English Poetry free essay sample

Nonetheless, poets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing modern forms and language in an effort to use ‘new’ language. An early exponent was Robert Burns, who is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet and influenced Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in April 1786 and included â€Å"The Two Dogs,† â€Å"Address to the Deil,† â€Å"To a Mountain Daisy,† and the widely anthologized â€Å"To a Mouse. † Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads defined good poetry as â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,† though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man â€Å"possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply†. Thus, though many people seize unfairly upon the notion of spontaneity in Romantic Poetry, one must realize that the movement was still greatly concerned with the pain of composition, of translating these emotive responses into the form of Poetry. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent Romantic poet and critic in his On Poesy or Art sees art as â€Å"the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man†. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of Romantic Poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process. 1 Major Romantic poets †¢ Brazil: Alvares de Azevedo, Castro Alves, Casimiro de Abreu, Goncalves Dias †¢ England: William Blake, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Keats †¢ United States: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson Questions: What are the characteristics of romantic poetry? Give examples of who were the romantic poets? Lyrical Ballads Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 (see 1798 in poetry) and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner†. (Additionally, although it is only the two writers that are credited for the works, William’s sister Dorothy Wordsworth influenced William’s poetry immensely because he studied her diary which held powerful descriptions of everyday surroundings). A second edition was published in 1800, in which Wordsworth included additional poems and a preface detailing the pair’s avowed poetical principles. Another edition was published in 1802, Wordsworth added an appendix titled Poetic Diction in which he expanded the ideas set forth in the preface. Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to overturn what they considered the priggish, learned and highly sculpted forms of eighteenth century English poetry and bring poetry within the reach of the average person by writing the verses using normal, everyday language. They place an emphasis on the vitality of the living voice that the poor use to express their reality. Using this language also helps assert the universality of human emotions. Even the title of the collection recalls rustic forms of art the word â€Å"lyrical† links the poems with the ancient rustic bards and lends an air of spontaneity, while â€Å"ballads† are an oral mode of storytelling used by the common people. In his famous â€Å"Preface† (1800, revised 1802) Wordsworth explained his poetical concept: The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. If the experiment with vernacular language was not enough of a departure from the norm, the focus on simple, uneducated country people as the subject of poetry was a signal shift to modern literature. One of the main themes of â€Å"Lyrical Ballads† is the return to the original state of nature, in which people led a purer and more innocent existence. Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau’s belief that humanity was essentially good but was corrupted by the influence of society. This may be linked with the sentiments spreading through Europe just prior to the French Revolution. Although the lyrical ballads is a collaborative work, only four of the poems in it are by Coleridge. Coleridge devoted much of his time to crafting ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. ’ Many of Coleridge’s poems were unpopular with the audience and with fellow writer Wordsworth due to their macabre or supernatural nature. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge’s work cannot be understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that book; though it does resemble Wordsworth’s in its idealization of nature and its emphasis on human joy, Coleridge’s poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional archaisms of â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner† and the hypnotic drone of â€Å"Kubla Khan† do not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect. Further, Coleridge’s poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult’s reconnection with nature through memories of childhood; in poems such as â€Å"Frost at Midnight,† Coleridge indicates the fragility of the child’s innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† and â€Å"Nightingale,† he stresses the division between his own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally, Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the â€Å"thousand thousand slimy things† that crawl upon the rotting sea in the â€Å"Rime† would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem. If Wordsworth represents the central pillar of early Romanticism, Coleridge is nevertheless an important structural support. His emphasis on the imagination, its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those found in the â€Å"Rime,† exerted a profound influence on later writers such as Shelley; his depiction of feelings of alienation and numbness helped to define more sharply the Romantics’ idealized contrast between the emptiness of the city – where such feelings are experienced – and the joys of nature. The heightened understanding of these feelings also helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction: this figure of the idealist, brilliant yet tragically unable to attain his own ideals, is a major pose for Coleridge in his poetry. His portrayal of the mind as it moves, whether in silence (â€Å"Frost at Midnight†) or in frenzy (â€Å"Kubla Khan†) also helped to define the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism; while much of poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquility, the origin of Coleridge’s poems often seems to be emotion recollected in emotion. But (unlike Wordsworth, it could be argued) Coleridge maintains not only an emotional intensity but also a legitimate intellectual presence throughout his oeuvre and applies constant philosophical pressure to his ideas. In his later years, Coleridge worked a great deal on metaphysics and politics, and a philosophical consciousness infuses much of his verse – particularly poems such as â€Å"The Nightingale† and â€Å"Dejection: An Ode,† in which the relationship between mind and nature is defined via the specific rejection of fallacious versions of it. The mind, to Coleridge, cannot take its feeling from nature and cannot falsely imbue nature with its own feeling; rather, the mind must be so suffused with its own joy that it opens up to the real, independent, â€Å"immortal† joy of nature. Questions: 1. Coleridge writes frequently about children, but, unlike other Romantic poets, he writes about his own children more often than he writes about himself as a child. With particular reference to â€Å"Frost at Midnight† and â€Å"The Nightingale,† how can Coleridge’s attitude toward children best be characterized? How does this attitude relate to his larger ideas of nature and the imagination? Like Wordsworth, Coleridge is wholly convinced of the beauty and desirability of the individual’s connection with nature. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Coleridge does not seem to believe that the child automatically enjoys this privileged connection. The child’s unity with the natural world is not innate; it is fragile and can be stunted or destroyed; for example, if a child grows up in the city, as Coleridge did, his idea of natural loveliness will be quite limited (in Coleridge’s case, it is limited to the night sky, as he describes in â€Å"Frost at Midnight†). Coleridge fervently hopes that his children will enjoy a childhood among the beauties of nature, which will nurture their imaginations (by giving to their spirits, it will make their spirits ask for more) and shape their souls. Close 2. Many of Coleridge’s poems – including â€Å"Frost at Midnight,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† – achieve their effect through the evocation of a dramatic scene in which the speaker himself is situated. How does Coleridge describe a scene simply by tracing his speaker’s thoughts? How does he imbue the scene with a sense of immediacy? William Blake’s biography William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son’s artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At 14, William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the Revolution, in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalized religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he was married himself). His unorthodox religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose influence is particularly evident in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic mode, and wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem. Linked together by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake’s own creation, these books propound a revolutionary new social, intellectual, and ethical order. Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake’s poetry during his life. It has also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake’s work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians. Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety about the public’s apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly found himself. When his self-curated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric – as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such poems as â€Å"The Lamb† represent a meek virtue, poems like â€Å"The Tyger† exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramatic – that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate modes of control ork together to squelch what is most holy in human beings. The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Ma ny of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes – over the heads, as it were, of the innocent – Christianity’s capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty. The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective (â€Å"The Tyger,† for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness. The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others, like â€Å"The Sick Rose† and â€Å"The Divine Image,† make their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake’s favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language.