ENG203 2 Quiz non-authors

The Romantic Period

1785-1832

Momentous break

A great turning point in British literary history, and the crux of this survey course

Great rebellion against what

Neoclassical aesthetics

Beginning of what

Modern liberal notions of art and the artist (and increasingly democratic sensibilities)

Ascendancy of what 

lyrical poetry  

celebration of what

the poet and the poetic vocation

What were they intense about in writing?

Emotional investment in nature and the natural world

Great art produced by

Unrestrained emotional expression – the triumph of the ‘heart’ over the ‘head’

Neoclassic – Traditionalism, invitation of established models

Romantic – Innovation in form and subject matter

Neoclassic – Reason and restraint

Romantic – “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth)

Neoclassic – poetry about human society and established truths

Romantic – new attention to nature and the natural world

Neoclassic – ‘universal’, truths, humility, and the ‘vanity of human wishes’

                  Romantic – individualism, ambition, and rebel/outcast (‘satanic’) figures

Neoclassic – literature in support of stable societal structures

Romantic – upheaval, revolution, new beginnings

Influence of what continental writers and philosophers

Rousseau and Goethe

Rapidly changing relationship to nature due to

Industrial Revolution and Laissez-faire economic policies

Landless ‘working class’ due to

Enclosure acts: previously common land now consolidated into private property

Abolitionist movements (late eighteenth-century)

Efforts to abolish slavery

American Revolution

Colonial resistance to British monarchy (newly cast as ‘tyranny’)

French Revolution

Great overthrow of the ancien regime in favour of liberal democracy

After French Revolution

Reign of Terror and Napoleonic Wars

•       Many Romantic poets (e.g. Wordsworth) were initially ____ inspired by the Revolution and its ideals, but later __________

•       inspired, disillusioned with the subsequent chaos and carnage

Some conservative writers were

•       horrified by the Revolution and its impact on European society (cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution)

•       Others were inspired by the Revolution and believed it would

•       usher in a new age of liberal democracy and sacred human rights (cf. Richard Price’s sermon, Discourse on the Love of Our Country, and Burke’s great enemy Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man)

•       English sympathizers to the Revolution, also known as

•       Jacobin writers (not to be confused with “Jacobite” or “Jacobean”!) extended the ideals of the Revolution (cf. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women)

Romantic authors shared a renewed interest in

oral culture and the popular songs of the “common people” (and especially illiterate people)

 systematic efforts to

write down and record popular ballads

•       Subject matter of ballads often

•        sensational or vulgar, but always “low”: an alternative to the refinement and elegance of “high” neoclassical style

•       Perceived primitivism of balladry:

•       a relic of a lost “gothic” past, closer to nature and the primal energies of poetry

•       Romantic interest in

•       sound effects and the oral qualities/living voice of poetry

•       The stark simplicity of ballad stanzas and their regular meter

•       patterns of refrain and repetition

•       Common ballad meter:

•       alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, usually rhyming ABAB

Common ballad meter Ex

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see

I wanna be the very best,
That no one ever was,
To catch them is my real quest,
To train them is my cause

•       Long ballad meter:

•       iambic tetrameter

•       Long ballad meter: Ex

All people that on Earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
Him serve with fear, his praise forthtell;
Come ye before him and rejoice

I kissed a girl and I liked it,
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it,
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it

•       Short ballad meter:

•       iambic trimeter

•       Short ballad meter: Ex

I love the jocund dance,
The softly breathing song,
Where innocent eyes do glance,
And where lisps the maiden’s tongue

The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality

 

•       Revolutionary manifesto

•       for a new species of poetry

•       Rejection of

•       decorum and the hierarchy of literary kinds: treating common people with serious (even tragic) poetic concern

Attack on the

•       artificial poetic diction of eighteenth-century poets (cf. Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West”)

The language of prose adapted

•       to poetry

Source of all good poetry

•       “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

•       Exalted role of the poet and the dignity of the poetic vocation:

