Romantic Poets

Name: Nikunj Bhatti

Email id: nikunjbhatti332@gimail.com

Roll no: 19

Study: M.A semester-2

Year: 2015

Submitted to: Department of English

Topic: Romantic Poets

Introduction

         

          According to William .J. Long the period from 1800-1850 is known as the Age of Romantic Age. The Romantic also called,

•  Romanticism
• Age of Poetry
• Age of Imagination
•  The second creative period of English literature
•  Transition Age

        Romanticism is specific movement started against the Classicism at the 18^th and 19^th century. Romanticism is a concept like Renaissance. Renaissance is the movement of Revival of new learning; While Romanticism is the Revival of thought, feeling and ideas in writing.

“Man was born free and,

Every where he is in chains”

The meaning of Romanticism is,

“The Romantic movement was the expression of

Individual genius rather than of established rules”

-         W.J. Long

Many of the great historic poets existed during this time. The Romantic era brought about change after the strict classical era and the French Revolution. Now let’s have discus Romantic poets.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

“ Wordsworth was as much, if not more, the poet of Man as of Nature and the poetry of Man took in his hands as great a development as the poetry of Nature ”

His life

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was eight—this experience shapes much of his later work. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed. Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities.

As a Poet

William Wordsworth was an English poet, a key figure of Romanticism, and the author of the most famous poem ever written about daffodils. Born in 1770, Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented a new style of poetry in which nature and the diction of the common man trumped formal, stylized language. In 1798 poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads, helped to launch the Romantic era of English literature, in which writers sought to unite the tranquility of nature and the inner emotional world of men.Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. His poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

            Wordsworth says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye that are the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”

Poetry

           He records that his earliest verses were written at school, and they were ‘a tame imitation of Pope’s versification.’

Ø An Evening walk(1739)

Ø Descriptive Sketches

Ø Lyrical Ballads (1798)

       Lyrical Balladsis a joint production Coleridge and himself, which was published at Bristol. This volume is epoch-making, for it is the prelude to the Romantic Movement proper. Wordsworth had the larger share in the book. In this book poems like The Thorn and The Idiot Boy, are condemned as being trivial and childish in style. Simon Lee, Expostulation and reply, are more accepted in their expression. The concluding piece is Tintern Abbey which is one of the great achievements of his genius.

During the years 1798-99 Wordsworth composed some of his finest poems, which appeared in 1800, together with his contributions of the Lyrical Ballads. Most noteworthy among them are,,,

Ø Michael

Ø The Old Cumberland Beggar

Ø She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Ø Strange fits of passion have I known

Ø Nutting

q His Theory of Poetry

In the preface to the 2^nd edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800),he set out his theory of poetry. It reveals a lofty conception of the dignity of the art which is the breath and the finer spirit of all knowledge, which is product of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, taking its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”.

Ø Regarding subject, Wordsworth declares his preference for “incidents and situation from common life” to obtain such situations, “humble 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”

Ø His views on poetical style are most revolutionary of all the ideas in this preface. Discarding the ‘’gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,' he insists that his poems contain little poetic diction, and are written in ‘’a selection of real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.

Ø His views on poetic diction he summed up with these words: “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”

His other poems

Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (1798)
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Upon Westminster Bridge (1801)
The Excursion (1814)
The River Duddon (1820)
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)
Memorials of a Tour of the Continent (1822)
Yarrow Revisited (1835)
The Prelude Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850)
The Recluse (1888)
The Poetical Works (1949)
Selected Poems (1959)
Complete Poetical Works (1971)
Poems (1977)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads,(1798) written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work BiographiaLiteraria.

Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the country town of Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, England. Samuel's father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was a well-respected vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School at Ottery. He had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by Reverend Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden. At the university, he was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy.

•  List of poems by Coleridge

•         The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

•         Kubla Khan

•         Christabel

•         Limbo

•         To Erskine

•         Kisses

•         Glycine’s Song

•         The Rose

•         The Sigh

•         Time, Real and imaginary

•         Work Without Hope

      Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence. “Kubla Khan,” one of the most famous and most analyzed English poems, is a fifty-four-line lyric in three verse paragraphs. In the opening paragraph, the title character decrees that a “stately pleasure-dome” be built in Xanadu. Although numerous commentators have striven to find sources for the place names used here by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, there is no critical consensus about the origins or meanings of these names.

Coleridge divided imagination into two parts:

       Imagination is the “SOUL that is everywhere, and each: and form into the one graceful and intelligent whole”. Coleridge focuses mainly an imagination as the key to poetry. He divided into two main components; primary and secondary imagination. Coleridge also adds Fancy in his description on the imagination.According to his philosophy, Fancy is even lower than the secondary imagination, which is already of the earthly realm.Fancy is the source of our baser desires. It is not creative faculty but a repository for lust.

Coleridge’s poem as a nature poem. According to Wordsworth,Coleridge and other Romantic poet experiencing nature was an integral art of the development of a complete soul and sense of personhood. Nature had the capacity to teach joy, love, freedom, and piety, crucial characteristics for a worthy, developed individual.

Nearly all of Coleridge’s poems express a respect for and delight in natural beauty.In “Forts at Midnight” poet describe that “the seasons and shall learn about God by discovering the beauty and bounty of the natural world. The son shall be given the opportunity to develop a relationship with God and with nature, an opportunity denied to both the speaker and Coleridge himself.”For example Coleridge’s poem The Rime of Ancient.

“Water, water, everywhere,

   And all the boards did shrink;

   Water, water, everywhere,

   Nor any drop to drink.”

-he Rime of Ancient.                  

