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’.