121-) English Literature

121-) English Literature

William Blake 

William Blake (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1827, London) was an English poet engraver,, painter, and printmaker, visionary ,and author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804[–?11]), and Jerusalem (1804[–?20]). The dating of Blake’s texts is explained in the Researcher’s Note: Blake publication dates. These works he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” and the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton, which has become a kind of second national anthem in Britain.Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".

Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he came to be highly regarded by later critics and readers for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic". A committed Christian who was hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to almost all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions. Though later he rejected many of these political beliefs, he maintained an amicable relationship with the political activist Thomas Paine; he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti characterised him as a "glorious luminary", and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries , nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".

In the early 21st century, Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or (unjustly) dismissed as mad.

"The Tyger" from the combined volume of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, ca. 1825; relief etching printed in orange-brown ink and hand-colored with watercolor and gold.(poems, poetry)

Early life

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in Soho, London. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Blake's father, James, was a hosier, who had lived in London.Blake was born over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London. He attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of 10, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Blake (née Wright). Even though the Blakes were English Dissenters, William was baptised on 11 December at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London.[20]His parents were James Blake (1722–84) and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake (1722–92). His father came from an obscure family in Rotherhithe, across the River Thames from London, and his mother was from equally obscure yeoman stock in the straggling little village of Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire. His mother had first married (1746) a haberdasher named Thomas Armitage, and in 1748 they moved to 28 Broad Street. In 1750 the couple joined the newly established Moravian church in Fetter Lane, London. The Moravian religious movement, recently imported from Germany, had had a strong attraction to the powerful emotions associated with nascent Methodism (see Moravian church). Catherine Armitage bore a son named Thomas, who died as a baby in 1751, and a few months later Thomas Armitage himself died.

Catherine left the Moravians, who insisted on marriages within the faith, and in 1752 married James Blake in the Church of England chapel of St. George in Hanover Square. James moved in with her at 28 Broad Street. They had six children: James (1753–1827), who took over the family haberdashery business on his father’s death in 1784; John (born 1755, died in childhood); William, the poet and artist; another John Blake (born 1760, died by 1800), whom Blake referred to in a letter of 1802 as “my Brother John the evil one” and who became an unsuccessful gingerbread baker, enlisted as a soldier, and died; Richard (1762–87), called Robert, a promising artist and the poet’s favourite, at times his alter ego; and Catherine Elizabeth (1764–1841), the baby of the family, who never married and who died in extreme indigence long after the deaths of all her brothers.

William Blake grew up in modest circumstances. What teaching he received as a child was at his mother’s knee, as most children did. This he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]”

The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and remained a source of inspiration throughout his life. Blake's childhood, according to him, included mystical religious experiences such as "beholding God's face pressed against his window, seeing angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel."

Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck and Albrecht Dürer. The number of prints and bound books that James and Catherine were able to purchase for young William suggests that the Blakes enjoyed, at least for a time, a comfortable wealth. When William was ten years old, his parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but instead enrolled in drawing classes at Henry Pars' drawing school in the Strand. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake made explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms.

Apprenticeship

On 4 August 1772, Blake was apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, at the sum of £52.10, for a term of seven years. At the end of the term, aged 21, he became a professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the period of Blake's apprenticeship, but Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake later added Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries; and then crossed it out. This aside, Basire's style of line-engraving was of a kind held at the time to be old-fashioned compared to the flashier stipple or mezzotint styles. It has been speculated that Blake's instruction in this outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London (perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice). His experiences in Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that "...the most immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour". This close study of the Gothic (which he saw as the "living form") left clear traces in his style. In the long afternoons Blake spent sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by boys from Westminster School, who were allowed in the Abbey. They teased him and one tormented him so much that Blake knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence". After Blake complained to the Dean, the schoolboys' privilege was withdrawn. Blake claimed that he experienced visions in the Abbey. He saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard their chant.

Royal Academy

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit". Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much from the president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater value than landscape and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his ideals into practice." Certainly Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, submitting works on six occasions between 1780 and 1808.

Blake became a friend of John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland during his first year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining the Society for Constitutional Information.

