Romanticism

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the Romanticism lecture notes.

Romanticism

An era in English Literature from the 1770s to the 1830s, characterized by a shift from reason to feeling, passion, and imagination.

Background

• 1775-76 | American War of Independence

• 1789 | French Revolution

• Industrial Revolution -- economic rise of the middle class

• Pantheism: God is immanent in Nature —> human mind ~ divine

• publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 = beginning of Romanticism

• central innovation: questioned the ideal of calirity —> vagueness and obscurity is more evocative of the infinite

• Empiricism: the idea that knowledge comes from experience; the mind is a blank slate at birth.

• sublime: a quality that inspires great admiration or awe, while also evoking the sense of terror, darkness and vastness, often associated with nature and beauty

• two generations of Romanticism

Neo-Classicism / Age of Reason / Enlightenment

Emphasized reason, logic, and social order; prevalent from the 1660s to the 1770s.

• the era preceding Romanticism

• Descartes: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)

• the head is int the center

• humans = social beings, products of social order

• respect for authority

• valued symmetry, balance, harmony

• stability and hierarchy

• universality over individualism

• conformity, representative truths

• tradition

• clarity, simplicity

• rational sense to universe: patterns laws, meaning

• present world, real world

first generation of the Romantic movement

William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

William Blake (1757-1827)

• created an idiosyncratic visionary universe

• consciously rejected the major ideas of Enlightenment

• Composite Art: illustrated and engraved his works —> verse + visual (limited number of hand-made copies)

• 1789-94 | Songs of Innocence and Experience

  • Innocence series first, later combined with the Experience series

  • not opposites but contrasts complementing each other

• for him, the only acceptable God is the creative/ poetic Imagination

Songs of Innocence

Introduced by a piper, represents a quasi-idyllic world of pastorals and psalms with central figures like children and shepherds.

• main elements: humble life, uncorrupted nature, uninhibited sexuality

• the inhabitatnts of Innocence are not immune to menace —> they often get lost or punished, live in orphanages, sold as slaves or chimney sweeps

• unaware of dangers

• dependent on a guardian: Nurse, Shepherd, Angel, Christ

• despite their vulnerability, these children retain a spiritual resilience and believe in a better world

Songs of Experience

Introduced by the ancient Bard, represents a dark, self-enclosed world with images like prematurely blighted children, dark forests, sick flowers, wild beasts.

• strong criticism of contemporary society, politics & religious dogmas of the Church

• Old Testament God = Nobodaddy (restricter and bounder of freedom)

• The Tyger

  • symbolic poem

  • represents the sublime, poetic imagination in constant fight with Nobodaddy, the creator (= God)

  • tyger = sins —> people

  • maybe experience is some kind of darkness —> darkness is a mental space to which the tyger appears to only to this speaker

  • therefore, the mind creates to world we see (the tyger is a creation of the mind) = seeing not through the eye but with the eye

  • we are God, we create the world —> the human being is divine

Lake Poets

Wordsworth and Coleridge; their joint project, Lyrical Ballads in 1798, marked a turning point in literary history with a revolution in English poetic style.

• opening poem: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner

• closing poem: Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

• themes:

  • supernatural

  • human suffering

  • psychology

  • nature

• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity (Wordsworth)

• delight in nature —> source of inspiration (Pantheism)

• sensory experiences

• memory

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• mysterious unity of man and nature

• joy, deligh, rapture, company in unlimited nature vs. vacant and pensive mood in an urban isolation

• poet of visual perception

• advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry

Tintern Abbey

• emblematic piece of early Romatic poetry

• last poem in Lyrical Ballads —> important place, somewhat of a conclusion

• written in blank verse in iambic pentameter

  • used to be a marker of serious poetry

• loco-descriptive poem: descriptive poetry on local scenery

• double exposure technique: multiple voices or perspectives are layered within a single poem

• visit to the Wye Valey in Wales

• Tintern Abbey only appears in the title

• Wordsworth apparently wrote this on his way to meet his publisher in Bristol —> composed it in memory

Themes:

• the restorative power of Nature

  • written during the Industrial Revolution —> rural areas transformed into centers of manufacturing and production

  • Wye Valey is still untouched and intact

  • reponse to the industrialization of society: urban life is lonely and depleating —> natural world restores and nourishes the human soul

  • urban life: “din“, “lonely“, “dreary“, “evil“ —y noisy, isolating

  • begins with lamentation and nostalgia ~ topographical elegies: the speaker returns to a place and looks at the changes and how time passes (he’s not talking about change here)

  • tranquility, stillness, quiet seclusion —> Romantic escapism - the poet is a lonely wanderer escaping to nature

