end of the poem,[27] although, unlike the other great odes, in this poem the person of the poet is entirely submerged,[24] so there is at most a faint hint of Keats's own possible fear. |
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| Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus |
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Author: Mary Shelley; Genre: Horror, Gothic, Romance, Science Fiction novel; published 1818.
Characters: Victor Frankenstein; The monster or the creature; Robert Walton (the seafaring scientist); Elizabeth; Henry Clerval (his friend); Justine Moritz (the servant); blind peasant De Lacey; his son and daughter, Felix and Agatha; and a foreign woman named Safie.
Themes: Responsibility and blame; monstrosity vs. humanity; the uncanny; passive femininity and the fatal mother aspect of mother (though who really brings death in the novel?); revenge; technological advancement; female creation vs. male creation; fire and ice; maturity; doubling and fragmentation; society's conception of ugliness as tied to morality; Frankenstein as Moral Idiot; society and the individual (community keeps us moral).
The Title: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
• Prometheus
o He provided fire to human beings and was punished by the Gods
• The monster ends his life in flames
o He is also a character who makes clay figures and breathes life into them
o We should already be expecting a story about appropriate and inappropriate uses of power in relation to the Gods
o The two titles already sets up that sense of doubling and fragmentation of identities
Structure of the Novel
• A set of nesting boxes, or frame stories
o The largest is the set of letters from the ship’s captain (Robert Walton) to his sister
• We are given no sense if those letters ever reach their destination and we don’t get replies to those letters
• It highlights the sense of isolation and the unknown
• Echoes Walton’s preoccupation with finding a true companion and easing his loneliness.
o The second frame: Victor’s stories about chasing the monster
o The third frame: The creature tells his own story to Walton
o There is a Bildungsroman repeated three times
• Three novels of education packed together
• The creature is not a separate kind of being. He goes through the same learning experiences. He is not less than human
o None of the three narrators are entirely trustworthy
• There is a refusal to provide a God’s eye view. Everyone has their own agendas, perspective, and desires. There is no scientific worldview in which we can get to the truth of the matter, despite what the main characters think.
• Walton is the closest to an objective viewpoint.
• But he is written as a younger version of Frankenstein
• Ambitious and grandiose in his goals
• There is another doubling between Frankenstein and Walton
o By the end of the novel, we should distrust that part of Walton’s character
o Walton has learned more from Frankenstein’s life than does Frankenstein
• Victor never accepts responsibility for his actions, which turns the monster into a true moral monster.
Romantic Characteristics of the novel:
• The novel takes place on a ship trapped on the ice
• The novel has a strange sense of pacing
o Sometimes whole years go by and sometimes minutes take pages
o Time is distorted, like a dream
• The tale from the lips of a dying man
• A sweet scene can go to something horrific very quickly
• People caught in forces they cannot control
• Doubling
• Sense of the supernatural and the reaction against Victor's Enlightenment attitudes
• Victor keeps delaying the tasks we could think he would want to do quickly
o Gives a sense that he is not completely in control of his own actions, psychologically.
• Nightmarish quality |
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| Preface to Lyrical Ballads |
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Author: Wordsworth; Genre: Non-fiction essay; Year: for the second edition (published in January 1801, and often referred to as the "1800 Edition") of the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, and then greatly expanded in the third edition of 1802.
"The principal object […] was to choose incidents and situations from common life."[1] Wordsworth justifies this by adding that our elementary feelings and passions can grow better in a field of rural life, which is built upon elementary feelings, and they may also be contemplated and communicated better than any other writer at the time.
"[D]escribe [those incidents] […] in a selection of language really used by men."[2] The rural men far from social vanity use their language to express feelings in a simple and unelaborated manner, more in connection with nature. He also claims that such a language is more permanent and philosophical because it results from "repeated experience and regular feelings".
"[T]hrow over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way."[3]
"[M]ake these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature." He also undertook to write in "a selection of language really used by men,"[5] on the grounds that there can be no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition."[6] In making this claim Wordsworth attacked the neoclassical principle that required the language, in many kinds of poems, to be elevated over everyday speech by a special, more refined and dignified diction and by artful figures of speech. Wordsworth's views about the valid language of poetry are based on the new premise that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"[7]—spontaneous, that is, at the moment of composition, even though the process is influenced by prior thought and acquired poetic skill.[8]
Wordsworth's assertions about the materials and diction of poetry have been greatly influential in expanding the range of serious literature to include the common people and ordinary things and events, as well as in justifying a poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice, expressed in the ordinary language of its time. But in the long view other aspects of his Preface have been no less significant in establishing its importance, not only as a turning point in English criticism but also as a central document in modem culture, Wordsworth feared that a new urban, industrial society's mass media and mass culture (glimpsed in the Preface when he refers derisively to contemporary Gothic novels and German melodramas) were threatening to blunt the human mind's "discriminatory powers"[9] and to "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."[10] He attributed to imaginative literature the primary role in keeping the human beings who live in such societies emotionally alive and morally sensitive. Literature, that is, could keep humans essentially human. |
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Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley; Genre: Essay/Criticism
Written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840, It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". It was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article The Four Ages of Poetry which had been published in 1820. To Peacock Shelley wrote:
Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage. . . . I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you . . . in honour of my mistress Urania.
