Odes responses

Hello Romanticists,

I have chosen three odes for us to discuss in our penultimate class.  I have selected these because all three are about attempting to exist in two realms simultaneously.  Shelley, we know, was both extraordinarily abstract in his political and poetical theories but also devoted to pragmatic social movements of the day.  Similar is Keats’ enchantment with other worlds.  He is drawn into worlds of gods and fairies, into beautiful and ideal worlds beyond our capacity to fully grasp.  And yet, the most characteristically Keatsian move is the awakening from these dream worlds (the knight wakes up on the cold hill’s side; the reader thuds back to her own reality with the sudden ending of “Eve of Saint Agnes”).  The poems for Tuesday are all attempts to reconcile ideals with lived experience, the eternal with our specific temporal moment. 

Unlike the other Keats poems we have read, “Ode to a Nightingale” has no single moment of awakening but rather is a series of awakenings, a continual process of realization that keeps the speaker balanced between dreaming and wakefulness.  “Ode to the West Wind” and “To Autumn” take the same season as their focal point.  While Shelley’s poem is filled with chaotic energy straining toward future fulfillment, Keats’ poem finds a calm balance in cyclical change which is both dynamic and eternal. 

Happy Reading,

Prof. M.

Autumn Sunset by English Romantic painter John Constable

Engraving of a Nightingale by Thomas Bewick, from The History of British Birds (1797)

Melancholic Keats responses

Dear Romanticists,

First, my apologies for the late posting; if you do not get a chance to upload your post before class, no worries.

In the 1819 letter assigned for Tuesday, Keats challenges the popular Christian notion of the world as a “vale of tears,” or a place in which people ceaselessly suffer until removed to Heaven by a merciful god (1459-60, Napoleonic edition).  This is not to say that Keats denies the pain of existence—how could he?—but rather he believes that pain is a vital and even salutary element of human life:

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul, a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways?” (1459).

Forms of suffering develop our souls; they refine our senses, shape our identities, and teach us to feel for others.  Our poems for Tuesday explore how, precisely, pain is connected to these larger phenomena.  In “Ode on Melancholy” Keats joins the discussion Wordsworth and Coleridge developed in their earlier odes on psychic pain.  “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” returns to the ballad form that has largely faded from our notice since the first half of the course.  Echoing both the encounter structure and the supernatural interest of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it tells the story of romantic betrayal.  Finally, as a sonnet grappling with devotion and mortality, “Bright Star” might remind you of Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy.”  As you read, consider the ways in which Keats expands or departs from these models of melancholic poetics. 

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

Clare response

Dear Romanticists,

We return now to discussing working-class poetry, though this time we will focus on one poet in particular.  John Clare is probably the most famous of our period’s self-educated authors.  His parents were essentially illiterate and Clare himself had no formal education after the age of 11 when he left school to work full-time as an agricultural laborer.  

Clare’s everyday life was bound up in the land on which he lived.  He was thus poised to become one of the great voices of the Agricultural Revolution, a series of technological advances and land reforms that changed the face of British countryside.  Acts of enclosure, for example, re-distributed lands that had been held in common, in some cases since the Middle Ages.  Trees and hedges were uprooted, fields plowed up, and marshlands drained.  For the first time in living memory, the land that so sharply informed rural identity radically changed. 

Much of Clare’s poetry records and responds to the destruction of the land he had known and the corresponding loss of rural cultural that went with it.  That is, like all of our Romantic poets, Clare was fixated on the concept of loss.  His loss, however, is rooted specifically in specific flora and fauna, agrarian traditions, and a pre-industrial relationship between people and the land they worked.  Until Thomas Hardy arrives on the scene at the opposite end of the century, no one will speak with more authority or more agony about the British countryside and the cultural memories and practices that once flourished there.

Read the assigned poems in our anthology; the other two listed on the syllabus can be found here:

The Skylark

First Love

Enjoy this work inspired by The Shepherd's Calendar by the contemporary artist from Clare's native Northamptonshire, Peter Newcombe. 

Shelley responses

Dear Romanticists,

            Two of the most innovative and influential theories of poetry come from the Romantic period.  One is the “Preface” to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.  The other is “A Defence of Poetry.”  Like the “Preface,” the “Defence” lays out its author’s most deeply held beliefs about what makes good poetry and what role poetry plays in the wider social world.  You will notice some common interests between the two, for example the importance of individual perception and imagination, and the spontaneous nature of poetic inspiration.  Read, then, for what Shelley adds to Wordsworth’s (and Coleridge’s) ideas.  For one thing, we know that one particularly Shellean tactic is the string of metaphors, so you might consider the importance of metaphors in his essay.

Also read the assigned poems; we will be examining these to see how Shelley’s poetic theory plays out in practice. 

Happy reading,

Prof. M.

Some skylarking for your amusement, by the British Romantic painter and writer Samuel Palmer.

Hemans responses

Hello Romanticists,

Hope you are having or have had a good and restful holiday.  Allow me to welcome you back by talking about the Catherine Robson text I asked you to read.  As you read the section of her chapter, please consider the following.  First, Robson is an exceptionally skilled writer and critic and Heartbeats models several important literary-critical moves that you may wish to develop (defining a gap in the field, historicizing a previously unexamined concept). 

