Significance of the boundary dates

. 1789: Outbreak of the French Revolution; Blake: Songs of Innocence

. 1798: Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads

. 1832: First Reform Act; Death of Sir Walter Scott

“Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.” – G. M. Trevelyan Remember!

 The Romantic Movement was not confined to England; it was a pan-European movement.

 The Romantic Movement was not confined to literature alone; it affected other arts as well, notably painting & music.

‘Romantic’: Two referents

The word ‘romantic’ has two referents: i. a period of time ii. a set of distinctive beliefs, sentiments, norms, and themes

Even among specialists a confusion prevails between ‘Romantic’ as a period term, referring to the time between 1789 and 1832 , or to a whole century between 1750 and 1850, and ‘Romantic’ as a set of norms, styles, and themes that characterize certain writers of the time but not all. Origins of the word ‘romantic’

• The word ‘romantic’ is derived from the word ‘romance’. In the early Middle Ages, ‘romance’ denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin (French, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese) in contradistinction to Latin itself, which had been more or less frozen & confined to the learned members of church, court & university. • The work produced in the new vernacular languages (also called ‘romance’ languages) was called romanz, roman, romanzo or romance. In Old French romaunt or roman meant ‘a courtly romance in verse’ or ‘a popular story’. Any sort of adventure story, be it of chivalry or of love, was called a romance. They were typically filled with adventurous knights, distressed damsels, evil magicians, fiery dragons & wild landscapes. • The word ‘romance’ (and the adjective ‘romantic’) still retains this old meaning in popular usage. ‘Romantic’ in the literary context

• The German & critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) introduced the term into the literary context. • It is difficult to give a single, simple definition of ‘’. “I cannot send you my explanation of the word ‘romantic’ because it would be 125 pages long.” (Friedrich to his brother Wilhelm in a 1793 letter.) • Jacques Barzun in Classic, Romantic and Modern (1961) cites examples of the word ‘romantic’ being used as a synonym for the following adjectives: attractive, bombastic, revolutionary, emotional, exuberant, fanciful, formless, heroic, irrational, mysterious, ornamental, stupid, unreal, unselfish, adventurous, daring, passionate, wild, bizarre & chimerical. • A. O. Lovejoy : “The word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the functions of a verbal sign”. Characteristic features of Romanticism

 a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature.  a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect.  a turning in upon the self & a heightened examination of human personality & its moods & mental potentialities.  a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules & traditional procedures.

Characteristic features of Romanticism (contd.)

 an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience & spiritual truth.  an obsessive interest in folk culture, national & ethnic cultural origins & the medieval era.  a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, & the diseased.

Novalis (1772-1801), poet & philosopher of early German Romanticism.

“The world must be romanticized. …By investing the commonplace with a lofty significance, the ordinary with a mysterious aspect, the familiar with the prestige of the unfamiliar, the finite with the semblance of infinity, thereby I romanticize it.”

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), German Romantic poet & critic.

“That is romantic that portrays emotional matter in an imaginative form.”

Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement.

“Romanticism so often ill-defined, is in the final analysis, and here is its real definition, if one considers only its militant aspect, nothing other than liberalism in literature.”

Ludovic Vitet (1802-1873), French dramatist.

“Romanticism is … protestantism in the arts and letters.”

“Romanticism, is in practice, a lively coalition of diverse interests, but with a common goal, warfare against the rules, the rules of convention.”

“Romanticism is the art of offering people the literary works which, in the present state of their customs and beliefs, can give them the greatest pleasure. Classicism, by contrast, offers them the literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers. “

Stendhal (1783-1842), French writer.

“All the great writers have been romantics in their time. A century after their death, it is those who copy them, instead of opening their eyes and imitating nature, who are classicists.” Periodization

 The Neoclassical Period: 1660-1745 (a) 1660-1700: Restoration Age (b) 1700-1745: Augustan Age

 Age of Sensibility: 1745-1789/1798 Reaction against Neoclassicism – proto-Romanticism

 The Romantic Period: 1789/1798-1832

Neoclassical/Neoclassicism

In the arts, the terms ‘neoclassical ‘ & ‘neoclassicism’ are used to describe a work which displays a revival of interest in and veneration for the classical attitudes & styles of ancient Greece & Rome, and which is influenced by and/or imitates such models in seeking to emulate their pursuit of order, clarity, harmony, grace, humanity, self-discipline & rational beauty.