•       “a man speaking to men,” but a more sensitive, expansive soul

•       Importance of memory and private contemplation:

•       “emotion recollected in tranquillity”

The aesthetic revolution of Romanticism cannot be understood without also understanding the political revolutions of this period

Industrial, American, French, Haitian

The Industrial Revolution

•       (c. 1760-c. 1840): long and complex process involving shift from power-driven machinery to replace hand labour

•       The American Revolution

•       (1776) and colonial resistance to British monarchy (newly cast as “tyranny”)

French Revolution

•       (1789-1815) – great overthrow of the ancien regime in favour of liberal democracy – and later Reign of Terror and Napoleonic Wars

Haitian Revolution

•       (1791-1804): successful slave revolt under Toussaint Louverture against the French colonial rule Saint-Domingue; ended with the nation’s formal independence

•       July 14, 1789:

•       Storming of the Bastille and release of political prisoners

October 6, 1789:

•       “March to Versailles” and removal of royal family to Paris

September 1792:

•       “September Massacres” of imprisoned nobility and clergy

•       January-February 1793:

•       Execution of king; declaration of war between France and England

•       July 1793-July 1794:

•       Reign of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre; thousands guillotined at the Place de la Revolution

•       1803-1815:•      

•       Napoleonic Wars

1804

•       Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor

1815

•       Final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo

An age of extraordinary reversals and contradictions

cf. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities

•       A radical restructuring of society on democratic principles:

•       breaking down the ancien regime of Europe (and its Three Estates)

Rationalist, secular principles:

•       -- Catholic churches abolished – Notre Dame renamed the “Temple of Reason”
-- Gregorian calendar/holidays/religious feast days (and all their references to saints) replaced by new calendar based on the natural world and seasonal cycles (mocked relentlessly by Britons)

•       An age of tremendous optimism,

•       hope, ecstatic joy

•       French Revolution thought to be the end of history:

•       an apocalyptic fulfillment of the Enlightenment project, and the founding of a utopia of liberty, equality, reason, benevolence, and limitless human progress

 

•       The Reign of Terror:

•       authoritarian regimes and mass paranoia

•       Barbarous anarchy and orgiastic mob violence

•       Eventual return to even more

•       entrenched conservative social order

A great source of

disillusionment for Romantic writers

•       Many Romantic poets (e.g. Wordsworth) were initially

•       inspired by the Revolution and its ideals, but later disillusioned with the subsequent chaos and carnage

•       Some conservative writers were

•       horrified by the Revolution and its impact on European society (cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution)

•       Others were inspired by the Revolution and

•       believed it would usher in a new age of liberal democracy and sacred human rights (cf. Richard Price’s sermon, Discourse on the Love of Our Country, and Burke’s great enemy Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man)

•       English sympathizers to the Revolution, also known as

•       Jacobin writers (not to be confused with “Jacobite” or “Jacobean”!) extended the ideals of the Revolution (cf. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women)

Jacobin

•       actually a term of opprobrium invented by “anti-Jacobins” as part of their smear campaign. NB: support for the Revolution virtually treasonous by 1792

•       Radicals like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine

•       celebrated the French Revolution, but abhorred violence: civil discussion and reasoning was their mode of rebellion

•       Not at all like the French Jacobins; more like the moderate Girondins:

•       in favour of parliamentary reform and protection of civil liberties

The Romantics shared a fascination with theThe Romantics shared a fascination with the

supernatural, the mystical and the occult. Some possible causes:

Medievalism

•       renewed interest in native British (“Gothic”) history and local cultural practices, superstitions, and beliefs from the medieval “Dark Ages” (vs. neoclassical preference for ancient Greco-Roman culture)

•       Influence of “oriental” literature

•       – especially the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments – and many Romantic poems with “Eastern” themes and settings (e.g. Byron’s “The Giaour,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and many more)

