DOCSLIB.ORG

Byron, Shelley, Keats the Second Generation of Romantic Poets

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Byron, Shelley, Keats the Second Generation of Romantic Poets 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 England, 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 London, 1788. Field Place (Sussex), London, 1795. 1792. Died Missolonghi, 1824. Livorno, 1822. Rome, 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 poems. 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 Edinburgh Review. 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 tuberculosis, 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 Fanny Brawne; got and destitute, returned to married but poverty, bad 1816: left England. England. health and pursuit of poetry made marriage 1815: lived close to impossible. London avoiding creditors. 1819: spent a week in the Isle of Wight ; then, stayed 1816: on a second trip to in Winchester 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 essays. 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 Mary Shelley who kept it. Main works Childe Harlod’s Ode to the West Wind Ode on a Grecian Urn Pilgrimage (1812-1818), (1819), To a Skylark (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 (The Masque of Anarchy, Greek art) is seen as a Men of England, symbolic representation of England in 1819). 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.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Keats's Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction
    Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and John Keats’s Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät IV (Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften) der Universität Regensburg eingereicht von Charles NGIEWIH TEKE Alfons-Auer-Str. 4 93053 Regensburg Februar 2004 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Rainer EMIG Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dieter A. BERGER 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION .............................................................................................................. I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... II ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... VI English........................................................................................................................ VI German...................................................................................................................... VII French...................................................................................................................... VIII INTRODUCTION Aims of the Study......................................................................................................... 1 On the Relationship Between S. T. Coleridge and J. Keats.......................................... 5 Certain Critical Terms................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Reviews 213 Especially Unfortunate for a Collection on Textuality, The
    Especially unfortunate for a collection on textuality, the essays are marred by typographical errors (“David Scan Kastan”, “feministm”, “Sommer- ville College”, “modem” for “modern”, “arid” for “and”). ;WUMWN \PMÅZ[\[M\WN ¹[MUQVITºM[[Ia[[PW_\PMQZIOMJ]\QV[WUM ways this is one of the pleasures in reading the volume. McGann’s essay from 1985 asks, “What is the relevance of textual and bibliographical stud- ies to literary intepretation?” and asserts “This is not a question that has been posed in a systematic way very often”. These statements would be unthinkable in the recent essays in the collection, a change due in a large part to McGann’s own work over the last two decades. He suggests that, faced by the same textual feature, literary historians and editors ask differ- ent questions. The former ask “what does this mean?” while the latter ask “is this right or wrong?” McGann’s essay is not about early modern texts, TM\ITWVMJa_WUMVJ]\Q\Q[QV\MZM[\QVO\WZMÆMK\WV\PM_Ia[QV_PQKPMLQ- tors of early modern women have almost always been literary historians ÅZ[\LZI_V\WMLQ\QVOQVWZLMZ\WUISMQVIKKM[[QJTM\M`\[I^IQTIJTMWomen Editing/Editing Women is both an essential primer for any would-be editor of early modern women and a stimulating statement of enduring ques- \QWV[IVLKPITTMVOM[QV\PMÅMTL1\[]OOM[\[IÅMTL_PQKPPI[LM^MTWXML rapidly over some forty years, and provides an exciting picture of both the many questions which have been answered, and those which remain for editors in this vibrant area. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Stephen Hebron. John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts. London: The Brit- ish Library, 2009.
    [Show full text]
  • BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS
    THE ROMANTIC AGE THE SECOND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS: BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS - they all left England, visited Italy and died young - return to complex forms of versification and richer language - interest in the world of ancient Greece - more interest in Politics (especially Byron) - different view of Nature (less idealistic) George Gordon Byron 1. Life (1788 – 1824) • In 1809 he set out on a tour of Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East. • After his return to England in 1812, he published the first ‘two cantos’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. • He became a literary and social celebrity, but then he left England in 1816, never to return. • He lived in Geneva, where he became a friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. • He moved to Venice, where he began his masterpiece, the mock-epic Don Juan. • In 1819 he moved to Milan where he became involved H. Meyer, Lord Byron, 1816, Victoria in the patriotic plots against Austrian rule. and Albert Museum, London • He committed himself to the Greek struggle of independence from Turkey. • His heart is buried in Greece, his body is interred in England. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 2. Main works • Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818). • The Giaour (1813), The Corsair, and Lara (1814): a series of verse narratives. • Manfred, a tragedy (1817). • Don Juan (1819-24). Jonny Lee Miller is Byron, in the BBC drama Byron. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 4. The Byronic hero • A moody, restless and mysterious romantic rebel. • Hides some sin or secret in his past.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- Says, Moral and Political, 2 Vols
    Notes Introduction 1. Robert Southey, “On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- says, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (1817; London: John Murray, 1832), II, 82. The identity of Junius remained a mystery, and even Edmund Burke was suspected. For an argument that he was Sir Philip Francis, see Alvar Ellegård, Who Was Junius? (The Hague, 1962). 2. Byron, “The Vision of Judgment” in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–92), VI, 309–45. 3. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Ro- mantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 13. 4. See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1980). 5. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 23–24. 6. Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 39. 7. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, p. 39. 8. McGann, “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 1–21 (13). 9. Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 209–25 (209). 10. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 12–13. 11. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Folkmann, Mads Nygaard
    University of Southern Denmark The Transfigurative Mode of Romantic Discourse Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Folkmann, Mads Nygaard Published in: Prism(s) Publication date: 2006 Document version: Final published version Citation for pulished version (APA): Folkmann, M. N. (2006). The Transfigurative Mode of Romantic Discourse: Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius. Prism(s), 14, 27-56. Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] Download date: 06. Oct. 2021 The Transfigurative Mode ofRomantic Discourse: Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Mads Nygaard Folkmann 0minant feature of Romantic literature is the wish to. transgress A;he given reality or, more precisely, to cnallenge and alternate the ways to both perceive and conceive reality. The literary text may not per it' change reality, yet it can suggest transformations indirectly by constructing new models or modes of seeing and comprehending. In this essay, I raise the question of the principle of transfiguration as a way of dealing with the Romantic desire for a radical transformation of perception.