Gordon Riots

Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that in June 1780 Blake was walking towards Basire's shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison. The mob attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze, and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during the attack. The riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, became known as the Gordon Riots and provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, and the creation of the first police force.

Marriage to Catherine Boucher

In 1781 Blake fell in love with Catherine Sophia Boucher (1762–1831), the pretty, illiterate daughter of an unsuccessful market gardener from the farm village of Battersea across the River Thames from London. The family name suggests that they were Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France.

According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, at their first meeting he told her how he had been jilted by Polly Wood , and Catherine said she pitied him from her heart.

“Do you pity me?” asked Blake.

“Yes, I do, most sincerely.”

“Then,” said he, “I love you for that.”

“Well, and I love you.”

Blake returned to Soho to achieve financial security to support a wife, and 12 months later, on Aug. 18, 1782, the couple married in her family’s church, Saint Mary’s, Battersea, the bride signing the marriage register with an X.

It was an imprudent and highly satisfactory marriage. Blake taught Catherine to read and write (a little), to draw, to colour his designs and prints, to help him at the printing press, and to see visions as he did. She believed implicitly in his genius and his visions and supported him in everything he did with charming credulity. After his death she lived chiefly for the moments when he came to sit and talk with her.

Not long after his marriage, Blake acquired a rolling press for printing engravings and joined his fellow apprentice James Parker in opening a print shop in 1784. Within a year, however, Blake had left the business and returned to making rather than selling prints.

Marriage

In 1781 Blake met Catherine Boucher when he was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine: "Do you pity me?" When she responded affirmatively, he declared: "Then I love you". Blake married Catherine, who was five years his junior, on 18 August 1782 in St Mary's Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. The original wedding certificate may be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982. The marriage was successful and Catherine became Blake's "partner in both life and work", undertaking important roles as an engraver and colorist. In 2019 Tate Britain's Blake exhibition gave particular focus to Catherine's role in Blake's work.

Education as artist and engraver

From childhood Blake wanted to be an artist, at the time an unusual aspiration for someone from a family of small businessmen and Nonconformists (dissenting Protestants). His father indulged him by sending him to Henry Pars’s Drawing School in the Strand, London (1767–72). The boy hoped to be apprenticed to some artist of the newly formed and flourishing English school of painting, but the fees proved to be more than the parental pocket could withstand. Instead he went with his father in 1772 to interview the successful and fashionable engraver William Wynne Ryland. Ryland’s fee, perhaps £100, was both “more attainable” than that of fashionable painters and still, for the Blakes, very high; furthermore the boy interposed an unexpected objection: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Eleven years later, Ryland was indeed hanged—for forgery—one of the last criminals to suffer on the infamous gallows known as Tyburn Tree.

The young Blake was ultimately apprenticed for 50 guineas to James Basire (1730–1802), a highly responsible and conservative line engraver who specialized in prints depicting architecture. For seven years (1772–79) Blake lived with Basire’s family on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. There he learned to polish the copperplates, to sharpen the gravers, to grind the ink, to reduce the images to the size of the copper, to prepare the plates for etching with acid, and eventually to push the sharp graver through the copper, with the light filtered through gauze so that the glare reflected from the brilliantly polished copper would not dazzle him. He became so proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire trusted him to go by himself to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments there for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the last quarter of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (vol. 1, 1786).

Death of Robert Blake

One of the most traumatic events of Blake’s life was the death of his beloved 24-year-old brother, Robert, from tuberculosis in 1787. At the end, Blake stayed up with him for a fortnight, and when Robert died Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy,’” as Alexander Gilchrist wrote. The occasion entered into Blake’s psyche and his poetry. In the epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?), he writes, “Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy, clapping his hands,” and, in his poem Milton, plates 29 and 33 portray figures, labeled “William” and “Robert,” falling backward as a star plunges toward their feet. Blake claimed that in a vision Robert taught him the secret of painting his designs and poems on copper in a liquid impervious to acid before the plate was etched and printed. This method, which Blake called “Illuminated Printing,” made it possible for Blake to be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all his published poetry thereafter, from Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem (1804[–20?]).