In A Defence of Poetry, [Shelley] attempts to prove that poets are philosophers; that they are the creators and protectors of moral and civil laws; and that if it were not for poets, scientists could not have developed either their theories or their inventions. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: ‘Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results...’ This ‘faculty of approximation’ enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a ‘relation between the highest pleasure and its causes’. Those who possess this faculty ‘in excess are poets’ and their task is to communicate the ‘pleasure’ of their experiences to the community. Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognizes in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful. Aesthetic admiration of ‘the true and the beautiful’ is provided with an important social aspect which extends beyond communication and precipitates self-awareness. Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with the social activities of life.
For Shelley, ‘poets...are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society...’ Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is ‘arbitrarily produced by the imagination’ and reveals ‘the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension’ of a higher beauty and truth. In short, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
Another characteristic of Romanticism, as expressed by Shelley in his Defence, was the belief that emotions and relationships were not just important, but were the very currency of life. Rather than functioning as a cog in a wheel, mechanically and unaware of the other parts comprising the whole machine, Shelley argued that: The great secret of mortals is love…and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.8 While some of the Romantics were more inwardly focused than the kind of engagement that Shelley called for so passionately in his Defence, they tended to agree on the major characteristics of Romanticism: the valuation of intensely felt emotion, the importance of creative expression, and the possibility of transcending ordinary experience, which was referred to as achieving a state of sublimity.9 As Bloom and Trilling explain, the meaning of sublimity changed between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods: “This sublimity [unlike that of previous eras]…is not a Sublime of great conceptions, before which the self feels small, but rather of a hoped-for potential, in which the private self turns upon infinitude, and so is found by its own greatness.” |
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| the name given to the period that preceded the Romantic Age, and it is in understanding the key features of the Enlightenment that one can best understand how the characteristics of Romanticism came to be, and how they differed so radically from those of the industrialized era. The Enlightenment had developed and championed logic and reason above all other qualities and there was little room in this worldview for the emotion-based nature that would define Romanticism. According the Enlightenment view, people and their relationships, roles, institutions, and indeed, their whole societies, could be understood best if organized and approached with a scientific perspective. Originating about 1650–1700, The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790–1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force. |
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Jane Austen:
What she is known for |
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biting social commentary and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature.
Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, |
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O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
[edit] II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
[edit] III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
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: oh, hear!
[edit] IV
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! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
[edit] V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? |
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| Wordsworth's sister and silent auditor in the final part of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" |
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| John Keats used the term negative capability to describe the artist as one who is receptive to the world and its natural phenomena, and to reject those who tried to formulate theories or categorize knowledge. The origin of the term is unknown, but some scholars have hypothesized that Keats was influenced in his studies of medicine and chemistry, and that it refers to the negative pole of an electric current which is passive and receptive. In the same way that the negative pole receives the current from the positive pole, the poet receives impulses from a world that is full of mystery and doubt, which cannot be explained but which the poet can translate into art. He believed that Shakespeare had the quality and that Coleridge lacked it because it was always seeking to gain knowledge. |
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| is also a prominent and distinctive element in the writings of the Romantic Age. The mode had originated in novels of the mid-eighteenth century that, in radical opposition to the Enlightenment ideals of order, decorum, and rational control, had opened to literary exploration the realm of nightmarish terror, violence, aberrant psychological states, and sexual rapacity. In the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the ominous hero-villain had embodied aspects of Satan, the fallen archangel in Milton's Paradise Lost. This satanic strain was developed by later writers and achieved its apotheosis in the creation of a new and important cultural phenomenon, the compulsive, grandiose, heaven-and-hell-defying Byronic hero. In many of its literary products, the Gothic mode manifested the standard setting and events, creaky contrivances, and genteel aim of provoking no more than a pleasurable shudder — a convention Jane Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey. Literary Gothicism also, however, produced enduring classics that featured such demonic, driven, and imaginatively compelling protagonists as Byron's Manfred (NAEL 8, 2.636–68), Frankenstein's Creature in Mary Shelley's novel, Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and, in America, Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby-Dick. |
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The Gothic begins with later-eighteenth-century writers' turn to the past; in the context of the Romantic period, the Gothic is, then, a type of imitation medievalism. When it was launched in the later eighteenth century, The Gothic featured accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles — experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the rest. By extension, it came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally. Closer to the present, one sees the Gothic pervading Victorian literature (for example, in the novels of Dickens and the Brontës), American fiction (from Poe and Hawthorne through Faulkner), and of course the films, television, and videos of our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture.
