Assignment - Paper 105
Name: Insiyafatema Alvani
Batch: M.A Sem:1
Roll no: 12
Subject Code: 22396
Paper name: History of English Literature - From 1350 to 1900
E-mail: insiyafatemaalvani@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt S.B Gardi Department of English MKBU
1)Romantic Age and Poets of This Age
Romanticism:
The Romantic Period in English literature is taken to begin with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and end with the death of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. Romanticism was a broad movement in the history of European and American consciousness which rebelled against the triumph of the European Enlightenment; it is also a comprehensive term for the larger number of tendencies towards change observable in European literature in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As an ageless phenomenon Romanticism Cannot be defined. The Romantic Movement is traditionally seen as starting roughly around 1780. Romantic periods start in 1798, the year in which William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads. As a historical phase of literature, English Romanticism Extends from Blake's earliest poems up to the beginning of the 1830's, though these dates are arbitrary. Romanticism manifested at some-what varied times in Britain, America,France, Germany and Italy. Romanticism affected arts and culture in general. Its main feature was a reaction against the eighteenth century and the Age of Reason. In fact, "Romanticism", or the "Romantic Movement'', was a reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century.
Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term ‘Romanticism’ has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The ‘Romantics’ would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in imaginative forms.
The Age of Revolution:
The Romantic poets were only a small part of a much larger cultural movement. This movement affected the whole of Europe and America. Great painters such as David, Gericault, Constable and Goya and great composers such as Beethoven and Schubert also arose during this time, influenced by the same revolutions, ideas and feelings as the Romantic poets. Aside from the negative impact of the Industrial Revolution on the working and lower classes, the Romantic poets lived through an era of great political change, which influenced their poetic thoughts. The period is sometimes coined the "The Age of Revolution." The American Revolution began in 1765 with Americans rejecting the imposition of taxes by the British Parliament. The French Revolution of 1789 actually started two years prior, in 1787, with the summoning of notabilities to discuss the increase of taxes of the privileged classes. The Revolution did not reach its first climax until two years later in August 1789. The French Revolution continued until 1799. Equality,brotherhood, liberty, freedom these are the main ideas of revolution. The revolutionary wars promised a great future for arts and humanity in a free society. This excited the Romantic poets and is reflected in the themes of their poetry, especially in poems by Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley.
Important concepts of Romantic Poets:
Imagination:
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions.Imagination is the primary faculty to creating all art.
Nature:
The Romantic treatment of nature is almost always philosophical or moral. Nature and natural life were not just the focus of Romantic disenchantment with the new urban industrial existence of the late 18th century. Nature was the mirror in which the Romantics could see the eternal powers which had made both man and the physical universe; it was no longer merely the canvas on which the classical dream of order was written. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself.
William Wordsworth:
Born: 7 April, 1770
Died: 23 April, 1850
Notable Works:
- Lyrical Ballads
- The Prelude
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation. A poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth in England, an area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience, as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth’s interest and sympathy for the life, troubles, and speech of the “common man.” These issues proved to be of the utmost importance to Wordsworth’s work. Wordsworth’s earliest poetry was published in 1793. Wordsworth was first taught to read by his mother and was sent to a low quality school in Cockermouth. Following his mother’s death, he was sent to a school in Penrith, which was a school for children of upper-class families. Wordsworth received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.
Wordsworth’s earliest poetry was published in 1793 in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 1802, he returned to France with his sister on a four-week visit to meet Caroline. Later that year, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature. Wordsworth’s most famous work, The Prelude is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English Romanticism. The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously. Often known simply as ‘The Daffodils’, this is also one of the most famous poems of English Romanticism. Poem is written by Wordsworth, celebrating the ‘host of golden daffodils’ he saw while out walking. On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they came upon a ‘long belt’ of daffodils, as Dorothy put it memorably in her journal.
William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife, Mary. He was eighty years old. He is buried at St Oswald’s Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical “Poem to Coleridge” as The Prelude several months after his death.
