English Romanticism Introduction Romantic poetry William

1
English Romanticism

• Introduction
• Romantic poetry
• William Wordsworth
• S.T. Coleridge
• G.G. Byron
• P.B. Shelley
• John Keats

2
Introduction

• English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the
  publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges The
  Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter
  Scotts death. William Blake and Robert Burns
  also belong to this literary genre, though they
  live prior to the Romantic period.

3
English Romanticism is a revolt of the English
imagination against the neoclassical reason. The
French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English
Industrial Revolution exert great influence on
English Romanticism. The romanticists express a
negative attitude towards the existing social or
political conditions. They place the individual
at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord
Byrons Byronic Hero. The key words of English
Romanticism are nature and imagination. English
Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the
greatest English writers. They argue that poetry
should be free from all rules.
4
Overview of Romantic literature

• The romantic period is an age of poetry.
  Wordsworth and Coleridge are the most
  representative writers. They explore new theories
  and innovate new techniques in versification.
  They believe that poetry could purify individual
  souls and society.
• For further study of their literary theory,
  please refer to Wordsworths Preface to The
  Lyrical Ballads Coleridges Biographia
  Literaria.

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Lake poets

• Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were known as
  Lake Poets because they lived and knew one
  another in the last few years of the 18th century
  in the district of the great lakes in
  Northwestern England. The former two published
  The Lyrical Ballads together in 1798, while all
  three of them had radical inclinations in their
  youth but later turned conservative and received
  pensions and poet laureateships from the
  aristocracy.

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• Other greatest Romantic poets are John Keats,
  P.B. Shelley and G. G. Byron.
• Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much. MU
  Dan(??/???),a renowned Chinese poet and
  translator , did splendid work to popularize
  Byron and Shelley in China.
• Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled
  negative romantic poets while Byron and Shelley
  were hailed as positive (revolutionary) Romantic
  poets. Wordsworth and Coleridges literary
  achievements were underestimated for a long time.

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Feminist works Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.
Gothic novel is a type of romantic fiction that
predominates in the late 18th century and
continues to show its influence in early 19th
century. Its principal elements are violence,
horror, and the supernatural. Frankenstein (1818)
by Mary Shelley and The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) by Ann Radcliffe are masterpieces of
English gothic novel.
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English fiction gropes its way amidst the
overwhelming Romantic poetry. It revives its
popularity in the hands of Jane Austen Walter
Scott. Walter Scott is noted for his historical
novel based on Scottish history and legends. He
exerted great influence on European literature of
his time. Jane Austen is the first and foremost
English women novelist. Following the
neoclassical tradition, she is unsurpassed in the
description of uneventful everyday life.
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Essayists in English Romanticism
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William Wordsworth Wordsworth is the most
representative poet of English Romanticism. He
was born into a lawyers family in 1770 at
Cockmouth, Cumberland. His parents died when he
was very young.
11
He was taken care of by his relatives. He got his
education at the Grammar School of Hawkshead and
then at St. Johns College, Cambridge. He was a
worshipper of nature from his childhood. He
frequently visited places of beautiful scenery. A
walking tour of the Swiss Alps heightened his
addiction to nature. He had great sympathy with
the French Revolution. He paid 2 visits to
France, during the second visit he fell in love
with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter.
12
Wordsworth was totally disillusioned by the
Jacobin dictatorship and the French invasion of
other European countries. He became conservative
in politics. He was labeled as negative
Romantic poet by Karl Marx and was severely
criticized by Byron. In 1795 he and his sister
Dorothy Wordsworth settled down in Racedown,
Dorsetshire. In 1797 he made friends with
Coleridge. The three persons became three people
with one soul in literary history.
13
Legend has it that Wordsorth and his sister lived
a kind of incestuous life during this period.
Dorothy helped Wordsworth turn his eyes to the
face of nature and preserved the poet in him.
She served as Wordsworths confidante and
inspirer. As Wordsworth put it in his poem
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears And
humble cares, and delicate fears A heart,
the fountain of sweet tears And love, and
thought, and joy.
14
In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their
Lyrical Ballads. In 1798 and 1799, he made a tour
around Germany. Upon his return to England, he
and his sister moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere,
the most beautiful place in the Lake District.
Coleridge Robert Southey lived a stones throw
from their dwelling place. The three poets came
to be known as Lake Poets. In 1802, Wordsworth
got married to Mary Hutchingson. In 1813, he got
a sinecure job as distributor of stamps.
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In 1842, he received the government pension and
in the following year, he succeeded Southey as
Poet Laureate. He died at Rydal Mount in 1850 and
was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.
16
His major works