    [Show full text]
  • John Keats 1 John Keats
    John Keats 1 John Keats John Keats Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. National Portrait Gallery, London Born 31 October 1795 Moorgate, London, England Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25) Rome, Italy Occupation Poet Alma mater King's College London Literary movement Romanticism John Keats (/ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death.[1] Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2] The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature. Biography Early life John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. There is no clear evidence of his exact birthplace.[3] Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records give the date as the 31st.[4] He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889) who eventually married Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez.[5] Another son was lost in infancy.
    [Show full text]
  • Bloody Poetry: on the Role of Medicine in John Keats's Life and Art
    Caroline Bertonèche, On the Role of Medicine in John Keat’s Life and Art Bloody Poetry: On the Role of Medicine in JoHn Keats's Life and Art Caroline Bertonèche To see Keats only as yet another British Romantic poet, author of the odes and the Hyperions, who died in exile, after one last fit of tuberculosis, is to forget that he spent as many years – six years to be precise – of his short life studying medicine as he did writing poetry. First a young apprentice to an apothecary, then a medical student from 1811 to 1816, Keats chose to start his career as an artist without completely burying his scientific past, making sure never to get rid of his old books on medicine – these books that were to previously shape his intellect before he even started putting together his collections of poems. Satisfied to have had the ability to distance himself from a rather contrasted form of education in order to favour a unified conception of knowledge, Keats will always seem to go back to those first readings as a source of reference. They are indeed the foundations of this unique rapprochement between medicine and poetry which, in British Romanticism, is certainly specific to him. It takes a visionary painter and a close friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, to remind us, in his very axiomatic letter of 3 May 1818 that Keats will never cease to praise the medical world as a means to keep “every department of knowledge” alive. From this pattern of now two complementary backgrounds, he therefore extracts the binary substance of one “great whole”1: Were I to study physic or rather Medicine again, — I feel it would not make the least difference in my Poetry; when the Mind is in its infancy a Bias is in reality a Bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a Bias becomes no Bias.
    [Show full text]
  • Disquietude Or the Leap Into the Sea
    Disquietude or the Leap into the Sea Teresa F. A. Alves* For João Flor With Whom I Read Novalis and Keats for the First Time There is so much in Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004) that evokes the lyric voice and the pseudo-urban landscape of Frank X. Gaspar’s previous three volumes of poetry that I again chose disquietude as the undertow that pulls this poet’s imagination in a given direction and offers a focus around which I will tentatively organize my own reading of his creative work.1 This is nowhere more evident than in the ebb and flow of lines patterned upon irregular length and rhythm, which like human breathing are ruled by the cadence of emotion; or in the hitching of the highly visual world of common perception to a dreamlike sense of experience that challenges the reader to a new awareness of things; or, finally, in the spiritual endeavor made language, which weaves lyricism to the vernacular and achieves a complex web of meaning and speculation. The tripartite structure of Night of a Thousand Blossoms is, as in the preceding volumes of poems, the device by means of which Gaspar organizes and entwines intra-and intertextual resonance, each of the sections being introduced by epigraphs. These, when on the same page, make inroads into each other’s significance, and when introducing a section are thematically relevant. Epigraphs from Novalis and Frank O’Hara open this volume. The temporal gap between the Romantic German poet and the Postmodern American one is overcome by their common incidence on revelation, explicit in the passage from Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) and implicit in the revisitation of a dialogue with the sun in “A True Account Of Talking To The Sun At Fire Island” (1958).