The Gothic revival, which appeared in English gardens and architecture before it got into literature, was the work of a handful of visionaries, the most important of whom was Horace Walpole (1717–1797), novelist, letter writer, and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In the 1740s Horace Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the Thames near London, and set about remodeling it in what he called "Gothick" style, adding towers, turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of every description, creating a kind of spurious medieval architecture that survives today mainly in churches, military academies, and university buildings. The project was extremely influential, as people came from all over to see Strawberry Hill and returned to Gothicize their own houses.
When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a chief initiator, publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, a Byronic villain (before Byron's time — and the villain's name is Manfred!), mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a moaning ancestral portrait, a damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion to English Literature puts it, "violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love." The work was tremendously popular, and imitations followed in such numbers that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the commonest type of fiction in England for the next half century. It is noteworthy in this period that the best-selling author of the genre (Ann Radcliffe), the author of its most enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective sendup (Jane Austen) were all women.
This topic offers extracts from some of the most frequently mentioned works in the Gothic mode: Walpole's Otranto as the initiating prototype; William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which is "oriental" rather than medieval but similarly blends cruelty, terror, and eroticism; two extremely popular works by the "Queen of Terror," Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), involving seduction, incestuous rape, matricide and other murders, and diabolism; and two works of 1818 poking fun at the by-then well-established tradition, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which refers specifically to the two Radcliffe novels just mentioned) and Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was inspired, as Shelley explains in her introduction to the edition of 1831, by a communal reading of German ghost stories with her husband and Byron during bad weather on the shores of Lake Geneva. Frankenstein is the single most important product of this Gothic tradition, but it considerably transcends its sources. Its numerous thematic resonances relate to science, poetry, psychology, alienation, politics, education, family relationships, and much else. Even so, one cannot imagine a more archetypically Gothic circumstance than the secret creation of an eight-foot-tall monster out of separate body parts collected from charnel houses; some of Victor Frankenstein's most extravagant rhetoric in the novel almost exactly reproduces the tone, and even some of the words, of the extract given here describing Isabella's distress in Otranto — as in this passage expressing Victor's feelings of horror when Justine is condemned for the murder of his brother William:
My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I believed in her innocence; I knew it. Could the daemon, who had (I did not for a minute doubt) murdered my brother, also in his hellish sport have betrayed the innocent to death and ignominy? I could not sustain the horror of my situation; and when I perceived that the popular voice, and the countenances of the judges, had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony. The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold. . . .
I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced sensations of horror; and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair that I then endured. . . . (volume 1, chapter 7)
More pervasive signs of Gothic influence show up in some of the most frequently read Romantic poems — for example, the account of the skeleton ship and the crew's reaction ("A flash of joy . . . And horror follows") in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (NAEL 8, 2.430); the atmosphere, setting, and fragmentary plot of witchery and seduction in Coleridge's Christabel (NAEL 8, 2.449–64); the initial scene ("a Gothic gallery") and most of the rest of Byron's Manfred (NAEL 8, 2.636–69); and the medievalism and several details of the plot of Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes (NAEL 8, 2.888–98), including Porphyro's invasion of Madeline's bedroom, which, while the poem is always at some level an idealized tale of young love, has obvious connections with the predatory overtones of our extracts from both Udolpho and The Monk. |
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1789; Looking back to his early radical years from his conservative middle age, the English poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) declared that
few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race. >> note 1
In the prologue to his successful play The Road to Ruin (1792), Thomas Holcroft predicted that the French Revolution would "fertilize a world, and renovate old earth!" And in The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth remembered the early years of the Revolution as a time when all Europe
was thrilled with joy,
France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.
(6.340–42; NAEL 2.346)
Human nature regenerate in a world made new: this was the theme of many enthusiasts in England during the first four or five years after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. These concepts are obviously theological. They originate in the apocalyptic and millennial passages of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and their use indicates that for a number of British idealists, the early enthusiasm for the revolution had the momentum and excitement of a religious movement.
