Romanticism

1. Romanticism Major poets and their representative works

2. William Blake (1757-1827) • Songs of Innocence ( p. 1789) • Introduction • The Lamb • The Chimney Sweeper • Songs of Experience (p. 1794) • Introduction • The Tyger • The Chimney Sweeper

3. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, how does the world of innocence change into the world of experience? • What is so fascinating about this collection of poems is the way in which Blake presents us with two contrasting views on life and society through the two selections of songs. He makes clear this parallel view on life by often having one poem in the Songs of Innocence matched by a very similar poem in the Songs of Experience. This allows him to emphasise the way that he is drawing our attention towards two contrasting ways of looking at the same object. For example, if we analyse the two different versions of "The Chimney Sweeper," we can see how this operates.

4. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, how does the world of innocence change into the world of experience? • Both poems depict the terrible kind of lives and situations that young boys who were chimney sweeps faced. However, in the first "innocent" version of the poem, what is crucial to spot is the way in which religion is used to justify their existence and to compel them to work hard and obedient. The dream that little Tom has shows how religion was (and is?) a force that is used to obligate people to be obedient and to accept their reality in the hope of gaining some future paradise. At the end of the poem, the speaker and Tom get up ready and eager to work at their terrible job with the final maxim of the poem running through their minds: • So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

5. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, how does the world of innocence change into the world of experience? • The other version of this poem offers no such hope or consolation. The state of innocence is changed into the state of experience through the stripping away of any such metanarratives that give the young chimney sweeps hope of anything good in the future. Whereas the first poem showed how religion was used to give (false) hope to the young chimney sweeps, in this poem, religion is shown to be the cause of misery. The young chimney sweep bemoans the fact that because he appears to be happy, his parents don't think they have done anything wrong by selling him into this profession and he bitterly mocks "God and his priest and king, / Who make up a heaven of our misery." The state of experience involves a much more cynical view of society and how it operates to perpetuate misery.

6. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) • “The World is too Much with us; Late and Soon” • “The Tables Turned” • “London, 1802” • “Tintern Abbey” • “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

7. What is the theme and idea of William Wordsworth’s writings? • Wordworth deals with the question of where the meaning in our life comes from.  He believed that it came from an intimate relationship with nature.  It can be seen in many of his poems. • In "Tinturn Abbey" he writes" • These beauteous forms,Through a long absence, have not been to meAs is a landscape to a blind man's eye:But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to themIn hours of weariness, sensations sweet,Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;And passing even into my purer mind,With tranquil restoration:--feelings too 30Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,As have no slight or trivial influenceOn that best portion of a good man's life,His little, nameless, unremembered, actsOf kindness and of love. 

8. Wordsworth wrote at the beginning of the RomanticMovement, and one of the things the Romantics were most concerned about what the growth of cities, the commercialization of life, and the growing influence of science which tends to aim at controlling nature rather than realting to it.  Scientific knowledge comes from "tuition," knowledge that is based on work, education, etc.  The Romantics believe that the essential knowledge comes from "intuition," a spontaneous learning built into our nature through the congruence of our "nature" with that of "Nature." • The entire poem, "The World is Too Much With Us" illustrates many of these points.

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834) • The Eolian Harp • Kubla Khan

10. “The Eolian Harp” is a lyric poem written in blank verse paragraphs of varying lengths. The title refers to a stringed instrument which produces music when placed in an open window so that the breeze may pass over it. The eolian harp was commonly used by poets in the Romantic period as a metaphor for the creative process. • The poem begins with the persona, who is clearly Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, addressing his wife, Sara. They are sitting affectionately together outside their cottage in Clevedon, in the English county of Somersetshire. It is a quiet and peaceful evening scene. They look up at the evening star and the passing clouds; they can smell the pleasing scent from the nearby bean field, and they listen to the distant murmur of the sea.

11. In the second verse paragraph, the poet turns his attention to the eolian harp placed in the window of the cottage. Touched by the intermittent breeze, it is sending its music into the air. Coleridge compares the harp first to a girl “half yielding” as she is caressed by her lover; then, as the music grows stronger, he compares the harp to entrancing sounds coming from fairyland. The combination of silence and soft sound leads the poet into an intellectual reverie. He celebrates “The one Life within us and abroad,” a single spirit infusing everything in creation with joy. He feels that in such a world, in which the very air seems to be filled with music, it is impossible not to be filled with love for all things. • Stimulated by this thought, he remembers an incident when he was climbing a hill at midday and had watched, through half-closed eyes, the sunbeams dancing on the sea. The tranquil scene had stimulated his mind, and the present scene is having the same effect on him: A stream of thoughts rushes spontaneously through his “indolent and passive brain.” Another intellectual meditation follows, which develops the ideas implicit in the previous reverie. The poet speculates that perhaps everything in nature is like an eolian harp, brought into being as one vast “intellectual breeze” sweeps over it, a breeze which is at once the soul of each individual thing and the God of the whole creation.