John Keats:
Died - 23 February 1821, Rome, Italy
Literary period - Romantic
"Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree; it had better not come at all'.
- John Keats
John Keats’s poetic achievement in a span of a mere six years can only be described as astonishing. But in his own lifetime, critics came close to destroying him. A revered English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years.
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father was a livery-stable keeper, he died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. His mother had tuberculosis when he was 14. In the summer of the same year, he was apprenticed to a surgeon neighbor of his maternal grandparents in Edmonton. In 1815 he began medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Despite qualifying, he never practiced medicine, turning instead to writing poetry. His first volume of poems, published in 1817, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’. In the same year, Blackwood’s Magazine published a series of reviews denouncing what it called the ‘Cockney school’: poets and essayists associated with the writer Leigh Hunt, of which Keats was one. Keats' introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in his development as a poet. Spenser's work inspired Keats to write his first poem, which he entitled Imitation of Spenser. Keats befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published his first poem in 1816.
Even as he studied medicine, Keats’ devotion to literature and the arts never ceased. Through his friend, Cowden Clarke, whose father was the headmaster at Enfield, Keats met publisher Leigh Hunt of The Examiner. In 1817 Keats leveraged his new friendships to publish his first volume of poetry, Poems by John Keats. The following year, Keats' published "Endymion," a mammoth four-thousand line poem based on the Greek myth of the same name. Keats had written the poem in the summer and fall of 1817, committing himself to at least 40 lines a day. He completed the work in November of that year and it was published in April 1818. An important change in Keats' life was a walking tour that he took through the Lake Country, up into Scotland, and a short trip to Ireland, with one of his friends, Charles Brown, in the summer of 1818. The trip lasted from June to August and reached its terminus in Cromarty, Scotland. The walking tour broadened Keats' acquaintance with his environment and with varieties of people. The hardships which Keats and Brown had to endure, often spending the night on the mud floor of a shepherd's hut, may have weakened Keats' constitution and shortened his life. The trip itself produced very little poetry.
However, in 1820 Keats fell ill with tuberculosis. He went to Italy in the hope that the climate might help. Nevertheless, John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821. He was only 25. Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery.
P. B. Shelley:
Born - 4 August 1792
Died - 8 July 1822
Literary period - Romantic
Occupation - Poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the epic poets of the 19th century and is best known for his classic anthology verse works such as Ode to the West Wind and The Masque of Anarchy. He is also well known for his long-form poetry. He went on many adventures with his second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born 4 August 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England. The eldest son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, he stood in line to inherit his grandfather’s considerable estate and a seat in Parliament. He attended Eton College, where he began writing poetry, and went on to Oxford University. His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810). After less than a year at Oxford, he was expelled for writing and circulating a pamphlet promoting atheism.
Shelley's unconventional life and romantic idealism made him a notorious and denigrated figure in his own time, but he became the idol of later generations of poets including major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Shelley was also known for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron. Early in 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley left England for the last time, and went to Italy. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works.
Of the romantic poets, who graced English poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Shelley was most vitally inspired. He was essentially different from his great contemporaries. He has remained the most enchanting poet in the great age of romantic poetry and represented the essence of romance in poetry .Wordsworth's poetry, though much conditioned by the French Revolution, hardly embodies any actual revolutionary spirit. In Shelley's poetry the spirit of revolution is found manifested with zeal and depth. Liberty is the very breath of his poetic spirit. His poetry is the voice of the revolution, rather the gospel of the children of the revolution, for a thorough change of the existing state of absolutism and repression all over Europe.
Shelley died early. But he remains till now one of the greatest English poets of the world. His imaginative faculty, his exuberant emotional vivacity, his deep love and feeling for man and nature, and his prophetic hope for mankind mingle together to give his poetry a force that is at once ennobling and enchanting. His feeling is the feeling of love for all the oppressed and enchained people. His voice is the voice of protest against the tyranny and exploitation of the bench of bishops and kings.
Conclusion:
This brief introduction of Romantic Poets and poem guides, and recordings offer introductory samples of the Romantic era. Included are the monumental Romantic poets 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.
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