  • turning to nature again —> turning away from the political scene? (Wordsworth was a supporter of the French Revolution)

• awe and the sublime

  • taking people beyonf themselves

  • nature offers access to the sublime —> transcending our earthly bodies

  • description of individual parts —> nature is so vast and overwhelming that the speaker can only grasp pieces of it

  • sense of unity in the natural world —> shift in description to portraying nature as a coherent whole

  • philosophical perspective: memory, education, knowledge, language —> perception and cognition are not really separate = we cannot ever see what the world is like objectively

  • “pastoral forms” - bucolic poetry (idyllic nature

  • a move from specificity to complete imagination —> nature becoming a mental image

    • “blind man“ - physical and mental perception (remembrance is quintessecially a form of mental seeing)

  • unconscious memories —> shape us —> perhaps seeing nature morally improved the lyrical I?

  • blessed mood

    • spiritual experience - religious?

• perception, creativity and imagination

  • poetic imagination: the ability to write and create poems

  • nature is a source of inspiration —> creative reflection

  • our minds are half creating/ inventing nature

    • wild secluded landscape —> gives rise to deep thoughts

      • impressing/ projecting the thoughts on the scene

      • the conflict of objective and subjective perception: seeing things as they are or imposing personal thoughts on them, giving them a subjective meaning

• time and change

  • the passage of time leads to loss, but also greater understanding of self and of the world

  • the speaer visited this place 5 years ago

  • growing up - losing the naive yet exciting emotional highs and lows of youth

  • appreciates nature more now that he’s older

  • use of first-person plural “we & us“ —> generality, turning his private conviction into a doctrine

  • the experience of loss, change and growth are part of a naturla pattern

  • structured around time: past —> present —> future

  • about the passge of time, yet a the poem gives as a moment of stillness too, preserving a single moment

• the degree to which mind creates nature or nature creates the mind

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• unity of comprehensiveness

• formative influences: Plato, Neoplatonism, Kant

• poet of auditory perception

• 1797-98 | Divine Comedy (3 supernatural poems)

• conversation poems: informal, coloquial poem whose tone echoes relaxed conversation

  • situates itself between speech and writing

• The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

  • ballad/ epyllion: a miniature epic poem resembling an epic in meter and/ or style, but not in length

  • framework: marriage

• Kubla Khan

  • fragment

  • exploration of the mind when it is not shackled by reason

  • 3 sections

    • Garden of Paradise/conscious/beautiful

    • satanic landscape/subconscious/sublime

    • at the end: return to Paradise

    • the poet has a superhuman creative energy experience, knowledge, wisdom: dangerous for the ordinary people

second generation of the Romantic movement

George Gordon Byron, John Keats, Percy Shelley

• overlaps in their poetic style with the first generational poets

• rich poetic language, elaborate forms, metaphors, classical allusions, fascination with Greece and the Mediterranean, cosmopolitan, European context

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

• Trinity College, Cambridge

• extravagant life

• 1807 | Hours of Idleness

  • conventional verses

• 1809 | Englsh Bards and Scotch Reviewers

  • uncompromising satire on contemporary literary life in the couplet style of Pope

  • ridiculing famous contemporaries: Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge

• Neoclassical tradition represents true poetry to him

• rejection of the Lake Poets

• Grand Tour: Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania, Greece

• 1812-16 | Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  • the travels and experiences of a pilgrim, who, sated with his past life of sin and pleasure, finds distraction in his travels through Portugal, Spain, Greece and Albania

  • dramatis persona, the Byronic hero: alien, mysterious, gloomy spirit, superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity

    • torturing memory of an enormous, nameless gilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom

    • Isolated, self-reliant, pursuing his own ends

    • self generated moral code

• 1816-17 | Manfred

  • similarities with Goethe’s Faust

  • verse drama

• 1818-24 | Don Juan

  • satirical novel in verse

  • picaresque: a genre of early novel characterized by a first-person narrative following the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer as they travel and interact with different social classes, often relying on wit and resourcefulness to survive

  • doubt, scepticism

  • attacks sexually prudish, religiously orthodox and politically conservative parties

  • everything is reduced to the same materialistic level

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• love, belief in the perfectability of man

• expelled from Oxford because of his pamphlet: The Necessity of Atheism

• 1813 | Queen Mab

  • first impotant work

  • institutional religion and codified morality are the roots of social evil

• major inlfuences: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Plato and Neoplatonism

