1

English Romanticism and Victorian Poetry: Synopses and Exercises in Inferring Meaning

Conf. dr. Ruxanda Bontila

2012

2

Contents I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries II. English Romantics: William Wordsworth

(i) A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (ii) Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

III. English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (i) Kubla Khan (ii) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

IV. English Romantics: George Gordon Byron (i) Don Juan

V. English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley (i) Mutability (ii) Ode to the West Wind (iii) Ozymandias

VI. English Romantics: John Keats (i) Ode to Psyche (ii) Ode to a Nightingale

VII. English Essayists on their Epoch VIII. Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson

(i) In Memoriam, Section 54 (ii) The Lotos-Eaters (iii) The Lady of Shalott

IX. Victorian Poets: Robert Browning (i) My Last Duchess (ii) Fra Lippo Lippi (iii) Andrea Del Sartro

X. Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins (i) The Starlight Night (ii) The Windhover

Bibliography

3

I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries 1. Romantic: etymology 2. 19th century: cultural milieu 3. Elements of Romantic poetics. 4 Defining Romanticism. 5 Romanticism vs. Classicism. 6 Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics. 7 Recent influential studies on Romanticism. 8 Romantic reconciliations. 1. romantic, mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring, charming, enchanting, idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly. 2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital ] --Syn. romanic, romance, Mediterranean, Italic, Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh, Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese, Castilian. 3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital] --Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic, Wordsworthian, Sturm und Drang (German). 2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in

France (1790). Reactions for : Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine, Rights of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791), Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1791);William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register; W.Godwin, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness,(1793).

3. The poet; creative power; nature of poetry . 4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of a

society which ‘was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of production.’(R. Williams) Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itself for the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness. (G. Hartman) Dynamic organicism based on a philosophy of becoming not of being. (Rene Wellek, 1949)

5. Change in the view of (1) the character and function of poetry and (2) the whole conception

of the nature of MAN and the world in which he finds himself. 6. A turning from-------- to i.e. reason--------------------------------senses, feelings

impersonal objectivism------------subjectivism ideal of order------------------------ideal of intensity etc. 7 M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, OUP,

1953 Rene Wellek, Comparative Literature, 1949 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976 Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory, 1986; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1986 Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist. Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol) I.A.Preda, English Romantic Poetics, 1995

4

8. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.

5

II. English Romantics: William Wordsworth 1. The Romantic Period’s birth certificate 2. W. Wordsworth (1770 – 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of convictions that he presents in his poetry. 3.1 W. W’s influence in literature 3.2 W. W’s philosophical vision: the ‘egotistical sublime’(J. Keats) 3.3 W. W’s Pantheism 3.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads 3.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads 4. Exercises in inferring meaning: A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal; Intimations of Immortality

from Recollections of Early Childhood. 1. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of the Romantic

Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self. 3.1 Use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature 3.2 ‘Egotistical Sublime’ (J. Keats) egotistical<strong autobiographical element;

sublime<permanent indeterminence of his vision of Nature<’human nature’ esp. simple solitary people.

3.3 Nature, both in her sublime and her most lowly states radiates a power that meets and inter-operates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man which is given various names: soul or simply power; the ‘leap’ of the heart at a rainbow.

3.4 Everyday tragedies in society; sufferings of old age; basic relationships; tales; children perceiving nature; poet as social missionary; poet as preacher

3.5 S.T. Coleridge would deal with supernatural things insisting upon the dramatic truth of such emotions “that would transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth.” W. Wordsworth would give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and would excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

4. (i) ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’ is a well-worn example for serious discussion of hermeneutics. Consequently, consider the two opposing views advanced by famous critics and try to rebuild their argumentation. 1. Find evidence in support of the opinion that the poem can be read as an unremittingly sombre

elegy. (eg. Cleanth Brooks will substantiate this idea) 2. Find evidence supporting an opposite opinion i.e. the poem as a gloriously optimistic tale of

pantheistic fusion of the beloved with Nature. (F.W.Bateson goes within this line) A slumber did my spirit seal; No motion has she now, no force;

