Progressive revolutionary romanticists

ROMANTICISM

(the beginning of the 19^th century)

Questions:

1. Conservatives (the older ones) “The Lake Poets”

Romanticism is a trend that came into all European literatures in the last decades of the 18^th century and lasted for the 1^st three or four decades of the 19^th century. So the period of Romanticism covers approximately 30 years.

Chronologically its emergence coincides with the following historic events:

1. the American Revolution or the American War of Independence (1771-1776)

2. the French Revolution (1789)

Romanticism is called the 1^st reaction of the intellectuals to the French Revolution.

The people of the period were disappointed with the outcome of the French Bourgeois Revolution. The common people did not obtain the liberty, fraternity and equality which they had hoped for; the bourgeoisie found that the reality was not what the Enlighteners had promised it to be. Quite naturally the reactionary feudal class was discontented, because the revolution had made it much weaker. The progressive minds of Europe expressed this general discontent and the new literary trend (Romanticism) reflected it.

The period of Romanticism in England had its peculiarities. During the 2^nd half of the 18^th century economic and social changes took place in the country. England went through the so-called Industrial revolution that gave birth to a new class-that of the proletariat. The Industrial revolution began with the invention of the weaving machine which could do the work of 17 people. The further introduction of machinery instead of hand labour in different branches of manufacture left far more people jobless. The reactionary ruling class of England was decisively against any progressive thought influenced by the French Revolution; as a result the last decade of the 18^th century was subjected to a rule that became known as the “white terror”. Progressive-minded people were persecuted and forced to exile, as in the case of Thomas Pain, the author of the Rights of Man, who had to flee to France.

The Industrial Revolution in England had a great influence on the cultural life of the country. The English writers of this period had to find answers to the problem that arose in their own country, such as: the growth of industry, the rising working class movement, and the final disappearance of the class of peasantry.

The writers influenced by the Revolution and its consequences reacted differently to it. All of them were enthusiastic about it when it started but they began to reconsider this event and change their views.

According to the difference of the attitude there appeared several groups:

1. Conservatives (the older ones) “The Lake Poets”

William Wordsworth

Samuel Coleridge

Robert Southey

2. Progressive revolutionary romanticists:

William Blake

George G. Byron

Percy B. Shelly

John Keats

1. Conservatives (the older ones) “The Lake Poets”

Conservative writers abandoned revolutionary ideas, turned their attention to nature and to the simple problems of life. They tried to avoid the contradictions, which were becoming so great in all the spheres of social life. They looked back to the idealized past of the English countryside and refused to accept the progress of industry: they even called to the Government to forbid the building of new factories, which they considered were the workers` sufferings.

Revolutionary writers denied the existing order, called upon the people to struggle for a better future, shared the people’s desire for liberty and objected to colonial oppression. Furthermore, they supported the national liberation wars on the continent against feudal reaction.

Among conservative writers there were poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and Robert Southey (1774-1843) who formed the “Lake School”, called so because they all lived for a time in a beautiful Lake District in the North-West of England. They dedicated much of what they wrote to Nature, especially Wordsworth. They disclosed life of the common people of the English countryside that was overlooked by their younger revolutionary contemporaries. The “Lake Poets” resorted to the popular forms of verse, which were known and could be understood by all. The works of these poets had very little relationship to one another but each of them exemplified romantic principles in poetry.

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), English poet, one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets, whose theories and style created a new tradition in poetry.

William met a poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an enthusiastic admirer of his early poetic efforts, and in 1797 he moved to Alfoxden, Somersetshire, near Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. The move marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between the poets. In the ensuing period they collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798.

This work is generally taken to mark the beginning of the romantic movement in English poetry. Wordsworth wrote almost all the poems in the volume, including the memorable "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge contributed the famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Representing a revolt against the artificial classicism of contemporary English verse, Lyrical Ballads was greeted with hostility by most leading critics of the day.

