The Romantics & The Victorians

7/28/2019 The Romantics & The Victorians

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Universitatea Dunrea de Jos Galai

Facultatea de Litere

ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN POETRY.SIGNPOSTS FOR A POETICS

Conf. univ. dr. Ruxanda Bontil

Galai2012


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Contents

Foreword (Objectives; Design)

1. Introduction: The Spirit of the Age 4Preparatory readings 10Further readings 11

2. William Wordsworth and self-consciousness 12Preparatory readings 13Stop and think 13Further readings 16

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the symbolic 17Preparatory readings 20Stop and think 20Further readings 25

4. George Gordon Byron and the question of sincerity 26

Preparatory readings 27Stop and think 27Further Readings 31

5. Percy Bysshe Shelley and self-discovery 32Preparatory readings 35Stop and think 36Further readings 40

6. John Keats and analogous thinking 41Preparatory readings 44Stop and think 45Further readings 52

7. Alfred Tennyson or the secular poet of the margins 53

Preparatory readings 56Stop and think 56Further readings 61

8. Robert Browning and the art of indirectness 62Preparatory readings 65Stop and think 67Further readings 71

9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the genuine feminine 72Preparatory readings 74Stop and think 75Further readings 76

10. Christina Rossetti and the precarious self 77Preparatory readings 78Stop and think 78Further readings 79

11. G. M. Hopkins and the ever return to God 80Preparatory readings 83Stop and think 83Further readings 88

Self-evaluation questions 89Bibliography 90


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ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN POETRY 3

FOREWORD (Objectives; Design)

The present course, Romantic and Victorian Poetry. Signpostsfor a Poetics, is dedicated to second year students and is part of the coreliterature syllabus for BA students. Since the study of literature we propose isdiachronic, students will have to:

get acquainted with British Romantic and Victorian poetryso as to better understand and subsequently evaluateliterary phenomena in a larger context

develop their textual practice by making informed readingdecisions enlarge their perception of literature as a dialogue

between sociology, philosophy, psychology with mostprofitable outcomes.

To this purpose we have structured each chapter as follows: We startwith literary views of and achievements by each poet; next we recommendsome texts to be read so as to prepare the exercises in inferring meaningfrom the next section Stop and think where students are invited to read thetexts mind and offer their own well grounded interpretation. Further

readings refer students to essential texts for an understanding in depth ofthe literary phenomena under observation. The self-evaluation questionsfurther problematize the core issues discussed in the previous sections. Anextended bibliography is offered at the end of the present course with a viewto helping students with future research work in the field.

The author


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Introduction


1.Introduction: The Spirit of the Age

The French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights ofMan and the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned political offenders,stimulated differing reactions from both English liberals and radicals. Thus,Thomas Paine, in his Rights of Man(1791-92), declared himself in favour ofthe French Revolution and against Edmund Burkes attack in his Reflectionson the Revolution in France (1790). Peter Priestly, in his Letters to Burke,also advocated the cause of the French Revolution in its exuberant

embodiment of defender of liberty and democracy. Even more influential inthe epoch was William Godwin (1756-1836), an atheist and philosopher ofutopian views, who, in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice(1793), foretoldan inevitable and peaceful evolution of society to a final stage in which allproperty would be equally distributed and all government would dissolve.Godwins philosophical radicalism will inform W. Wordsworths objectivenaturalism and mostly P. B. Shelleys rational thinking. Then, there is MaryWollstonecraft, a feminist avant la lettre, who wrote an early defense of theFrench Revolution, A Vindication of the Rights of Men(1790), to be followedin 1792 by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a founding classic of thefeminist movement. However, the cause of womens rights was still to wait

until the Victorian era, or even better, until twentieth century when itconsistently fueled the minds of effective spokeswomen.

I. A. Preda in English Romantic Poetics (1995) argues thatRomanticism resists being defined as a period or a set of qualities that canbe comfortably ascribed to others and assigned to the historical past. M. H.Abrams and Jack Stillinger (1986) also endorse this view when they remindus that the qualifier Romantic was not used to designate writers belongingto the period until half a century later by English historians. Contemporarycritics and reviewers treated them as independent writers, or else groupedinto separate schools, such as: The Lake School of W. Wordsworth, S. T.Coleridge, and Robert Southey; the Cockney School, a derogatory term forthe Londoners Leigh Hunt, W. Hazlitt, and associated writers, including JohnKeats; and the Satanic School of G. G. Byron, P. B. Shelley, and theirfollowers. Nevertheless, the majority of the great writers felt as partaking ofsome pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate which constituted whatthey have termed the spirit of the age. For instance, Shelley, in A Defenceof Poetry, claimed that the literature of the age has arisen as it were from anew birth, and that an electric life burns within the words of its best writers,which is less their spirit than the spirit of the age (1821/1986: 798). Shelleyexplained this literary spirit as an accompaniment of political and socialrevolution. W. Hazlitt too, in his essay Mr. Wordsworth from a collection of

essays entitled The Spirit of the Age, described how, in his early youth, theFrench Revolution seemed the dawn of a new era, a new impulse had beengiven to mens minds. The new poetry of the school of Wordsworth, hesustained, had its origin in the French Revolution. It was a time of


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Introduction


promise, a renewal of the world and of letters. So, it is correct to say thatthe imagination of the periods writers was preoccupied with both the fact andidea of revolution, not only in the political and social realm but in intellectualand literary enterprises too. And this is to be borne out by the publication in1798 of W. Wordsworths and S. T. Coleridges Lyrical Ballads, to benecessarily foreworded in 1800 by Wordsworths programmatic Preface.

Still, however hazardous through incompleteness the enterprise ofdefining Romanticism might be, we shall single out some synthesizingformulations that can contribute to understanding the movement better.

Raymond Williams, a Marxist critic, presents Romantic thought(1958) as initially a compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of asociety which was coming to think of man as merely a specializedinstrument of production and of art as one of a number of specialized kindsof production.

Ren Wellek in Comparative Literature (1949), in his attempt atdefining Romanticism, focuses on three main concepts: (1) imagination forthe view of poetry; (2) organic concept of nature for the view of the world; (3)

symbol and myth for poetic style. His ensuing underlying metaphor forRomanticism is dynamic organicism based on a philosophy of Becoming notof Being. This translates the theorists belief that the positive values ofchange, diversity and acceptance of imperfection are inherent in the processof creation.

Paul de Man in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1986) speaks aboutthe main tenet of all critical philosophies and Romantic literatures as beingthe continuity of perception with cognition, of aesthetic with rationaljudgment. This might well imply the power of imagination to effect anunmediated (that is, an aesthetic) contact with noumenal (i.e. an unknownand unknowable substance or thing as it is in itself) levels of reality.

I. A. Predas way of revealing the web of interconnections in theRomantic poets views on man and the universe concerns three pivotalconcepts: (1) the poet seen as an exceptional being whom his genius setsapart from and above other men; (2) creative power whose organ isimagination, closely connected to the poets power of intellection or mind,very similar to eighteenth century associanist psychology on which somepoets founded their theory of poetry; (3) nature of poetry which, whileretaining the concept of mimesis for the central place given to nature andhuman nature (man), is turned inwardly as well as towards a supersensiblereality. These major categories can further generate a whole paratactic list offeatures easily detectable in the works of those poets we shall designate asRomantic.

As for the main documents of the period, these have becomeclassical contributions to the understanding, and even shaping of Romanticthought and theory. They all certify to their authors eagerness tophilosophize, theorize and detail upon their poetic principles.

W. Wordsworths 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, referred to as thebirth certificate of British Romanticism (to be enlarged even further in thethird edition of 1802), sets itself the task to organize isolated ideas into acoherent theory based on explicit critical principles, such as: the concept ofpoetry and the poet; poetic spontaneity and freedom; Romantic nature

poetry; glorification of the commonplace; the supernatural and theStrangeness in Beauty.S. T. Coleridges Biographia Literaria(1817) purports to correct some

of the pronouncements made by Coleridges friend, companion and co-


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Introduction


creator, while further insisting on the necessity of delimiting the period fromthe previous tradition. In here, the poet-philosopher also pioneered theorganic theory of the imaginative process and the poetic product, based onthe model of the growth of a plant. That is, he conceived a great work ofliterature to be a self-originating and self-organizing process that begins witha seedlike idea in the poets imagination, grows by assimilating both the

poets feelings and the diverse materials of sense-experience, and evolvesinto an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each otherand to the whole.