Main features of Neoclassicism  a tendency to be conservative in its view that contemporary culture was necessarily inferior to that of the classical past (a fierce debate between the ‘Ancients’ & the ‘Moderns’ raged throughout the 1690s & 1700s).  valuing & admiring the ‘proprieties’: regularity & simplicity of form, order & proportion, elegance & polished wit.  encouraging emotional restraint & rating most highly art which displayed technical mastery.  notions of ‘decorum’ (the harmony of form & content) – action, character, thought & language all need to be appropriate to each other – grand & important themes should be treated in a dignified & noble style; the humble or trivial in a low style.  use of stylized & stock epithets, classical references, artificial tropes, etc. to ‘heighten’ the language of . NOTE: The critical tenets of Neoclassicism were (to some extent) coterminous with the worldview of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment

 ‘Enlightenment’ is a term used to describe an intellectual movement in Europe between c. 1660 & c. 1770.

 The movement was critical of traditional beliefs, superstitions & prejudices, and placed its central faith in human reason & strict scientific method.

 Enlightenment thinking embraced notions of human progress, the rational perfectibility of humankind, and the universe as governed by observable laws & systematic principles. Major English Enlightenment thinkers

. John Locke (1632-1704) [empirical philosopher]

. Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) [scientist & mathematician]

Enlightenment & Neoclassicism

 Aspects of the Enlightenment cast of mind are to be found in Neoclassical literature, although never comprehensively or unproblematically.

 The rejection of the irrational & the distrust of feelings & the imagination common to both led to a reaction at the end of the 18th cent in what has been called the ‘Age of Sensibility’.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night, God said, Let Newton be, and all was light. Alexander Pope’s couplet captures a sense of the wonder and respect Newton inspired in the of the period. Pre-Romantic Age or Age of Sensibility?

For a time, literary historians called (some do even now) the middle phase (the phase between Neoclassicism & Romanticism) ‘Pre-Romanticism’. Northrop Frye objected to this label.

“Not only did the ‘pre-Romantics’ not know that the Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a poet’s having regarded a later poet’s work as the fulfillment of his own.” – Northrop Frye

NOTE: Modern scholarship regards Romanticism as an episode within the larger & longer movement of Sensibility.

Meaning of ‘Sensibility’

 In the 18th cent, the term ‘sensibility’ did not mean ‘sensibleness’ – it meant ‘sensitivity’ or ‘emotional responsiveness’, as opposed to reasonableness or detachment – a capacity to identify with & respond to the sorrows of others – it acquired the meaning of ‘susceptibility to tender feelings’ – it was part of a cluster of closely related terms: ‘sensibility’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘sympathy’ & ‘sentiment’ were often interchangeable.

 This quality of empathy rose as a reaction against the view expressed by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan (1651) that man is innately selfish & motivated by self- interest & the drive for power & status.

Philosophers of Sensibility

 The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) [Anthony Ashley Cooper] is generally regarded as the official philosopher of the ‘Age of Sensibility’. Reacting against the views of Hobbes, Shaftesbury proclaimed in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711) that “benevolence” – wishing other persons well – is an innate human sentiment & motive, and that the central elements in morality are the feelings of sympathy & ‘sensibility’ – that is, responsiveness to another person’s distresses & joys.

