E28A: The Poetic Imagination

E28A: The Poetic Imagination Carpe Diem Oct. 24. 2014

Admin: • Peer review sign up sheet. • Give them your draft by Sun at latest. • Give back comments back by Wed at latest.

Monday reading: • 2 (very different) Wordsworth poems

Essay #1: • Due in one week

“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” Sonnets from Astrophil and Stella “Sonnet 1” from Amoretti Sonnets 1595 1600 1609 1591 1599 1633 1552-1599 Spenser 1552-1618 Raleigh 1564-1616 Shakespeare 1571-1631 Donne 1554-1586 Sidney 1564-1593 Marlowe “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” “How Soon Hath Time” “Tintern Abbey” “Kubla Khan” “To the Virgins” 1648 1751 1631 1816 1798 1591-1674 Herrick 1608-1674 Milton 1716-1771 Gray 1770-1850 Wordsworth 1772-1834 Coleridge

SONNET 71 No longer mourn for me when I am dead Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot If thinking on me then should make you woe. O, if, I say, you look upon this verse When I perhaps compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. But let your love even with my life decay, Lest the wise world should look into your moan And mock you with me after I am gone.

ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) • uses the word “grave” only once • sadness of the fleeting: “Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” • “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, / Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray”—relation to carpe diem poetry? • Contains many phrases which have entered • the common English lexicon: • "The Paths of Glory" • "Celestial fire" • "Some mute inglorious Milton" • "Far from the Madding Crowd" • "The unlettered muse" • "Kindred spirit"

Elegy: -An elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject. Where does the elegy come from? • [sunt] lacrimaererum: latin for “There are tears of things” (despair for the human condition) – derived from Book 1, line 462 of the Aeneid. In this passage, Aeneas gazes at a mural found in a Carthaginian temple (dedicated to Juno), which depicts battles of the Trojan War and deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is moved to tears, and says "suntlacrimaererum et mentemmortaliatangunt" (trans. "There are tears for [or "of"] things and mortal things touch the mind.") The character Robert Frobisher ends his final letter in Cloud Atlas (novel) by David Mitchell (author) with the quotation "suntlacrimaererum."

STANZAS 13-15 (LINES 45-56) Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

6 Groups • Highlight words according to theme • Build a What/How/Why argument: • Topic sentence/thesis • 5 supporting pieces of evidence • Conclusion sentence • Themes to look for: missed opportunities, leading a virtuous life, death as the great equalizer, nature, remembering the past

British Romanticism (1798-1837) A different kind of “romance”…

British Romanticism (1798-1837) “Kubla Khan” “Tintern Abbey” 1798 1816 1770-1850 Wordsworth 1772-1834 Coleridge

British Romanticism (1798-1837) Queen Victoria takes the throne of the United Kingdom. The beginning of Queen Victoria's reign sees the decline of the Romantic Movement. Why 1798? “Kubla Khan” “Tintern Abbey” 1798 1816 1770-1850 Wordsworth 1772-1834 Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads published in 1798 But 1789—the beginning of the French Revolution might also be an appropriate starting point “Kubla Khan” “Tintern Abbey” 1798 1816 1770-1850 Wordsworth 1772-1834 Coleridge

British Romanticism (1798-1837)

British Romanticism (1798-1837) • What characterizes British Romantic Poetry? • Imagination • Nature • Individual • Critique of social order • Rejection of neoclassical style

From The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3 ed.): Romanticism: A sweeping but indispensable modern term applied to the profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most subsequent developments in literature The restrained balance valued in 18th‐century culture was abandoned in favour of emotional intensity, often taken to extremes of rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or sentimentality. The Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. They stressed the creative power of the mind and allowed nature to be seen as a responsive mirror of the soul. Many Romantic writers cultivated the appeal of the exotic, the bizarre, or the macabre; almost all showed a new interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium or of folk superstition and legend. The creative imagination occupied the centre of Romantic views of art, which replaced the ‘mechanical’ rules of conventional form with an ‘organic’ principle of natural growth and free development.

The Lake Poets (esp. Coleridge, Wordsworth) were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.

“This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentry, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797.”

“Kubla Khan” is… • “an ecstatic spasm, a pure spurt of romantic inspiration” • “pure lyricism—sound, picture, sensation—clothed in the sensuous beauty of imagery that none knew so well as its author how to evoke” • & it has “an air of meaning rather than meaning itself”

It seems the most pressing question we can have about this poem is "What does it mean?" -- if, indeed, it was ever intended to have any particular meaning. • For the overwhelming majority of Coleridge's contemporaries, Kubla Khan seemed to be no better than nonsense, and they dismissed it contemptuously. • Throughout the nineteenth century and during the first quarter of the twentieth century Kubla Khan was considered, almost universally, to be a poem in which sound overwhelms sense. • This reminds us that not everything about poetry is meant to be wholly explicable -- especially in such poems as Kubla Khan, where "meaning" is not a formulated idea and is, at best, only suggested through oblique and suggestive imagery. • Generally speaking, however, the most popular view by far is that Kubla Khan is concerned with the poetic process itself. "What is Kubla Khan about? This is, or ought to be, an established fact of criticism:Kubla Khan is a poem about poetry”. • On this reading, Kubla Khan, who causes a pleasure-dome and elaborate gardens to be constructed in Xanadu, is a type of the artist, whose glorious creation is a precariously balanced reconciliation of the natural and the artificial.

If you agree that Kubla Khan is a poet-figure, how does he compose his “poetry”? Look at what happens in stanza 1: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But what happens in the next stanza?: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

1. “I would build that dome in air” (46), declares the speaker—why can't he do it? Or is that what the fragmentary poem we have amounts to—the dome he would like to build in air?

Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1482) shows the fertility of spring, yet the principle figure in the center, Venus, can also be understood as the Virgin Mary, an example of two different levels of discourse for two different classes of people.

E28A: The Poetic Imagination