In defense of his unconventional theory of poetry, Wordsworth wrote a "Preface" to the second edition of Ballads, which appeared in 1800 (actual date of publication, 1801). His premise was that the source of poetic truth is the direct experience of the senses. Poetry, he asserted, originates from "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form and an intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made. Far from conciliating the critics, the "Preface" served only to increase their hostility. Wordsworth, however, was not discouraged, continuing to write poetry that graphically illustrated his principles.

William settled in 1799 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmorland, the loveliest spot in the English Lake District. The poet Robert Southey as well as Coleridge lived nearby and the three men became known as the Lake Poets.

Much of Wordsworth's easy flow of conversational blank verse has true lyrical power and grace, and his finest work is permeated by a sense of the human relationship to external nature that is religious in its scope and intensity. To Wordsworth, God was everywhere manifest in the harmony of nature, and he felt deeply the kinship between nature and the soul of humankind.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), English poet, critic, and philosopher, who was a leader of the Romantic Movement.

Coleridge attended Jesus College, University of Cambridge. At the university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian society in Pennsylvania. Coleridge had met and begun what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The two men published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), which became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the romantic school, such as the famous "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In addition to the "Ancient Mariner" he wrote the symbolic poem "Kubla Khan"; began the mystical narrative poem "Christabel"; and composed the quietly lyrical "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison", "Frost at Midnight," and "The Nightingale," considered three of his best "conversational" poems.

In 1816 Coleridge wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The sections in which Coleridge defines his views on the nature of poetry and the imagination and discusses the works of Wordsworth are especially notable.

Coleridge was esteemed by some of his contemporaries and is generally recognized today as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compelling conversational powers made him perhaps the most influential English literary critic and philosopher of the 19th century.

Southey, Robert (1774-1843), English poet, considered one of the Lake Poets. He was born in Bristol and educated at the University of Oxford. He was a good friend of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he made plans, which never materialized, to found a utopian community on the Susquehanna River in the United States. Partly in preparation for this scheme, Southey and Coleridge married sisters. Southey and Edith Fricker wed in 1795; Coleridge and Sara Fricker courted and wed at the same time. Southey traveled in Portugal in 1800, where he gathered material for a Portuguese history and completed his long poem Thalaba the Destroyer (12 volumes, 1801). In 1803 he settled with the Coleridge family at Greta Hall, Keswick. Southey became a political conservative and was appointed poet laureate in 1813. He wrote voluminously to support the household, including narrative poems such as The Curse of Kehama (1810) and a fine Life of Nelson (1813). In 1821 Southey published A Vision of Judgement, a long poem written in honor of British King George III. In the preface to this poem, Southey vigorously attacked the works of Lord Byron, who retaliated with a parody of A Vision of Judgement, in 1822. His prose is now regarded more highly than his poetry. Southey wrote essays on moral issues, edited works of Sir Thomas Malory and produced volumes of history.

2. Progressive revolutionary romanticists:

Blake, William (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and engraver, who created a unique form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric, and prophetic in the language.

Blake’s most popular poems have always been Songs of Innocence (1789). These lyrics—fresh, direct observations—are notable for their eloquence. In 1794, disillusioned with the possibility of human perfection, Blake issued Songs of Experience, employing the same lyric style and much of the same subject matter as in Songs of Innocence. Both series of poems take on deeper resonances when read in conjunction. Innocence and Experience, "the two contrary states of the human soul," are contrasted in such companion pieces as "The Lamb" and "The Tyger." Blake’s subsequent poetry develops the implication that true innocence is impossible without experience, transformed by the creative force of the human imagination.

In his so-called Prophetic Books, a series of longer poems written from 1789 on, Blake created a complex personal mythology and invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought and expression, he declared in one of these poems, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s."

Blake was a nonconformist radical. Poems such as The French Revolution (1791), America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and Europe, a Prophecy (1794) express his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794), and the dreadful cycle set up by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in "The Mental Traveller" (circa 1803). Among the Prophetic Books is a prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), which develops Blake’s idea that "without Contraries is no progression." It includes the "Proverbs of Hell," such as "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

Burns, Robert (1759-96), Scottish poet and writer of traditional Scottish folk songs, whose works are known and loved wherever the English language is read.

Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, January 25, 1759. He was the eldest of seven children born to William Burness, a struggling tenant farmer, and his wife, Agnes Broun. Although poverty limited his formal education, Burns read widely in English literature and the Bible and learned to read French. He was encouraged in his self-education by his father, and his mother acquainted him with Scottish folk songs, legends, and proverbs. In 1784 Burns read the works of the Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson. Under his influence and that of Scottish folk tradition and older Scottish poetry, he produced most of his best-known poems, including "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "Halloween," "To a Daisy," and "To a Mouse." In addition, he wrote "The Jolly Beggars," a cantata chiefly in standard English, which is considered one of his masterpieces. Several of his early poems, notably "Holy Willie's Prayer," satirized local ecclesiastical squabbles (споры) and attacked Calvinist theology, bringing him into conflict with the church.

In 1786 he arranged to issue by subscription a collection of his poetry. Published on July 31, Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect was an immediate success. He moved in the fall of 1786 to Edinburgh, where he was lionized by fashionable society. Charmed by Burns, the literati mistakenly believed him to be an untutored bard, a "Heavens-taught Plowman." He resented their condescension, and his bristling independence, blunt manner of speech, and occasional social awkwardness `alienated admirers.

Burns’ later literary output consisted almost entirely of songs, both original compositions and adaptations of traditional Scottish ballads and folk songs. He contributed some 200 songs to Scots Musical Museum (6 volumes, 1783-1803).In 1792 Burns wrote about 100 songs and some humorous verse for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, compiled by George Thomson. Among his songs in this collection are such favorites as "Auld Lang Syne," "Comin' Thro' the Rye," "Scots Wha Hae," "A Red, Red Rose," "The Banks o' Doon," and "John Anderson, My Jo."

After the outbreak of the French Revolution, Burns became an outspoken champion of the Republican cause. His enthusiasm for liberty and social justice dismayed many of his admirers; some shunned or reviled him. After Franco-British relations began to deteriorate, he curbed his radical sympathies, and in 1794, for patriotic reasons, he joined the Dumfriesshire Volunteers. Burns died in Dumfries, July 21, 1796.

Burns touched with his own genius the traditional folk songs of Scotland, transmuting them into great poetry, and he immortalized its countryside and humble farm life. He was a keen and discerning satirist who reserved his sharpest barbs for sham, hypocrisy, and cruelty. His satirical verse, once little appreciated, has in recent decades been recognized widely as his finest work. He was also a master of the verse-narrative technique. Finally, his love songs, perfectly fitted to the tunes for which he wrote them, are, at their best, unsurpassed.

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) He was born on January,22, 1788 in London, in an old, but poor family, inherited the title Lord from his uncle. He got education at Cambridge University. When he was 21, he became the member of the House of Lords. In 1809 he traveled around Europe, visiting different countries. During a journey he wrote a diary, which was the base for his “Childe Harolde`s Piligrimage”, which he began in Greece. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distractions in foreign lands. Besides furnishing a travelogue with Byron`s own wanderings through the Mediterranean, the first 2 cantos express the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In the poem Byron reflects upon the vanity of ambition, the transitory nature of pleasure, and the futility of the search of perfection in the course of a pilgrimage through Portugal, Spain, Albania and Greece.

Byron`s first published volume of poetry “Hours of Idleness” appeared in 1807. It was criticized by many Scottish journals. In answer he published “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”. In this poem he stressed the necessity for a poet to deal with the most topical themes of the day. In the cycle of “Hebrew Melodies”, “Oriental Poems”, the author tells about a rebellious man, who fights against any form of oppression.