P. B. Shelleys Defence of Poetry(1821/1840) constitutes itself as aplea for the necessity of poetry in an age where aggressive individualism andprimarily economic relationships dominate the new society. In so being,Shelley poignantly extends the term poet to comprehend all the creativeminds that break out of the limitations of their age and place to approximatewhat he regards as enduring and general forms of value including not onlywriters in verse and prose, but artists, legislators, and prophets, as well asthe founders of a new organization of society, morality, or religion.

We shall further detail on the main elements in the theory and poetryof the Romantic period so as to bring some light about how muchconsistency there is between what these poets proffered and how they putthese concepts into practice.

1. The Concept of Poetry and the PoetParadoxically, the Romantic poet locates the source of a poem not in

the outer world, but in the individual poet, thus the origin of the poem is to befound in the mind, emotions and imagination of the poetrather than the outerworld. This certifies to the prominence of the Romantic lyric as a genre,wherein the I is no longer a conventionally typical lyric speaker but hasrecognizable characteristics of the poet in his own person and

circumstances, those we can have access to through the poets confessionalwritings - letters, journals. Then, there is the perception of the Romantic poetas assuming the persona and voice of a poet-prophet, modeled on Miltonand the prophets in the Bible, and offering himself as a herald of traditionalWestern civilization at a time of profound crisis. Thus, major Romanticproductions, such as, Wordsworths Prelude, Shelleys PrometheusUnbound, or Keatss Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion are mainlyconcerned with the formation of the self, often centering on a crisis, and arepresented in the radical metaphor of an interior journey in quest of ones trueidentity and destined spiritual home. The Romantic essayists, the Romanticpoets counterparts, will also insist on extreme subjectivity whether in theirhighly personal essays (Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt) orspiritual autobiography (Thomas de Quincey). Elena Brteanu (2000) is rightwhen asserting that the romantic, an artist par-excellence the one whosecenter is within himself (Fr. Schlegel), is searching, first and foremost, for hisown self, slides down the inner abysses of subjectivity, analyses himself, in astrenuous search of his own density. The extrapolation of the Romantic egosublimates itself in the poetic reverie, whose lyrical rhythms will inevitablytake him to his sources: both personal and collective, attempting somereconciliation between the individual myth and those of humanity, whilelending them modern adornments (1955/2000: 8). To this very purpose,

romantic discourse besides assuming the epistemological, ethical,metaphysical functions of communication, also rejoices certain messianic,didactic, and sacrificial dimensions.


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2. Poetic Spontaneity and FreedomPoets and essayists alike seem to agree on the necessity of the act

of composition to be spontaneous inasmuch as it must arise from impulse,and it must be free from all rules and the artful manipulation of means toforeseen ends. Consequently, Wordsworths conviction that good poetryshould be a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings finds a correlative in

reflection (emotion recollected in tranquillity) rather than a counterargument.Keats, through his axioms, also supports this view, concurring withShelleys and Hazlitts beliefs. S. T. Coleridge, who believed that truth lies ina union of opposites, came closer to the principles of Romantic practice whenhe claimed that the act of creation involves the psychological contraries ofpassion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose. It isobvious that the poets insistence on the free activity of the imagination isrelated to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition, and thefeelings of the heart to supplement the judgments of the purely logicalfaculty, as Coleridge will let us know in his Biographia Literaria

3.Romantic Nature Poetry

It is important to stress that, despite the Romantic poets apparentdevotion towards the exterior landscape, they all consented that the naturalscene represented just the stimulus to the most characteristic human activity,that of thinking. Thus, Romantic nature poems are, in fact, meditativepoems, in which the presented scene usually serves to raise an emotionalproblem or personal crisis whose development and resolution constitute theorganizing principle of the poem. This is in close connection, on the onehand, to the metaphysical concept of nature which had developed in clearrevolt against the world views of the scientific philosophers of the 17th and18th centuries; and, on the other hand, to the poets views of the createduniverse as giving direct access to God, and even as itself possessing the

attributes of divinity. This further correlates to the symbolist poets tendencyto present an object from nature as an object invested with significancebeyond itself, or as Shelley put it: I always seek in what I see the likelinessof something beyond the present and tangible object. This certainly relatesto how the romantic and the sublime seek each other and in so doing theyunravel one more paradox: how mans spiritual grandeur does stem from hisvery insignificance or as B. Pascal put it: through its materiality, the universesurrounds and engulfs me; through thinking I can surround and engulf theuniverse. Or as Nicolae Rmbu put it: we call romantic the spiritual forcecapable of imposing laws upon the ignoble material world through artcreation (2001: 12).

4.The Glorification of the CommonplaceW. Wordsworth, while elevating humble and rustic life and the plain

style into the main subject and medium for poetry in general, was veryinsistent that his aim in Lyrical Balladswas not to represent the actual world,but, as he announced in the Preface, to throw over situations fromcommon life. a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary thingsshould be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect (1802/1986: 159). M.H. Abrams considers that Wordsworths aim throughout is to shake us out ofthe lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder in the everyday,the commonplace, the trivial, and the lowly. Shelley, too, in his Defence of

Poetry, instructs us about how we should understand the defamiliarization ofthe common/usual as performed within poetry


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5. The Supernatural and Strangeness in BeautyColeridge, in Biographia Literaria, divulged the role he would mostly

play in his poems to the purpose of achieving a sense of wonder by a frankviolation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events, in poems of whichthe incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural. Thus, inThe Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, the poet would open up to

poetry the realm of mystery and magic, in which materials from ancientfolklore, superstition, and demonology are used to impress upon the readerthe sense of the working of occult powers and unknown modes of being.Keats also contrived to violate our sense of realism and the natural law in hismedieval romances La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes.Hence the term medieval revival, frequently related to the Romantic perioddue to the celebrated ballad imitations in the epoch by the Romantic poets.Furthermore, there is what W. Pater later called the addition of strangenessto beauty through such experiences of the occult and esoteric like thosecourted by Coleridge, Blake and Shelley. Then, there is a common concernfor dreams, nightmares, forbidden experiences not disconnected from some

writers confessed addiction to opium, or just a taste for lifes terrifyingextravagancies. All this will certainly pave the way to the morbid stateinduced in poetry by such respectable decadents as Charles Baudelaire andAlgernon Charles Swinburne, later in the century.

The Romantic poets striving for the infinite, for creating anew theuniverse by the power of the mind, their constant pursuit of the infinitethrough the finite led the Romantic artists to continuously experiment withpoetic language, versification, and design. They contributed to enriching theforms and style of poetry by daringly playing upon the potential of old formsand style. Thus, Wordsworth tempted to isolate the subject in order to betterforay it; Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron defiantly courted solitary protagonists

rejecting society or being rejected by it. It is admitted that the solitaryRomantic nonconformist was very frequently a sinner too. Writers of thatperiod were fascinated by the outlaws of myth, legend, or history, such asCain, Satan, Faust, the Wandering Jew, or the great, flawed figure ofNapoleon about whom they wrote and on whom they modeled a number oftheir villains or their heroes.

Consequently, Emil Ciorans synthetic formulation of what EnglishRomanticism is about a fortunate mixture of laudanum, exile and phthisis(1980/1992: 7) may well epitomize the Romantics aspirations of anapocalyptic vision of the mind. Whatever their means, they all seem to insiston a new way of seeing, capable of achieving that much longed-forRevelation, made possible by our visionary transcendence of our senses andsensebound understanding. To this same conclusion Carlyles essay SartorResartus(1833) leads us when we discover that his heros wild spiritual crisisand conversion turns out to be the achievement of an individual apocalypse.

George Ford and Carol Christ (1986: 928) consider that theconnections between the Romantic and Victorian ages are quite close. Theysee R. Browning and A. Swinburne related to B. P. Shelley, Tennyson toKeats, and Arnold to Wordsworth. They also consider that most Victorianpoets address the same religious issues that had been a central concern forWordsworth, Blake, and Shelley. To us, the Victorians are rather deviant

challengers than followers of the Romantic poets. They differ from theRomantic poets in the way they understand to build their public image,significantly less strongly contoured than the Romantics. They feel morecautious about going public, since they are suspicious about turning


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subjective, and thus their poems be less a work than an effluence(Browning, 1852/1968: 336-7). So, they may stand for the anxious anduneasy final stage in what is variously termed traditionalism or pre-modernism.

