Unit 6 The Age of Romanticism

(1800—1840)

● Key Words: Industrial Revolution; French Revolution; Romanticism; William Wordsworth; Lyric Ballad; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Robert Southey; George Golden Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Walter Scott

● Target: The students are supposed to get the basic literary history of Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism in English literature, the important figures of this period and their works.

● Study Points:

1. Romanticism;

2. William Wordsworth;

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge;

4. Robert Southey

5. George Golden Byron;

6. Percy Bysshe Shelley;

7. John Keats

● Time Span: 3 weeks

Part I Romanticism

1. Industrial Revolution

2. The French Revolution (July 14, 1789)

3. Romanticism

Romanticism is a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period.

As a historical period in English literature, the age of Romanticism extends from 1798, when Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, to the 1832, when all the major Romantic writers were either dead or no longer productive. Romanticism, the predominant literary mode of the first third of the 19th century, was expressed almost entirely in poetry.

4. The Special Qualities of Romanticism

Romanticism favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature. It has the following prominent characteristics which distinguish it from the neoclassical literature introduced in the previous section.

1) The Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings

2) The Creation of a world of Imagination

3) The Return to Nature for Material

4) Sympathy with the Humble and Glorification of the Commonplace

5) Emphasis Upon the Expression of Individual Genius

6) The Return to Milton and Elizabethans for Literary Models

7) The Interest in Old Stories and Medieval Romances

8) A Sense of Melancholy and Loneliness

9) The Rebellious Spirit

Part II Romantic Poets

◆ The First Generation

The first generation of Romantics includes Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. They were also called "Lake Poets" because they had lived for a time in close association in the mountainous Lake District in the northwest of England. They are regarded as one group also because of their community of literary and social outlook. They traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.

1. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

◆ Life

• the representative poet of the first generation of Romantics and the chief spokesman of Romantic poetry

• born in 1770 in the Lake District of Cumberland.

• lost both parents when still very young and was brought up by relatives, who sent him to school at Hawksherd in the beautiful lake region in Northwestern England, where he had time to lead a life of delighted freedom in the surrounding hills.

• loved nature more than his books

• entered Cambridge in 1787, but left it without distinction.

• in 1790, he took a Continental tour to France, Alps, and Italy;

• returned to France in 1791 and spent a year there. The French Revolution was then at its height and exercised a strong influence on his mind.

• in 1795, he received a legacy, which freed him from monetary cares, and he settled down with his sister Dorothy, one of the most sustaining personal influences of his life.

• in 1797, he made friends with Coleridge, a personal influence of at least equal importance, and they lived together in the Lake District, devoting their time to the writing of poetry.

• in 1798, they jointly published a memorable volume, Lyrical Ballads.

• Although Lyrical Ballads was not favorably received by reviewers at the time, it marked the opening of an epoch in the history of English poetry, the break with the conventional poetical tradition of 18th century neoclassicism, and the beginning of the Romantic Movement in England.

• With the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship in France (1793-94), Wordsworth's attitude towards revolution changed into conservative, and the younger Romantics like Byron and Shelley criticized him. He accepted the office of a distributor of stamps, and on the death of Southey (1843) he was made Poet Laureate.

• For nearly 50 years, he lived a secluded life close to nature and died in 1850.

• Wordsworth wrote a great many poems, among which only a small number are good. His best poems are descriptions of nature: of mountains, rivers, flowers, birds, children and peasants, and reminiscences of his own childhood and youth.

◆Principal works

– We Are Seven

– Lines Written in Early Spring

– To the Cuckoo

– I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

– the Lucy Poems

– The Solitary. Reaper

– Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

– The Prelude

• The great decade of his poetry was from 1797 to 1807; thereafter it slowly declined in merit while his reputation slowly grew, until it became almost unreadable, although his reputation continued to grow.

◆ Lyrical Ballads (抒情民谣集)

The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads served as the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry.