•       A strong reaction against

•       Enlightenment rationality, the rise of scientific modes of thinking, and the gradual disenchantment of the world

•       Part of Romantic individualism and the exploration of personal subjectivity:

•       dream states, psychological extremes, altered consciousness under the influence of drugs (esp. opium)

ugely popular non-realist genres (“romances”), especially Gothic fiction

•       (tales of terror and suspense), e.g. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); William Beckford, Vathek (1782/86); Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796). Satirized memorably in Austen’s North-anger Abbey (1818), and perfected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

 

The “two cardinal points of poetry,” according to Coleridge:

(1) “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature,” and

(2) “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination”

 

•       Objective (1) would be achieved by drawing on subjects found in ordinary life

•       (e.g. Wordsworth’s vagrant poems, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

 

•       Objective (2) would be achieved by drawing on supernatural incidents and agents, and exploring

•       “the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency” (see BL)

•       Objective (1) would be achieved by drawing on subjects found in ordinary life

•       (e.g. Wordsworth’s vagrant poems, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

•       Objective (2) would be achieved by drawing on supernatural incidents and agents, and exploring

•       “the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency” (see BL)

Anna Letitia Aikin (later Barbauld) and John Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1773):

“A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of ‘forms unseen, and mightier far than we,’ our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.”

Coleridge’s critical theories recorded in Biographia Literaria (1817). See especially:

-- Ch. 14: Heightened definition of the Romantic/post-Romantic “Imagination”: the human faculty most closely related to the divine power of creation

-- Chs. 17-18: Reservations about Wordsworth’s depiction of ordinary life, deliberately “low” subjects, and especially his complete rejection of neoclassical poetic diction

Fascinated by the metaphysics of perception and altered/heightened states of consciousness (for poetic treatments, see “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel”)

Greater Romantic lyric:

an extended lyric poem (i.e. describing the speaker’s thoughts and feelings) of picturesque description and serious meditation:

usually begins with a description of a landscape or “natural” setting,

which stimulates a complex thought process (memory, feeling, anticipation) in the speaker (closely identified with the poet)

proceeds to a long meditation in which the

poet achieves an insight, resolves a difficult problem, or comes to a decision

usually ends with a return to the local scene,

with a wiser or more composed perspective

William Blake (1757-1827):

•       idiosyncratic visionary poet of long prophetic poems (e.g. Songs of Innocence and Experience)

•       William Wordsworth (1770-1850):

•       greatest Romantic innovator and author of short lyrics (in ballad stanzas) and long meditative poems in blank verse (e.g. The Prelude)

•       Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):

•       poet and literary critic, famous for his long prose autobiography/aesthetic treatise (e.g. Biographia Literaria) and haunting narrative ballads of sin and redemption (e.g. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

•       Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822):

•       radical author of classical lyric poems (e.g. “Ode to the West Wind”) and ecstatic manifestos (e.g. A Defence of Poetry)

•       George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824):

•       solitary Romantic upholder of neoclassical literary proprieties. Famous for his salacious lifestyle, outcast figures, and satires on European culture (e.g. Don Juan)

•       John Keats (1795-1821):

•       greatest exponent of Romantic medievalism and author of sensuous odes about love and death (e.g. The Eve of St. Agnes)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Works

His “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the first poem in all editions of Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805)

Author of great “conversation” poems:
“Frost at Midnight” (1798), “The Eolian Harp” (1796), “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), and “Dejection: An Ode” (1802)

•       Richard Price (1723-1791): Welsh Unitarian minister and political reformer

, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1789)

•       Edmund Burke (1729-1797): former proponent of the American Revolution, but became shockingly conservative after the French Revolution

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

•       Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): great Jacobin writer and founder of modern liberal feminism (also husband of William Godwin and mother of Mary Shelley)

 A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

•       Thomas Paine (1737-1809): American independence propagandist and champion of liberty

The Rights of Man (1791)