Second, Robson’s reevaluation of Hemans is part of a larger movement of challenging of the literary canon, a movement in which our class is also engaged.  Robson thus provides a useful model for our inquiries, as well as important background.  In particular, Robson highlights Hemans’s immense popularity.  More than just a best-selling author, Hemans was a cultural phenomenon whose works were seen as articulating the core values of British identity.  That iconic status makes her similar to Byron, despite their ideological differences.

For next Tuesday, read the assigned Hemans poems, focusing on those from her collection Records of Woman.  You might consider the parallels or contrasts between her historical “heroes” and Byron’s Childe Harold and Don Juan.  Post by noon on Monday (April 13).

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

P. S.: Enjoy a couple "Casabianca" artifacts:

Cover illustration,"Casabianca" set to music, nineteenth century.

Phillips Cigarettes collector's card from their of "Famous Boys" series, 1924. 

Don Juan Canto II responses

They [other epic poets] so embellish that ‘tis quite a bore

Their labyrinth of fables to thread through,

Whereas this story’s actually true.  (Don Juan, I.1609-10, 1614-16)

            …she [Haidee] was one

Fit for the model of a statuary
(A race of mere imposters, when all’s done;

I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal).  (Don Juan, II.940-44)

On Don Juan:  “[I]t is the sublime of that there sort of writing.  It may be bawdy, but is it not good English?  It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing?  Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?”  (letter from Byron to Douglas Kinnard, 26 October 1819)

Hello Romanticists,

Throughout both the first two cantos of Don Juan, Byron denies that his poem is only a matter of aesthetic convention.  The narrative, unlike the twists and turns of classical epics, “is actually true”; Haidee is, unlike idealized sculpture, “ripe and real.”  Moreover, the whole of the poem, Byron argues, bears witness to the realities of everyday lived experience.  This may seem a ludicrous claim about a poem whose stanzaic and rhyme schemes are so carefully crafted and whose eponymous character is a legendary rather than real-life figure.  On the other hand, we know that all of Byron’s works flagrantly defy social convention.  In Canto II, as Juan’s erotic adventures continue, you’ll see Byron puncturing familiar, idealistic views of love and devotion. 

Less expectedly, he will also turn his focus to the depiction of disaster at sea.  Like love stories, shipwrecks are common literary tropes, but keep in mind that Byron’s shipwreck is both an artistic convention and a ripped-from-the-headlines reality.   Two years before Byron began Canto II, a French frigate called the Medusa ran aground off the coast of Africa.  Nearly 150 of its crew and passengers escaped on a raft, but with little food or water.  For 13 days they starved, raved, killed each other, ate their dead, and despaired.  By the time they were rescued, only 15 people were left alive.  The disaster garnered international attention.  In an era of radical instability, the story of the raft of the Medusa crystallized fears about the decay of civilization and the horrors that humans are capable of when pushed to the extreme.

This is the story in the background of Byron’s depiction of Juan and his comrades lost at sea.  You might consider what the poet’s characteristically irreverent portrayal says about this real-life event.  You might also compare it to the other famous artistic rendering of event: Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that was first displayed for the public in 1819, the same year in which the first two Cantos of Don Juan were published.

Remember to post your response to canto II by noon on Monday.

Happy reading,

Prof. M.

Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse

Byron responses

Hello Romanticists, and welcome to a new era.

We are still in the thick of British Romanticism, but having passed the midpoint of the semester, we now turn to a group often referred to as the second generation of Romantic poets.  We will talk more in class on Tuesday about what separates our first poets (Smith, Yearsley, Robinson, Blake, the anonymous weaver poet, Wordsworth, and Coleridge) from our second group (Byron, Hemans, PB Shelley, Clare, and Keats), the primary distinction is this: the first generation lived in a time of revolution; the second generation were born into a world in which the ideals driving revolution had already been realized, and had already compromised, diluted, or perverted.  Our second generation poets are thus still deeply desirous of social change, but their work has a distinctly different tone, one of caution, defensiveness, or bitterness.  

Lord Byron will be our introduction to this new generation.  Pay close attention to the biographical sketch in our anthology, first because it makes a rattling good yarn, but secondly because Byron’s persona is inseparable from his poetry, and in particular his greatest contribution to literature, the Byronic hero.  The greatest celebrity of his day, Byron was notorious for his string of scandalous affairs, his reckless racking up of debt, and his general tendency to defy moral or legal codes.  He develops the same persona in his poetry.  The figure is at once a lover and a misanthrope; achingly sincere and bitterly cynical.  He is a man of great passions, but they are always already past, as some unnamed trauma has soured him, turned him away from human society, and aged him before his time.  If you are acquainted with Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester, Eugene Onegin, the count of Monte Christo, Batman or Severus Snape, then you know the type. 

Byron first introduces his hero figure in the long, semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  The publication of the first two cantos made Byron famous almost overnight.  Four years later, as he was fleeing scandal and debt in England, Byron wrote Canto III, the piece we’ll be discussing on Tuesday.  On the syllabus I have listed the stanzas that you must read, but please read more than that if you can. 

The final reading for Tuesday is short: “Messalonghi, 22 January 1824. On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year” (1065).  Note that he had sailed to the Greek city to fight in the Greek war of independence and that he died less than three months after writing the poem.  

Post your responses by noon on Monday.

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

P.S.: As befits a celebrity, Byron's death was mythologized in a flurry of artworks, including the following death-bed portrait by the Neo-Classical painter Joseph Denis Odevaere.