 David Hume (1711-66) in Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) & Adam Smith (1723-90) in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) also argued that the heart, which prompts us without reflection, is a better source of good character & right action than the intellect, which calculates consequences or prudently obeys codes of conduct. Characteristics of the ‘Age of Sensibility’

 A recoil from Neoclassical ‘correctness’ towards a stress on spontaneity, an emphasis on humanitarian values, on the idea of original genius, and the importance of the imagination.  An admiration of the sublime as that power in nature & art which inspires awe & deep emotion & which is manifest in grand & wild natural scenes & in the writings of older, native British writers – instead of Classical writers such as Virgil, Horace & Ovid there was a turn to models such as Spenser, Shakespeare & Milton (“renaissance of the Renaissance”) – along with these models came an interest in ballads, folk literature & medieval romance.  A taste for the exceptional rather than the conformable also revealed itself in vogues for the Oriental & the Gothic.  This liking for the thrills of unusual & uncharted psychological territories was similarly apparent in the dwelling on mystery & melancholy that typified what has been called ‘the poetry of night and tombs’. Cult of the sublime

Edmund Burke (1729-97) in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) popularized two aesthetic terms: the sublime & the beautiful. The sublime in Burke’s formulation is awe-inspiring and transports the viewer, recognizing in the experience a power beyond themselves. The beautiful, however, is soft & small, something which pleases but which the viewer feels s/he has control; of rather than being controlled by it, as is the case in an encounter with the sublime. Literature of Sensibility

 Drama of Sensibility (Sentimental Comedy)

 Novel of Sensibility (Sentimental Novel)

 Poetry of Sensibility Drama of Sensibility (Sentimental Comedy)

• Richard Steele: The Conscious Lovers (1722) • Hugh Kelly: False Delicacy (1768) • Richard Cumberland: The Brothers (1769) ; The West Indian (1771)

Sentimental comedy was also called ‘weeping comedy’ – in France it was called comédie larmoyante (‘tearful comedy’).

Novel of Sensibility (Sentimental Novel)

. Samuel Richardson: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa; or, History of a Young Lady (1747); Sir Charles Grandison (1754) . Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) . Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey (1768) . Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling (1771) . Henry Brooke: Juliet Grenville; or the History of the Human Heart (1774)

Two famous European specimens:  Rousseau: Julie, or the New Héloise: Letters of Two Lovers who live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps (1761)  Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

In The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Goethe created a prototype of the Romantic hero at odds with his world and doomed to destroy himself through his passionate, obsessive nature. This novel made Goethe the leader of the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) movement in Germany.

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Illustration Poetry of Sensibility (Precursors of Romanticism) • James Thomson (1700-48): The • Thomas Warton, Jr. (1728-90): Seasons (1726-30) “The Pleasures of • (1716-71): “Elegy Melancholy”(1747) Written in a Country • Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74): Churchyard” (1751); The “The Deserted Village” (1770) Progress of Poesy (1757); The • William Cowper (1731-1800): Bard (1757) The Task (1785) • (1721-59): Odes • James Beattie (1735-1803): The on Several Descriptive and Minstrel; or, the Progress of Allegoric Subjects (1746) Genius (1771-74) • Mark Akenside (1721-70): The • George Crabbe (1754-1832): Pleasures of Imagination (1744; The Village (1783), The Borough 1772) (1810) • Joseph Warton (1722-1800): The • Robert Burns (1759-96): Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish (1744) Dialect (1786)

Two important books

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) The Works of Ossian (1765)

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

Thomas Percy (1729-1811) Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)

The Works of Ossian

James Macpherson (1736-1796) The Works of Ossian (1765) Danish painter, Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809) Ossian Sang his Swan Song to the Harp, 1782

Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of Fallen French Heroes, 1801-02 François Pascal Simon Gérard (1770-1837) Ossian Evoking Ghosts on the Edge of the Lora, 1801 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) Ossian's Dream, 1813 John Martin (1789-1854), The Bard, 1817 Inspired by Thomas Gray’s “The Bard” (1757) Cult of Melancholy

The cultivation of ‘melancholy’ and the indulgence in its ‘pleasures’ [Thomas Warton, Jr (1728-90) wrote a poem called ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy’ (1747)] developed into a cult. Wandering into groves or ruins or graveyards at evening or sitting by the lamp in one’s study and pondering the brevity and sorrows of life – these became common settings and themes in poetry, novels, and paintings. The melancholic soul was not simply sad or gloomy, however, but rich in wisdom, benevolent towards frail fellow mortals, sometimes even ‘rapt’ or ‘transported’ by the religious vision evoked by the meditative mood. James Thomson wrote of the “sacred influence” of the “Power / Of Philosophic Melancholy” (‘Autumn’, 1730), and the term became almost synonymous with philosophy itself, and with religious introspection. Later Keats in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1819) urged readers to drink in “the melancholy fit” without trying to muffle it, for from it we gain, not philosophic serenity, but sheer intensity of life.

