Part 2 Romantic Age Poets in The Romantic Age (1798-1824) Lecture 14

1. Part 2 Romantic Age Poets in The Romantic Age (1798-1824) Lecture 14 History of English Literature MA ENGLISH COMSATS Virtual Islamabad

2. Introduction • The most fruitful period • The revolt against the Classical school which had been started • Most popular English poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats belong to this period.

3. The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the publication in 1798 of the little volume of 'Lyrical Ballads' which contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

4. Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a hard battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the founding and continued success of the first two important English literary and political quarterlies.

5. Conti. • 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The Quarterly Review,' which in general stood in literature for the conservative eighteenth century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the Romantic poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a few words in passing.

6. Imagination • The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity.

7. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art.

8. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.

9. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance.

10. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

11. English Romanticism • Introduction • Romantic poetry • William Wordsworth • S.T. Coleridge • G.G. Byron • P.B. Shelley • John Keats

12. Introduction • English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s TheLyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they live prior to the Romantic period.

13. INTRODUCTION • English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. • The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism. • The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions. They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero.

14. INTRODUCTION • The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination. • English Romantics tend to be nationalistic, defending the greatest English writers. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules.

15. Overview of Romantic literature • The romantic period is an age of poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge are the most representative writers. They explore new theories and innovate new techniques in versification. They believe that poetry could purify individual souls and society. • For further study of their literary theory, please refer to Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads & Coleridge’s BiographiaLiteraria.

16. Lake poets • Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were known as Lake Poets because they lived and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. The former two published The Lyrical Ballads together in 1798, while all three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative and received pensions and poet laureateships from the aristocracy.

17. Other greatest Romantic poets are: John Keats, P.B. Shelley and G. G. Byron. • Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much. • Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled “negative romantic poets” while Byron and Shelley were hailed as “positive (revolutionary) Romantic poets”. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s literary achievements were underestimated for a long time.

18. Feminist works Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Gothic novel is a type of romantic fiction that predominates in the late 18th century and continues to show its influence in early 19th century. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe are masterpieces of English gothic novel.

19. English fiction gropes its way amidst the overwhelming Romantic poetry. It revives its popularity in the hands of Jane Austen & Walt Scott. Walt Scott is noted for his historical novel based on Scottish history and legends. He exerted great influence on European literature of his time. Jane Austen is the first and foremost English women novelist. Following the neoclassical tradition, she is unsurpassed in the description of uneventful everyday life.

20. Essayists in English Romanticism

21. William Wordsworth Wordsworth is the most representative poet of English Romanticism. He was born into a lawyer’s family in 1770 at Cockmouth, Cumberland. His parents died when he was very young.

22. He was taken care of by his relatives. He got his education at the Grammar School of Hawkshead and then at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was a worshipper of nature from his childhood. He frequently visited places of beautiful scenery. A walking tour of the Swiss Alps heightened his addiction to nature. He had great sympathy with the French Revolution. He paid 2 visits to France, during the second visit he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter.

23. Wordsworth was totally disillusioned by the Jacobin dictatorship and the French invasion of other European countries. He became conservative in politics. He was labeled as “negative Romantic poet” by Karl Marx and was severely criticized by Byron. In 1795 he and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth settled down in Racedown, Dorsetshire. In 1797 he became Coleridge`s friend. The three persons became “three people with one soul” in literary history.

24. Legend has it that Wordworth and his sister lived a kind of incestuous life during this period. Dorothy helped Wordsworth turn his eyes to “the face of nature” and “preserved the poet in him”. She served as Wordsworth’s confidante and inspirer. As Wordsworth put it in his poem: She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy.

25. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads. !n 1798 and 1799, he made a tour around Germany. Upon his return to England, he and his sister moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, the most beautiful place in the Lake District. Coleridge & Robert Southey lived a stone’s throw from their dwelling place. The three poets came to be known as Lake Poets. In 1802, Wordsworth got married to Mary Hutchingson. In 1813, he got a job as distributor of stamps.

26. In 1842, he received the government pension and in the following year, he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate. He died at Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

27. His major works • Wordsworth’s fame lies chiefly in his short poems. His short poems fall into 2 categories: poems about nature and poems about human life. • He is a “worshipper of nature”. It is nature that gives him “strength and knowledge full of grace”.

28. His best known poems of nature include: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Tintern Abbey, To the Cuckoo, My Heart Leaps up, To a Butterfly, An Evening Walk, & The Sparrow’s Nest. His best known poems about human life include: Lucy Poems, The Solitary Reaper and The Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, & To a Highland Girl.