I had no human fears; She neither hears nor sees; She seemed a thing that could not feel Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

The touch of earthly years. With rocks, and stones, and trees. (1800)

Here is a nice example of ‘undecidability’ at work in the poem, built on the adjective ‘diurnal’, consisting of a collection of divergent glosses compiled by Norman E. Holland. ‘Hugh Kenner calls it (diurnal) an ‘abstract, technical term’, and F:R:Leavis says the word has a ‘scientific nakedness’ but also ‘evokes the vast inexorable regularity of the planetary motions.’ By contrast, Cleanth Brooks finds in it a ‘violent but imposed motion’, a ‘whirl’. FW:Bateson calls it a ‘solemn Latinism’ which contrasts with the other, simpler words, to set off ‘the invulnerable Ariel-like creature’ against her present ‘lifeless and immobile’ state. E.Drew finds this ‘one long, formal word in the poem’ not lifeless at all, but contributing to ‘a majestic affirmation.’ Robin Skelton finds in it a fear that, if the poet unites his soul with nature, he will

6

me turned daily like the earth, selfless and unthinking. Skelton also finds a ‘subconscious effect of the syllable ‘de’, which to the ear suggests that a word having reference to division, to the dichotomy of the world, is about to be spoken.’ To whose ear? And yet, I hasten to admit, I hear in ‘diurnal’ the word ‘urn’ as saying another way the whole earth has been made Lucy’s funeral vessel.’ (from M.Riffaterre, Undecidability as Hermeneutic Constraint, in Literary Theory Today, (eds.) Peter Collier & Helga Geyeryan, Oxford, 1990) (ii) W. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Considering the fact that W.Wordsworth saw the poet’s job in terms of restoring the equilibrium in which ‘pleasure’ consists (‘Preface’), discuss the poet’s solution to the essence of identity in the last two stanzas of the poem, ll. 168-203. Reflect upon the following constituents of Wordsworth’s poetics.

1. The conflicting constituents of the principal themes and categories within the text. 2. The poet’s awareness of the rhetorical level of language towards reaching consistency

between statement and performance 3. The relationship to history through time 4. The characteristics of the poetic discourse, achieved in this particular poem.

10

Then sing, ye Birds, sing a joyous song! And let the young Lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. 11

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joy, and fears,

7

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

(1807)

8

III. English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834)’s views of poetry and nature. 2. S.T. Coleridge’s philosophy. 3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest. 4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning. 4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization. 4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion. 5. Coleridge’s technique. 6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel. 7. Exercises in inferring meaning: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS. 2. Coleridge’s antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kant’s The

Critique of Pure Reason). ‘The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlation of being.’(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only of ‘lifeless and sightless notion’; reason is ‘a source of actual truth’, the soul beholds, it does not hypothesize. Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding; imagination / fancy exemplified on Shakespeare’s work.

3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight. ‘Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominal Philosopher without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is his Stuff- and Verbiage the Stamp & Impression.’(Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444)

4. ‘Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endless power of semination.'(The Statesman’s Manual (1817),Lay Sermons) ‘a Symbol… is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter… Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures.’

4.1 Symbolization = the imaginative containment of a living idea. Verbalization = the manipulation of fixed counters(The Friend)

4.2 ‘It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to this negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that at times we should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry & Religion.’(Notebooks, vol.3 no 3632)

5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850)’ s technique in the Sonnets >viz. the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spatially in a particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation of auditory powers. ‘What I call this “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the current and the new and surprising the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.’(T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry, p.111)

6. The TRAGIC LOSS OF INITIATIVE: e.g. The Ancient Mariner – only increasing self-awareness and a spontaneous moment of empathy will restore, however imperfectly, a more creative, imaginative spirit with the mariner; Christabel – through the themes of LONELINESS and ISOLATION OF SPIRIT, the old conflict between LIFE and LIFE-IN-

9

DEATH is being brought to the fore; Kubla Khan – the frustration of creative purpose is described in a language charged with the sense of tragic loss.

7.