120-) English Literature

120- ) English Literature 

A Brief Biography of William Blake

His Early Life

William Blake was a famous poet, painter, and engraver of the late 18th century and early 19th century. Blake was a radical, anti-authority figure.

William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street in Soho, London on 28 November 1757. His father James Blake was a hosier. He and his wife Catherine had 6 children. Apart from William, they had 4 boys and 1 girl.

From an early age, William Blake was artistic. He also had ‘visions’ of things like angels. When he was 14 William was made apprentice to an engraver called James Basire. William served 7 years and became an engraver himself in 1779. Blake also wanted to paint and the same year he became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts.

On 18 August 1782, William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher at the Church of St Mary in Battersea. Blake also wrote poems. A book of poems called Poetical Sketches was published in 1783. In 1789 he published a book of poems called The Song of Innocence.

In 1793 Blake published Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The same year, in 1793 Blake published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Also in 1793, Blake published America, a Prophecy.

The Great Poet

In 1794 Blake published a book of poems called Songs of Experience. It included the famous poem The Tiger. The Book of Urizen was also published in 1794. Also in 1794, William Blake published Europe, a Prophecy.

In 1800 William Blake moved to the village of Felpham near Bognor in Sussex. Then on 12 August 1803, Blake got into a fight with a soldier named John Schofield who entered his garden. Schofield later told a magistrate that Blake damned the king of England during the altercation. William Blake was tried for sedition (a serious charge) in Chichester in January 1804. However, he was acquitted.

Meanwhile in 1803 Blake and his wife returned to London. In the years 1804-1810, William Blake wrote and illustrated his work Milton A Poem in Two Books. The preface included the famous poem now known as Jerusalem, which was written in 1804. (Blake did not give it that title. It was originally called ‘And did those feet in ancient time’. Hubert Parry wrote music for it in 1916). In 1820 Blake painted The Goblin. He also painted a miniature called The Ghost of a Flea.

In 1825 Blake was commissioned to illustrate Divine Comedy by Dante but he died before he could complete the task. William Blake died on 12 August 1827. He was buried in Bunhill Fields in London.

119-) English Literature

119- ) English Literature

Romanticism

Drama

This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”) theatres created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when commissioning new texts, legitimate theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.

This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.” But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem, 1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.

By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction (1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot, and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences of the “illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker, The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and television of a later period.

Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the work of James Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic (Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse) at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theatre (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly disappeared.

The post-Romantic and Victorian eras

Self-consciousness was the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of the men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors. Hazlitt’s essays in The Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.

This persistent scrutiny was the product of an acute sense of change. Britain had emerged from the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world’s predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day.”

This new status as the world’s first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy.

The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to faith. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic thought were challenged by the growing prestige of empirical science and utilitarian moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more-objective modes in literature. Realism would be one of the great artistic movements of the era. In politics a widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.

John Stuart Mill caught this contradictory quality, with characteristic acuteness, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every contemporary thinker, he argued, was indebted to these two “seminal minds.” Yet Bentham, as the enduring voice of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief English example of the Romantic reaction against it, held diametrically opposed views.

A simila sense of sharp controversy is given by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). An eccentric philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne, the book argues for a new mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to be one of mechanism. Carlyle’s choice of the novel form and the book’s humour, generic flexibility, and political engagement point forward to distinctive characteristics of Victorian literature .

Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel

Several major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died in 1834, De Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843 and held the post until his own death seven years later. Posthumous publication caused some striking chronological anomalies. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” was not published until 1840. Keats’s letters appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth’s Prelude in 1850.

Despite this persistence, critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of Austen in 1817 and Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of prose fiction were published in Victorian Britain by as many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or “three-decker”) was the standard mode of first publication; it was a form created for sale to and circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in the 1830s by the advent of serialization in magazines and by the publication of novels in 32-page monthly parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker finally yield to the modern single-volume format.