29. Wordsworth wrote many sonnets. His famous sonnets are: Earth Has Not Anything to Show More Fair, On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, & Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland. His best known long poem is The Prelude. In this poem Wordsworth analyses the growth of hispoetic genius during his childhood and youth, and recalls the lessons he owes to nature.

30. Wordsworth’s greatest contribution to English literature is his poems and his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads. Though The Lyrical Ballads is known as the collaborated work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, all the poems but one (The Rime of The Ancient Mariner) are written by Wordsworth. Most of his most quoted poem are taken from this collection.

31. Preface to Lyrical Ballads • Wordsworth’s Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads is the manifesto of English Romanticism. It is “one of the revolutionary works of criticism, helping usher in the Romantic Age in literature” (Dutton, 1984:50). • He is primarily concerned to justify the kinds of his poems which he had contributed to Lyrical Ballads.

32. Key points in his Preface • Definition of a poet • He ( poet) is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.

33. Creative process of authentic poetry Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred (similar) to that which before was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins……

34. Subject matter & poetic language The principal object…was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men , and at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented in an unusual aspect……

35. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity…… The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.

36. Brief Comments • Wordsworth is the representative poet of English romanticism • Wordsworth’s poetry is distinguished by the simplicity and purity of his language. • Wordsworth’s theory on versification has exerted profound influence on later poets. (mimesis--imaginative recreation)

37. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

38. Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Coleridge was born into a clergyman’s family in 1772. He was a great genius. At the age of six, he had read the Bible, Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights. He was a mentally precocious boy, full of fantasy and dreams in his mind. During his Cambridge years, he made friends with Charles Lamb, the great essayist of English Romanticism.

39. But the campus life bored him. He ran away from the university and enlisted in the army but discharged after a few months and he returned to Cambridge. He joined Robert Southey in a utopian plan of establishing an ideal democratic community (named Pantisocracy) in America. The plan resulted in nothing but his marriage to Sara Fricker, which turned out to be an unhappy marriage. • In 1797 he began his friendship with Wordsworth. In 1798 they published The Lyrical Ballads.

40. In 1798 he traveled to Germany with Wordsworth and began to take to Germany philosophy. Upon his return to England, he became addicted to opium with a view to relieving his headache. He quarreled seriously with Wordsworth in 1810. Though they were reconciled to each other later, their friendship had never reached its former intimacy. In his later years, he turned conservative and resorted to theology for his spiritual support.

41. Demonic poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khan Christabel Conversational poems Frost at Morning Dejection: An Ode Essays Biographia Literaria Lectures on Shakespeare. Major works

42. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • It is Coleridge’s contribution to TheLyrical Ballads. It tells us a strange story in ballad meter. Three guests are on their way to a wedding party when an ancient mariner stopped one of them. The mariner tells of his adventures on the sea. When his ship sails towards the South Pole, an albatross comes through the snow-fog and alights on the rigging.

43. The mariner shoots at it quite thoughtlessly. Then misfortune befalls. The whole crew, with the only exception of the old mariner, die of thirst as punishment for the act of inhospitality. The spell breaks only when themariner repents his cruelty. • The poem is famous for its beautiful cadenceand wonderful imagery. The combination of the natural and supernatural, the ordinary and extraordinary makes it one of the masterpieces of Romantic poetry.

44. Kubla Khan • During an illness in 1797 Coleridge retired to a lonely farmhouse. One day he fell asleep as he was reading a passage about Kubla Khan from Pilgrimage by Purchas. While dreaming he composed a poem about 200 or 300 lines. On waking he began to write down the poem. But he was interrupted by a person on business from Porlock and the vision faded. He left a fragment of only 54 lines and never finished the poem.

45. Christabel • It tells a story of a sorcerer who casts a spell over a pure young girl. It is written in ballad meter. Its mysterious atmosphere and the Gothic horror may freeze our blood. It is not wholesome to read the poem.

46. BiographiaLiteraria • It is Coleridge’s most influential book of literary essays. The main ideas can be summed up as follows. • A poem should not be judged as a mirror of truth—as we judge science--but as a thing in itself, almost as a living organism.

47. Poets are born and not made. Poems should be judged only according to their own lights and not according to any established precept or precedent. Coleridge envisages that the poet as a man of great integrity as well as of special gifts, producing poems which would offer profound insights into man’s imaginative, psychological, and ultimately, moral being.

48. Comments • Coleridge is a great Romantic poet. His poetic imagination is unique. He is fond of unusual and supernatural things. • Coleridge is one of the first critics to pay close attention to language of poetry. He maintains that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure “through the medium of beauty”.

49. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

50. Biographical Introduction • Byron was born into an aristocratic family. His father is a profligate. His mother was a passionate Scotswoman. • He was born with a clubfoot, which made him feel sore and unhappy all his life. • He was a radical supporter of worker’s movement.