(i) In The Pains of Sleep, Coleridge tackles with poignant bewilderment the self-division he experienced in frightening dreams. Coleridge himself described his poetry as ‘rationalized dream’. It is interesting to distinguish between dream/vision and reverie within rare, unforgettable moments in Coleridge’s poetry, that ‘enwrap them inside’ one another and balance, in his own words, ‘judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement’. This is to be found in the rhapsodic, if self-doubting close of ‘Kubla-Khan’, with its haunting glimpse (and hearing) of unrecapturable beauty. An analysis of Kubla Khan is substantially complicated by its extraordinary preface, as well as by the way the verse seems to fall into two sections, or separate visions, the ‘body’ of the poem (ll. 1-36), and the last 18 lines, we may call the ‘epilogue’. Notice how the preface distances the reader from specific imagery and content of the poem, while raising a host of subsidiary issues such as: the relation of art to dream and extraordinary states of consciousness generally, sources of art in the unconscious, the relation of images seen with the inward eye and the correspondent expressions, the relation of the resulting poem to the original vision, and the role of memory in imaginative activity. You may also note the creation of a ‘persona’ for the preface writer, an alternative authority responsible for the views presented, which will immediately alert the reader to the possibility of irony (gesture well familiar with Coleridge from The Ancient Mariner and Biographia Literaria). There may be some more profound significance to the statement that the poet fell asleep while reading the quoted lines from Purchas his Pilgrimage, than merely that it was the occasion of the dream. See if there might be implied some connection between explicit sources and original transformation of those sources from other authors into new creations. And, if the chasm between such sources and the original use of them emphasizes the mystery surrounding the passage from ordinary consciousness into creative states. Identify other ways of ‘thinginfying’ (Kathleen M. Wheeler) and reaching meaning, besides the role of the preface, we have already mentioned. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

10

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice. And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed. And drunk the milk of Paradise.

S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1. Describe how ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive is/are rendered. 2. Identify the symbols in the poem. 3. Speak about peculiarities of form. 4. Describe atmosphere through imagery: provide evidence. 5. Detect possible religious connotations in the poetic discourse.

11

English Romantics: George Gordon Byron 1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition. 2. G.G. Byron’s own poetics. 3. Byron and the interpreting act. 4. The lure of biography. 5. Byronism and the Byronic hero. 6. Byron’s metafictional strategy. 6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique. 6.2 Inter- and extratextuality. 7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Don Juan 1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues, Milton appealed to the avenger, Time; If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs And makes the word ‘Miltonic’ mean ‘sublime’, He deigned not to belie his soul in songs, Nor turn his very talent to a crime; He did not loathe the sire to laud the son, But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10) You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only blackbird in the dish;(Don Juan, Dedication, St.3) 2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in ‘individual words’,

as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish. 3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our own

fallible mental activities. Byron declared about Don Juan, ’I have no plan – I had no plan – but I had or have materials’; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story – as he observed, ‘I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy.’

4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my

sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”

Hours of Idleness (1808)……………Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816)

5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer. = ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.’ (Macaulay) Byronism = the attitude of ‘ Titanic cosmic self-assertion’; Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron. ‘I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me.’ (Letter to a friend of his Lady Blessington) ‘There are but two sentiments to which I am constant – a strong love of liberty and a detestation of CANT.’

12

6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose enough to contain an intermittent ironic commentary on contemporary life and manners as well as himself.

6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance – Luigi Pulgi, Francesco Berni - > a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence is magnificently exploited.

6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the process whereby literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referential creating those “myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] create the gaps in which his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

G. G. Byron, Don Juan, from Canto 4 [Juan and Haidée] 1. Explore the sources that might have contributed to its being an intertext. 2. Detect intertextual traces within the text. 3. Consider some on-going ‘appeals’ of the poem. 4. Think of points of similarity and difference between Byron’s hero and the original Don

Juan. 5. Express your thoughts on how tone and atmosphere are achieved. 6. Detect the strategies for achieving the comic.

13

English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)’s specific poetics. 1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery. 2. P.B. Shelley’s creed. 3. P.B. Shelley’s works. 4. P.B. Shelley’s views on the social part of the poet and poetry. 5. P.B. Shelley’s symbolism 6. Exercise of inferring meaning: Epipsychidion

1.1 The pure lyric = a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poet’s own soul with few or no attendant circumstances. Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam.

Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g. The Triumph of Life The feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it.

2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwin’s views: “evil is not inherent in the system of creation but an accident that might be expelled.”

3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; The Witch of

Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems. 4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811); A Defence of Poetry (1821).

5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelley’s symbolism has an air of ‘rootless fantasy‘ because it has

never lived in the mind of a people.

P.B. Shelley, Mutability Compare and contrast the two poems in point of structure and imagery.

(see guide to poetic discourse in Seminar Outline)

14

English Romantics: John Keats 1. Characteristics of John Keats’s (1795-1821) poetics. 1.1 The poet as central concept. 2. J. Keats’s thinking system. 3. The Bower principle vs. the Buildung principle. 4. A chronology of J. Keats’s work. 4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes 5. Keats’s conception of a ‘general and gregarious advance of intellect’ in cultural history. 6. Keats and the poetic principle of self-development. 7. The allegorical function of self. 8. Keats’s principle of ‘vale of soul-making’. 9. Keats’s sense of the fellowship with essence. 10. Exercise of inferring meaning: Ode to Psyche. 1. ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Heart’s affections and the truth of

imagination.’(Letter to Bailey) ‘I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.’(Letter to George) M. Arnold said that “No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.” Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greek mythology and Middle Ages.

1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Plato’s theory of the Daimon. 2. Due to his analogous thinking, Keats’s poetry is allusive, programme-free, not naming

things but suggesting them. Keats’s mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts: Beauty and Truth.

3. Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keats’s work: The Bower principle = the embodiment of a naïve rather than a decadent state of Oneness with nature. The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation and not quite the principle of the quest. = it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g. Endymion) or a poetics of historicity ( e.g. the Two Hyperions).

4. Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion

(1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; Ode On Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; The Eve of St. Agnes (1820);

4.1 Leading theme: the theme of transience and permanence. 5. The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the

mind.(Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818) The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the mind’s mansion, and all doors open from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is imperceptibly impelled to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, by forces which have strangely awakened, on the lines of Coleridge’s recognition that at times we should awake and step forward.

6. ‘I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men – seeing how

great a thing it is.’ (Letter to Hunt)

15

7. The self’s function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of Poetry

– the thinking principle, motivated by ‘ the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty- and the Memory of Great Men.’ (Notebooks)

‘They are very shallow people who take everything literal – A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative.’ (Shakespeare’s Criticism)

‘Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.’ 8. ‘Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man – they make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a

Passion.’ (The Friend) – the principle of Vale of Soul- Making.

‘A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination – it can scarcely be conceived how Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault.’ (marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Student’s Manual, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, 1972) Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his own process of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing or digesting, (frequent metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids in the Vale of Soul- making, nerving the spirit.

9. The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essential verse.(in

Keats’s sense of a fellowship with essence). Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing the richness of any potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a range of complex sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc. ‘I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love – they are all in their sublime, creative of essntial Beauty.’ According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on) the being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) ‘reflects’ the mystery of being.

J. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale 1. Detect mood by identifying means of construing the meaning. 2. Explain the function of rhetorical figures in the economy of the text. 3. Identify the features triggered by the word ‘Ode’ in the title. 4. Identify the ‘included participants’ or ‘growth points’ vs. ‘excluded participants’ in the

text. 5. Draw a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants. 6. Comment upon the poem’s symbolism.

16

English Essayists on Their Epoch 1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and their Vision on their Own Epoch. 1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment. 1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy. Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context. 2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse. Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation. 20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age. Characteristics of Victorian Literature. Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation. Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry. Victorian Theories of the Poet. 1. Reformers (Politics + Religion) Conservatives Uncommitted L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830) Ch. Lamb (1775-1834) � Periodicals � practical critic � personal essays l (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality) e.g. Essays of Elia everyday life) � impressionist criticism e.g. Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866) � Survivor of the great 18th c. tradition of satire e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry Th. De Quincey (1785-1859) � impressionist criticism e.g. Style; Rhetoric � nightmarish side of human consciousness e.g. Confessions of an English Opium Eater 1.2 Supporters of Personal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848 –

year of The Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about which The Queen had to say: “Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different – then let them remain each in their position.” In Mill’s view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : “For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations.” The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. The Age’s Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-Engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” J. Ruskin: ”The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and the mountains.”

