Byron, Shelley, Keats The second generation of Romantic poets

Byron, Shelley and Keats, conventionally defined as the second generation of Romantic poets, share different personal and artistic characteristics which can be summed up as follows:  Individualism, restlessness, escapism  strong ideals and thoughts  early death, far from , in Mediterranean countries  alienation of the artist from society  reflection on the relationship between the ideal and the real  longing for political and social order

George Gordon Byron Percy Bisshe Shelley John Keats Born , 1788. Field Place (Sussex), London, 1795. 1792. Died Missolonghi, 1824. Livorno, 1822. , 1821. Family Father: aristocratic, vice- Father: Whig Member of Father: well-off holster. admiral. Parliament. Mother: his father’s Mother: Scottish Mother: a Sussex employer's daughter. aristocratic. landowner. Education 1794-1801: Aberdeen 1797-1802: at home, 1800-1810: Enfield Grammar School. tutored by Reverend (private school). Evan Edwards of 1801-1805: Harrow High Warnham. 1810-1814: surgeon's School. apprentice at Thomas 1802-1804: Syon House Hammond's apothecary 1805-1809: Trinity Academy of Brentford. shop in Edmonton. College, Cambridge. 1804-1810: Eton 1814-1816: student at College. Guy's Hospital.

1810: University College, Oxford (soon expelled). Early years 1805: began to write lyric 1804: fared poorly, 1804: his father died of a . subjected to almost daily fractured skull after falling bullying acts by his from his horse. 1807: published a small classmates. volume of lyric poems 1805: his mother remarried which received savage, 1810: at Oxford College, but quickly left the new anonymous criticism in attended only one lecture husband and moved the . but used to read sixteen herself to live with her hours a day; unpopular mother. 1809: the attack in the with both students and Edinburgh Review, dons, he published a 1810: his mother died of prompted his taste for Gothic novel; then, a , leaving him satire (English Bards and collection of verses his grandmother. Scotch Reviewers); followed. travelled to Spain, 1814: left his surgeon's Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle 1811: published a apprenticeship after a fight East. pamphlet (The Necessity with his master at Thomas of Atheism) for which he Hammond's apothecary 1812: published Childe was expelled from and became a student at Harold’s Pilgrimage and Oxford; then, got married Guy's Hospital; devoted became a literary and (Harriet) and had a child. more and more of his time social celebrity. to the study of literature. 1814: abandoned his 1815: got married but his pregnant wife and child 1817: met Shelley. marriage collapsed and sailed to Europe, because of his incestuous bound for Switzerland; 1818. fell in love with love with his half-sister. after six weeks, homesick ; got and destitute, returned to married but poverty, bad 1816: left England. England. health and pursuit of made marriage 1815: lived close to impossible. London avoiding creditors. 1819: spent a week in the Isle of ; then, stayed 1816: on a second trip to in where he Switzerland, met Byron; wrote The Eve of St Agnes. regular conversation with him had an invigorating 1820: cut his relationship effect on his output of with his wife; began poetry got married for the showing serious signs of second time (Mary). tuberculosis and decided to leave the cold airs of 1817: met Keats. London behind; left England. 1818: left England. Late years 1816: lived in Geneva 1818: lived in Venice, 1820: lived in Rome where met P. B. Shelley. Naples and Florence. where, despite attentive care of his friends, his 1817: moved to Venice. 1819: lived in Rome health rapidly deteriorated. where he wrote political 1819: moved to Milan poems and . 1821: died; buried in the where became involved Protestant Cemetery, in the patriotic plots 1820: lived in Pisa; heard Rome; his last request was against Austrian rule. of John Keats' illness and to be buried under a wrote him a letter tombstone reading, "Here 1820: joined inviting him to join him; lies One Whose Name was ‘carboneria’, the Italy’s Keats replied with hopes writ in Water." His name revolutionary of seeing him, but was not to appear on the organization instead, arrangements stone. Despite these 1823: decided to commit were made for Keats to requests, however, his himself to the Greek travel to Rome. friends also added the struggle of independence epitaph: "This Grave from Turkey. 