12. In the final verse paragraph, the poet catches sight of his wife, Sara, who is chastising him for indulging in fanciful ideas. She tells him to “walk humbly with [his] God.” The poet praises her as a “Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!” and accepts her rebuke. He dismisses his thoughts as nothing more than the “shapings of the unregenerate mind” and concludes the poem with a more orthodox Christian position. He remembers that God is beyond understanding, except to the eye of deeply felt faith, and he accepts that it is only through God’s grace that he has been saved from his sins and granted the peace and happiness he now enjoys with his wife.

13. “The Eolian Harp” is one of Coleridge’s first achievements in a new lyric form he developed, which is known as the conversation poem, or greater Romantic lyric. The form was later used by almost all the major English romantic poets, including Coleridge’s close friend William Wordsworth in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798). • The conversation poem, so called because it embodies the relaxed and informal tones of the speaking voice, is usually addressed to a silent listener, in this case Coleridge’s wife Sara. It usually begins with a description of a quiet scene in nature, then turns inward, to the workings of the poet’s own mind. Typically, the poet will reflect on an emotional or intellectual problem and work his way to some kind of resolution before the poem rounds back to where it began, in the calm of the natural scene. The rhythm is one of systole and diastole.

14. The dominant image is that of the eolian harp, whose spontaneous music feeds the poet’s loftier speculations. The harp also provides the poet with an image of himself and his own craft: Like the harp, the poet waits passively for inspiration to come to him. He must “tranquil muse upon tranquillity” until the external scene, received through “half-clos’d eyelids,” stimulates his “indolent and passive brain” to deep thoughts. Linked to this interaction between active and passive modes of being is another prominent group of images, in which silence coexists with soft sound, as in the line, “The stilly murmur of the distant Sea/ Tells us of Silence,” and in all the passages that describe the harp’s music.

15. “The Eolian Harp” expresses Coleridge’s belief in a natural philosophy that emphasizes the connectedness of all things, both inner and outer: “O! the one Life within us and abroad,” as he puts it in this poem. Coleridge believed that any separation between subject and object, the knower and the known, was ultimately false, and he was always searching for the ways in which the laws that govern the operation of the human mind could also be discerned in the workings of the external world. Like Wordsworth, he thought this could best be achieved when the mind was quiet—hence the emphasis in the poem on his own “indolence.” (Wordsworth called such a state “wise passiveness.”) Settling down into its own silence, the mind could then perceive the underlying principle of joy and harmony which runs through the whole of creation, the “Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where” suggested to the poet by the music of the harp.

16. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) • Ozymandias • Ode to the West Wind

17. The first person narrator begins the poem with a story of meeting a traveler who had gone to an ancient land obviously Eqypt. Here he sees the remains of a huge statue in the desert.  Only the legs and pedestal remain in place with the face sunken into the sand showing only the frowning, sneering mouth. The artist was able to capture the inner turmoil of the pharaoh implying that the artist can see into the true nature of people.  Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

18. The poem implies that although the statue cannot speak, the frown and sneer speak volumes about the impression that the ruler wanted to leave on his people and posterity. In a few lines, Shelley brings to light several historical issues: all leaders die regardless of their braggadocio; nothing lasts forever; and the fleeting time of tyrannical power • The sestet then symbolizes the contention of the poet.  Ironically, the tyrant asks for the other world leaders and his people to survey his accomplishments.  However, nothing remains of them but a few pieces of the destroyed statue.  Because Ozymandias thought that he was a superior king, he had to have a “colossal statue.” The surrounding area is even bleak and desolate.  The pharaoh’s legacy has been abandoned.

19. John Keats (1795- 1821) • Ode on a Grecian Urn • http://maggiefelisberto.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/urn.jpeg

20. The main thing that captures the speakers interest in the urn, is the idea of time and art and beauty. The lovers on the urn are frozen in time, for all eternity. Although the "bold lover" will never catch the girl, the girl will never age. The urn is beautiful to the speaker because of the fact that it will never change for all eternity. The beauty also comes from a safe place. One way of looking at the "truth and beauty" statement is to consider that the scene on the urn is true and beautiful because it is self-contained: it has no need for answers, and so it will always have found its truth, unlike real life, where new details always rise up and make truth and beauty elusive. The common factor to both truth and beauty in this poem is that they both occur when you know all that you need to know, regardless of what is happening around you.