17

SCIENCE (Darwin) RELIGION LOSS OF FAITH DOUBT / BELIEF FAITH Utilitarianism Philosophical Conservatives Tractarianism (J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill) EDUCATION Agnosticism T.H. Huxley(1825-1895) Th. Carlyle (1795-1881) J.H.Cardinal Newman controversialist Sartor Resartus (1801-1890) On the Physical Basis of Life The Everlasting No Oxford Movement The Everlasting Yea Apologia Pro Vita Sua (vital spark) John Stuard Mill Th. Macaulay (1806-1873) (1800-1859) On Liberty History of England from Of Individuality the Accession of James II What Is Poetry? (Great debater of progress) (INDIVIDUAL more important than the State or Church.) J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : “If only the Geologists would let Modern Painters me alone, I could do very well, The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! I The Nature of Gothic hear the clink of them at the (a prophet) end of every cadence of the Bible verses.” (1851) W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888) News from Nowhere The Function of Criticism (ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy The Beauty of Life Friendship’s Garland (‘work-pleasure’) (CULTURE=a panacea) (ag. PHILISTINISM) W. Pater(1839-1894) : “the legitimate contention Is, not Appreciations of one age or school of literary Aesthetic Poetry art against another, but of all Romanticism successive schools alike, (epicurian preacher, against the stupidity which is impressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.” 3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; ‘Punch and Judy’ shows Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky) for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: ‘the Great Summer of Human Civilization’

against: Georgian reaction: ‘Victorian’=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain; Th. Carlyle’s poet as ‘hero’; Sinfield’s the ‘poet of the margins’; J.S. Mill’s and Lewes’s the

‘secular poet of the margins’= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is to aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g. Tennyson)

18

Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson 1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular ‘poet of the margins’. 2. Alfred Tennyson’s poetry between solipsism and social involvement. 2.1 Alfred Tennyson’s self renewing techniques. 3. Signposts in His Evolution. 3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery. 4. Arthur Tennyson’s Conception of Language. 5. Exercise of inferring meaning: In Memoriam, Section 54 1. Vex not the poet’s mind

With thy shallow wit: Vex not thou the poet’s mind; For thou canst not fathom it. Clear and bright it should be ever, Flowing like a crystal river; Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poet’s Mind, 1830 )

2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): “…it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in which I move.” Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered T’s ‘relation to modern life’: T’s age was ‘vividly with him’ as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom; the sad condition of the poor; the position of women in the ‘onward movement of the world’; the role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; the noble elements of English character, their long descent and ‘the sacred reverence we owed to them.’

3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte d’Arthur]; Ulysses; The Princess, ‘A Medley’; Idylls of the King (The Coming of Arthur…The Passing of Arthur).

3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) – literary sources: Horace’s Odes; pastoral elegy; love-sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae.

4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language <Locke: sensations are the source of all knowledge and a word is merely “a sound that is arbitrarily attached to a sensation.” (b) The idealist perspective, deriving from Kant, current among the Apostles (the “Germano-Coleridgean”, Cambridge Society in the 1820s)

T. S. Eliot: “A great poet because of abundance, variety and complete competence.” “The saddest of the English poets.” Terry Eagleton: “Tennyson marks the last point in English life at which poetry was still a public genre. Yet even here the cracks are beginning to show: In Memoriam rehearses the set themes of Victorian Society, but it is really an assemblage of lyrical fragments in which private experience is now running too deep for public articulation.” (in T. L. S. /Oct.1992) Penelope Fitzgerald: “He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language,i.e. the sound of the language talking to itself.” “At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sounds that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce.” (in T. L. S. /Oct. 1992, A Hundred Years After) Isobel Armstrong: “He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for a simplicity which is betrayed by the complexity of its language.”