• Wordsworths fame lies chiefly in his short
  poems. His short poems fall into 2 categories
  poems about nature and poems about human life.
• He is a worshipper of nature. It is nature that
  gives him strength and knowledge full of grace.

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His best known poems of nature include The
Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), Tintern
Abbey, To the Cuckoo, My Heart Leaps up, To a
Butterfly, An Evening Walk, The Sparrows
Nest. His best known poems about human life
include Lucy Poems, The Solitary Reaper and The
Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, To a Highland
Girl.
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Wordsworth wrote many sonnets. His famous sonnets
are Earth Has Not Anything to Show More Fair
(Written Upon Westminster Bridge), On the
Extinction of the Venetian Republic, Thought of
a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland. His
best known long poem is The Prelude. In this poem
Wordsworth analyses the growth of his poetic
genius during his childhood and youth, and
recalls the lessons he owes to nature.
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Wordsworths greatest contribution to English
literature is his poems and his Preface to The
Lyrical Ballads. Though The Lyrical Ballads is
known as the collaborated work of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, all the poems but one (The Rime of The
Ancient Mariner) are written by Wordsworth. Most
of his most quoted poem are taken from this
collection.
20
Preface to Lyrical Ballads

• Wordsworths Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads is
  the manifesto of English Romanticism. It is one
  of the revolutionary works of criticism, helping
  usher in the Romantic Age in literature (Dutton,
  198450).
• He is primarily concerned to justify the kinds of
  his poems which he had contributed to Lyrical
  Ballads.

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Key points in his Preface

• Definition of a poet
• He ( poet) is a man speaking to men a man, it
  is true, endowed with more lively sensibility,
  more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
  knowledge of human nature, and a more
  comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be
  common among mankind.
• Norton Anthology of English Literature??????????
  

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Creative process of authentic poetry Poetry is
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility the emotion is contemplated till, by
a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually
disappears, and an emotion, kindred (similar) to
that which before was the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood
successful composition generally begins
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Subject matter poetic language The principal
objectwas to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or describe them,
throughout, as far as was possible in a selection
of language really used by men , and at the same
time, to throw over them a certain coloring of
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented in an unusual aspect (cf. Liu Yong in
Song Dynasty. ?????,?????)
24
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil in which
they can attain their maturity The language,
too, of these men has been adopted (purified
indeed from what appear to be its real defects,
from all lasting and rational causes of dislike
or disgust) because such men hourly communicate
with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived.
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Brief Comments

• Wordsworth is the representative poet of English
  romanticism
• Wordsworths poetry is distinguished by the
  simplicity and purity of his language.
• Wordsworths theory on versification has exerted
  profound influence on later poets.
  (mimesis??--imaginative recreation)

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Coleridge was born into a clergymans family in
  1772. He was a great genius. At the age of six,
  he had read the Bible, Robinson Crusoe and
  Arabian Nights. He was a mentally precocious boy,
  full of fantasy and dreams in his mind. During
  his Cambridge years, he made friends with Charles
  Lamb, the great essayist of English Romanticism.

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• But the campus life bored him. He ran away from
  the university and enlisted in the army but
  discharged after a few months and he returned to
  Cambridge. He joined Robert Southey in a utopian
  plan of establishing an ideal democratic
  community (named Pantisocracy) in America. The
  plan resulted in nothing but his marriage to Sara
  Fricker, which turned out to be an unhappy
  marriage.
• In 1797 he began his friendship with Wordsworth.
  In 1798 they published The Lyrical Ballads.