The term apocalypse, derived from the Greek word meaning "revelation," designates the disclosure, in the Bible, of God's providential design for the end of human history. In its fully developed form, an apocalypse is a prophetic vision, elaborately symbolic of the imminent events that will abruptly end the existing world order and replace it with a new and perfected condition both of humanity and of the world. The root elements of apocalypse are the concern of the Hebrew prophets with the catastrophic punishments to be visited upon Israel and its enemies in "the latter end of the days," as well as with the expectation of a Messiah, a deliverer from suffering in this disaster-ridden world. These elements are collected in the writings attributed to the prophet Isaiah, which foretell, after God has vented His wrath, the advent of a renovated world of ease, joy, and peace. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth," in which "the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock" (Isaiah 65.17–25). The Hebrew Bible also contains a full-fledged apocalypse, the Book of Daniel.
Passages predicting an imminent apocalypse occur in the New Testament, both in the Synoptic Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul. The New Testament then concludes with the most spectacular and intricately ordered of all apocalyptic prophecies, the Book of Revelation. A series of seven symbolic events signalize the conflict between the forces of Christ and of Antichrist, culminating in a prodigious violence in which the stars fall like ripe figs and the harvest of the earth is cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." (6.13). This fierce destruction, however, is a cleansing one, preparatory to the inauguration of the Kingdom of Christ on earth, which will last one thousand years — in Latin, a "millennium," from which are derived the terms "millennial" and "millenarian" to signify the belief in a blissful earthly condition at the end of history. At the end of the millennium, the forces of evil are loosed again and finally defeated, after which the original creation, its function in the divine plot accomplished, will pass away, to be replaced by a new creation and by a new Jerusalem that will reconstitute, for the deserving elect, the paradise that was lost at the Fall: "And there shall be no more death . . . neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (21.4).
Two distinctive images occur persistently in later writings that derive from biblical apocalypses. One is the image of a sacred marriage that signifies the consummation of history. In Isaiah, the final redemption is figured as a marriage between the people of Israel and their land (62.2–5); in Revelation, it is figured as a marriage between Christ and the new, or purified, Jerusalem, "coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (21.2, 9–10). The second recurrent image represents the final condition of blessedness as a renovated heaven and earth. "For, behold," the Lord said to Isaiah, "I create new heavens and a new earth" (65.17, also 66.22). Thus also Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away" (21.1, also 21.5).
The apocalyptic and millennial books in the Bible are readily convertible into a scenario for political revolution, since they consist of an infallible text ordaining a necessary destruction of the forces of evil and guaranteeing the outcome of this violence in peace, plenty, and consummate happiness. In the Civil Wars in seventeenth-century England, for example, there were fervent apocalyptic expectations among radical parliamentary sects that were shared by Oliver Cromwell, as well as by John Milton. The late eighteenth century was another age of widespread apocalyptic expectation, when the promise of the American Revolution, followed by the greater and more radical expectations raised by the early years of the French Revolution, revived among a number of English Nonconforming sects the millenarian excitement of Milton and other seventeenth-century predecessors. "Hey for the New Jerusalem! The millennium!" Thomas Holcroft exulted in 1791. >> note 2 Preachers such as Richard Price, Joseph Fawcett, and Elhanan Winchester, as well as Joseph Priestley, who was not only a great chemist but a founder of the Unitarian Society, all interpreted the convulsions in France in terms of the prophecies in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. They thus invested the political events of the day with the explosive power of the great Western myth of apocalypse and expanded a local phenomenon into the expectation that humanity, everywhere, was at the threshold of an earthly paradise.
The phenomenon is of great literary importance because, during their formative period in the early 1790s, the first generation of Romantic poets incorporated in their poems a vision of the French Revolution as the early stage of the abrupt culmination of history, in which there will emerge a new humanity on a new earth that is equivalent to a restored paradise. In 1793, while still a student at Oxford, Robert Southey wrote Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem. In it Joan is granted a vision of a "blest age" in the future when, in a violent spasm not quite named the French Revolution, humanity shall "burst his fetters," and "Earth shall once again / Be Paradise". >> note 3 In the Song of Liberty that he appended to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1792, Blake represents a revolutionary "son of fire" moving from America to France and proclaiming an Isaian millennium: "Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease" (NAEL 8, 2.122). In the short prophetic poems of revolution that he wrote in the early 1790s, Blake introduced the Giant Form that he names "Orc," the spirit of Energy that bursts out in total political and spiritual revolution. See also Blake's America: A Prophecy [1793], plates 6, 8, 16, and, for an earlier, nonsymbolic work on the events in France, The French Revolution. In 1793 Wordsworth concluded his Descriptive Sketches with the enthusiastic prophecy (which precisely matches the prophecy he attributed to the Solitary in his later poem The Excursion) that events following the French Revolution would fulfill the millennial prophecy of the Book of Revelation. In those happy early years of the revolution, Coleridge shared this expectation, in a historical sequence that he succinctly summarizes in his prose Argument of the plot of Religious Musings (1794) as "The French Revolution. Millennium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion."
