ROMANTIC ~ context (full FCs)

William Blake

• Family was Moravian ~ grace via Jesus not the church 

• Had visions from young age which he saw as spiritual vision of change ~ not traumatic; would walk countryside to realign himself with visions

• Blake later involved in Swedenborgianism (mystic) but later rejected it as a form of institutionalised religion like the Church of England

• Lived in metropolis of London

• Designed the series of plates for Songs of Innocence & in 1794 combined the early poems w/ companion poems called Songs of Experience ~ title page of the set announces the poem show “the two Contrary States of the Human Soul”

• 1790: published book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without contraries is no progression.”

• Storming of Bastille, Paris 1789 + agonies of French Revolution culturally huge ~ Blake often wrote against monarchy eg. in his early Tiriel, Blake traces the fall of a tyrannical king

• Familiar with many leading radical thinkers of his day eg. Mary Wollstonecraft ~ politics often topic of convo. at publisher Joseph Johnson’s house

William Blake’s process of engraving

• “Illuminated printing” combined text + image on single plate ~ wrote + designed in reverse

• Words + pictures could be inked + printed together from same surface →total creative control

• Freed him from costly printers + publishers, allowing him to control production

‘On Education’ (links to Blake)

1762: Rousseau publishes  ‘Emile’ or ‘On Education’

• “give nature time to work before you take over her business”

• “What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life?... Childhood is the sleep of reason”

• “Hold childhood in reverence”

• References Plato’s idea in The Republic that children should be educated through play

• Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ details child labour

‘The Sick Rose’

William Blake

• Many Songs of Experience poems condemn sexual repression: Earth’s Answer speaks of “free love with bondage bound” 

• Even gonorrhea + syphilis incurable in Blake’s time

• Blake = non-conformity; Christian teachings on love + marriage oppress sexuality to extent that it fuels prostitution industry as men felt need for secrecy when catering to individual sexual desires

• Outspoken advocate for women’s rights in The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion etc

• Poem published w/ engraving in which rose’s petals resemble surreal contorted figures

• Romantic poets condemned unnatural constraints upon human condition eg. taxes, famine →French Revolution BUT here Blake examines natural constraint as disease = natural consequence of sexual freedom but parallels it to unnatural constraint of monarchy/corrupt parliament upon democracy

‘Holy Thursday’ (‘Songs of Experience’/ ‘Songs of Innocence’)

William Blake

• St. Paul’s Cathedral = most sacred site in London; historic centre 

• Blake saw London as Jerusalem in visions, like the new Jerusalem has lost its way 

• Blake against monarchy ~ link between church + monarchy (king = head of CofE, royal weddings at St. Paul’s)

• Also against institutionalised religion, which segregated rich + poor making religion inaccessible/ non-democratic. Links to grace/ the elect

• dualist religions eg. Calvinism may encourage financial prosperity —> capitalist structures

• Ascension Day = service for poor children of London charity schools (many orphans); children enter 2 by 2 

• “Beadle” = warden, associated w/ hypocrisy as given money by borough to help children but a lot would be pocketed

• 1782-1787 = period of ‘optimism’ in which Blake, newly-married, was able to witness at close quarters the undertakings of childcare being established by the Government of the Poor in his own parish, founded 1782

• Songs of Experience poem illustrated w/ dark colours of nature & a dead child under a barren tree w/ a woman looking down at it

‘The Tyger’

William Blake

• published 1794 ~ 4 years after ‘The Lamb’, childlike hymn poem in which a child addresses a lamb, wondering how it came to exist (God’s creation)

• ‘The Lamb’ engraved with naked child; trees on either side seem to be strangled by a snake-like weed (foreshadowing revelation); surrounded by sheep

• ‘The Tyger’ engraved with non-intimidating tiger ~ passive ~ back legs move forward while front legs are immobile/rooted; tale of 2 halves, of internal contradiction

• title engraved in similar way to tree: organic relationship between the word + nature (religious?)