29
In 1798 he traveled to Germany with Wordsworth
and began to take to Germany philosophy. Upon his
return to England, he became addicted to opium
with a view to relieving his headache. He
quarreled seriously with Wordsworth in 1810.
Though they were reconciled to each other later,
their friendship had never reached its former
intimacy. In his later years, he turned
conservative and resorted to theology for his
spiritual support.
30
Major works

• Demonic poems
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Kubla Khan
• Christabel

• Conversational poems
• Frost at Morning
• Dejection An Ode (??)
• Essays
• Biographia Literaria
• Lectures on Shakespeare.

31
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• It is Coleridges contribution to The Lyrical
  Ballads. It tells us a strange story in ballad
  meter. Three guests are on their way to a wedding
  party when an ancient mariner stopped one of
  them. The mariner tells of his adventures on the
  sea. When his ship sails towards the South Pole,
  an albatross (???) comes through the snow-fog and
  alights on the rigging.

32

• The mariner shoots at it quite thoughtlessly.
  Then misfortune befalls. The whole crew, with the
  only exception of the old mariner, die of thirst
  as punishment for the act of inhospitality. The
  spell breaks only when the mariner repents his
  cruelty.
• The poem is famous for its beautiful cadence(??)
  and wonderful imagery. The combination of the
  natural and supernatural, the ordinary and
  extraordinary makes it one of the masterpieces of
  Romantic poetry.

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Kubla Khan

• During an illness in 1797 Coleridge retired to a
  lonely farmhouse. One day he fell asleep as he
  was reading a passage about Kubla Khan from
  Pilgrimage by Purchas. While dreaming he composed
  a poem about 200 or 300 lines. On waking he began
  to write down the poem. But he was interrupted by
  a person on business from Porlock and the vision
  faded. He left a fragment of only 54 lines and
  never finished the poem.

34
Christabel

• It tells a story of a sorcerer (??) who casts a
  spell over a pure young girl. It is written in
  ballad meter. Its mysterious atmosphere and the
  Gothic horror may freeze our blood. It is not
  wholesome to read the poem.

35
Biographia Literaria

• It is Coleridges most influential book of
  literary essays. The main ideas can be summed up
  as follows.
• A poem should not be judged as a mirror of
  truthas we judge science--but as a thing in
  itself, almost as a living organism.

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Poets are born and not made. Poems should be
judged only according to their own lights and
not according to any established precept or
precedent. Coleridge envisages that the poet as a
man of great integrity as well as of special
gifts, producing poems which would offer profound
insights into mans imaginative, psychological,
and ultimately, moral being.
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Comments

• Coleridge is a great Romantic poet. His poetic
  imagination is unique. He is fond of unusual and
  supernatural things.
• Coleridge is one of the first critics to pay
  close attention to language of poetry. He
  maintains that the true end of poetry is to give
  pleasure through the medium of beauty.

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George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
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Biographical Introduction

• Byron was born into an aristocratic family. His
  father is a profligate. His mother was a
  passionate Scotswoman.
• He was born with a clubfoot, which made him feel
  sore and unhappy all his life.
• He was a radical supporter of workers movement.

40

• In 1811, Byron took seat in the House of Lords.
  He made vehement speeches to attack English
  governments policy for the Luddites (workers who
  destroy machinery).
• Byron left England for ever in 1816.
• He first visited Switzerland, where he made
  acquaintance with Shelley. He wrote Sonnet on
  Chillon in Switzerland.
• Then he moved to Italy, where he finished Childe
  Harolds Pilgrimage and wrote his masterpiece Don
  Juan.

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Upon hearing the news of the Greek revolt against
the Turks, Byron plunged himself into the
struggle. The Greeks made him commander in chief
of their forces in 1824. Due to months hard work
under bad weather, he fell ill and died. The
Greek people mourned over his premature
death. Byron was regarded as the satanic poet
by the English government when he died. It was
not until 1969 that a white marble memorial to
Byron was erected in Westminster Abbey. Nowadays
his name is put in the Poets Corner.
42
Major works

• Long Poems or Collections
• Hours of Idleness
• English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
• Childe Harolds Pilgrimage
• Don Juan

• Best known single poems in China
• When We Two Parted
• She Walks in Beauty
• The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan)
• Sonnet on Chillon

43
Brief comments

• Byrons poetry is based upon his own experience.
  His heroes are more or less pictures of himself.
  His hero is known as Byronic Hero, a proud,
  mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. For such
  a hero, the conflict is usually one of rebellious
  individual against outworn social systems and
  conventions.