There is insightful knowledge to derive from Carlyles advice to hiscontemporaries in 1834: Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe. This may

translate as a warning against formal literary excess (fact which contributedto considering Keats the Romantic poet most influential in the Victorian age),and aristocratic life-style excess (the happy-go-lucky enjoyment of thephysical pleasures of life Byrons contemporaries were so engulfed in). Then,there was the burden of the puritan code of Victorian England that the poetshad to comply with, although they seemed less affected by the narrowness ofthe puritan middle-class mind than their counterparts - the Victorian novelists were. Consequently, when R. Browning was writing The Ring and the Book(1868-69), a poem about domestic tyranny put on trial, he was obviouslyunworried about the prudish reactions of a prudish society; in there, as wellas in the majority of his dramatic monologues, he, indirectly, would rather

concern himself with raising the status of woman from selflessness to self-consciousness. In similar terms, Swinburnes Poems and Ballads (1866)were meant to flout the taboos of the period, in close harmonization with thespirit of the symbolist French poets, whom he not only admired, but alsotranslated. However, despite the Victorian poets concern with alienation,dreams, and madness, they are miles from embodying the image of thepote maudit.

The most obvious truth is that Victorian poetry has borrowed from theepoch its directionlessness, which reflects in the multiplicity of styles andformal innovation enabling the status of multiple identities for the poet. Thiscorrelates to how the persona of poetry, the poetic I, becomes a speaker

subjected to language, and thus, most apt to ensure forays into theunconscious motivation of the speaker. The Victorian poets impulse tocomply with their readers hegemony translates in a more oblique stratagemwhich has often conferred poetry, at its best, its aura of superficial aloofness,or studied optimism. The lucky turn of such deviant manifestations incurspoetic inventiveness both in content and form. Thus, the poets strenuouseffort to search for appropriate modes of expression which both preserve andusurp old forms of poetry (i.e. Tennysons self-renewing techniques;Hopkinss adaptation of sprung rhythm to sonnet form, etc.) is a different wayof catching the readers eye and ear. This certifies to Matthew Arnoldsfunctional recommendation that poetry should be a magister vitae inasmuchas it [poetry] partook of the best self, deriving inspiration not only frommysterious and prophetic sources but from intellectual and critical activitiestoo. The role of the poet and function of poetry are amply dealt with by allpoets in different degrees of accessibility (e.g. Brownings Sordello,Tennysons In Memoriam, Arnolds Scholar Gypsy, and Tyrsis). In line withthe poets metrical experiments are their experiments in the art of narrativepoetry to be illustrated by Tennysons Maud, Elizabeth Barrett BrowningsAurora Leigh, Robert Brownings The Ring and the Book, or Arthur HughCloughs The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich(1848).

Thus, we cannot but agree with critics who contend that what canbe

isolated is just the temper of Victorian literature, a state of mind andemotion mindful of the expanding horizons of nineteenth-century life. Thisgives scope to frequently recurring subjects in Victorian literature, including apreoccupation with humanitys relationship to God, and also an acute


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awareness of time, past, present, and future. Love, an appealing theme withthe Victorian poets too, is explored in its more unexpected appearances,such as the timeless equilibrium of lovers pictured by D. G. Rossetti, or thedistressing experience of isolation by M. Arnold and Christina Rossetti,unrequited love relationships by R. Browning, or overwhelming loverelationships by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The emergence of the poetess,

anthologized and critically evaluated, can also pass for a new coordinatebrought forth by the process of adaptation poets and poetry went through. Itis worth mentioning that in the 1860s, poetry (Swinburnes, Hopkinss)became the focus of scandal due to the fleshliness of discourse as well asthe themes accommodating the poets proliferating identities (homicide,eroticism, religion, irreligion) that shocked the Victorian reading public. This iscertainly in compliance with Hopkinss view that legend and mythology arefully displaced in their age: Believe me, the Greek gods are a totallyunworkable material; the merest frigidity, which must chill and kill every livingwork of art they are brought into. (Letterto Robert Bridges, May 1885, 1985:203).

Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom (1973) argue for consideringVictorian poetry a diluted replica of Romantic poetry in spite of its conclusivecontribution to the development of modern poetic consciousness. Thisconnects to what the critics call the existence of a curious effect created byevery Victorian poet except Swinburne, a sense that they never delivered thewhole of their Word (Kermode, 1973: 1178).

We say that the Victorians sense of restrain translates a more genuinebelief in a hopeful Christian humanism towards a broader cultural, andimplicitly, poetic understanding of the universe.

Richard Bradford (1993) assesses that the unifying features of Victorianverse derive from the compromise between the Romantic affiliation to poetry

as the supremely subjective medium for expression, and poetry as aparticular system of prescribed devices. Hence the tension within tradition,post-Romantic exuberance, and pre-modernist innovation the Victorians areso weary to display.

Preparatory Readings:P. B. Shelley (1821/ 1986) A Defence of Poetry; Elena Brteanu

(2000) Preface to Franois Furet (coordinator) (1955/ 2000) Omul romantic;W. Wordsworth (1802/1986) Preface to Lyrical Ballads; G. M. Hopkins,Letter To Robert Bridges (1885/ 1985), p. 203, in Poems and Prose; W.Pater (1876/ 1889/ 1973) Romanticism; S. T. Coleridge (1817/ 1986)Biographia Literaria; Thomas Carlyle (1833/ 1986) Sartor Resartus; W.Hazlitt (1825/ 1986) My First Acquaintance with Poets; Thomas Carlyle(1851/ 1986) Life of John Sterling; Thomas Carlyle (1831/ 1986)Characteristics; John Stuart Mill (1833/ 1986) What Is Poetry? J. S. Mill(1873/ 1986) Autobiography; Matthew Arnold (1864/ 1986) The Function ofCriticism; Matthew Arnold (1879/ 1986) Wordsworth; M. Arnold (1880/1986) The Study of Poetry.


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Further Readings:N. Rmbu (2001) Romantismul filozofic german; R. Williams (1958)

The Romantic Artist; G. Hartman (1970/ 1993) Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness; Eagleton, T. (2007) How to Read a Poem; Paul de Man,(1984) The Rhetoric of Romanticism; F. Kermode (1957/2007) fromRomantic Image;


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William Wordsworth


2. William Wordsworth and self-consciousness

William Wordsworth, a genuine Lake District Poet, born and gainedback by this District, is the first poet to realize that self-consciousness,however tormenting it proves, is the very substance modern poetry could becarved in. So, when H. Bloom and L. Trilling admit that Lyrical Ballads, With aFew Other Poems, published anonymously in 1798, remains the mostimportant volume of verse in English since the Renaissance, they, in fact,point out the decisive role this volume played in inaugurating modern poetry,the poetry of the growing inner self.

William Hazlitt, in reviewing The Excursion in 1814, most justly

asserts that [Wordsworth] sees all things in himself since his mind wasconversant only with itself and nature, which might well become suspiciousof egotism.

Lyrical Ballads, with A few Other Poems (1798), Wordsworths andColeridges joint effort, marked the beginning of the Romantic Revolution asis made evident by the comments of trustworthy critics of the time, such asFrancis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review who wrote in 1802 thatWordsworths poems were a positive and bona fide rejection of artaltogether; Thomas De Quincey for whom Wordsworths early poems werean absolute revelation of untrodden worlds; and W. Hazlitt, who stated that:in the Thorn, the Mad Mother, and the Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman, Ifeltthe sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry that overcame me(qtd. Fruman in TLS, 1997, 4717: 4).

The idea that Lyrical Ballads revolutionized poetic language issustained by F. W. Bateson too, when the critic emphasized therebelliousness in Wordsworths whole approach to poetry: Poems like TheIdiot Boy, We are Seven and Peter Bellare not merely outside the literarytradition Blakes poems are outside it too they are written in a deliberatedefiance of it. The gross, offensive non-literariness is an important part oftheir meaning (qtd. Fruman in TLS, 1997, 4717: 5).

The Preface to the 1800 Edition of Lyrical Ballads is also

considered by critics unique in its theoretical originality and, especially, theexpanded conception of the mission of the artist. They all agree that thechallenge as to the proper language of poetry is the next importantcontribution of this seminal essay.

So, ultimately, the modern poetic revolution consists in the use ofnatural, conversational language, and the focus on the artists vision thatmakes the ordinary uncommon. The artist is no longer content to reflectreality, his mind illuminates and transforms it; or as Meyer Abrams (1953) putit, the mirror has become the lamp (1953).