Byron’s greatest poem is “Don Juan”, a satire in the form of a picaresque (плутовской) verse tale. The first 2 cantos of Don Juan were begun in 1818 and published in 1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norms against which to view the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. Upon being sent abroad by his mother from his native Seville, Juan survives a shipwreck and is cast up on a Greek island, where he is sold in the slavery in Constantinople. He escapes to the Russian army, participates in the Russian siege of Ismail, and is sent to St. Petersburg, where he wins a favor of the Empress Catherine the Great and is sent by her on a diplomatic mission to England. The poem’s story remains merely a peg on which Byron could hang a witty and satirical social commentary. His most consistent targets are, first, the hypocrisy and can’t underlying various social and sexual conventions, and, second, the vain ambitions of poets, lovers, generals, rulers and humanity in general. “Don Juan” remains unfinished; Byron completed 16 cantos and had begun the 17^th before his own illness and death.

In “Don Juan” he was able to free himself from the excessive melancholy of “Ch. Harolde” and reveal other sides of his character and personality – his satiric wit and his unique view of the comic rather than tragic discrepancy between reality and appearance. It is a lyrical epic poem, where he mocks at his literary colleagues. He touched upon almost every aspect of life. It is called a satirical encyclopedia of European life. He planned to write 24 cantos, but he died in Greece in 1824, April, 19, where he was considered to be a national hero. His heart is buried in Greece, and body was placed in the family vault near Newstead, as it was refused to bury him in Westminster Abbey.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), English poet, considered by many to be among the greatest, and one of the most influential leaders of the romantic movement. Throughout his life, Shelley lived by a radically nonconformist moral code. His beliefs concerning love, marriage, revolution, and politics caused him to be considered a dangerous immoralist by some.

He was born on August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, educated at Eton College and, until his expulsion at the end of one year, the University of Oxford. With another student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley had written and circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), of which the university authorities disapproved.

In 1817, Shelley produced Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem that tells a symbolic tale of revolution. It was later reissued as The Revolt of Islam (1818). At this time, he also wrote revolutionary political tracts signed "The Hermit (отшельник) of Marlow." During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works.

Many critics regard Shelley as one of the greatest of all English poets. They point especially to his lyrics, including the familiar short odes "To a Skylark" (1820), "To the West Wind" (1819), and "The Cloud" (1820). Also greatly admired are the shorter love lyrics, including "I arise from dreams of thee" and "To Constantia singing"; the sonnet "Ozymandias" (1818); and "Adonais" (1821), an elegy for the British poet John Keats, written in formal Spenserian stanzas. The effortless lyricism of these works is also evident in Shelley's verse dramas, The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820); these remain, however, profound but unproduceable closet dramas. His prose, including a translation (1818) of The Symposium by Plato and the unfinished critical work A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840), is equally skillful. Other critics, particularly antiromanticists who object to the prettiness and sentimentality of much of his work, maintain that Shelley was not as influential as the other British romantic poets Byron, Keats, or William Wordsworth.

Keats, John (1795-1821), English poet, one of the most gifted and appealing of the 19th century and an influential figure of the Romantic Movement.

Keats was educated at the Clarke School, Enfield, and at the age of 15 was apprenticed to a surgeon. Subsequently, from 1814 to 1816, Keats studied medicine in London hospitals; in 1816 he became a licensed druggist but never practiced his profession, deciding instead to be a poet.

Keats had already written a translation of Aeneid and some verse by Virgil; his first published poems (1816) were the sonnets "Oh, Solitude if I with Thee Must Dwell" and "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Both poems appeared in the Examiner, a literary periodical edited by the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt, one of the champions of the Romantic Movement in English literature. Hunt introduced Keats to a circle of literary people, including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; the group's influence enabled Keats to see his first volume published, Poems by John Keats (1817). The principal poems in the volume were the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, the sonnet "To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent,""I Stood Tip-Toe upon a Little Hill," and "Sleep and Poetry," which defended the principles of romanticism as proclaimed by Hunt and attacked the practice of romanticism as represented by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Keats's second volume, Endymion, was published in 1818. Based upon the myth of Endymion and the moon goddess, it was attacked by two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry”, Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry.