John Keats

“If Poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

-John Keats

English poet whose short life spanned just 25 years, John Keats was born October 31, 1795, in London, England. He was the oldest of Thomas and Frances Keats’ four children. Keats lost his parents at an early age. He was eight years old when his father, a livery stable-keeper, was killed after being trampled by a horse. His father's death had a profound effect on the young boy's life. In a more abstract sense, it shaped Keats' understanding for the human condition, both its suffering and its loss. This tragedy and others helped ground Keats' later poetry—one that found its beauty and grandeur from the human experience.

The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.

His Theme

·       Characteristics of his Poetry

Ø Sensuousness

•         “POETRY that gives pleasure to eyes and has no philosophical bent is said to be giving Sensuous Beauty.” 

•         Form, color, perfume, music.

Ø Treatment of Nature

•         Nature for Keats is a “Delicious Poetry Book.”

•         Loved Nature for its Sake, and for the glory and loveliness.

Ø Romance

•         He dreamt dreams in order to create such a dream world.

•         Legends of Greece

•         Subjects are classical; treatment of them is always Romantic.

•  List of poems by John Keats.

 Odes

•         Ode to a Nightingale

•         Ode on a Grecian Urn

•         Ode to Psyche

•         To Autumn

•         Lines on the Mermaid Tavern

•         Robin Hood – To a Friend

•         Ode to Apollo

Other poems by John Keats

•         I stood tiptoe upon a little hill

•         Specimen of an induction to a poem

•         To Some Ladies

•         To a Young Lady who Sent Me a Laurel

•         Crown

•         To My Brother George

He was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic Movement. The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery.Keats’ cynicism about his life and his impending doom was seldom of his work. Though he was depressed about death, he wrote with a strong appreciation of life, love and beauty.

“In the great Odes, Keats explores the relation between pleasure and pain, happiness and melancholy, imagination and reality, art and life, with brilliant poetic force.”

Keats as the supreme lover of beauty says, “A thing of beauty is joy forever”. In Ode to Nightingale hearing the song connected with Nightingale bird. In “Indolence", the speaker Rejected all artistic effort.The “Art” of the Nightingale endlessly changeable.As befits his celebration of music “Nightingale” it is a sing of too full a connection. Ode to a Grecian urn in the poet “reading” the urn as we “read his” ode. In this poem “urn” as work of art.

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty

That is all ye know on earth,

And all ye need to know”

Keats ode to psyche is full of context of ode Psyche is youngest daughter of King Keats speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess psyche In this poem the story of the woman so beautiful that love fell in with her Projected outward in to Art“ode to psyche” is a famous myth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792 - 1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the dominant English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some critics as among the finest lyric poets in the English language Shelley was one of England’s finest lyric poets of the romantic era. Some of his most well-known and popular works were “Ode to the West Wing”, “To a Skylark”, “Ozymandias”, and “The Mask of Anarchy”. Shelley was born in Field Place near West Sussex, England in 1792. Shelley’s radical views and unconventional ideals were in part responsible for his lack of popularity while he was alive. Shelley met his first wife at the ripe age of 19, soon after he left school. He eloped in Scotland with his first wife Harriet with whom he was married for three years. Harriet birthed two children during her marriage with Shelley. Shelley soon became disenchanted in his marriage to Harriet and often left his family and took up language and other studies. His contribution of poetry….

·        The Revolt of Islam

·        Love's Philosophy

·        Good-Night

·        A Lament

·        Mutability

·        Ode to the West Wind

·        To The Men Of England

·        A Bridal Song

·        To A Skylark

Shelley’s temperament was peculiarly responsive to lyrical impulses. His intensely imaginative and sensitive nature was aptly fitted for the lyric, and into lyrics, both personal and impersonal he poured the best of his poetic genius. Shelley’s lyrics have an emotional ecstasy. The songs of “Prometheus Unbound” are marked with an emotional feeling of joy probably at the liberation of man from thralldom.

Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)

Robert Southey was a prolific English poet of the Romantic period, was associated with the Lake School. His works influenced many other great writers such as Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning. In this lesson, we will learn about the life of this writer from the Romantic era.Robert Southey was born in Bristol, England, in 1774. Even as a teen, he showed great promise as a poet. He attended London's Westminster School but was actually expelled for standing up against the school's policy of flogging. He then attended Oxford University, but he disliked it and left before his education was complete.

Southey was a prove writer from the time he was young, and he showed a flair for both dramatic and epic pieces. In 1794, he wrote The Fall of Robespierre, and in 1796, his poem Joan of Archave definite revolutionary themes, and the latter gained the poet early recognition. Southey's reputation during his lifetime was largely established by his epics: “Thalaba the Destroyer”, “Madoc”, and “The Curse of Kehama” , all set in exotic locations. His poems also explore the nature of leadership while theorizing about the types of government that might lead to a truly great and just civilization. Southey's last major poem, “Roderick, the Last of the Goths” (1814), set on the Iberian Peninsula.

Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

"I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? "

  

Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore, 5 July 1821

Lord Byron, also known as George Gordon Byron, was known as the leading English poet in the Romantic era. Byron was as famous in his lifetime for his personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.

Lord Byron's Poems Themes

•         Liberty

•         The power of Nature

•         The folly of "love"

•         The value of classical culture

•         Realism in literature

•         The enduring power of art

The concept of the Byronic hero, an antihero in many ways, can be seen as a reflection of both his art and his life. Byron’s poems, particularly those based on his travels, raise the problem of oppression throughout Europe and defend the necessity of human liberty. Nature was a powerful complement to human emotion and civilization.
 Byron saw Nature more as a companion to humanity. Certainly, natural beauty was often preferable to human evil and the problems attendant upon civilization, but Byron also recognize Nature’s dangerous and harsh elements. “The Prisoner of Chillon” connects Nature to freedom. He was a Romantic poet; Byron saw much of his best work as descriptions of reality as it exists, and not how it is imagined.