The mission of the poet is another cornerstone of his poeticssurpassing by far the dual mission (prodesse aut delectare) all writers have

always been concerned with.Except for Tintern Abbey and his Intimations Ode, Wordsworthsother poems of Lyrical Balladsare populated by men, women, children from


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William Wordsworth


the lower classes, who are presented without patronization, always withrespect, and sometimes with love. It is the talent of direct address, avoidanceof paradox, ambiguities and reconciled opposites that forms the strength ofWordsworths early poems. By using language which was non-literary to thepoint of bathos, Wordsworth chose subjects that would reveal the workings ofthe human heart in all their elemental simplicity. But, this quality will soon turn

into a wanting, a lack since recent critics were more likely to suffer with theWordsworth of that intense, self-regarding inward gaze so characteristic ofthe 1798-9 two-part autobiographical Prelude and of modern poetry ingeneral.

Keats calls Wordsworths sustained and unified vision the egotisticalsublime due to its bearing on the strong autobiographical element (his life orhis sisters Dorothy) as well as the permanent interconnection of his vision ofNature and that of the human nature, especially simple, solitary people.This also relates to his Pantheistic philosophy based on the conviction thatNature in her sublime as well as her most lowly states radiates a power thatmeets and inter-operates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man

which is given various names: soul or simply power. The inner contributionis not simply a wise passiveness but heightened awareness and response,the leap of the heart at a rainbow, as he confesses in the Orphic poem MyHeart Leaps Up.

Thus, Wordsworths influence is mainly in two directions: (1) he didaway with the conventional phraseology of 18th century and claimed forpoetry the right to use concrete, picturesque, familiar terms and expressions;(2) he taught men to look at nature with the eyes of imagination and discernin its glory the unseen presence of a Spirit of Beauty and Goodness.

Preparatory Readings:W. Wordsworth (1802/1986) Preface to Lyrical Ballads; S. T.

Coleridge (1817/ 1986) Biographia Literaria; W. Wordsworth, LyricalBallads, 1981.

Stop and Think

Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of EarlyChildhood(Stanzas 1; 10; 11, 1802-4/ 1986).Considering the fact that W. Wordsworth saw the poets mission interms of restoring the equilibrium in which pleasure consists(Preface), discuss the poets solution to the essence of identity as itcomes out from the quoted stanzas. Consider the following co-ordinatesof Wordsworths poetics: (a) the (non)conflicting constituents of the

principal themes; (b) the poets awareness of the rhetorical level oflanguage (dichotomies: form/content; thought/feeling; dream/reality); (c)the relationship to history; (d) genre affiliation.


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William Wordsworth


The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to be

Bound Each to each by natural piety.

1

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,The earth, and every common sight,To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream, 5It is not now as it hath been of yore; -

Turn wheresoever I may,By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more

10Then sing, ye Birds, sing a joyous song!And let the young Lambs boundAs to the tabors sound! 170

We in thought will join your throng,Ye that pipe and ye that play,Ye that through your hearts to-dayFeel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright 175Be now for ever taken from my sight,Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind; 180In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be;In the soothing thoughts that springOut of human suffering;In the faith that looks through death, 185

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

11And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,Forebode not any severing of our loves!Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;I only have relinquished one delight 190To live beneath your more habitual sway.I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet; 195The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eyeThat hath kept watch oer mans mortality;Another race hath been, and other palms are won.Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 200


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William Wordsworth


Thanks to its tenderness, its joy, and fears,To me the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

The Prelude(Book VI, ll. 525-548). When Wordsworth finds himself inthe presence of Nature, it is also the occasion for seeing his

imaginations own spaciousness and sublimity. This is never truer thanin the famous crossing of the Alps in Book VI when Wordsworth offers apaean of praise to the Imagination. L. Anderson remarks that: Theattempt to meet sublimity on its own terms, even if such an attempt isdoomed to failure, is also a way of trying to guarantee the existence ofsubject beyond the text (2001: 57). Does the poets writing down hisown subjectivity compensate for that loss of self that the grandeur ofNature seems to induce to the poet? Find textual evidence accountingfor Mary Jacobuss insistence that the Divine signs are a privileged andcompensatory writing, protecting against the even anticlimax of theliteral text: writing comes in aid of writing, reanimating the dead page

with intimations of meaning that always exceeds it (qtd. in Anderson,1989/2001: 58).

Imagination! Lifting up itself 525Before the eye and progress of my songLike an unfathered vapour here that Power,In all the might of its endowments, cameAthwart me; I was lost as in a cloud,Halted without a struggle to break through; 530A new recovering, to my soul I say I recognize thy glory; in such strength

Of usurpation, in such visitingsOf awful promise, when the light of senseGoes out in flashes that have shown to us 535The invisible world, doeth greatness make abode,There harbours, whether we be young or old.Our destiny, our nature, and our homeIs with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die, 540Effort, and expectation, and desire,And sometimes evermore about to be,The mind beneath such banners militantThinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aughtThat may attest its prowess, blest in thoughts 545That are their own perfection and reward,Strong in itself, and in the access of joyWhich hides it like the overwhelming Nile.

Ted Hughes (b 1930), River (1983): The poets equally delicate andvigorous response to the natural world. Compare and contrast thispoem to Wordsworths Tintern Abbey. See how indeterminacy of affectis constructed within each poem.

Fallen from heaven, lies across/ The lap of his mother,broken by world. // But water will go on/ Issuing from


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William Wordsworth


heaven// In dumbness uttering spirit brightness/ Through itsbroken mouth.// Scattered in a million pieces and buried/ Itsdry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,// At a rending ofveils,/ It will rise, in a time after times,// After swallowingdeath and pit/ It will return stainless// For the delivery of thisworld./ So the river is a god// Knee-deep among reeds,

watching men,/ Or hung by the heels down the door of adam// It is a god, and inviolable./ Immortal. And will washitself of all deaths.

Further Readings:M. H. Abrams (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic theory and

the Critical Tradition; Duncan Wu (2002) Wordsworth. An Inner Life; M.Riffaterre, (1990) Undecidability as Hermeneutic Constraint; LigiaConstantinescu (2000) English Romanticism: Samples of Approach andAnalysis;


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Samuel Taylor Coleridge


3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the symbolic

Poet, philosopher, critic, journalist, playwright, Coleridge is perceivedby his best critics like an eccentric, even peripheral, his texts a circle whosecentre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. Josie Dixon(2002) admits his gratitude to Coleridges Notebooks for his betterunderstanding of the man and man of culture. For The Notebooksseem toform a rare space of secrecy and discovery which offers refuge from theanxieties and failures of the public sphere (2002: 75). Partaking of acomposite genre (journal, travelogue, sketchbook and commonplace book),they succeed in contouring not only a more humane Coleridge, but also a

view of his work in progress, in confessional, tentative or experimental mode.They bear witness of that legendary myriad-mindedness Coleridge is a vividsymbol of. His massive contribution in all spheres of knowledge available tonineteenth century enquiry was often perceived as occult, frustrating or evenbaffling by his contemporaries and not only.

Paradoxically, Coleridge, the great talker, the dialogic monologuizer,so to say, or intellectual chameleon (J. Keats) was the victim of hisvacillating personality which caused him to dependent on narcotics. Heseemed to have suffered from what a modern behaviourist would callobsessive-compulsive disorders, fact which made him unusually self-conscious and dependent on the approval of others simultaneously.

Twenty first century reappraisal of Coleridges work engages severaldirections: the poet, the literary critic, and the philosophical/ religious/politicalthinker. The poet for a restricted number of poems (The Ancient Marinerbeing still most honored); the critic for his production of Biographia Literaria(1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare (both instances lending him thestatus of the founding father of modern literary criticism); the otherpreoccupations (philosophy, religion, politics) for his magic powers of, if notconverting, at least, buttonholing an audience captive.

His activity as a journalist and political thinker (The Watchman(1796)and the Friend (1809-10)), in the same interventionist style, is meant toreform public taste out of his dissatisfaction with the luxuriant misgrowth ofour activity a reading-public.

As a religious thinker, Coleridge has been portrayed as a compositeof: radical Unitarian, mystic, theosophist, Anglican, and metaphysician whotried to fuse the questioning spirit of philosophy with religious faith. Theconcept of Logos is most important in his thinking and religious systeminasmuch as he identified the principles of Being, of Intellect, and of Actionwith the Trinity, i.e., the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. Logos, as anintellectual principle making possible the coexistence between dynamicpolarity and its reconciliation, provided the foundation for his belief in theanimating power of language, seen as the poetic and the symbolic. He

insisted on delimiting symbol from allegory, always favouring the former sinceit allowed the union between the human word and the divine spirit. Nature isseen as a symbolic language too, in perfect agreement with poeticimagination, the vital & idea-creating force standing for his own inner


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nature. This is how Coleridge intimates us to his idea of nature as a symboliclanguage in Anima Ptae:

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge will detail on the doctrine he callsnegative faith, according to which poetic language is constituted (asaesthetic) by its difference from the thing represented, and in so being itforegrounds its own verbal texture. This correlates to another dichotomy he

formulated: imitation vs. copy, the poets task aiming at the former not thelatter. Coleridge will test his theory of linguistic and psychologicalunderpinnings of the literary symbol in his Shakespearean criticism. In here,he works out his own version of the organic philosophy originating inGermany, in the context of trying to define the nature of the poetic orimaginative mind which Shakespeare supremely modelled.