• ‘Tyger’ = archaic spelling; though fairly equally used in Blake’s time, Blake uses other spelling in other works possibly suggesting intentional variation

• Sometimes tygers were used to politically to describe revolutionaries in France

• Blake on Milton: “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it”: ‘Paradise Lost’ narrates the fall from Satan’s perspective, as an almost Cromwellian figure of legitimate overthrow against an omnipotent monarch. Often seen as heretical/ blasphemous but Blake hugely respected Milton, believing tale ot be literal

• Blake believer the creation = the fall; one + the same rather than Adam + Eve personally causing sin/evil

‘London’

William Blake

• Engraved with image of young boy pulling old man & gesturing towards an open door through which we can see a beam of light

• Thomas Paine (radical thinker): “Every chartered town is an aristocratic monopoly in itself” ~ Blake defended Paine’s controversial works eg. “either a devil or an inspired man”

• Blake apparently driven to fury when he witnessed a child being beaten on his street in chains

• Poor children often went off to fight to keep America as part of Britain or to simply maintain the racial unity of Britain’s empire

William Wordsworth

• Advocate of using vocabulary + speech patterns of common people

• Criticises “arbitrary + capricious habits of expression” separating poet from man, advocating instead for the “real language of men”

• Grew up in Lake District, in a sort of rural paradise along the Derwent River 

• His parents died within 5 years of each other 

• Began writing poetry as young boy at grammar school & before graduating went on walking tour of Europe which deepened love for nature + sympathy for the common man (particularly the Alps; sublimity vs rural commonness of England)

• Arrived in France on the 1st anniversary of the storming of the Bastille 

• French Revolution: ‘The Terror’ (guillotine; thousand executed inc. King Louis XVI + Marie Antoinette, in the name of revolutionary justice) + Napoleon's military dictatorship

• Passion for democracy clear in his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, also called Apology for the French Revolution

• Sympathy for common people remained even after revolutionary fervour was replaced w/ “softended feudalism” he endorsed in 1818

• ‘The Prelude’ books 1 + 2 focus on his own childhood & attempts to identify/study genesis of his own poetic imagination which he felt originated in early communication w/ nature

• Composition was thus dependent on adult Wordsworth’s memory + retrospect

‘Lines Written in Early Spring’

William Wordsworth

• From Lyrical Ballads 1798 ~ published w/ Coleridge

• In Milton’s Paradise Lost (17th cent.), “bower” = yonic symbol of fallen sexuality ~ secluded place where Adam + Eve experience unashamed sexual relationship blessed by God VS love-making after fall = dark inversion

‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’

William Wordsworth

• De-anthropomorphism (extended celestial metaphor) links to Galileo proving that earth orbits sun & not the other way around in the 17th century

• ‘Ode to Duty’ + ‘The Character of the Happy Warrior’ are Wordsworth poems which transfer us from the natural to the moral worlds without sharp separation

‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’

William Wordsworth

• Wordsworth returned from France 1792 (lost faith in French Revolution & left child in France) ie. around 5 years before poem written, around the same time that he is recollecting (“Five years have past”)

• Wye = Southeast Wales, north of Cardiff city (liminal) bordering England: detachment from civilisation

• Ruins = archetypal setting for Romantic poets eg. Wordsworth’s contemporary painter Turner

• Ancient Greek philosophy (Heraclitus): river analogous to paradox of flux + change ~ Platonic theory of forms reactionary in part to material decay; soul’s anamnesis (recollection) as unitive by returning to pure non-physical form realm. River as transient but also eternal/ having an essence 

• “No man ever steps in the same river twice”

Lord Byron

• Born w/ clubbed right foot; raised by emotionally unstable mother ~ excessive tenderness, fierce temper + pride ~ she often mocked his lameness

• From Presbyterian nurse, developed lifelong love for Bible + fascination w/ Calvinist doctrines of innate evil + predestined salvation

• Inherited title of lord at 10 when his great-uncle died

• First formed passionate attachments w/ younger boys at the Harrow School (young)