• It is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often seen as the starting point of the Romantic Movement.

• The volume first appeared anonymously in 1798. Most of the poems were by Wordsworth, Coleridge’s contributions being “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” “To the Nightingale,” and “The Dungeon.” The second edition (1800) appeared under Wordsworth’s name only, and included the famous Preface.

• In Chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes how the collaboration came about. He and Wordsworth had discussing ‘two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination.’

• They projected a volume in which Coleridge should direct himself to characters ‘supernatural’ or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest sufficient to procure…that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.’

• Wordsworth’s object would be to ‘excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural’ for everyday things the beauty of which was normally concealed by the ‘film of familiarity.’

• Wordsworth’s “Preface” (1800) to Lyrical Ballads is a poetic manifesto attacking the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ if poets such as Thomas Gray, who attempt to separate the language of poetry as far as possible from that of real life.

• Wordsworth proposes instead to fit ‘to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.’ ‘Humble and rustic life’ is the chosen subject ‘because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.’

• Therefore, the poet should use diction as natural and direct as that of the most natural speech. "The language of the poet should not be abstract. "It is the figure of speech which makes poetry, not the elegance of vocabulary. It is important not to oversimplify his aims or practice here.

• His language in the volume does sometimes affect the flat plainness of prose and at other times he employs the sing-song meter and artless repetitions of the primitive ballad. Sometimes however, as in the non-ballad blank verse poem “Lines written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” the philosophical, literary vocabulary of earlier reflective verse is in evidence (“tranquil restoration”, “somewhat of a sad perplexity”).

• Further more, "All good poetry" he asserted, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The strong emotion which poetry records is inevitably "emotion recollected in tranquility.”

◆ Major Features of Wordsworth’s Poetry

• A constant theme of Wordsworth's poetry was the growth of the human spirit through the natural environment;

• He skillfully combined natural description with expressions of inward states of mind.

• His poems are characterized by sympathy with the poor, simple peasants, and a passionate love of nature.

• They have been much admired for their perfect simplicity, vivid imagery, directness of language, and unadorned beauty. His deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry that no other poet has ever equaled.

• Because of his wonderful description of nature, he is often called the "Nature Poet."

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• poet and critic, was the son of a country clergyman; He began reading books at the age of three, and by the time he was six he had read the Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and A Thousand and One Nithts.

• He was educated at Christ's Hospital, a charity school, after his father's death. He studied at Cambridge from 1791 to 1793, and left it without taking his degree.

• He made the acquaintance with Robert Southey, with whom he wrote The Fall of Robespierre, a poetical drama, and planned to set up a Utopian society, "Pantisocracy", but failed. He and Southey married two sisters.

• The greater influence upon him was his long enduring friendship with Wordsworth. Together they published Lyrical Ballads. The principle of the collaboration was that while Wordsworth was to reveal the poetical significance of the commonplace of life, Coleridge was to dramatize human emotions aroused by extraordinary events.

• Like Wordsworth, Coleridge also turned from radical to conservative in political ideas. He suffered from poor health all his life, and after 1800 became an opium eater. He died in 1834.

• Coleridge's literary production was relatively small. He wrote all his best poetry between 1797 and 1802, including the supernatural poems--”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” (imagination, combination of the natural and supernatural.) “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan;” (a drama poem) and the "conversation" poems--“Frost at Night,” “The Nightingale,” “This Lime-tree Bower,” as well as “Dejection; An Ode.”

• His poetry shares with Wordsworth's new simplicity of diction and fluency of movement

• but his finest poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel,” are characterized by a sense of mystery. These three poems of mystery and demonism are indeed great and unprecedented achievements. They are especially noted for their supernatural and fantastic atmosphere, their peculiar and mystic imagery, and their haunting music.

• The romanticism of both Wordsworth and Coleridge comes out in their reverence for the spontaneity and inherent dignity of the feelings, and their cultivation of truthful and profound expression of them.