Most Famous Writers in The Romantic Period in English Literature- Summary

1. William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

2. S.T Coleridge (1772–1834)

3. Lord Byron (1778–1824)

4. P.B. Shelley (1792–1822)

5. John Keats (1795–1821)

William Wordsworth

The poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a remote town in the lowlands of northern England. He is known as “Poet of Nature,” “Worshiper of Nature,” “The Lake Poet.” The French Revolution inspired him. He became The Poet of Laureate in England.” In nature, the great Creator exists,” his belief is known as Pantheism William Wordsworth was the brightest star of the age of the Romantic Period.. This poet died in 1850.

His Well-known Works :

 Lyrical Ballads  , The Daffodils , The Solitary Reaper , The Excursion ,

 The Prelude  , The Recluse

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the youngest of thirteen children of his parents. He was an extraordinary child who read the Bible and Arabian Nights before he was five. He was an influential writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher of the age of the Romantic Period. He was a founder of his friend William Wordsworth of the Romantic Movement in England. He was called “Opium Eater,” “The Poet of Super-naturalism.” This poet died in 1834.

His Well-known Works :

· Lyrical ballads , · The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , · Christabel , · Kubla Khan , · Dejection: An Ode , · The Nightingale , · Biographia Literaria

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron was a British poet and one of the leading figures in the Romantic movement . The poet was born in 1788 in London, the year preceding the French Revolution. He was called the Rebel poet in England. He was also an influential poet of the age of the Romantic Period. He published his first work “Hours of Idleness (Juvenilia)” at the age of 19 when he was reading Cambridge University. He fought on behalf of the Greeks in their Liberation War. This poet contracted fever at the age of 36 and died in 1824.

His Well-known Works :

Don Juan ,  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ,  She Walks in Beauty ,  Hours of Idleness ,  Heaven and Earth

Percy Bysshe Shelly

Percy Bysshe Shelly was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. The famous English poet was born in 1792 in Fieldplace, near Sussex, England. He was an Optimistic & Pessimistic poet. This great poet died in 1822 when he was caught in a storm while traveling by boat on the beach.

His Well-known Works :

Ode to a Skylark ,  Ode to the West Wind ,  Adonais ,  Queen Mab ,  The Necessity Atheism ,  A Defense of Poetry , Prometheus Unbound

John Keats

John Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists. He was most young among the Romantic poets. The famous poet of English literature was born in 1795 in Mubfields, London. He was called “Poet of Beauty” “Poet of Sensuousness.” He was most famous for his sense of beauty and professionally known as a man of medicine. This poet died at the age of 26 of Tuberculosis in 1821.

His Well-known Works :

Ode to a Nightingale ,  Ode to Psyche ,  Odeon Melancholy ,  Ode to Autumn

,Isabella ,  Lamia

Poets / Romanticism / Writer / English Language

William Blake. , Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834 , Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822 , John Keats 1795–1821 , Robert Burns , 1759–1796 , Joseph Warton 1722–1800 , Walter Scott, 1771–1832 , Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849 , Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882 , James Russell Lowell , 1819–1891 , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882 , Mary Shelley 1797–1851 , Thomas Love Peacock 1785–1866 , John Clare 1793–1864 , Felicia Hemans 1793–1835

118-) English Literature

118-) English Literature 

Romanticism

Poetry

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment . “Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

Other poets of the early Romantic period

In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly coloured narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.

The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron

The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin , whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervour burns throughout the early Queen Mab (1813) , the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behaviour evinced and approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and power.

John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his early work, such as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. As the program set out in his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows, however, Keats was determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820, when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity. He experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published 1820), an adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in its attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same time a poem involved in contemporary politics. His epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery, but Keats soon found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called “other sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819, Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement, showing what has been called “the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the complex themes being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb letters show the full range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics. Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of sensibility and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was further mined in dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there became a formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire on Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822).

Other poets of the later period

John Clare, a Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), and The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Both his reputation and his mental health collapsed in the late 1830s. He spent the later years of his life in an asylum in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there was rediscovered in the 20th century. His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent observation, his almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make him one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose violent imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the Jacobean dramatists, represents an imagination at the opposite pole; metrical virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical passages from his over-sensational tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously, 1850). Another minor writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was George Darley, some of whose songs from Nepenthe (1835) keep their place in anthologies. The comic writer Thomas Hood also wrote poems of social protest, such as “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs,” as well as the graceful Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827). Felicia Hemans’s best-remembered poem, “Casabianca,” appeared in her volume The Forest Sanctuary (1825). This was followed in 1828 by the more substantial Records of Woman.