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• The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the
  life and personality of Byron.
• Byrons poetry exerts great influence on the
  Romantic Movement. He stands with Shakespeare and
  Scott among the British writers who exert great
  influence over the mainland of Europe.

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P. B. SHELLEY (1792-1822)
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Life story

• Shelley was born into an affluent family at
  Sussex. He got a very good school education,
  first at Eton and then at Oxford.
• In 1811, while he was still a student at Oxford,
  he wrote a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism,
  repudiating the existence of God.

47
He was expelled from Oxford for his seditious
pamphlet. Then he eloped with Harriet Westbrook
to Edinburgh. When he returned to London, he
became a disciple of William Godwin, a radical
social philosopher. He fell in love with Godwins
daughter. Harriets drowning enabled him to marry
Godwins daughter, but left him a bad reputation
as an immoralist. He left England and went to the
Continent.
48
He made friends with Byron while they were in
Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote his best poems
during this period. On July 8, 1822, while he was
sailing in a small boat along the coast of Italy,
a tempest struck her boat and he was drowned. He
was buried in Rome. The inscription on his
tombstone reads Percy Bysshe Shelley, COR
CORDIUM. ( meaning heart of hearts)
49
Upon his untimely death, one of his opponents
writes, Shelley, the writer of some infidel
poetry, has been drowned now he knows whether
there is a God or not. Engels thinks highly of
Shelley and Byron, He writes, Shelley, the
genius, the prophet, Shelley, and Byron, with his
glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our
existing society, find most of their readers in
the proletariat.
50
Major works

• Ode to the West Wind???
• To a Skylark???
• The Cloud?
• Prometheus Unbound ?????????
• Queen Mab ????
• The Masque of Anarchy ?????????
• The Necessity of Atheism???????
• A Defence of Poetry??

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Brief Comments

• Shelley grew up with revolutionary ideas under
  the influence of Hume and Godwin. He held a life
  long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority
  and institutional religion.
• Shelley is one of the greatest English lyrical
  poets. He expresses his love for freedom and his
  hatred towards tyranny.

52
His poems abound with personification, metaphor
and other figures of speech. Shelley is one of
the most important dramatists of English
Romanticism. His greatest achievement in theater
lies in his poetic drama Prometheus Unbound.
53
Keats life story

• Keats was born into a stable keepers family. He
  got little school education. He was apprenticed
  to a surgeon though his interest was in poetry.
• With the aid of Shelley, Keats first collection
  of poems was published in 1817.
• He was severely criticized by leading literary
  magazines such as Blackwoods Magazine and
  Quarterly Review.

54
Keats contracted consumption (pneumonia) while he
was taking care of his brother. He died in 1821
in Rome, Italy. His grave in Rome bears the the
epitaph Here lies one whose name is writ in
water. Shelley and Byron wrote elegies for his
premature death. (cf. Liu Bingshan 293)
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Major Works
56
Major Works

• Long poems
• Endymion
• Isabella
• The Eve of St. Agnes
• Lamia
• Hyperion

• Odes and sonnets
• Ode to Autumn
• Ode to a Nightingale
• Ode on Melancholy
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Bright Star
• When I Have Fear
• The Grasshopper and The Cricket.

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Comments

• Keatss poetry is always sensuous, colorful and
  rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of
  his senses.
• He draws diction, style and imagery from works of
  Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Dante. With
  vivid and rich images, he paints poetic pictures
  full of wonderful color.

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Comments 2

• Keats produced a variety of works, including
  epic, lyric and narrative poems. The mythic world
  of the ancient Greece and the English poetry of
  Renaissance period provide Keats with the most
  imaginative resources.
• Keats poems present us with an everlasting
  poetic beauty. His motto is Beauty is truth,
  truth beauty.