• Apart from his poetry, Coleridge also did valuable work in literary criticism. His most important criticism is in his Biographia Literaria. He was one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language.

• In both poetry and criticism, his work is outstanding, but it is typical of him that his critical work is very scattered and disorganized, that two of his best known poems, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” are unfinished, and that he was most famous among his contemporaries for his talk. He introduced to England the 18th century German philosophy of Kant and other. He was also an original thinker, and he attempted to give his literary criticism a profound philosophical basis.

3. Robert Southey (1774-1843)

• Robert Southey, poet and biographer, was the son of a linen draper, educated first at Westminster School and the Oxford.

• He was a friend of Coleridge and also of Wordsworth. He shared their revolutionary ardour in the 1790's, but his opinions, like theirs, became conservative during the first decade of the 19th century, and from the founding of the Quarterly Review in 1809, he became one of its leading contributors.

• Southey had distinguished literary career, and won respect and admiration quite beyond the merit of his poetic gifts.

• In 1813, he was made Poet Laureate, a post he held for 30 years, until his death in 1843.

• His long poems were written with great facility. They exhibit the more obvious aspects of Romanticism, but lack any profound poetic quality, and are not likely to find admirers again.

• Works

Inspired by the French Revolution, he wrote an epic Joan of Arc.

Drama: Wat Tyler

Drama: The Fall of Robespierre

But later, he abandoned his old principles and became an opponent of all liberal ideas. He was made poet laureate in 1813.

A Visition of Judgement

“Most of his works are the product of literary industry, not of literary creation.”

• He is now chiefly remembered for a handful of short poems, of which the best known are

– After Blenheim

– The Scholar

– The Holy Tree

• After his fortieth year, Southey's writings were mostly in prose. His biography of Nelson is the best of these.

• On the whole, Southey's importance is rather historical than literary.

◆ The Second Generation

The second or younger generation of Romantics includes Byron, Shelly and Keats. Byron and Shelley were also called "Satanic" by Robert Southey because of their revolutionary spirit and their rebellion against society

1. George Golden Byron (1788—1824)

 Life:

At 19, he published his first collection of poems, entitled House of Idleness but attacked severely by a certain critic. Byron received it as a challenge. Two years later, he published English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in the form of a satire.

After enjoying the success of his counter-attack, Byron set sail for Europe and this tour lasted for two years. 91809—1811)

On his return to England, Byron embarked on his political career. On February 27, 1812, he made his maiden speech, at 23.

In 1815, Byron married miss Milbank, which proved to be a most unhappy marriage.

On April 25, 1816, he set sail for Europe, never to return.

1816—1823, Italy. He took an active part in the revolutionary work;

1823, he went to Greece and plunged into the struggle for the national independence of that country.

April 19, 1824, Byron died.

 Works

Byron was made famous chiefly by his long narrative and dramatic poems:

– Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

– Oriental Tales

– Manfred, Cain,

– Don Juan, Byron’s most important work, and his unfinished masterpiece.

Byron's short lyrics are also among the simplest and most moving ever written in the English language.

– When We Two Parted

– She Walks in Beauty

– Stanzas for Music

– So We’ll Go No More

– On the Day I Completed My Thirty-Sixth Year

 Features of Byron’s Poems

• Byron's poetry was distinguished for

– the novelty of his subject matter

– the exotic quality of his descriptions of oriental scenery which he got to know during his travel, and which was unfamiliar to most of his English readers.

• He also introduced into English poetry a new style of character, which has often been referred to as "Byronic Hero" of "satanic Spirit".

• Byron's long narrative poems are intermingled with innumerable digressions which express his opinions on different political, social and cultural problems.

• There are magnificent descriptions of natural scenery and exquisite lyrics of love and despair.

• Byron in a way was also a Neoclassic in taste, admiring Pope and his school. He never believed himself to break away from tradition, and his lucid perfection of form is akin to the Classical ideal.

• Byron's poetic style is loose, fluent, and vivid. Ease and raciness are always characteristic of him.