The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott

Flourishing as a form of entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel underwent several important developments in this period. One was the invention of the Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a politically engaged fiction in the years immediately before the French Revolution. A third was the rise of women writers to prominence in prose fiction.

The sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Charles Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1798). Novels of this kind were, however, increasingly mocked by critics in the later years of the 18th century.

The comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way. John Moore gave a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors in Zeluco (1786) and Mordaunt (1800). Frances Burney carried the comic realist manner into the field of female experience with the novels Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796). Her discovery of the comic and didactic potential of a plot charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the altar would be important for several generations of female novelists.

More striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace Walpole’s invention, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as the Gothic novel. Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of “ancient romance” with the realistic characterization of “modern” (or novel) romance. Characters would respond with terror to extraordinary events, and readers would vicariously participate. Walpole’s innovation was not significantly imitated until the 1790s, when—perhaps because the violence of the French Revolution created a taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction—a torrent of such works appeared.

The most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished between “terror” and “horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of “uncertainty and obscurity.” Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Radcliffe’s own novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), were examples of the fiction of terror. Vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be illusions.

Matthew Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the hero commits both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman’s imprisonment in a vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of Gothic fiction have more-sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a subtle study of religious mania and split personality. Even in its more-vulgar examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious political and psychological issues.

By the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the ideas of the French Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the process. One practitioner of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered for Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), in which a “natural” hero rejects the conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas Holcroft published two novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794), influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best example of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a narrative of social oppression.

Women novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798), Elizabeth Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796) celebrated the rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Jane West (A Gossip’s Story, 1796; A Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia Opie (Adeline Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-Control, 1811) stressed the dangers of social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth, whose long, varied, and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) to Helen (1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent (1800), an affectionately comic portrait of life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the subsequent work of Scott.

Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in novels that incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into love stories that many readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels—Sense and Sensibility (first published in 1811; originally titled “Elinor and Marianne”), Pride and Prejudice (1813; originally “First Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817)—were drafted in the late 1790s. Three more novels—Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817, together with Northanger Abbey)—were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen uses, essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected heroine is gradually acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously looked down on her (such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-deceived heroine (such as Emma Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) belatedly recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she had previously despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a powerful case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism, and rationality to the new “Romantic” values of imagination, egotism, and subjectivity. With Austen the comic brilliance and exquisite narrative construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in conjunction with a distinctive and deadly irony.

Thomas Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate knowledge of Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic debates rather than conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare Abbey (1818) are sharp accounts of contemporary intellectual and cultural fashions, as are the two much later fictions in which Peacock reused this successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll Grange (1860–61).

Sir Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a Romantic novelist. After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose fiction in 1814 with the first of the “Waverley novels.” In the first phase of his work as a novelist, Scott wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern world in a series of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with Quentin Durward in 1823, he added European settings to his historical repertoire. Scott combines a capacity for comic social observation with a Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the novel in ways that equip it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.

Discursive prose

The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.

The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period, particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819) and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming, whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example of the charm and humour of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the new interest in writing about the self, producing a colourful account of his early experiences in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach” and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.

The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun 1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on contemporary writers could be savagely partisan , they set a notable standard of fearless and independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.

117-) English Literature

117-) English Literature

British Romanticism

An introduction to the poetic revolution that brought common people to literature’s highest peaks .

“[I]f Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all,” proposed John Keats in an 1818 letter, at the age of 22. This could be called romantic in sentiment, lowercase r, meaning fanciful, impractical , unachievably ambitious. But Keats’s axiom could also be taken as a one-sentence distillation of British Romanticism—with its all-or-nothing stance on the spontaneity of the highest art, its conviction of the sympathetic connections between nature’s organic growth and human creativity, and its passion for individual imagination as an originating force. This period is generally mapped from the first political and poetic tremors of the 1780s to the 1832 Reform Act. No major period in English-language literary history is shorter than that half-century of the Romantic era, but few other eras have ever proved as consequential. Romanticism was nothing short of a revolution in how poets understood their art, its provenance, and its powers: ever since, English-language poets have furthered that revolution or formulated reactions against it.

