Romantic poets (context/style/method)

Blake main 5 methods

1. Microscopic detail
2. Symbol
3. Atomic perspective
4. Doubling
5. Childhood forms

Blake context

* Context of production- art and paintings, what it looks like
* Collection influenced by the French Revolution- when he starts writing HT Innocence, the revolution is liberating. When he finishes writing HT Experience, the revolution is bloody and gory. 
* HT poems are two integrated perspectives, fused together. Duality, two possibilities. 
* Reception: Blake was received

Wordsworth main 5 methods

1. Asyndetic listing
2. Inner, shifting landscapes of the mind
3. Invisible listener
4. Premonitions, shadows death
5. Switching of time (temporality)

Wordsworth unique style

* Demythologises: focus on the natural world and the power of the feeling. Pastoral with literal interest in symbolism, interested instead in individuals. 
* Naturalism (a rose is a rose, literal)
* Selfhood (non universal, fascination with inner self and inner life (growing, individual ‘I’)

Shelley main 5 methods

1. Greek mythology
2. Transience and shifts, between seasons and moods etc
3. Soundscape- assonance
4. Sublime

Shelley context

Romantic context:

* Shelley draws on Greek myths to celebrate passion, desire, and erotic dissent. 
* Shelley explores our relationship with nature. 

Shelley himself:

* Intense 
* Tempestuous/rapidity
* Exile: cut off, not allowed to print in England 


* Immoralist


* Atheist

Byron main 5 methods

1. Satire and wit
2. Contrast and Opposition
3. Grotesque
4. Stolen choruses from sea shanties/other poems
5. Lyrical voice

Byron unique style

* Uneven, shifting voice
* Wholly sceptical 
* Ritual and tradition
* Tasteless and profane 
* Witty and satirical
* Heroes: extreme in all, antithetically mixed

Byron context

* *Memento mori* (inevitable death)
* Exoticism and orientalism
* ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ (Lady Caroline Lamb)
* ‘I cannot exist without some object of love’
* national hero in Greece, died and desired a funeral pyre
* conflicted, pessimistic

Keats main 5 methods

1. Senses and sensual imagery
2. The Ode
3. Greek/Roman/Biblical references
4. Specific natural imagery
5. Temporality/time markers

Keats unique style

* Mortality (bodies change and let us down)
* Ephemeral (trying to leave a legacy, we don’t last)
* Beauty (death is real but beauty is truth and escape)
* Tragedy (death of senses, vitality is lost)

Keats context

Why: industrialisation, French Revolution, mechanicalisation

What: intense focus on one individual, opposition, transforming the pastoral, sublime over nature

Keats- Negative Capability

‘The ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready made or omnipotent certainties upon an ambiguous situation or emotional challenge’.