‘Graveyard Poets’

• Thomas Parnell (1679-1718): “Night-Piece on Death” (1721) • Edward Young (1683-1765): The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742) *** • Robert Blair (1699-1746): “The Grave” (1743) • James Hervey (1714-58): “Meditations among the Tombs” (1748) [Prose] • Thomas Gray (1716-71): “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

*** Young also wrote a highly influential prose tract called Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Translated into German in 1760, the work was enthusiastically received by writers of the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement . An interesting fact! Poems of many of the so-called ‘pre-Romantic’ poets were translated into Bengali in 19th cent Bengal

Thomas Parnell, The Hermit  Bholanath Mukhopadhyaya, Sanyaseer Oopakhyan, 1870. James Beattie, Poems  Gangacharan Mukhopadhyaya, Kavita Kalap, 1876. William Cowper, Selection of Poems  Suresh Chandra Mitra, Padya Kusumavali, 1876. Edward Young, Night Thoughts  Nimai Charan Gangyopadhyay, Nisitha Chinta, 1883. Thomas Gray, Elegy  Nabin Chandra Das, Shokagiti, 1900.

Trioson, Portrait of Chateaubriand Meditating on the Ruins of Rome, 1809.

Considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature, Chateaubriand (1768-1848) represented the melancholy school in literature.

The Gothic Gothic novels

• Horace Walpole (1717-97): The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) • Clara Reeve (1729-1807): The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (1778) • William Beckford (1760-1844): Vathek (1786) • Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823): The Romance of the Forest (1791); The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) • Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818): The Monk (1796) An 1822 engraving showing the central tower and crossing of the medieval abbey in Whitby Headland.

REVELEY'S DRAWING OF THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO AS IT EXISTED IN 1785 (WATERCOLOUR)

The main entrance of Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, Middlesex. A staircase at Strawberry Hill.

Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, near London, 1749-77.

Illustration from The Mysteries of Udolpho. Illustration from The Monk. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau … might fairly be called the grandfather of Romanticism. “ (Michael Ferber)

MAJOR WRITINGS  Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)  Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men (1755)  Emile, or On Education (1762)  The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) Romantic Poets

First generation poets Second generation poets • • George Gordon, Lord Byron • William Wordsworth • Percy Bysshe Shelley • Samuel Taylor Coleridge •

NOTE: These poets were not known as ‘Romantic poets’ in their own day. Wordsworth & Coleridge (and also Robert Southey) were called the “” because of their links with the Lake District in northwest England; the poetry of Shelley & Byron was called the “Satanic School” of poetry because of their unconventional lifestyles & irreverent ideas; Keats’s lower-class status led to the snobbish label “Cockney School” being applied to his work. The term ‘Romantic’, as a means of labelling a literary school began to be applied from the second half of the 19th cent. Use of the word ‘Romantic’ to designate a literary school

In 1864, Outlines of by Thomas B. Shaw was reprinted under the title A History of English Literature. Shaw’s book was published first in St. Petersburg in 1846 & again in London in 1849. Chapter 19 of the 1864 book was entitled ‘The Dawn of ’ and opens thus:

“The great revolution in popular taste and sentiment which substituted what is called the romantic type in literature for the cold and clear-cut artificial spirit of that classicism which is exhibited in its highest form in the writings of Pope was, like all powerful and durable movements, whether in politics or in letters, gradual. …indications soon began to be perceptible of a tendency to seek for subjects and forms of expressions in a wider, more passionate, and more natural sphere of nature and emotion.” First Generation Poets (Senior Romantics)

