William Wordsworth (1770-1850 )

1. William Wordsworth (1770-1850 ) • born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District

2. Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight--this experience shapes much of his later work. • Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed, he made his first attempts at verse. • studies at Cambridge University

3. While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth's interest and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of the "common man".

4. Selected works: • AN EVENING WALK, 1793 • DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES, 1793 • THE BORDERS, 1795-96 • LYRICAL BALLADS, 1798 (with Coleridge) • UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, 1801 • ON POETIC DICTION, 1802 • INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, 1803-06 • POEMS I-II, 1807 MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS, 1807 • THE EXCURSION, 1814 • THE WAGGONER, 1819 • THE RIVER DUDDON, 1820 • THE RECLUSE, 1888 • PROSE WORKS, 1896

5. Coleridge with Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the Preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet's views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

6. THE PRELUDE • About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title THE PRELUDE. • It is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism. The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. • The long work describes the poet's love of nature and his own place in the world order

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

8. born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. He was the youngest of ten children, adored by his parents. • After his father's death, Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London. Coleridge studied at Jesus College. He joined in the reformist movement stimulated by the French Revolution, and abandoned his studies in 1793.

9. Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge got addicted to opium • After a physical and spiritual crisis at Greyhound Inn, Bath, he submitted himself to a series of medical régimes to free himself from opium. He found a permanent harbor in Highgate in the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed almost legendary reputation among the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left the house.

10. Selected works: • THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE, 1794 • POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, 1796 • LYRICAL BALLADS, 1789 (incl. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Frost at Midnight') • THE FRIEND, 1812 (final three-volume edition 1818) • REMORSE, 1813 • poem fragments CHRISTABEL and KUBLA KHAN, 1816 • BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, 1817 (2nd edition by Sara Coleridge) • NOTEBOOKS, 1957 (3 vols.)

11. ' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'-, a 625-line ballad, is among his essential works. It tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and for that crime against nature endures terrible punishments. The ship upon which the Mariner serves is trapped in a frozen sea. • An albatross comes to the aid of the ship, it saves everyone, and stays with the ship until the Mariner shoots it with his crossbow. The motiveless malignity leads to punishment.

12. Coleridge emphasizes the way in which the natural world dwarfs and asserts its awesome power over man. • The supernatural communicates through the natural • Spirit, whether God or a pagan one, dominates the physical world in order to punish and inspire reverence in the Ancient Mariner. At the poem's end, the Ancient Mariner preaches respect for the natural world as a way to remain in good standing with the spiritual world, because in order to respect God, one must respect all of his creations.

13. George Gordon Noel Byron(1788-1824)

14. The English poet George Gordon Noel Byron,(6th Baron Byron), was one of the most important figures of the romantic movement. • Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be considered the personification of the romantic poet-hero. • George Gordon Noel Byron was born on Jan. 22, 1788, into a family of fast-decaying nobility. On the death of his granduncle in 1798, Byron inherited the title and estate. After 4 years at Harrow (1801-1805), he went to Trinity College, Cambridge,

15. The Byronic hero:in his total alienation he now actively assumes the tragic fatality which turns natural instinct into unforgivable sin, and he deliberately takes his rebellious stance as an outcast against all accepted notions of the right order of things. • Byron modelled his "Byronic hero," who first appeared in Manfred, after himself – a rebellious, lonely man, brooding about some darkness in his past.