In The Statesmans Manual; or the Bible the Best Guide to PoliticalSkill and Foresight (1816), besides discussing the implications of biblicalstudies in life, politics, etc. (to be further enlarged upon in Confessions of AnInquiring Spirit, 1840), he makes a memorable distinction between symboland allegory as modes of narrative discourse:

For Coleridge symbols are the concrete evidence of communicationbetween self and the internal deities who inhabit the realm of ideas (therealm of Reason), which are co-extensive with imagination a further realmwhich can nevertheless operate through imagination. However, symbolscarry within them the ideas which are the pre-requisite for a condition ofcontinuing growth. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and everyidea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimelyobserved) containth an endless power of semination (The StatesmansManual. Lay Sermons).

Coleridges conception of a symbol is therefore inseparable from hisview of mental growth which translates the poets fascination with the

conditions which had to prevail for the mind to be able to explore its ownmystery and resistance. Consequently, Coleridge emphasized symbolization(the imaginative containment of a living idea) rather than verbalization (themanipulation of fixed counters), which was certainly consistent with hismethod of observing the mind, that of focusing on the relations of things andnot on things only (The Friend).

In Aids to Reflection (1825), (a meditative study on spiritual growthand the role of religion in everyday life), Coleridge makes effective use of theconcept of symbol, considering the biblical text at once Symbol and History.This book was extremely influential among the American Transcendentalists(Emerson, Whitman) who acclaimed its reconciliation of German philosophywith traditional religious faith.

Biographia Literaria (1817) continues to be read as the greatestbook of criticism in English and the most annoying book in any language asArthur Symons claimed in 1906. Meant as a short preface to his poems, itfinally evolved into a genuine treatise, investigating into its authorsphilosophical queries into language, the language of poetry, and the properdistinction between fancy and imagination. It was also born out of its authorsimpulse to question Wordsworths theories on poetry and the language ofpoetry. As a structural whole, this work contains a series of interlockingautobiographical, philosophical, religious, and critical stories told almost

simultaneously. Chapters 12 and 13 re-engage a philosophical discussionleading to the short, suggestive distinctions between fancy, primary and,secondary imagination. Beginning with chapters 17-20 and 22, Coleridgegives a virtuoso reading of W. Wordsworths poetry. It is unanimously agreed


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that Coleridge anticipated the New Criticism, structuralism, and evenpostrstructuralism in its indecisiveness about the logocentric.

One conspicuous difference between Wordsworth and Coleridgeconsists in the way the two finally positioned themselves toward empiricism,associationism, and materialism (Hartley, Priestley, Hobbes, Locke,Condillac). In his 1815 Preface, Wordsworth defines imagination as a

heightened form of associationism. Coleridge disregards associationism asinadequate to explain human powers of perception, creativity, idealization,creative, organic processes of nature and the cosmos, as well as the powerof the will, our absolute self. Thus, chapters 5-13 postulate a philosophywhere the mind in its dynamic relation to the world has primacy; whereimagination is perceived as the living Power and prime Agent of all humanPerception allowing us to partake of the work of the creator of nature, God(the infinite I AM); which, in its secondary agency, dissolves, dissipates, inorder to re-create it struggles to idealize and to unify, thus, producing finearts and poetry; Fancy, a mode of memory must receive all its materialsready made from the law of association, being, thus, confined to the

reorganization and recombination of already existing, separate senseimpressions (Ch. 13). Coleridges views on the negative faith of theimagination certainly inform Keatss concept of negative capability andShelleys distinction between a materialistic reason and a spiritual,sympathetic imagination. This is not unconnected to the principle of likeness-in-difference of Coleridges theory of dramatic illusion. The poet insists on thespectators or readers active involvement in this state through an exercise ofwill more exactly, through a willing suspension of judgement, the mentalfaculty that normally determines whether or not a thing really exists, or as thepoet, most memorably expressed himself: that willing suspension of disbelieffor the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (Biographia Literaria, Ch. 14).

Interestingly and characteristically too, Coleridges distinctionbetween poetry and science, a much vaunted Romantic issue, echoesWordsworths discussion of the Man of Science and the Poet in the 1800Preface, anticipating Th. Love Peacocks and Shelleys argumentation too.

Coleridge parts way with Wordsworth again when he states that thebest part of language is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, toprocesses and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no placein the consciousness of the uneducated man (Ch. 17). Still, his early style ismuch indebted to William Lisle Bowless (1762-1850) technique from hissentimental sonnets (exploring an arrested moment of emotion spatially andcultivation of auditory powers). In the Conversation Poems1, as P.Magnuson posits, Coleridge adopts a natural symbolism in which theperceiving, remembering, imagining mind searches for images of itself andGod in nature. In these crisis lyrics, the poet confronts a loss, overcomesthat loss through an excursion in imagination to nature and to sympathy withother minds, often uttering a blessing on the person addressed.

Critics agree that Coleridges claim to be a great poet lies in thecontinued pursuit of the consequences of The Ancient Mariner, Christabel,and Kubla Khan in his later poetry. They also agree that Coleridges later

1 The term was coined by McLean Harper in 1928 borrowing the subtitle of TheNightingale. A Conversation Poem. They are: The Eolian Harp; This Lime-Tree Bower

My Prison; Frost at Midnight; The Nightingale; Fears in Solitude; Dejection: An

Ode; To William Shakespeare..


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poems are disturbing because they are self-absorbed and introspective,thus positioning Coleridge between eighteenth-century sensibility andnineteenth-century censoriousness. These poems continue to tell the story ofa writers failure in love and a blocked emotional situation. It is much owing toColeridge that since Poe and Baudelaire, poetry and fiction have largelyemployed the pattern of the spiritual and intellectual quest rather than that of

realistic narrative. It also anticipates the illogical order of symbolist art whichcoincides with the order of learning and insight. So, it is right to say thatColeridge has developed from a poet of rhetorical statement to a master ofsymbolic ritual, prophetically enacting the history of art and poetry of thecentury which followed him. This may well justify his famous contemporariesopinions that have set and maintained the stage of opinion on Coleridge:William Hazlitt considered him the only person I ever knew that answered tothe idea of a man of genius; and De Quincey called him the largest andmost spacious intellectthe subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yetexisted among men (Beer, 2002: 231).

Preparatory Readings:S. T. Coleridge (1817/ 1986) Biographia Literaria; W. Hazlitt (1825/

1986) My First Acquaintance with Poets; John Stuart Mill (1833/ 1986) WhatIs Poetry?S. T. Coleridge, The Watchman(1796); he Friend(1809-10); S.T. Coleridge The Statesmans Manuel; or the Bible the Best Guide toPolitical Skill and Foresight(1816); Confessions of An Inquiring Spirit, 1840;

Stop and Think

Read the following extracts from Wordsworths Preface toLyrical Ballads (1800/1802) and Coleridges Lectures and BiographiaLiteraria(1817) and see to what extent the latter echo or differ from the

former. They comprise the poets celebrated definitions of poetry.I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: ittakes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion iscontemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility graduallydisappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject ofcontemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in themind. (Wordsworth, The Preface)

[Poetry] is the artof representing external nature and human Thoughts &Affections, both relatively to human Affections; to the production of as greatimmediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the larger possible

Sum of Pleasure in the whole. (Coleridge, Lectures)


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What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? Thatthe answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is adistinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains andmodifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poets own mind.(Biographia Literaria).

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner(Part IV, ll. 224-291).All along the poem the argument follows the processes of humanexperience. It is interesting to notice the effect brought about byjuxtaposition of the old ballad rituals and verbal simplicities with the lyricimpulse generated by their study of aesthetic moment and its attendantlandscape. It is also worth discovering the way the confessional anddigressive character of the Ancient Mariner contours itself throughmetre and method (directness; simplicity; swift movement of event;supernatural features and atmosphere; repetition for effect; abrupttransitions from narrative to dialogue and brilliant visual images).Read Part 4of the poem and see how it proceeds with the process ofthe readers illumination about the central problem in the poem: thecrime capriciously committed beginning the drama of estrangementfrom mankind. Describe how ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness ofmotive are rendered. Identify the symbols in this part. Detectpeculiarities of form/ genre. Describe atmosphere through imagery,always providing evidence. Search for religious connotations in thepoetic discourse. Comment upon the effect brought about by thecreation of a persona glossing the poem. Remember that Coleridge ofall people would be aware of those dimensions of darkness in thehuman self that can so easily swallow up the brightness of intentionhowever bright.