In Britain, Romanticism was not a single unified movement, consolidated around any one person, place, moment, or manifesto, and the various schools, styles, and stances we now label capital-R Romantic would resist being lumped into one clear category. Yet all of Romanticism’s products exploded out of the same set of contexts: some were a century in the making; others were overnight upheavals. Ushered in by revolutions in the United States (1776) and France (1789), the Romantic period coincides with the societal transformations of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of liberal movements and the state’s counterrevolutionary measures, and the voicing of radical ideas—Parliamentary reform, expanded suffrage, abolitionism, atheism—in pamphlets and public demonstrations. Though Britain avoided an actual revolution, political tensions sporadically broke out into traumatizing violence, as in the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which state cavalry killed at least 10 peaceful demonstrators and wounded hundreds more.

Emboldened by the era’s revolutionary spirit, Romantic poets invented new literary forms to match. Romantic poetry can argue radical ideas explicitly and vehemently (as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England in 1819,” a sonnet in protest of Peterloo) or allegorically and ambivalently (as in William Blake’s “The Tyger,” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience). To quote from William Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking collection he wrote with fellow poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romantic poets could “choose incidents and situations from common life” as its subjects, describing them not in polished or high-flown diction but instead in everyday speech, “a selection of language really used by men.” Romanticism can do justice to the disadvantaged, to those marginalized or forgotten by an increasingly urban and commercial culture—rural workers, children, the poor, the elderly, or the disabled—or it can testify to individuality simply by foregrounding the poet’s own subjectivity at its most idiosyncratic or experimental.

Alongside prevailing political and social ideas, Romantic poets put into practice new aesthetic theories, cobbled from British and German philosophy, which opposed the neoclassicism and rigid decorum of 18th-century poetry. To borrow the central dichotomy of critic M.H. Abrams’s influential book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Romantic poets broke from the past by no longer producing artistic works that merely mirrored or reflected nature faithfully; instead, they fashioned poems that served as lamps illuminating truths through self-expression, casting the poets’ subjective, even impressionistic, experiences onto the world. From philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the Romantics inherited a distinction between two aesthetic categories, the beautiful and the sublime—in which beautiful suggests smallness, clarity, and painless pleasure, and sublime suggests boundlessness, obscurity, and imagination-stretching grandeur. From the German critic A.W. Schlegel, Coleridge developed his ideal of “organic form,” the unity found in artworks whose parts are interdependent and integral to the whole—grown, like a natural organism, according to innate processes, not externally mandated formulas.

The most self-conscious and self-critical British poets to date, the Romantics justified their poetic experimentations in a variety of prose genres (prefaces, reviews, essays, diaries, letters, works of autobiography or philosophy) or else inside the poetry itself. But they never wrote only for other poets and critics: the Romantics competed in a burgeoning literary marketplace that made room for the revival of English and Scottish ballads (narrative folk songs, transcribed and disseminated in print), the recovery of medieval romances (one etymological root of Romantic), and prose fiction ranging from the psychological extremes of the gothic novel to the wit of Jane Austen’s social realism. Romantic poets looked curiously backward—to Greek mythology, friezes, and urns or to a distinctly British cultural past of medieval ruins and tales of knights and elves—to look speculatively forward. Perhaps no pre-Romantic author inspired the Romantics more than William Shakespeare, who exemplified what Keats termed “Negative Capability , that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” For Keats, “a great poet” such as Shakespeare opened his imagination to all possibilities, limited neither by an insistent search for truth nor by his own egocentric gravity: “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Drawing on unrestrained imagination and a variegated cultural landscape, a Romantic-era poem could be trivial or fantastic, succinctly songlike or digressively meandering, a searching fragment or a precisely bounded sonnet or ode, as comic as Lord Byron’s mock epic Don Juan or as cosmologically subversive as Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If any single innovation has emerged as Romanticism’s foremost legacy, it is the dominance among poetic genres of the lyric poem, spoken in first-person (the lyric I) often identified with the poet, caught between passion and reason, finding correspondences in natural surroundings for the introspective workings of heart and mind. If any collection cemented that legacy, it would be Wordsworth and Coleridge’s landmark collection Lyrical Ballads, first published anonymously in 1798. The collection provokes with its title alone, inverting hierarchies, hybridizing the exalted outbursts of lyric poetry with the folk narratives of ballads. In a retrospective preface added for the 1800 second edition and expanded in later editions, Wordsworth set out his polemical program for a poetry grounded in feeling, supplying Romanticism with some of its most resonant and lasting phrases: “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