Blake (1757-1827)

Principal Works

1783: Poetical Sketches 1789: Songs of Innocence; The Book of Thel 1790: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1793: Vision of the Daughters of Albion; America: a Prophecy 1794: Songs of Experience; The Book of Urizen; Europe: a Prophecy 1795: The Song of Los; The Book of Los; The Book of Ahania 1797: The Four Zoas, or Vala 1804: Milton; Jerusalem William Blake, Newton, 1795 Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Principal Works

1798 (with Coleridge): Lyrical Ballads 1805: The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind 1807: Poems in Two Volumes (includes “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”, “Resolution and Independence”, “The Solitary Reaper”, etc.) 1814: The Excursion Coleridge (1772-1834)

Principal Works 1796: Poems on Various Subjects (includes ‘The Eolian Harp’) 1798: ‘Ode to France’; ‘Fears in Solitude’; ‘Frost at Midnight’ 1798 (with Wordsworth): Lyrical Ballads (‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’) 1802: ‘Dejection: an Ode’ 1816: Christabel and Other Poems (‘Kubla Khan’; ‘Pains of Sleep’; ‘The Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’) 1817: Biographia Literaria

NOTE: A group of eight poems composed by Coleridge between 1795 & 1807 is called ‘Conversation Poems’: “The Eolian Harp”, “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement”, “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison”, “Frost at Midnight”, “Fears in Solitude”, “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem”, “Dejection: An Ode”, “To William Wordsworth”. On the composition of Lyrical Ballads

“The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be (in part at least) supernatural – and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. The characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them or to notice them when they present themselves.” (From Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14) contd.

“In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic – yet so as to transfer, from our inward nature, a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us – an inexhaustible treasure but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.” (From Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14)

From Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)

“The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems, was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; …Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

(NOTE: There are two main versions of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The first is that of 1800 (the 1798 edition of the poems had been prefaced simply by an ‘Advertisement’) and the second that of 1802, which is the basis of Wordsworth’s final version of 1805.)

contd.

“The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings , is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.” ***

*** In Chapter 17 of Biographia Literaria Coleridge objects to Wordsworth’s arguments about the language of poetry. contd.

“Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word “poet”? What is a poet?** To whom does he address himself ? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men – a man (it is true) endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him, delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. … (** Shelley writes about the function of a poet in A Defence of Poetry) I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”

Second Generation Poets (Junior Romantics) Byron (1788-1824)

Principal Works

1807: Hours of Idleness 1809: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1812-18: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (4 cantos) 1813: The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour 1814: The Corsair, Lara 1817: Manfred (drama) 1818: Beppo 1819-24: Don Juan (16 cantos) 1821: Cain (drama) 1822: The Vision of Judgment Shelley (1792-1822)

Principal Works

1813: Queen Mab 1818: The Revolt of Islam 1820: Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”, “To a Skylark” 1821: Adonais 1821: A Defence of Poetry 1832: The Mask of Anarchy

Shelley’s idea of the poet

“Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets.**A poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.” (A Defence of Poetry)

** In his Apologie for Poetrie, Sir Philip Sidney had observed: ‘Among the Romans a poet was called “Vates”, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet … so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heartravishing knowledge.’ Keats (1795-1821)

Principal Works

1816: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” 1817: Poems (includes “Sleep and Poetry”) 1818: Endymion, Hyperion: A Fragment (written, 1818-19) 1819: The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (begun in 1819; unfinished fragment) 1820: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the five great odes – “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy” & “Ode to Autumn”