The Wedding-Guest I fear thee, ancient Mariner!Feareth that a Spirit I fear thy skinny hand! 225Is talking to him; And thou art long, and lank, and brown,

As is the ribbed sea-sand.

I fear thee and thy glittering eye,And thy skinny hand, so brown.-

But the ancient Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! 230Mariner assureth This body dropped not down.Him of his bodilyLife, and proceedeth Alone, alone, all, all, alone,To relate his horrible Alone on a wide wide sea!

Penance. And never a saint took pity onMy soul in agony. 235

He despiseth the The many men, so beautiful!Creatures of the calm, And they all dead they lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLived on; and so did I.

And envieth that I looked upon the rotting sea, 240They should live, And drew my eyes away;And so many lie dead. I looked upon the rotting deck,

And there the dead men lay.

I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;But or ever a prayer had gushed, 245A wicked whisper came, and madeMy heart as dry as dust.


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I closed my lids, and kept them close,And the balls like pulses beat;

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky250Lay like a load on my weary eye,And the dead were at my feet.

But the curse liveth The cold sweat melted from their limbs,For him in the eye Nor rot nor reek did they:Of the dead men. The look with which they looked on me 255

Had never passed away.An orphans curse would drag to hellA spirit from on high;But oh! More horrible than thatIs the curse in a dead mans eye! 260Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,And yet I could not die.

In his loneliness and The moving Moon went up the sky,Fixedness he yearneth And nowhere did abide:Towards the Softly she was going up, 265Journeying Moon, And a star or two beside-And the stars thatstill sojourn, yet still Her beams bemocked the sultry main,move onwards; and Like April hoar-frost spread;everywhere the blue But where the ships huge shadow lay,sky belongs to them, The charmed water burned always 270and is their A still and awful red.appointed rest, andtheir native countryand their ownnatural homes,which they enterunannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

By the light of the Beyond the shadow of the ship,Moon he beholdeth I watched the water snakes:Gods creatures of They moved in tracks of shining white,the great calm. And when they reared, the elfish light 275

Fell off in hoary flakes.Within the shadow of the shipI watched their rich attire:Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,They coiled and swam; and every track 280Was a flash of golden fire.

Their beauty and O happy living things! No tongueTheir happiness, Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,And I blessed them unaware: 285He blesseth them in Sure my kind saint took pity on me,his heart. And I blessed them unaware.

The spell begins to The self-same moment I could pray;Break. And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank 290Like lead into the sea.

Use the following extracts from the Conversation Poems totest Bradfords thesis, that which he calls the Romantic paradox

(1993: 128) according to which Romantic poetry opens a fissurebetween the poetic function, the elements that combine to producecomplex textual patterns, and its referential counterpart, the inferred


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pre-linguistic situation or the intention of utterance. Ask such questionslike: Who is speaking to whom? What do the syntactic and deicticelements tell us about the situation of the utterance? How does theconventional element of the double pattern (metre, rhyme) relate to itscognitive counterpart (the paraphrasible message)?

My pensive Sara! Thy soft cheek reclinedThus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it isTo sit beside our Cot, our Cot oergrownWith white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle,(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love! 5And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eveSerenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)Shine opposite! How exquisite the scentsSnatched from yon bean-field! And the world sohushed! 10The stilly murmur of the distant SeaTells us of silence.

(The Eolian Harp. Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire,1796/ 1817)Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lostBeauties and feelings, such as would have beenMost sweet to my remembrance even when ageHad dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, 5Friends, whom I never more may meet again,On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,To that still roaring dell, oerwooded, narrow, deep, 10And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rockFlings arching like a bridge; - that branchless ash,Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leavesNeer tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, 15Fanned by the waterfall! And there my friendsBehold the dark green file of long lank weeds,That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edgeOf the blue clay-stone.(This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. Addressed to Charles Lamb, of

the India House, London)

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,In word, or sigh, or tear O Lady!, in this wan and heartless mood, 25To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed,All this long eve, so balmy and serene,Have I been gazing on the western sky.And its peculiar tint of yellow green:Ans still I gaze and with how blank an eye! 30And those thin clouds, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;Those stars, that glide behind them or between,Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 35


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In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;I see them all so excellently fair,I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!(Dejection: An Ode, 1802/ 1817)

Friend of the wise! And teacher of the good!Into my heart have I received that lay

More than historic, that prophetic layWherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)Of the foundations and the building up 5Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tellWhat may be told, to the understanding mindRevealable; and what within the mindBy vital breathings secret as soulOf vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart 10Thoughts all too deep for words!(To William Wordsworth. Composed on the Night after His

Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind)

In a letter to William Sotheby (1802), Coleridge explained:

Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes &feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, & that we are all one Life. APoets Heart & Intellectshould be combined, intimatelycombined & unifiedwith the great appearances in Nature - & not merely held in solution & loosemixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes.

Coleridges Conversation Poems, first and foremost, present a creativeuniverse, sustained by Gods purposes working through a plastic, shapingnature, and expressed in a symbolic way. The Language as bond between

mind and nature is of divine origin and seeks recognition from both themind and the heart.

Read through the Romanian translation of The Rime of theAncient Mariner(Part II, ll. 115-130) by Procopie P. Clonea (2005, pp.40-43) and discuss how Romanian has become a historical home tosuch exemplary stylistic and linguistic performance as Coleridges text.Agree or disagree to the idea that translation constitutes itself as a formof reading and writing, i.e., interpretation as visible action; or as M.Wood put it, the best translation is the one that allows the bestguesses, or causes the least impoverishment. (1995: 152)

Day after day, day after day, Zi dup zi, zi dup zi, 115We stuck, nor breath nor motion; Nu ne-am clintit, nici vntul c-a suflat.As idle as a painted ship Jurai c vasu-i o picturUpon a painted ocean. Pe un ocean pictat.

Water, water, everywhere, Ap, ap, cer de ap,And all the boards did shrink, Se strnge lemnu-ncheietur 120Water, water, everywhere, Ap, ap, cer de ap,Nor any drop to drink. Dar de but, nu-i pictur.

The very deep did rot: O Christ! Doamne! scrbavnic strv i marea toat!That ever this should be! Blestem cumplit acum ne-apas!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Slinoase trturi proase 125Upon the slimy sea. Crruiesc prin apa urduroas.


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About, about, in reel and rout n jur dnd roat, ca la hor,The death-fires danced at night; Lumini de mort jucau prin noapteThe water, like a witchs oils, Iar apa, ca n cazan de vrjitoare,Burnt green, and blue and white. Ardea-n culori ce-curcubeu s apte. 130

Further Readings:Paul de Man,The Rhetoric of Romanticism(1984); Josie Dixon (2002) The

Notebooks, in Lucy Newlyn (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge; K. M.Wheeler (1995) Kubla Khan and the Art of Thingifying in Duncan Wu (ed.)Romanticism. A Critical Reader; G. W. F. Hegel, Division of the Subject,Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 1993; F. Schlegel, from Dialogue on Poetry,1800/1969; Kermode, F. Romantic Image (1957/2007); T. E. Hulme (1924)Speculations.


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George Gordon Byron


4. George Gordon Byron and the question of sincerityGeorge Gordon Byron, the sixth Lord Byron, taking his inherited seat

in the House of Lords when he came of age, has found himself the bone ofcontention of critics/ criticism ever since he published his first collection oflyric verse Hours of Idleness in 1807. He then could easily retort to thesupercilious reviewers of the Edinburgh Review, by publishing the poemEnglish Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire in Popes style, which,somehow, foreshadowed his rebellious tone and attitude in both life andpoetry. The over excessive ridicule he then poked at his contemporaries,established Byrons stand as nonconformist, even libertine, despite the

Calvinist morality of Scottish Presbyterianism he was indoctrinated with. So,we here advocate the existence of a poet whose life and work was abattlefield of contraries perplexing his adulators and detractors alike. If theformer caused Byron to assume the status of dandy/ sex-symbol, the latterforced him into permanent exile, which was no less than a death sentence.What is important is the poets faithfulness to his true self, and his love offreedom and hatred of hypocrisy that has specified his bearing in the world ofmen and art.