• Took a bear to college at Cambridge as dogs were explicitly not allowed

• London diversions eg. fencing, theatre, demimondes + gambling →debt

• Literary advisor objected to frank eroticism of first book of poetry

• Campaigned for self-determination of small empires/nations eg. Israel;

• 1811: was deeply affected by mother’s loss + loss of 2 friends. Unable to attend mother’s funeral ~ didn’t follow procession to grave but watched from gate at Newstead Abbey

• Accompanied Percy Shelley to Italy & swam across the Strait at Hellespont ~ eccentricity

• Part of “grand tour” to escape debt + scandal of getting sister pregnant (?)

• Died fighting Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence (liberal, romantic nationalism)

• “mad, bad + dangerous to know” ~ Lady Caroline Lamb after affair w/ Byron ended

‘Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull’

Lord Byron

• Formed from a monk (probably; Byron’s gardener found skull at his Newstead Abbey estate, former monastery) ~ adds anticlerical subtext as monk having fun

• Real goblet made from upside-down skull (“upon” = about, not literally engraved)

• Created drinking society called the “order of the skull”

• Parallel to “veni, vidi, vici” of Julias Caesar (“I came, I saw, I conquered”)

• Worm = common motif in carpe diem poems (‘To His Coy Mistress’) ~ as is virginity (‘To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time’)

• Biblical/moralistic association with drink

‘So We’ll Go no more A Roving’

Lord Byron

• Written in Venice at end of Carnival + beginning of Lent ~ transition from hedonism to abstinence

• Described exhaustion turning nearly 30 in letter to friend: “the sword wearing out the scabbard”

• Taken from Scottish song The Jolly Beggar in which daughter is seduced by rakish suitor, but tone changed to more mournful

‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’

Lord Byron

• Greece (during Greek War of Independence) & also where Byron would die

• Greece took back control of country from oppressive Ottoman Empire, inspired by Enlightenment/ Romantic ideals of liberty

• Dying ~ health in decline + had drunk away money; would later die of fever

• “yellow leaf” = allusion to Macbeth when he speaks (soliloquy) to Lady Macbeth ~ nihilistic exploration of meaningless of life but w/ more heroic attitude from Macbeth who keeps fighting (“It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ SIgnifying nothing.”

Percy Shelley

• Subjected to bullying (due partly to hallucinations + sleepwalking) at Syon House Academy

• Retained interest in science (astronomy, chemistry etc.) from lectures w/ Adam Walker

• Taunted w/ epithets at Eton College eg. “Mad Shelley” + “Shelley the atheist”

• First publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi ~ put his heretical + atheistical opinions into mouth of villain Zastrozzi (interlocutor) airing dangerous opinions w/o them being ascribed to him as author

• Prose pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism written when in Oxford ~ title more inflammatory than argument, which centres upon “the nature of belief”

• Shelley derived this position from sceptical philosophies of Locke + Hume (H; mind = blank slate, formed by experience; non-conformity Christian hating CofE)

• Burden of proof for belief can only be found in the senses, reason, or testimony

• By implicitly questioning monarchy, Shelley didn’t express patriotism required in midst of the Napoleonic Wars ~ French Revolution fundamentally about atheism & thus abolishing Catholicism (revolutionaries hated how revolution against rich was equated w/ Revolution against God)

• Oxford authorities expelled him in 1811 for this ~ could have been reinstated by Shelley’s father but refused to disavow the pamphlet. Had earlier been reprimanded for Satanism as tried to rise the devil in crypt

• Believed in sexual freedom but this translated in his life to abandoning multiple wives ~ vehemently ideologically opposed to idea of marriage

• Eloped with 16 year-old Harriet Westbrook, against his father’s wishes, then abandoned her for years & ran away to Italy with Mary Shelley

• Had children who died with both wives

‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’