Keats's great creative outpouring came in April and May of 1819, when he composed a group of five odes. Literary critics rank these works among the greatest short poems in the English language. Each ode begins with the speaker focusing on something—a nightingale, an urn, the goddess Psyche, the mood of melancholy, the season of autumn—and arrives at his greater insight into what he values.

In "Ode to a Nightingale," the nightingale's song symbolizes the beauty of nature and art. Keats was fascinated by the difference between life and art: Human beings die, but the art they make lives on. The speaker in the poem tries repeatedly to use his imagination to go with the bird's song, but each time he fails to completely forget himself. In the sixth stanza he suddenly remembers what death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his own humanity.

In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the bride and bridegroom painted on the Grecian urn do not die. Their love can never fade, but neither can they kiss and embrace. At the end of the poem, the speaker sees the world of art as cold rather than inviting.

The last two odes, "Ode on Melancholy" and "To Autumn," show a turn in Keats's ideas about life and art. He celebrates "breathing human passion" as more beautiful than either art or nature.

In 1820 Keats became ill with tuberculosis. Nevertheless, the period from 1818 to 1820 was one of great creativity. In July 1820, the third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished poem "Hyperion".

He died in Rome and some of his best-known poems were posthumously published, including "Eve of St. Mark" (1848) and "La belle dame sans merci" (The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy; first version pub. 1888). Keats's letters, praised by many critics as among the finest literary letters written in English, were published in their most complete form in 1931; a later edition appeared in 1960.

Although Keats's career was short and his output small, critics agree that he has a lasting place in the history of English and world literature. Characterized by exact and closely knit construction, sensual descriptions, and by force of imagination, his poetry gives transcendental value to the physical beauty of the world.

The Romanticists paid a good deal of attention to the spiritual life of man. This was reflected in an abundance of lyrical verse. The so-called exotic theme came into being and great attention was dedicated to Nature and its elements. The description became very rich in form and many-sided in contents. The writers used such means as symbolism, fantasy, grotesque, legends, tales, songs, and ballads also became part of their creative method. The Romanticists were talented poets and their contribution to English literature was of immense importance.

Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832),Scottish novelist and poet, whose work as a translator, editor, biographer, and critic, together with his novels and poems, made him one of the most prominent figures in English Romanticism. He was born in Edinburgh, August 15, 1771. Trained as a lawyer, he became a legal official, an occupation that allowed him to write.

A love of ballads and legends helped direct Scott's literary activity. His translations of German Gothic romances in 1796 gained him some note, but he first achieved eminence with his edition of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in 1802-1803. His first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), brought him huge popularity. Following this success, he wrote a series of romantic narrative poems, which included Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), The Bridal of Triermain (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). In 1813, he was offered the poet laureateship of England, and declined, recommending Robert Southey for the post. He also published editions of the writings of the English poet John Dryden in 1808 and of the English satirist Jonathan Swift in 1814.

Scott's declining popularity as a poet, in part caused by the competition of Lord Byron, led him to turn to the novel. Waverley (1814) began a new series of triumphs. More than 20 novels followed in rapid succession, including Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Rob Roy (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), Quentin Durward (1823), and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). Although he published this fiction anonymously, his identity became an open secret.

Scott is the first major historical novelist. In his portraits of Scotland, England, and the Continent from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense of political and traditional forces and of their influence on the individual. Although his plots are sometimes hastily constructed and his characters sometimes stilted, these works remain valuable for their compelling atmosphere, occasional epic dignity, and clear understanding of human nature. James Fenimore Cooper in America, Honore de Balzac in France, and Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray in England were among the many that learned from Scott's panoramic studies of the interplay between social trends and individual character. In Great Britain, he created an enduring interest in Scottish traditions, and throughout the Western world he encouraged the cult of the Middle Ages, which strongly characterized Romanticism.

Lecture 5

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE 19^TH CENTURY

Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel

Questions:

1. Later 19^th century poets: A.Tennyson, R.Browning.

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