British Literature Unit 4: Chapter 2 Notes

Romantics insisted on human what as the appropriate lens through which to see the interconnectedness of the universe and address the world’s problems?

imagination

• Shifted poetry’s focus from objective truths of society to the subjective experience of the individual 

• Treated common life in gracefully adorned diction 

• Along with Coleridge, published a collection of poems Lyrical Ballads in 1798, beginning the Romantic Era in literature. 

• With age, became increasingly conservative, voicing strong opposition to liberal political reforms

William Wordsworth

a poetic device in which lines flow past the end of one verse line and into the next

Enjambment

a pause in the middle of a poetic line, usually indicated by punctuation

Caesura

• Author is William Wordsworth 

• Theme: Memories of nature bring him joy 

• “And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.”

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud 

• Author is William Wordsworth

• We can’t appreciate nature because we are too involved in society. 

• When we can appreciate nature, it will benefit us in a positive way. 

• “So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”

• Theme: Society is corrupting and nature is healing 

The World is Too Much With Us

• Author is William Wordsworth 

• “The picture of the mind revives again: while here I stand, not only with the sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years.” – this moment of time (memory) of nature will be healing not only now, but also in future years. 

• “The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.” - he replace nature with God (he is a pantheist)

• Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege, through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy: for she can so inform the mind that is within us, so impress with quietness and beauty, and so feed.” - he wants his sister to enjoy (worship) nature like he does.

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

• Along with Wordsworth, inaugurated the romantic era in British poetry 

• Exerted a strong influence on English literary criticism and philosophy 

• Accepted Anglicanism and the doctrine of the Trinity, although his theology was influenced by German higher criticism. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

the use of words that imitate the sounds being described

Onomatopoeia

rhymes within a line

Internal Rhyme

the repetition of vowel sounds in nearby stressed syllables

Assonance

a character who changes internally 

Dynamic Character

a character who does not change

Static Character

• Author is Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

• The outer frame tale is narrated by the author and the inner frame tale is narrated by Mariner

• Theme: Nature is an extension of God so there should be a love that binds together all created beings. 

• “He prayeth best, who loveth best all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us, he made and loveth all.” 

• Conflict starts when Mariner shoots the albatross because he had no reason to do so. He had to wear the albatross around his neck to represent his guilt and sin. 

• Albatross = guilt and sin

• “Instead of the cross, the Albatross about my neck was hung.” 

• When he starts to observe nature, he appreciates it. 

• “O happy living things! No tongue their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, and I blessed them unaware!”

• When he appreciates nature, he can now pray and no longer has to wear the albatross around his neck. 

• Part of his punishment is to go tell others about what happened to him. 

• “Since then, at an uncertain hour, that agony returns: and till my ghastly tale is told, this heart within me burns.” 

A Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Public persona and poetry captivated the European imagination 

• Most influential literary contribution was the Byronic hero, an antihero who nobly truffles against his interior defects and exterior oppression 

• Achieved frame with his semi-autobiographical narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

George Gordon, Lord byron 

an antihero who nobly truffles against his interior defects and exterior oppression 

Byronic hero

consists of nine lines, the first eight in iambic pentameter (five iambs) and the ninth in iambic hexameter (six iambs) with a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc

Spenserian Stanza

• Author is George Gordon, Lord Byron 

• The character Harold is based on the author himself 

• Finds comforts in nature 

• “Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb; and life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.” - life doesn’t always go how you want it to

• “Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held little in common” - felt isolated from other men 

• “To spirits against whom his own rebelled” - doesn’t want society to tell them how to feel 

• Stanza 179 - apostrophe to the ocean (compares the power of the sea to the insignificance of man) 

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

• Author is George Gordon, Lord Byron 

• Compares Anne Wilmot’s beauty to a starry sky 

• Praises not only her beauty, but also her peace, calmness, her grace, eloquence, and her demeanor

She Walks in Beauty

• Poetry depicts the individual’s struggle against social oppression 

• Masterpiece was Prometheus Enbound (1820) 

• Widely considered one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language 

• Died in boating accident in 1822

• Regarded his poetry as an instrument of revolution and reform that could help lead to a golden era of peace and freedom. 

• His belief that many contemporary political rulers were tyrants and his disillusionment with conservative post war British politics are particularly evident in the poems that follow

Percy Bysshe Shelley

a long lyric poem that is elevated in style, generally serious in theme, and structured with a complex stanza

Ode

a verse form in which three-lines stanzas (tercets) interlock in the following rhyme pattern: aba, bcb, ded, and so on

Terza Rima

• Author is Percy Bysshe Shelley 

• Theme: Uses situational irony to describe that human power is fleeting in the face of time and nature. It does this by giving an illustration of a sculpture from a king named Ozymandias, which is in ruins. 

• “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my words, ye mighty and despair!” - this is ironic because he was prideful about his kingdom but his kingdom is no longer around because of time. 

• Three voices are the narrator, the traveler, and Ozymandias.

Ozymandias

• Author is Percy Bysshe Shelley 

• Theme: Criticizes the king and corrupt government, but offers hope of revolution 

• “Times worst statue unrepealed — are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.” – they didn’t have many rights because of the corrupt government, but he gives a hope for revolution and change if they continue to use their voice. 

England in 1819

• Author is Percy Bysshe Shelley 

• “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!” - wind is both a destroyer and preserver because as time passes, it destroys old things, but replaces them with better things. 

• The idea of the wind passing destroys old things, and the seeds that are being scattered are political ideas being scattered. 

• “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to quicken a new birth.” - he wants his new political ideas to be scattered for social reform. 

• “O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” - time keeps going so eventually tyranny will change. 

Ode to the West Wind

• Produced some of the finest lyric poetry ever written in English 

• Orphaned as a teenager 

• Abandoned medical work to pursue poetry full-time 

• Published long poems as well as odes 

• Died at age 25 after a long illness 

• Found tragic beauty in the natural rhythms of life 

• Keats’s poetry incorporated the major emphases of romanticism: the imagination, the individual, and nature

• His poetry also incorporated elements of the sublime while achieving a sense of distance. 

• As a romantic, Keat perceived a connection between truth and beauty. To him, in its appeal to the imagination, beauty was a primary marker of the presence of truth 

John Keats

agreeable sounds, especially in the phonetic quality of words

Euphony

jarring, discordant sounds

Cacophony

devotion to beauty (and therefore to art) as highest human concern

Aestheticism

• Author is John Keats 

• Autumn is just as beautiful as spring and the author personifies it. Autumn and Spring are both beautiful, but they each have different beauties. He uses the beauty of a woman to define the beauty of autumn.

To Autumn 

• Author is John Keats 

• Theme: preserve art because that is how we can value beauty 

• Even when people get old and decay, art will remain beautiful because it is frozen in time (permanent) 

• “When old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ —that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Ode on a Grecian Urn 

• Author is John Keats 

• He is afraid to die at a young age without being able to produce great works, and he doesn’t want to leave the woman he loves behind. 

• “When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean’s my teeming brain, before high-piled books, in charactery, hold like full garner the full ripen’d grain:” - he is afraid he won’t be able to get the works in his brain on paper. 

• “Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” 

When I Have Fears that I may Cease To Be