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Romantic Poetry and the Modern World Dr Sarah Burdett

Romantic Poetry and the Modern World Dr Sarah Burdett. Dr Sarah Burdett. ‘Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to the endless night.’ - William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (1807), lines 122-124.

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Romantic Poetry and the Modern World Dr Sarah Burdett

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  1. Romantic Poetry and the Modern World Dr Sarah Burdett Dr Sarah Burdett

  2. ‘Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to the endless night.’ - William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (1807), lines 122-124

  3. ‘“End of the Night” is ... well, it’s Jim [Morrison] saying to the world, come on, people, get free, get rid of all that shit, take a journey to the great midnight. I’m sure that has meaning for me, and I’m sure that has meaning for you.’ - Interview with Paul Rothchild, producer of the first Doors’ album, March 1967 • Romantic Themes • Discontent with the present • situation • Quest for liberation • (mental and/or physical) • Desire to travel to mystical, and • seemingly impossible realms • (‘great midnight’) • Active protest for change

  4. Romanticism (1780-1830-ish) ‘Profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century... Its chief emphasis was upon freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became the new standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical models favoured by 18th-century neoclassicism. Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. ... They saw themselves as free spirits expressing their own imaginative truths.’ • Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015)

  5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) • An increasing interest in nature and its spiritual properties (‘Natural Religion’) • Glorification of the natural, primitive and uncivilised way of life • Power of imagination • Need for spontaneity in thought and action • Freedom of personal expression • Idea of the Noble Savage – man inherently good but corrupted by society

  6. ‘Romanticism represents a critique of Modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilisation, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past... The Romantic critique is bound up with an experience of loss... [It is] characterised by the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost, at the level of both individuals and humanity at large... The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude.’ - Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Duke UP, 2001), pp.17, 21-22

  7. Innovation and Revolution ‘A Multitude of causes, unknown to former times’ - William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 • 1776: American Declaration of Independence • 1780-1840: Industrial Revolution • 1788: George III suffers mental collapse • 1789-1803: French Revolution • 1803-1815: Napoleonic Wars • 1811: Prince of Wales becomes Prince Regent of England • 1819: Peterloo Massacre (Britain) • 1825: Decembrist Uprising (Russia) • 1832: Reform Act (Britain) • Industrialisation • Urbanisation • Political Revolution

  8. Industrial Revolution (1780-1840) • Birth of the machine • Arrival of wide-spread media through news print: steam-press, paper-making machine, mail coach • Establishment of factory economy • Labourers working long hours in dangerous environments for very little pay

  9. Urbanisation • Vast spread of people to cities for work • London population in 1715 = 630,000. London population in 1815 = 1.4 million London population in 1860 = 3,188,485 • ‘Even next door neighbours, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other’s names’. -William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 • ‘The sky was blotted out by smoke and dust’. - Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The English Journeys. Journal of a Visit to France and Britain, 1826

  10. French Revolution (1789-1803) and Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) • 1789 - Storming of the • Bastille • Praised by Blake in his • poem ‘The French • Revolution’ (1790) • ‘Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! ... Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. • – William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 Emergence in Britain of 1790s ‘Pamphlet Wars’ (Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin)

  11. Reign of Terror (1793-1794) Revolution turns bloody under Robespierre’s reign Jacobins: Extremist French radicals • 21 January 1793: Execution of • Louis XVI • 1 February 1793: France declares • war on Britain and Holland • 14 October 1793: Execution of • Marie Antoinette • Conservative backlash in Britain

  12. Post-Reign of Terror ‘Most melancholy ... were my day-thoughts, my dreams were miserable; ... long after the last beat of those atrocities ... I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep’. - Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 1794: Radicals John Thelwall, John Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy arrested for high treason (Treason Trials) 1813: John and Leigh Hunt imprisoned for criticising the Prince Regent John Thelwall addressing the crowd in 1794

  13. ‘... a great modern public abruptly and dramatically comes to life. This public shares the feeling of living in a revolutionary age, an age that generates explosive upheavals in every dimension of personal, social and political life. At the same time, the 19th-century modern public can remember what it is to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all. From this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously, the ideas of modernisation and modernism emerge and unfold.' - Marshall Berman, All that is SolidMelts into Air (Penguin, 1982),p.17 A break with the past Time is always ‘out of joint’ ‘A rejection of contemporary society, an experience of loss, a melancholic nostalgia, and a quest for the lost object: such are the chief components of the Romantic vision’. -Lowry and Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, p.24

  14. William Blake (1757-1827): First Generation British Romantic. London-based. • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): Second Generation British Romantic . Largely nomadic. • Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837): Russian Romantic/Realist. • Imagination and Perception • Earthly transcendence • Poet as legislator • Nature as active agent of change

  15. ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (1807)Imagination, Perception and Prophecy ‘We are led to Believe a LieWhen we see not Thro' the Eye.’ - Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, lines 125-126 ‘Leads you to believe a lie, When you see with, not thro' the Eye.’ - Blake, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ Seeing with the eye = scientific, rationalist way of viewing things, associated with Newton and Locke. Seeing through the eye = Bringing the imagination into play in order to actively re-shape the world around us.