The following poems, poets, articles, poem guidesare samples of the Romantic era . Included are the monumental Romantic poets often nicknamed “the Big Six”—the older generation of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge and the so-called Young Romantics—Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Indispensable women poets such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Felicia Dorothea Hemans; the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns; and the farm laborer–poet John Clare are also represented. But even this collection is only a beginning: no introduction to Romanticism can encompass the entire period in all its variety and restless experimentation.

BRITISH ROMANTIC POETS

William Blake , William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Lord Byron (George Gordon) , Percy Bysshe Shelley , John Keats , John Clare , Leigh Hunt , Mary Robinson , Robert Southey , Sir Walter Scott , Anna Lætitia Barbauld , Dorothy Wordsworth , Walter Savage Landor , Thomas Chatterton , Charlotte Smith , Mary Lamb , Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Robert Burns , Charles Lamb , Letitia Elizabeth Landon , Charlotte Richardson , George Crabbe , Hannah More , Hartley Coleridge

SEMINAL POEMS

Ode on a Grecian Urn , JOHN KEATS / To Autumn , JOHN KEATS

Ozymandias , PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The Tyger , WILLIAM BLAKE

Kubla Khan , SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

London , WILLIAM BLAKE

Ode to the West Wind , PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) , SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young , WILLIAM BLAKE

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud , WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Ode to a Nightingale , JOHN KEATS

I Am! , JOHN CLARE

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 , WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Don Juan: Dedication , LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)

The Lamb , WILLIAM BLAKE

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni , PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Red, Red Rose , ROBERT BURNS

She Walks in Beauty , LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)

First Love , JOHN CLARE

from The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time , WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Tam O 'Shanter , ROBERT BURNS

The Book of Thel , WILLIAM BLAKE

The Rights of Women , ANNA LÆTITIA BARBAULD

from Endymion , JOHN KEATS

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty , PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Huge Vapours Brood above the Clifted Shore , CHARLOTTE SMITH

The Sick Rose . WILLIAM BLAKE

So We'll Go No More a Roving , LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)

This Lime-tree Bower my Prison , SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be , JOHN KEATS

To a Skylark , PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Scotland

Although after union with England in 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and wider cultural norms, its literature developed a distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation. Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. James Macpherson (1736–1796) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics. Fingal, written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and especially in German literature, through its influence on Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was also popularised in France by figures that included Napoleon. Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from Scottish Gaelic, but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience.

Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement . His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Scott began as a poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first prose work, Waverley in 1814, is often called the first historical novel . It launched a highly successful career, with other historical novels such as Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820). Scott probably did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets and novelists James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839).

Scotland was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817), which had a major impact on the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol suggest that publications like the novels of Scott and these magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish Romanticism that by the early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to emerge as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider formation of a "British Isles nationalism".

Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. Theatres had been discouraged by the Church of Scotland and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth century, many plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and were not published and so most have been lost. Towards the end of the century there were "closet dramas", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed, including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition and Gothic Romanticism.

United States

In the United States, at least by 1818 with William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl", Romantic poetry was being published. American Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) and "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local colour" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and drama of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel.

Influence of European Romanticism on American writers

The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption.

Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained. The Romantic movement  gave rise to New England Transcendentalism, which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new philosophy presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American culture.

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement.

The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down during the period.