Byrons is the exceptional case of a poet who, despite his manyinconsistencies, was considered, in the epoch, the greatest and mostEnglish, from whom one could learn more truths of his country and of his

age than from all the rest together. That was the French critic HippolyteTaines perception of the poet in 1850. The same critic explains that Byronsclaim to be considered an arch-Romantic owes to his having provided theage with its ruling personage, the model that contemporaries invest withtheir admiration and sympathy. The personage came to be called theByronic hero, and the general mood he impersonated, Byronism. TheByronic hero, in his various guises (Chile Harold, Manfred, Beppo, DonJuan), displays, in different doses, the character of a gloomy, passionate,and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer/ ruler. In his most characteristicform, as we find it in Manfred, he is an alien, mysterious, depressed spirit,immensely superior in his passions and powers to the common run ofhumanity, whom he regards with disdain. Emblematically, he carries theburden of a diffuse guilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom, whichdoesnt make him less self-reliant and adamant about the value of his self-generated moral code - his beginning and his end. Critics admit that thisfigure, infusing the arch-rebel in a nonpolitical form with a strong eroticinterest, embodied the implicit drives of Byrons time; but mostly contributedto shaping the figure of the intellectual as rebel throughout. Bertrand Russell,in his History of Western Philosophy (1945), dedicates a whole chapter toByron, on the grounds of the phenomenon he caused into being, Byronism,he describes as the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion. The

philosopher considers that Byronism established a certain outlook towardhumanity and the world that entered nineteenth-century philosophy andeventually helped form Nietzsches concept of the Superman, the hero whostands outside the jurisdiction of ordinary criteria of good or evil. However, M.


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George Gordon Byron


H. Abrams, rightfully points out that, although Byronism was largely a fiction,produced by a collaboration between Byrons imagination and that of hispublic, the fiction was historically more important than the poet in his actualperson (1962/ 1986: 503). Byron came to be considered the master ofcolloquial tone in verse, the inventor of a species of discursive narrativepoetry loose enough to contain an intermittent ironic commentary on

contemporary life and manners as well as himself. The colloquial andnarrative technique was established by the use of ottava rima stanza,(appropriated from Italian Renaissance poetry Luigi Pulci; FrancescoBerni), which was appropriate for a style of mock-heroic impudence, socharacteristic of the poets thematics and style.

It is important to understand that Byron, unlike the otherRomanticists, was concerned with unmasking the logic of the internalcontradictions of the creative act. Byron, through his lyric poetry, made itclear that sincerity for the poet has to be a convention, an artifice oflanguage. Byrons lyric style is a satire upon the normative mode of romanticwriting, thus calling into question Coleridges definition of poetic faith as

willing suspension of disbelief. His is the faith in contradiction rather thanbalance and reconciliation, as he has Manfred postulate about the illusion ofsynthesis, he calls The last infirmity of evil (Manfred, I. ii. 29).Consequently, Byrons stylistic idiosyncrasy consists in turning satire intoself-criticism, which means, placing himself at the centre of his work and thusproblematizing the relationship between the romantic display of self and thequestion of sincerity.

Byrons contribution lies in the range of ironizing and critical techniquesthat he brought to the new lyrical forms of romantic sincerity. Thesetechniques extend from the most sentimental kinds of romantic irony toexplosive self-imploding forms, the latter becoming a crucial point of artistic

departure for such Ascendentalists as Poe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire. Theconnection between Byron and Baudelaire is most easily traceable throughthe cultural history of dandyism; still there is a clear difference of perceptionof later criticism on the two dandies. If Baudelaires dandyism could be readas sheer linguistic reactionary liberalism, Byrons lyrical dandyism wasperceived as a twofold entity: factual/psychological and linguistic, since, InByronic masquerade we have difficulty distinguishing figure from groundbecause the presumptive ground, the real Lord Byron, becomes a figuralform in the poetry.

Preparatory Readings:Thomas Carlyle (1831/ 1986) Characteristics; John Stuart Mill (1833/ 1986)

What Is Poetry?

Stop and Think Fare Thee Well! (1816): a poem Byron addresses to his wife,Annabella Milbanke, and in perfect agreement with his anti-romantic


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George Gordon Byron


poetics. In this poem, Byron adopts the conventions of romanticism inorder to break them apart. Hence, the sincerity of the poem is a pose, amask that at once covers and reveals a deeper sincerity. Thus thepoem can read as a cruel and pathetic piece of hypocrisy; it is adramatic presentation of the illusion resting at the heart of the romanticlyric, with its commitment to a willing suspension of disbelief on the

part of the poet and the reader alike. There is in this poem, althoughcritics generally disregard it as bad poetry, the poets critical explorationof the conventions of romanticism and its sentimentality. Hence, itappears that Byrons anti-aesthetic design is the very way ofmanipulating the mask of romantic sincerity. This is the last part of thepoem, where the poet, hypocritically, assumes all the sins his wifeaccused him of (the worst of them all, in real life, being the incestuousrelationship with his half sister Augusta Leigh, which brought along hisostracization and exile).

All my faults perchance thou knowest, 45

All my madness none can know;All my hopes, whereer thou goest,Wither, yet with theethey go.Every feeling hath been shaken;Pride, which not a world could blow, 50Bows to thee by thee forsaken,Even my soul forsakes me now;But tis done all words are idle Words from me are vainer still;But the thoughts we cannot bridleForce their way without the will.Fare thee well! Thus disunited,

Torn from every nearer tie,Seard in heart, and lone, and blighted,More than this I scarce can die. 60

Byrons stance, in this poem as elsewhere, appears cynical, desperate,or worst of all, indifferent. There is a distinct non-benevolent sympathyinforming his verse which stems from Byrons deliberate shuttlebetween sentimental conventions and the critical examination of thisinheritance. Subjecting Byrons work to a programmatic hope for somesocial accommodation, Carlyle would later call it The Everlasting Nay,which, somehow, translates his understanding of Hegels negation of

the negation. By the same token, Baudelaire will prize ByronsSatanism out of a deep understanding of the poets politics of makinga theatrical display of himself/ his self.

The Prophecy of Dante(1819, i. 143-55): a dramatic soliloquy,written in the city of Ravenna, where Dante lies buried. This piece ofhistoric/histrionic prowess was dedicated to the countess Guiccioli, hismistress, who apparently suggested the theme.

I am not of this people, nor this age,And yet harpings will unfold a taleWhich shall preserve these times when not a page 145Of their perturbed annals could attractAn eye to gaze upon their civil rage


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Did not my verse embalm full many an actWorthless as they who wrought it: tis the doomOf spirits of my order to be rackdIn life, to wear their hearts out, and consumeTheir days in endless strife, and die alone;Then future thousands crowd around their tomb,And pilgrims come from climes where they have known

The name of him who now is but a name 155

This extract is a good example of how Byrons work is engulfed in thatdisillusioning ambiguity an ambiguity which it deliberately embraces.Thus, Dantes address turns into Byrons speak in favour of politicalliberty in a country that lay under the Austrian yoke. What is ever moreunsettling is the structure of convertibility of the poem which turnseverything into its opposite. It can be argued that the bicepital figureByron puts up, testifies to his tactic of interrelating apparitional formswith his various fictional and historical selves. In so doing, the poetmanages to create an overwhelming/ universal darkness which carries

word, but out of the word/world. When Byron/Dante declares I am notof this people, nor this age, he, in fact, admits sharing Cassandrasgloomy gift of prophecy. In the preface to the poem, Byron associateshis prophecy with the vision of Cassandra, whose prophetic truthshares the doom of Troy. His is the darkened vision of an immenselysad prophecy due to its indeterminacy. In the fragment, the wordembalm (l. 148) performs the function of connecting the poets workwith corpsed forms as if he (Dante/ Byron) were a literal figure of thenightmare life-in-death that he perceives all around him. To consultsuch a poet one has to visit his tomb, where one encounters merely hisname. This is to say, that the tombstones engraved letters signify notonly the existence of the poet beyond his tomb, but they also anticipatehis postmortem existence before his actual death.

Read the poem When We Two Parted(1813/ 1816) and see ifBaudelaires view that Byron is a poet of masks and poses, themanipulator of his own subjectivities holds true. See how the romanticstyle of personal delivery is annihilated by the poets deliberatetheatricality.