Percy Shelley

• Believed to be written around 1816

• Concerned w/ regeneration of spiritual + poetic self & of Europe politically

• Napoleonic war just finished (N defeated) ~ 1815

• Industrialisation→overcrowding, extreme poverty

• Written when Shelley was w/ Mary Shelley but associated w/ grief for Harriet Westbrook’s death, who had been missing for a month when her body was found

• Eloped w/ Harriet when she was 16; she gave birth in 1813 when Shelley accused her of marrying him for money. He left her pregnant with 2nd child, running away to Italy w/ Mary Shelley

• Some descriptions build on poetic tradition of Blazons eg. Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 130’

‘Ode to the West Wind’

Percy Shelley

• Peterloo Massacre 1819: St Peter’s Field, Manchester ~ 60,000 gathered to demand reform of parliamentary representation →militia (MC rural tories) sent in; 18 dead but battle connotes huge bloodshed

• Acute economic slump after Napoleon Wars: chronic unemployment, harvest failure, corn laws keeping bread prices high 

• Manhood suffrage movement: due to 40 shilling rule only around 3% of the population had the vote: had to own property with annual rental value of at least 40 shillings

• Industrial revolution → popularised Northern cities with no MPs

• Shelley detested waste of living in luxury & felt the royals were hypocrites (idealist)

• Also this year, Mary loses child William

• Wed wind causes storm (catalyst for growing conflict), relating to the Greek god Zephyr; also possibly alludes to class division as West of cities often UC as smoke blows West → East

‘The Question’

Percy Shelley

• Echo of middle section (‘Purgatorio’) of ‘The Divine Comedy’ (Dante) from the 14th century, a long epic about reaching Heaven/ soul’s journey towards God ~ famously opens with description of being lost in woods as a metaphor for midlife crisis (or crisis of faith)

• Shelley: “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination”

• Written after the death of Shelley’s first three children but also after the birth of his fourth child (Percy Florence) who would survive

‘Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples’

Percy Shelley

• Had lost custody of dead wife Harriet’s children; moved to Naples for the Winter in September 1818

• Daughter died shortly after; Mary blamed Shelley for not delaying travel as she had a fever ~ they were briefly estranger

• Extremely depressed; rumours he attempted suicide whilst in Naples

• Spenserian stanza = fixed verse form invented by Spenser’s famous epic ‘The Faerie Queen’ (16th cent.) ~ 9 lines, 8 in iambic pentameter & a final ‘alexandrine’ line (12 syllables) in iambic hexameter

John Keats

• Wide range of poetic forms from sonnet to Spenserian romance to Miltonic epic

• Critics attacked his work as that of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” 

• Father seriously injured when horse stumbled & died the next day & mother died 5 years later

• At school, encouraged to read broadly + pursue own interests ~ headmaster Clarke was close friend of radical reformer John Cartwright

• Friend w/ liberal, anti-authoritarian public speaker Leigh Hunt who argued for democracy in revolutionary age + praised Keats

• Criticised by more conservative critics ~ “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language”

• Criticised also for being escapist/fanatist but described literature as “realms of gold”

• In 1817, got into debate walking with friend Dilke, & talked of what exactly it meant to be a “Man of Achievement” ~ “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after factor + reason”

‘Sonnet on the Sea’

John Keats

• April 1817 ~ had quit medical school to pursue poetry in 1816; caring for brother with what would be fatal tuberculosis

• First collection published March & nobody outside Keats’ circle showed interest. Clarke: the book “might have emerged in Timbuctoo”. Failure.

• Partly conventional Petrarchan sonnet but unusual sestet rhyme scheme

• Sonnets have tradition of unattainability

‘Ode to a Nightingale’

John Keats

• Once wrote in a letter “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

‘Ode on Melanchol'y’

John Keats

• Among Keats’ favourite readings in 1819 was Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’, a 17th century encyclopedia investigation of the causes + symptoms of melancholy

• 1819 letter to his brother: “while we are laughing the seed of trouble is put into the wide arable land of events”

• Byronic allusion (‘She Walks in Beauty’) subverted in final stanza