• He is the master of cutting wit and biting repartee(巧妙应答), and superior in imagery and diction.

• His works exerted a very powerful influence on the literature of France, Germany, Italy and Russia, and were translated into all European languages. He still remains one of the most influential Romantic poets to foreign readers.

2. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

 Life

Shelly was born into a very wealthy family. His grandfather loved him so much that appointed him as his property heir. Shelly was early displayed an inclination for independence thinking and a strong love of literature. He was gentle and kind by nature, but he had a stout heart. He could not stand any injustice. When he was at Oxford, he wrote and published an anti-religious pamphlet, for this he was expelled from the university and disowned by his father. When he was living alone in London at the age of 19, he met with and married a school-girl of 16. In 1812, he went to Ireland and attended political activities.

Shelly’s marriage with Harriet had proved hasty and unsuitable. The unhappy union was dissolved in 1814. In 1816, Shelly married Mary Godwin. Their peaceful and happy life was broken by the sudden death of Harriet, who drowned herself in a river. Shelly was compelled to leave England in 1818 and spent all the rest of his life in Italy.

On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small boat along the coast of Italy, a sudden tempest struck his boat and he was drowned. The inscription on his tombstone reads, “Percy Bysshe Shelly, CoR CORDIUM” (众心之心)

 Works

Queen Mab (麦布女王)

It is written in a form of a fairy-tale dream;

The poem has 9 cantos.

The first 2 cantos deal with a vision of past.

The last 2 with an ideal view of the future.

The 5 central cantos are devoted to a fierce attacked on the social evils of the day.

It is a revolutionary poem. Shelly in this poem was looking forward to a happy future but rejecting violence revolution.

The Revolt of Islam

In this poem Shelly described “the bloodless dethronement” of the people’s oppressors and express his belief in “a slow, gradual, silent change”. Here, he did not understand the necessity of armed struggle for a better society.

Prometheus Unbound

a lyrical drama in 4 acts;

The poem symbolizes the victory for man’s struggle against tyranny and oppression.

The Masque of Anarchy

Anarchy here means the tyranny of a handful of oppressors and exploiters over the popular masses. In this poem, Shelly sings the men of England, their strength and future victory. He calls upon them to rise against the oppressors and blood-suckers. (Peterloo Massacre August 16, 1819)

Other political lyrics: Song to the Men of England

Lyrics on Nature and Love

Ode to the West Wind (an expression of the poet’s eager aspiration for something free from the care and misery of real life.)

To a Skylark

Love Lyrics (Love is sung as sth. Noble, high above the “cash payment” marriage institution under capitalism.)

A Defence of Poetry (literary criticism)

Shelly wrote this essay in order to refute the view that poetry must inevitably decline with the progress of civilization. He maintained that poetry, so far from being deteriorated and made powerless by the advance of civilization, is actually the indispensable agent of civilization.

 Features of Shelly’s Poetry

1. Shelley’s rebellious spirit can be found in such poems as

– Queen Mab

– Revolt of Islam

– The Cenci

– The Masque of Anarchy

– Prometheus Unbound

2. Shelley as a lyrical poet is admired for such lyrics as

– Ode to the West Wind

– To a Skylark

– The Cloud

These three poems are regarded as the most beautiful nature poems in English language

3. Shelley is one of the greatest English nature poets. Descriptions of nature reveal his political ideas. West wind, for instance, is associated with revolution, signifying the destruction of the old world and the coming of a new world.

4. Shelley’s poems shine with radiant beauty, marvelous symbolism and imagery, exalted exquisiteness of personification, and perfectness of artistry

– spontaneous flow

– youthful freshness and enthusiasm

5. Shelley’s poetry are rich in scenes of dreamlike lands and possesses an ethereal musical quality.

3. John Keats (1795—1821)

 Life

John Keats was born in 1795 in London. Before he was fifteen, both his parents died and he was sent to be an apprentice to a surgeon. During his seven years’ apprenticeship, he developed a love of poetry and got acquired with some prose-writers and published some poems. With the help of Shelly, he published his first collection of poems in 1817. In the same year, he left London and started on a walking tour around England and Scotland. His poems during this period of time show his interest in the political life and his concern for the miserable condition of the common people.