1821: inspired by the contains all that was death of Keats, wrote an mortal, of a YOUNG 1824: organized an elegy. ENGLISH POET, who on expedition and devoted 1822: was setting up a himself to training the journal which would act his Death Bed, in the troops in Missolonghi as a counter-blast to Bitterness of his heart, at where he died struck by a conservative periodicals; the Malicious Power of his severe fever; his heart is drowned in a sudden enemies, desired these buried in Greece, his storm while sailing back words to be Engraven on body in England. from Livorno to Lerici in his Tomb Stone" along his schooner; his body with the image of a lyre was cremated and his with broken strings. heart was snatched from the funeral pyre and given to who kept it. Main works Childe Harlod’s to the West Wind Pilgrimage (1812-1818), (1819), (1819), The Eve of St The Corsair (1814), Don (1820), Prometheus Agnes (1819), La Belle Juan (1819-1824). Unbound (1820). Dame sans Merci (1819). Ideals & believed in individual contempted conventional his imagination is stricken thought freedom and hated any forms of religion and by beauty and his form of constraint; polotics; refused all disinterested love for it; denounced the evils of social conventions, the contemplation of society and fought political oppression and beauty is fundamental to against tyrants. any form of tyranny; reach truth which is the believed in a better future ideal of all art; the in which to apply the Classical Greek art is principle of freedom and expression of beauty (and love through which man so that truth) which lives could overcome any again re-interpreted with political, moral and the eyes of a Romantic social constraint. poet. Political joined ‘carboneria’; his political commitment though there is no commitment decided to commit appears in a series of evidence of his active himself to the Greek angry political poems political involvement in struggle of independence condemning the the events of the period, from Turkey; organized arrogance of the power; his socio-political an expedition and his political poetry has consciousness is reflected devoted himself to less to do with his in his works where nature training the troops in intervention in (in connection with the Missolonghi. contemporary politics glorification of classical (, Greek art) is seen as a Men of England, symbolic representation of ). the ideas of liberty, peace, and freedom. Role of more than being the imagination is expressed imagination has a supreme imagination result of imagination, through poetry which twofold value: a) in his “poetry is the expression contains revolutionary poetry he imagines a of excited passion, and creativity meant to predominantly artificial that there is no such change the reality world; b) poetry comes thing as a life of passion (stronger than the ideal) from imagination in the any more than a of an increasingly sense that a great deal of continuous earthquake, material world. his work is a vision of or an eternal fever” what he would like human (letter to his friend life to be; imagination Thomas Moore, 5 July should be struck by beauty 1821). which is the ideal of all art. Poet’s task never considered himself a poet had to be both a The poet is endowed with a Romantic poet; he prophet and a Titan the ability to experience embodied a passionate, challenging the cosmos; ‘uncertainties, mysteries, moody, restless and his task was to help doubts without any mysterious man who hid mankind to reach an ideal irritable reaching after fact some horrible sin or world where freedom, and reason’. In other secret in his past; proud love and beauty win on words, the poet has the individualist, rejected the tyranny, destruction, capability to deny his conventional moral rules alienation. certainties and personality of society; outsider, in order to identify himself isolated and attractive at with the object which is the same time; noble of the source of his birth, but rough and wild inspiration and the place in his manners; hard but where Truth resides. When handsome, with great the poet can rely on this sensibility to nature and ability to deny (negative beauty; bored with the capability), he is able to excesses and excitments seek sensation which is the of the world; women basis of the knowledge could not resist him, but since it leads to beauty and he refused their love; truth. Poetry is nothing men either admired or else than the means envy him (Byronic hero). through which beauty and truth are rendered. View of nature is seen as wild, nature is a beautiful veil nature is purely nature cruel and exotic, and that hides the eternal synaesthetically sensous provides a foreground truth of the Divine spirit; and the poet loves it for its landscape for an isolated it provides images (the own sake; it is percieved man; it is not a source of wind, the clouds...) and not only through the consolation and joy. symbols for the creation noblest senses (sight and of cosmic schemes; it hearing), but through all represents the favourite the senses which lead to refuge from the reach ‘physical beauty’ disappointment and (that is colours, perfumes, injustice of the ordinary shapes...); if all senses are world and a hope for a involved in this process, better world. joy is much deeper and ‘spiritual beauty’ is reached (that is love, friendship and poetry); ‘physical beauty’ and ‘spiritual beauty’are strictly interwoven since the former is linked to life, enjoyment, decay and death and the latter is related to eternity. Style witty, satirical; it covers a wide range of His lyric “I” is not sometimes seems to metric and stanzaic spiritually autobiographic, descend from forms: from the does not stand for a human neoclassical models to the being linked to the events rather than earlier couplet, from the blank of his time, but for a Romantic poets. verse to Dante’s terza universal “I”; rima, from the political ballad to the classical elegy and the short .