When we two parted/ In silence and tears, / Half broken-hearted/

To sever for years, / Pale grew thy cheek and cold, / Colder thykiss; / Truly that hour foretold/ Sorrow to this.//

The dew of the morning/ Sunk chill on my brow -/ It felt like thewarning/ Of what I feel now. / Thy vows are all broken, / And lightis thy fame; / I hear thy name spoken, / And share in its shame. //

They name thee before me, / A knell to mine year; / A shuddercomes oer me - /Why wert thou so dear? / They know not I knew thee, / Who knewthee too well -/ Long, long shall I rue thee, / Too deeply to tell. //

In secret we met -/ In silence I grieve./ That thy heart could forget,/Thy spirit deceive./ If I should meet thee/ After years,/ How shouldgreet thee? -/ With silence and tears.


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Don Juan (Canto 4, 1819). Canto IV is mainly a sustainedmoral due to the insistence on the purity and freshness of Juan andHaides love, meant as a striking contrast to the fastidiousness,shallowness and falsehood of Canto I (Juan and Julia). In fact, the storyrevolves around the characters love affairs which are never coldly

calculated seductions. In contrast to the original Don Juan, Byrons DonJuan is never the seducer but the great seduced.Read through the stanzas from Canto 4 (Juan and Haide) and explorethe sources which might have contributed to its being an intertext.Express your thoughts on how tone and atmosphereare achieved. Ifyou agree that Don Juan is a comic satire (due to the many kinds ofregister shifts), then try to detect the strategies for achieving the comicin the quoted stanzas.

3As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow,

And wished that others held the same opinion;

They took it up when my days grew more mellow,And other minds acknowledge my dominion;Now my sere fancy falls into the yellow

Leaf, and Imagination droops her pinion,And the sad truth which hovers over my desk

Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.4

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,

Tis that our nature cannot always bringItself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first into the depths of Lethes spring,Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep:

Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.6

To the kind reader of our sober climeThis way of writing will appear exotic;

Pulci was sire of half-serious rhyme;Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic,

And reveled in the fancies of the time,True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic;

But all these, save the last, being obsolete,I chose a more modern subject as more meet.

7How I have treated it, I do not know;

Perhaps no better than they have treated meWho have imputed such designs as showNot what they saw, but what they wished to see:

But if it gives them pleasure, be it so;This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free:

Meantime Apollo plucks me by the ear,And tells me to resume my story here.

26Juan and Haide gazed at each other

With swimming looks of speechless tenderness,Which mixed all feelings, friend, child, lover, brother,

All that the best can mingle and expressWhen two pure hearts are poured in one another,

And love too much, and yet cannot love less;But almost sanctify the sweet excessBy the immortal wish and power to bless.


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28They should have lived together deep in woods,

Unseen as sings the nightingale; they wereUnfit to mix in these thick solitudes

Called social, haunts of Hate, and Vice, and Care:How lonely every freeborn creature broods!

The sweetest songbirds nestle in a pair;The eagle soars alone; the gull and crowFlock oer their carrion, just like men below.

29Now pillowed cheek to cheek, in loving sleep,

Haide and Juan their siesta took,A gentle slumber, but it was not deep,

Forever and anon a something shookJuan, and shuddering oer his frame would creep;

And Haidees sweet lips murmured like a brookA wordless music, and her face so fairStirred with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air.

Here is an excerpt from J. M. Coetzees novel Disgrace(Booker

Prize, 1999; the Nobel for literature, 2003). The novel presents the storyof David Lurie, a middle-aged ex-Romantic poetry professor, who hasan impulsive affair with a student, which brings along his disgrace, andcalls into question the fragility of human relationships. It is interesting tonotice how the process of subjectivation of the character and thereader interoperates with such instances of poetic discourse, especiallywhen the hero describes his indulging in composing the music of hischamber opera in progress Byron in Italy, a meditation on Byrons short-lived love for Teresa Guiccioli, the girl of nineteen with the blonderinglets who gave herself up with such joy to the imperious Englishman(pp. 182-3). Can the note of falsity piercing the heros enterprise lead

the way to truth, however provisional, on art, life, even history?

Seated on his own desk looking on the overgrown garden, he marvelsat what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought hisown ghostly place in Byron in Italywould be somewhere between Teresasand Byrons: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionatebody and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he waswrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, butthe comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even assome blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slapof the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous

instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on the line.So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange!How fascinating! (Disgrace, pp. 184-185)

Further Readings:T. S. Eliot (1943) On Poetry and Poets, London, pp. 232-3; Peter J. Manning

(1995) Don Juanand Byrons Imperceptiveness to the English Word in D. Wu (ed)Romanticism: A Critical Reader; J. McGann (1995) Byron and the AnonymousLyric, in D. Wu (ed.);


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Percy Bysshe Shelley


5. Percy Bysshe Shelley and self-discovery

P. B. Shelley, Il buon tempo verr prophet, lived and died by therules of the Romantic game. Still, as Mary Shelley, his widow, could sayafterwards, there was a sublime fitness in his fate. Very much like inByrons case, there have been taken strenuous efforts to make a heroic taleout of the poets life. As usual, the type of hero has varied: tyrant-hater,atheistical seducer, ineffectual angel (Matthew Arnold), herd-abandoneddeer (Shelley himself). There were aspects of his life accounting for all theseconflicting views. But, the more aggravating labeling always comes frommajor critics whose reading of the poet has stuck with more ordinary readers

for generations. It is T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis who nearly dismissedShelley as they considered him almost a blackguard with a passionateapprehension of abstract ideas of little substance.

That Shelleys distinguishing feature is his passion for abstract ideascannot be denied. What still needs to be amended is that Shelleys abstractideas engage in a laborious battle of self-discovery, on the premise thatoppressors and tyrants are not only of this world but of us too. He thereforethought that what we call evil (like what we call creativity or power) ispart of a primitive, irresistible energy that links man with the wild and terriblein nature. And he refused to submit to such power as he refused to admit toconventional religion and conventional marriage. So, we may say that

Shelleys constant preoccupation is to strike a balance between the assertionof the self and the need to lose ones self in someone else, or in an idea oractivity. Hence, his works are incessant explorations in the historys/philosophys mind, starting with Plato through David Hume and WilliamGodwin.

Shelley was a skeptical idealist as he was holding provisionally to theideas envisaged by an imagination that transcends experience, and he wasrefusing to assert that these ideas are anything more than high possibilities.Hence, his major poems express his sense of the limits of certain knowledgeand his refusal to let his intuitions and hopes fossilize in some philosophicalor religious creed. However, Shelleys is the province of hope rather thandespair, as he believed in its power to relieve the creative and theimaginative that are its only available means.

Shelleys poems yield a seriousness of purpose even didacticismmindful of the writings of the radical philosopher William Godwin (The Inquiryconcerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue andHappiness, 1793). Godwins insistence on individual liberties had a greatimpact on the young poet who was soon to become one of those poets whoare unacknowledged legislators of the world. Queen Mab(1813) carries inseed Shelleys later revolutionary ideas, testifying to subsequent underlyingunity of purpose in his poetry and the growing flexibility in attitude dictated by

his desire for social regeneration. The poet considers Queen Mab aphilosophical poem, with notes, as in there, he put forward his views ofmans past, and its legacy, the present evils that prevented man fromreaching a state of peace and happiness. Based on Godwins rationalistic


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principles, the poem seems to detail on Shelleys deterministic philosophyabout the existence of a prevailing law of necessity throughout the Universe.

Shelleys next poem, Alastor (1815), deals with the self, and in sodoing it becomes a mixture of abstraction and passion, of mythopoeia andnarcissism, of moralizing and emotional self-indulgence. The poem, writesShelley, represents a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius

led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with allthat is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. [] Thepoet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to asingle image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted byhis disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave (1815/ 1986: 667).

Shelleys characters are embodiments of characteristics or ideas andhis subject is the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny in thepolitical, religious, domestic spheres. In so being, Shelley prefers to give thefeeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it. By thesame token, he prefers to generalize nature and idealize, universalize thehuman nature or the mythological personages. His lyrical drama Prometheus

Unbound (1819) is illustrative of Shelleys concern with the ineffable andmostly his hope in political and social regeneration. Here again, Shelley dealswith abstractions, the cosmic, the timelessness, the eternal, so as to give hisown vision of the Promethean myth, in proclaiming the victory of love overhatred.

Shelleys creed, synthesized in the myth of Prometheus, draws onGodwins rationalistic philosophy and tackles the problem of evil which to himis not inherent in the system of creation but an accident that might beexpelled. That is why his Prometheus is the type of the highest perfection ofmoral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives to thebest and noblest ends (Preface, p. 700). Shelleys Prometheus resembles

both Miltons Satan (in point of courage but not envy, revenge and pride) andChrist (in point of willingness to suffer for the sake of mankind).

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The Romantics & The Victorians