• 1816 | Mont Blanc

  • local poem

  • major influence: Tintern Abbey

  • landscape is the emblem of the human mind

• 1821 | Adonais

  • elegy on Keats’s death

  • belief in Neoplatonic resurrection in the eternal beauty of the universe

John Keats (1795-1821)

• beauty and truth

• influences: Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron

• distinctive qualities of his poems:

  • richly sensuous surface

  • objective correlative

  • negative capability —> the poet totally identifies himself with the object he contemplates, almost loses his own identity

  • slow paced movement

  • melancholy in delight, pleaeure in pain

  • imagination is often expressed in the combined metaphor of consummated love and death

Ode to a Nightingal

• 80 lines - the longest ode of Keats’s

• rhyme scheme: abab cdecde —> playing with the sonnet form

• the speaker starts with talking about his heartache and he says he feels numb

• a pain is present – what should be done about it? (drugs, alcohol, death)

• Lethe (river of the underworld in Greek mythology): he wants to forget worldly memories and be part of the shadow world

• drinking hemlock (poison): Socrates was the first person killed by hemlock (wise and good people are murdered in this world)

  • process of dying by hemlock: losing sensations 

• he addresses a nightingale whose voice he heard and tells it that he is not jealous of its happiness just understands it too completely

  • structure based on opposition (the nightingale is happy, he is not)

  • desire: he wants his position to be the same as the bird's

• he is standing in a dark forest, listening to the beguiling and beautiful song of the nightingale bird

  • a deep and meandering meditation by the speaker on time, death, beauty, nature, and human suffering

  • something the speaker would very much like to escape

  • nothing can last: the speaker perceives “immortality” in the figure of the bird—a creature that, the speaker believes, does not feel the passing of time, and whose song has echoed across the centuries

  • the nightingale flies away: sense of loss and reassurance that everything inevitably fades

• he is tasting happiness in his own garden

  • Province, France: troubadour poetry, poetic inspiration

  • Hippocrene: mythological spring associated with the muses (Greec)

  • journey through time to the beginning of poetry

• reason to die: time presses down on people, producing “weariness” and sickness and making people age

  • youthful vigour and beauty “fade” 

  • Keats recently lost his younger brother, he is traumatised

  • youth grows pale and dies (recalling his brother Tom)

  • beauty cannot stay beautiful, and “new Love” will also soon be gone

  • everything is exposed to the changes brough by time

  • you need to learn to live with these changes

• the speaker wants to escape all the pressures and suffering that come with being human

  • drink or drugs might offer a release

  • the speaker feels that consciousness itself is a kind of burden—that merely "to think is to be full of sorrow" 

  • the speaker does not really want to get drunk—instead, the speaker is longing for purity and beauty

• the speaker finds comfort in the nightingale's song and at one point even believes that poetry will bring the speaker metaphorically closer to the nightingale

• being with the nightingale brings an ecstatic moment, a unity

  • sitting in the garden, hearing the nightingale makes him imagine he is flying with the bird: description of a fairy world (Moon Queen)

  • imagination is powerful, but only a trick of the mind

• even the natural world comes to represent the crushing progress of time

  • flowers fade "fast" and become covered autumn leaves 

  • buzzing flies (representation of death)

  • the poet thinks it might be easier to just do away with time at the earliest opportunity—via death

• synaesthesia (all senses working together) brings the real climax

  • he hears the flies, smells the roses, touches things

  • physical things around him delight him

  • more valuable than anything associated with imagination

• the nightingale’s requiem (funeral song) describes death

  • there is no afterlife (lack of belief)

  • dying is described not in terms of a loss, but as an ecstatic feeling (reaching the fullness of this world)

• death would end the speaker’s suffering, but would make also make him unable to perceive the beauty of the nightingale’s song

  • the poem briefly argues in favour of human consciousness because it allows the experience of beauty (in the natural world or in art)

  • he tells the nightingale to fly away and he will follow him by the wings of poetry, and he already starts to describe the forest

• the speaker calls the nightingale “immortal” 

  • its song is the same as the song heard in “ancient” and biblical times – poetry is immortal

• the tragedy of life against the immortality of the music of the nightingale

  • no one can escape the world forever

  • the song of the bird is poetry, which will live on - compared to the mortality of the poet, as humans die

• the speaker seems to be an isolated figure

  • the nightingale flies away - no lasting comfort

  • confirming the speaker’s anxiety that nothing good or beautiful can last forever

  • the speaker remains alone, suggesting that ultimately people are alone, confined within the limits of their own minds 

• one must be careful with imagination

  • when you return to the actual world, everything seems more painful

• Do I wake or sleep? —> symbol of an uncertain world

  • ability to learn to live in the world where you do not always get an answer for everything