Two Revolutions, Two Historic Documents

American Declaration of Independence Declaration of the Rights of Man and of (4 July 1776) the Citizen (26 August 1789) Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August, 1789) Revolutionary & Napoleonic Period in France (1789-1815) • 1789: The French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille on July 14. On August 26, the new National Assembly passes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. • 1792: September Massacres (2-6 Sept) • 1793: King Louis XVI (Jan 21) & Queen Marie-Antoinette (Oct 16) executed; England joins the alliance against France. • 1793-94: [The Jacobin**] Reign of Terror under Robespierre. • 1804: Napoleon crowned emperor. • 1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo. ** Jacobins: The Jacobins of the French Revolution were members of a society (formed in May 1789) called the Jacobin Club, a radically democratic political club. Led by Robespierre, the Jacobin Club became increasingly extreme, and in 1793 instigated the Reign of Terror. 1792-1802: French Revolutionary Wars 1803-1815: Napoleonic Wars

NOTE: In British cultural history, the term ‘English Jacobins’ was applied to the English supporters of the French Revolution or anyone with radical political views. Impact of the French Revolution • The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (26 August 1789), evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike. The overthrow of the ancien régime in France, a political system that encouraged decadence and luxury legitimated by the absolute rule of the king, was almost universally heralded in Britain.

• Wordsworth visited France twice during the revolutionary period. He recalls the excitement that he felt during the period in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude. Early Reactions to the French Revolution

“… few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race. “ – Robert Southey

“… Europe was rejoiced, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.”

(Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, 6. 352-54)

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! “

(Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, 10. 696-97)

Impact of the French Revolution

• Liberal English sympathizers, however, dropped off as the Revolution followed its increasingly grim course: the accession to power by Jacobin extremists intent on purifying their new republic by purging it of its enemies; the “September Massacres” of the imprisoned nobility in 1792, invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands, which brought England into the war against France; the guillotining of thousands in the Reign of Terror under Robespierre; and, after the execution in their turn of the men who had directed the Terror, the emergence of Napoleon, first as dictator, then as emperor of France. Wordsworth lamented in The Prelude: … become oppressors in their turn, Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence For one of conquest; losing sight of all Which they had struggled for … (1805 ed.; 10.696-97) • Napoleon, whose rise through the ranks of the army had seemed to epitomize the egalitarian principles of the Revolution, himself became an arch-aggressor, a despot, and would-be founder of a new imperial dynasty. He seemed to have returned the country to a dictatorship much like the absolute monarchy the Revolution had originally sought to overthrow.

Radical thinkers of the Romantic era

Thomas Paine Mary Wollstonecraft William Godwin (1737-1809) (1759-97) (1756-1836) • Common Sense • A Vindication of the • An Enquiry (1776) Rights of Men Concerning • Rights of Man (1790) Political (1791, 1792) • A Vindication of the Justice (1793) • The Age of Reason Rights of Woman (1794) (1792)

Impact of the French Revolution

Three important books epitomize the radical social thinking stimulated by the Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) justified the Revolution against Edmund Burke’s attack in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-92) also justified the Revolution against Burke’s attack and advocated for England a democratic republic that was to be achieved, if lesser pressures failed, by popular revolution. More important as an influence (on Wordsworth & Shelley) was Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which foretold an inevitable but peaceful evolution of society to a final stage in which property would be equally distributed and government would wither away.

Impact of the French Revolution

Shelley, who was born three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, described the Revolution as the “master theme of the epoch in which we live” in a letter to Byron on 6 September 1816. In the concluding paragraph of A Defence of Poetry (1821), he wrote:

“It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their own spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants [expounders] of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.“

Political Revolution & Literary Revolution

“Mr. Wordsworth is at the head of that which has been denominated the Lake school of poetry. …This school of poetry had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution. …Our poetical literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into the most trite, insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the hands of the followers of Pope and the old French school of poetry. It wanted something to stir it up, and it found that some thing in the principles and events of the French revolution. From the impulse it thus received, it rose at once from the most servile imitation and tamest commonplace, to the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox. The change in the belles-lettres was as complete, and to many persons as startling, as the change in politics, with which it went hand in hand. There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. All the commonplace figures of poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications … were instantly discarded; a classical allusion was considered as a piece of antiquated foppery; capital letters were no more allowed in print, than letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life; kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere; rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular government.“ – William Hazlitt, ‘On the Living Poets’ (Lectures on the English Poets, 1818)