  16. ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And Eternity in an hour.’ Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, lines 1-4 ‘Divine Arts of Imagination—Imagination, the real and Eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow.’ Blake, Jerusalem Imagination = Godlike in its capacity for creation.

  17. ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) Earthly Transcendence and Poet as Legislator ‘If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; if I were a swift cloud to fly with thee ... If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be / the comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven... O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ - ‘Ode’, Stanza IV ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’ - Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821) ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/ Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth!’ - ‘Ode’, stanza V

  18. Peterloo Massacre (16 August 1819) 60,000 working men and women met at St Peter’s fields, Mancheser, to listen to Henry Hunt protest for universal suffrage, liberty and political rights. Local magistrates panicked and sent in Yeomanry to arrest Hunt. • When crowd locked • arms, the Yeomanry • began striking people • down with their swords. • Hussars ordered in to • ‘control’ the public. • 11 people killed and • over 400 seriously • injured, including • women and children.

  19. ‘The torrent of my Indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously to hear how the country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers.’ -Shelley, Letter to Charles Ollier, August 1819 ‘What are the people of England about? ... A troop of the enraged master manufacturers are let loose with sharpened swords upon a multitude of their starving dependents, and .... they ride over them and massacre them without distinction of sex and age and cut off women’s breasts and dash the heads of infants against stones.’ • Shelley, Letter to Leigh Hunt, November 1819 ‘[Shelley] would overthrow the constitution … pull down our churches, level our Establishment and burn our Bibles’ -The Quarterly Review, 1818.

  20. ‘With folded arms and steady eye, and little fear and less surprise, look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away Then they will return with shame, to the palace from which they came, and the blood thus shed will speak, in hot flushes on their cheek.’ - Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, 1819, Stanzas 85-86 ‘Rise like Lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number-Shake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on youYe are many - they are few.’ - Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Stanza 91

  21. ‘The Bronze Horseman’ (written 1833, published 1841)St Petersburg Flood (7 November 1824)

  22. Decembrist Uprising (14 December 1825) • Military officials staged a revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in St Petersburg, Russia • Aim was to overthrow the government and make Russia a constitutional monarchy • Pushkin implicated as part of the riot due to radical sympathies • Revolt failed - Nicholas I ascended to the throne and prevented spread of liberal movement in Russia

  23. ‘I’m in love / with your strict and structured form, The Neva’s commanding flow. ... ‘I’m in love with the frost and immobile air of your brutal winter’ - Pushkin, ‘Bronze Horseman’, Prologue, stanza 4 ‘The Romantic critique is bound up with an experience of loss... [It is] characterised by the painful and melancholic conviction that in modern reality something precious has been lost, at the level of both individuals and humanity at large... The soul ardently desires to go home again, to return to its homeland, in the spiritual sense, and this nostalgia is at the heart of the Romantic attitude.’ - Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, p.21-22 ‘He never once went home ... The world had lost all meaning to him’ - Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, Part 2, stanza 8

  24. ‘Petersburg’s whole life story is here, brilliantly crystalized and compressed: a vision of the city’s grandeur and magnificence, and a vision of the madness on which it is based – the mad idea that a volatile nature can be permanently tamed and dominated by imperial will; nature’s revenge, erupting cataclysmically, smashing grandeur into rubble, shattering lives and hopes; the vulnerability and terror of Petersburg’s common people caught in the midst of a battle of giants.. Pushkin’s poem speaks for the martyred Decembrists ... But “The Bronze Horseman” also goes beyond them, for it reaches far deeper into the city, into the lives of the impoverished masses.’ - Berman, All that is Solid, 188-189 ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ - Shelley, ‘Ode’ to the West Wind’, stanza V Idea of nature as active agent of change

  25. ‘The Bronze Horseman’ and the 5 Features of Modernity • A break with the past ‘One hundred years have passed’ (prologue) ‘He gazes around, but nothing is as he knows it’ (part 2, stanza 4) • Time is always ‘out of joint’ Amalgamates reign of Tsar Peter the Great (1696–1725) with Flood in St Petersburg (1824) • Space-time compression ‘On the banks of a wilderness of water one man stood, brimming with thoughts’ (Prologue, stanza 1). ‘crowded shores busy with life, / and ships from all ends of the earth jostle towards rich jetties’ (Prologue, stanza 3) • The rise of the ‘everyday’/ephemeral ‘They discovered no trace / of yesterday’s disaster’.(part 2, stanza 7) • An experience of fragmentation, displacement and dispersal ‘The gates / I guess, got taken by the flood. / But where are the walls / the doors?’ (pt 2, st 5). ‘Where there’d once been a door, they found my insane friend’ (pt 2, st 11)

  26. Romanticism and the Modern World • Recurring emphasis in poems on liberation and transformation. • All advocate a journey from the bleakness and oppressiveness of modernity, to a world in which enchantment, freedom, and humanity might be re-found. • Poetry = reaction to world in which humans are replaced by machines, busy city life dominates, and Europe is plagued by social and political instability.

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