Two decades later, the young Percy Shelley recapitulated the millenarian expectations of his older contemporaries. His early principles, Shelley said, "had their origin" in those views that "occasioned the revolutions of America and France." >> note 4 Shelley's Queen Mab, which he began writing at nineteen, presents a vision of the woeful human past and the dreadful present, as preceding a blissful future "surpassing fabled Eden," of which most features are imparted from biblical millennialism.
Looking back in 1815, Thomas Noon Talfourd — an eminent jurist who was also a poet and playwright — analyzed the fashion in which the French Revolution had shaped the great literature of the age:
At one moment, all was hope and joy and rapture; the corruption and iniquity of ages seemed to vanish like a dream; the unclouded heavens seemed once more to ring with the exulting chorus of peace on earth and good-will to men. . . .
But "on a sudden" the "sublime expectation[s] were swept away" in "the terrible changes of this August spectacle." And an immediate effect "of this moral hurricane . . . this rending of the general heart" was "to raise and darken the imagination," and so to contribute "to form that great age of poetry which is now flourishing around us." >> note 5 Talfourd recognized the religious, apocalyptic nature of the enthusiasm and hopes evoked by the early years of the revolution; he recognized also, however, that the essential featureof the French Revolution as a cultural influence was that it had failed. The greatest poetry of the age was written not in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the mood of revolutionary disenchantment and despair, after the succession of disasters that began with the Reign of Terror in 1793–94. A number of the major Romantic poems, however, did not break with the formative past, but set out to salvage grounds for hope in a new and better world. That is, Romantic thought and imagination remained apocalyptic in form, but with a radical shift from faith in a violent outer transformation to faith in an inner moral and imaginative transformation — a shift from political revolution to a revolution in consciousness — to bring into being a new heaven and new earth. |
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the second term sometimes expanded to "Oriental exoticism" or "Oriental fantasy" — brings together two concepts that continue to be much in dispute among theorists and literary historians. Orientalism" refers to the geography and culture of large parts of Asia and North Africa, plus some of what we now think of as Eastern Europe. Above all, from a British point of view, "Orientalism" connotes foreignness or otherness — things decidedly not British — and it sometimes seems as if the "East" signified by "Orient" is not only what is east of Europe and the Mediterranean but everything east of the English Channel. n literary history, Romantic Orientalism is the recurrence of recognizable elements of Asian and African place names, historical and legendary people, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, interior decoration, costume, and the like in the writings of the British Romantics. At first glance, Romantic literature may seem to be divided between the natural settings of sheep fields in the southwest of England or the Lake District and the unnatural settings of medieval castles that are, for all their remoteness from present-day reality, always Christian and at least European, if not always British. But a closer look reveals a tiger — decidedly not indigenous to the British Isles — the founder of the Mongol dynasty in China as well as an Abyssinian "damsel with a dulcimer" in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"; Eastern plots, characters, and themes in Byron's "Oriental tales," some of which show up later in Don Juan; and Lebanon in "The Eve of St. Agnes"; an Arab maiden, Safie, as the most liberated character in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Orientalism, via the literature and art of the time, was increasingly in the air (as well as the texts) in both London and the British countryside.
he Orientalism of British Romantic literature has roots in the first decade of the eighteenth century, with the earliest translations of The Arabian Nights into English (from a version in French, 1705–08). The popularity of The Arabian Nights inspired writers to develop a new genre, the Oriental tale, of which Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is the best mid-century example (NAEL 8, 1.2680–2743). It is as though the "otherness" of Oriental settings and characters gives the staid British temperament a holiday. Gothicism and Orientalism do the work of fiction more generally — providing imaginary characters, situations, and stories as alternative to, even as escape from, the reader's everyday reality. But they operate more sensationally than other types of fiction. Pleasurable terror and pleasurable exoticism are kindred experiences, with unreality and strangeness at the root of both. he European Romantic imagination was saturated with Orientalism, but it reflected persistent ambivalence concerning the East, complicated in Britain by colonial anxiety and imperial guilt. We shall consider how Western notions of cultural hegemony were bolstered by imperial rhetoric and challenged by intercultural translation." As a spate of new books and articles attests, a political approach to Romantic Orientalism is currently one of the major enterprises among critics and theorists. |
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