    [Show full text]
  • The Critical Theory of John Keats
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1960 The Critical Theory of John Keats Rita Claire Callan Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Callan, Rita Claire, "The Critical Theory of John Keats" (1960). Master's Theses. 1553. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/1553 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1960 Rita Claire Callan THE CRITICAL THEORY or JOHN KEATS by Rita Claire Callan A Thesis Submitted to the Faoulty ot the Graduate Sohool of Loyola University in Partial Pulfillment of the Requirements tor the Degree of Master of Arts June 1960 LIFE Rita Claire Callan, n!£ Wegner, was born in Chicago, Illinois, August 6, 1930. She was graduated from the Aoademy of Ou.r Lady, Chioago, Illinois, June. 1948, and trom the University of Illinois, June, 1953, with the degree of Baohelor of Science. From 1953 to 1957 the author worked as an ocoupational therapist at the Chicago Department of Welfare Convalesoent Home and the Veteran's Administration Researoh Hospital, Chicago. Illinois. She began her graduate studies at Loyola University in February, 1953. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1 Growing interest in Keats's philosophy ot art-­ Disagreement among critics--Method of this study-­ Character of Keats's letters.
    [Show full text]
  • History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats Timothy Ruppert
    Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2008 "Is Not the Past All Shadow?": History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats Timothy Ruppert Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Ruppert, T. (2008). "Is Not the Past All Shadow?": History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1132 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Timothy Ruppert March 2008 Copyright by Timothy Ruppert 2008 “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS By Timothy Ruppert Approved March 25, 2008 _____________________________ _____________________________ Daniel P. Watkins, Ph.D. Jean E. Hunter , Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of History (Dissertation Director) (Committee Member) _____________________________ _____________________________ Albert C. Labriola, Ph.D. Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of English (Committee Member) (Chair, Department of English) _____________________________ Albert C. Labriola, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Professor of English iii ABSTRACT “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS By Timothy Ruppert March 2008 Dissertation Supervised by Professor Daniel P.
    [Show full text]
  • A Tale of a Table: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and the Legacy of Thomas Carlyle
    A Tale of a Table: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and the Legacy of Thomas Carlyle MARYLU HILL The following essay is a version of a plenary address given at the Carlyle Conference, University of Edinburgh, 10–12 July 2012. he story begins with an entry in an 1895 auction catalogue for 16 Tite Street, Chelsea—Oscar Wilde’s Tresidence. The auction was part of the bankruptcy sale occasioned by the costs of the infamous trials that resulted in his imprisonment for gross indecency. The catalogue entry reads as follows: “Lot number 171: An Antique Mahogany Writing Table, with 2 flaps, rising slope, and draw-out desk, fitted—formerly the property of Thomas Carlyle, the Historian” (Munby 386). In addition, the auction catalogue prominently features “Carlyle’s Writing Table” on its cover, clearly as a selling point. The listing raises two important questions: first, how did Oscar Wilde get the desk, and second, why would he of all people particularly want Carlyle’s writing desk? Each biography of Wilde, from the earliest to the most recent, claims roughly the same thing: Wilde purchased the desk sometime around the time he moved to Tite Street with his new wife Constance (so presumably in 1883 or thereabouts).1 1 See R. H. Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (1911); Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (1946); Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987), and Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (2008). CSA 29 2013 138 CARLYLE STUDIES ANNUAL According to the biographers, the writing table was the one used by Carlyle while writing The French Revolution, and Wilde told friends he hoped it would inspire him to write.
    [Show full text]
  • Romantic Poetry from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia Jump to Navigationjump to Search
    Romantic poetry From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889); the group members, from left to right, are Trelawny , Hunt and Byron Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era , an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, [1] and lasted from 1800 to 1850, approximately. [2][3] Contents • 1English Romantic poetry o 1.1 Characteristics of English Romantic poetry ° 1.1.1 The Sublime ° 1.1.2 Reaction against Neoclassicism ° 1.1.3 Imagination ° 1.1.4 Nature poetry ° 1.1.5 Melancholy ° 1.1.6 Medievalism ° 1.1.7 Hellenism ° 1.1.8 Supernaturalism ° 1.1.9 Subjectivity • 2France • 3Germany o 3.1 Jena Romanticism o 3.2 Heidelberg Romanticism • 4Poland • 5Russia o 5.1 Influence of British Romantic poetry • 6Sweden • 7Spain • 8United States • 9See also • 10 References • 11 Bibliography English Romantic poetry [edit ] Main articles: Romantic literature in English , English poetry , and Romantic sonnets In early 19th century England, the poet William Wordsworth defined his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's innovative poetry in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798): I have said before that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility 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.
    [Show full text]