16. Major works • Hours of Idleness 1806 • English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1809 • Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1812 – 1818 • The Giaour 1813 • The Corsair 1814 • Lara 1814 • The Siege of Corinth 1816 • The Prisoner Of Chillon 1816 • Manfred 1817 –a metaphysical verse drama set in the Alps, plainly autobiographical, with a hero who is a voluntary outcast seeking oblivion

17. The Two Foscari i1821 • Cain 1821 • The Vision of Judgement 1821 • Heaven and Earth 1821 • Don Juan 1819– 1824; incomplete on Byron's death in 1824

18. The Child Harold´s Pilgrimage1812 • „I awoke one day and found myself famous“ – was Byron´s comment on the immediate success of the poem. • The poem describes the travels , experiences and refelctions of a pilgrim • Childe Harold´s pilgrimage corresponds to Byron´s own • The pilgrim – a defiant outcast - outcast – is the first truly Byronic (Titanic)hero

19. Canto I. and II. Travels through Portugal, Spain, the Ionian Islands, Albania. • Canto III. The pigrim travels to to Belgium, the Rhine, the Alps and the Jura - the reflection on nature, states of his mind are more skilfully blended than in the first two cantos • Canto IV. The device of a pilgrimage is abandoned. The poet speaks directly in a long meditaion on time and history

20. We wither from our youth, we gasp away -   Sick - sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,   Though to the last, in verge of our decay,   Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first -   But all too late, - so are we doubly curst.   Love, fame, ambition, avarice - ’tis the same -   Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst -   For all are meteors with a different name,And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

21. Few - none - find what they love or could have loved:   Though accident, blind contact, and the strong   Necessity of loving, have removed   Antipathies - but to recur, ere long,   Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;   And Circumstance, that unspiritual god   And miscreator, makes and helps along   Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,Whose touch turns hope to dust – the dust we all have trod.

22. Our life is a false nature - ’tis not in   The harmony of things, - this hard decree,   This uneradicable taint of sin,   This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,   Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be   The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew -   Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see -    And worse, the woes we see not - which throb throughThe immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.

23. But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:   My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,   And my frame perish even in conquering pain,   But there is that within me which shall tire   Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire:   Something unearthly, which they deem not of,   Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,   Shall on their softened spirits sink, and moveIn hearts all rocky now the late remorse

24. Percy Bysshe Shelley1792 - 1822 • Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, the M.P. for New Shoreham, was born at Field Place near Horsham, • educated at Eton and Oxford University • He wrote The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet that attacked the idea of compulsory Christianity. Oxford University was shocked when they discovered what Shelley had written and on 25th March, 1811 he was expelled.

25. Major Works • The Necessity of Atheism 1811) • Queen Mab (1813) • Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ( (1817) • The Revolt of Islam (1817) • Ozymandias (1818) • The Cenci (1819) • Ode to the West Wind (1819) • The Masque of Anarchy (1819) • Prometheus Unbound (1820) • To a Skylark (1820) • A Defence of Poetry (1821) (first published in 1840) • The Triumph of Life 1822 • (unfinished, published in 1824

26. Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen year old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. This created a terrible scandal and Shelley's father never forgave him for what he had done. Shelley moved to Ireland where he made revolutionary speeches on religion and politics.

27. Queen Mab, a long poem by Shelley celebrating the merits of republicanism, atheism, vegetarianism and free love. • In 1814 Shelley fell in love and eloped with Mary, the sixteen-year-old daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. For the next few years the couple travelled in Europe

28. In 1822 Shelley, moved to Italy with Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron where they published the journal The Liberal. • Soon after its publication, Percy Bysshe Shelley was lost at sea on 8th July, 1822 while sailing to meet Leigh Hunt.

29. Prometheus Unbound (1820) • - a lyrical drama in four acts • A great but uneven work based on the Aeschylian story of Prometheus-the firebringer and Satan as the hero (Paradise Lost) • The Prometheus- Lucifer triumphs over Tyranny • The poem is executed in a number of verse forms : rhetoric soliloquies, dream visions, lyric choruses, love songs, dramatic dialogues

30. THE EARTH I am the Earth, Thy mother; she within whose stony veins, To the last fibre of the loftiest tree Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air, Joy ran, as blood within a living frame, When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy! And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust, 160 And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here.

31. PROMETHEUS • Tremendous Image! as thou art must be He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe, The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear, Although no thought inform thine empty voice.