 Works

Keats poems revealed mastery of formal (aestheticism) and depth of feeling. But his democratic views offended the aristocratic-bourgeois literary circles, who attacked Keats savagely. Under the great stress of poverty, personal sorrow and his own poor health, he wrote some magnificent poems.

When Keats on the brink of death, his some long poems containing Isbella, the Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia appeared.

Endymion

A poetic romance is a poem of 4,000 lines;

The effect of this poem is like a sort of fairy voyage after beauty. It symbolizes the truth of life and the beauty of life.

Isabella

The basic idea in Isabella is sympathy for the oppressed and indignation at the cruelty of the rich. The root of the evils in the system of exploitation.

The Eve of St. Agnes

In this poem, Keats expressed his fondness for sensuous beauty and showed his ability of painting exact word-pictures.

Lamia

Keats emphasizes the theme on appreciation of sensuous beauty.

Hyperion

Its theme is the conflict between the old and the new;

Keats shows that each stage of development is fated to give place to a higher excellence and the victory of life and youth over the forces of decay and retrogression. The passing of an old order of things and the coming of a new—this is the eternal law of nature.

Short Poems:

The one artistic aim in his poetry was to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. His leading principle is: “Beauty in truth, truth in beauty.” What the imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth.

Ode to a Greek Urn

The most important short poems of Keats are sonnets and odes.

Keats voiced his resentment against the rule of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in a manner different from his brother-poets, Byron and Shelly. Byron and Shelly attempted to remould the contemporary society with both poetry and political action, while Keats restricted his application of the principle of liberty to the sphere of art. His pursuit of beauty in all things showed an aspiration after a better life than the sordid reality under capitalism.

 Features of Keats’ Poetry

• Keats’ lyrics are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be satisfied until he knows more of such delightful poetry. Those who study only "Ode to a Nightingale" will find four things a love of sensuous beauty, a touch of pessimism, a purely pagan conception of nature, and a strong individualism, which are characteristic of this last poet of Romanticism.

• In many respects he is the best workman of all romantic poets.

– his poetic expression, or the harmony of word and thought, is generally more perfect than theirs

– More than any other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of arts.

– he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his "On a Grecian Urn," beauty and truth were one and inseparable. To him, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." He is an apostle of beauty. Some of his poems incline toward "Art for art's sake."

– He shows certain aloftness from the interest of worldly life and seems seeking refuge in an idealistic world of illusions and dreams, but this is due to his resentment of the bourgeois aristocratic society.

– The poetry of Keats shows the enthralling beauty of line, colour, shape, order and taste.

– His poems are marked by the mastery of artistic form, depth of feeling, vivid imagery, perfect finish, and touching melody.

4. Walter Scott (1771—1832)

Scott himself is a romanticist in that he was interested in the past and his rich imagination.

vivify the past;

historical events are closely interwoven with the fates of individuals;

he was mindful of the fates of the ordinary people;

careful studies into the historical life and imagination;

Conservative but he shows the decay of the old and the victory of the new social forms.

Scott’s literary career makes the transition from romanticism to realism in English literature of the 19th century.

 Works

The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Marmion; The Lady of the Lake; Rob Roy; Ivanhoe, etc.

III. English Novel—Jane Austen (1775—1817)

Jane Austen was the first great woman novelist. Jane Austen, within her accurate and exquisitely feminine sense of character and scene, has probably never been equaled within her deliberately limited range. Her works were regarded as realistic works, but they have a tendency of classicism, because in her novel, she emphasized reason.

 Works (6 novels)

Northanger Abbey; Persuasion; Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; and Emma.

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