19

Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters; The Lady of Shalott 1. De-center the poems so as to re-center them in compliance with the poet’s main

objective. 2. Demonstrate how Tennyson builds his outward imagery. 3. Exemplify how Tennyson’s language functions in the context of the two early 19th

century theories of language. 4. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of Tennyson.

20

Victorian Poets: Robert Browning 1. Robert Browning (1812-1889)’s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennyson’s method. 2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry. 2.1 The Dramatic Monologue as norm. 2.1.1 Definition; advantages. 3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Browning’s poetry. 4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age. 5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician. 6. Exercise of inferring meaning: My Last Duchess 1. Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennyson’s Pelleas and Ettare

(1869): “…Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the temptation of that friend’s mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I should judge the conflict in the knight’s soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson thinks he should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, and anything but the soul. “My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worth study.”(Sordello) His poems are described “always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.”(Preface of 1868)

2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.: “to the great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, ‘I’ll tell my state as though’t were none of mine.”

2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: “the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or another the norm.” (Poetry and the Age, 1953)

2.2 D.M.= A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience. = One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address.

(1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of D.M. provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is brought together as the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poet.

3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest seems desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2) language, versification and poetic texture.

4. In point of characters and style. Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women.

5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man – preference for the conflict in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God is revealed to Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ. Browning’s Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the greater the chance to contain approximations of truth – personal, existential truth. Browning’s imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and the Book; he dealt more with Facts than Fancies. General theme: Order Vs Disorder General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of human happiness, capable to overcome human suffering. Diction is denotative to the extreme. R. Browning, Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi.

1. Name the challenges you feel confronted with, when reading the poem. 2. Identify artistic ways of exposing the mind’s deviance.

21

3. Re-construct the compositional elements (theme, form, tropes and tone). 4. Identify features of the dramatic monologue. 5. Identify the ‘included participants’ or ‘growth points’ vs. ‘excluded participants’ in the

text. 6. Explain how a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants can help or not. 7. Build up your own image of the poet.

Victorian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880 One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is: Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this. What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under: If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder. Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt: We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without? Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover: Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over. Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight: Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate. Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels: God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels. Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which: The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole: Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul? One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two: Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true. Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks: Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox. Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew: You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you. Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock: Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock. God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see: Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

22

Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins 1. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeper knowledge. 1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of Poetic

Language. 1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition. 1.3 Hopkins’s Concept of Identity. 2. His Theory of Poetry and Language. 2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress. 2.2 Language and the ‘taste’ of Himself. 2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus. 2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins. 3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse. 4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion. 4.1 The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) 5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language. 6. Hopkins as Critic. 7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets. 1. “Every true poet…must be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each

poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur.” (Hopkins)

1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: “speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.”

1.3 “I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.”

2.1 Inscape the outward signs by which a creature’s inner identity could be grasped. Instress the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his consciousness. Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye. Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects. Power of the object to reveal its own inscape.

Secures the unity of the world. Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything. Running Instress the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one in the mind of the observer.

2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being. 2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local and cosmopolitan. 2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality. 3 Religious content: A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection. 4 Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal (1866-1875):

‘All the world is full of inscape’; and he ‘caught’ inscapes everywhere: in leaves, flowers, trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls, clouds, sunsets and stars.

23

“ I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.” “ The world might be seen as the INSCAPE of GOD.” Duns Scotus’s Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory of thisness.

4.1 ‘You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work…’ (letter to Dixon, 1878) Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained in Preface to Poems.

5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress. Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmatic shifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order.

5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, “inscaping” the world. The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artist’s person. Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art

- being in earnest with your subject-reality Beauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of the Holiness – beauty + good The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character 6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Carrion

Comfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

G.M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night; The Windhover; As Kingfishers Catch Fire. 1. Check how LOGOPOEIA fits the poet’s own theory of verse making. 2. Sprung Rhythm and the wave of anapests in the 19th century. 3. Explain how I.A. Richards’s definition of the poem = ‘economy of mental effort’ holds

true with Hopkins. 4. Swinburne’ s Nephelidia and MELOPOEIA. 5. Identify how instress informs inscape. 6. Look for Hopkins’s ‘stumbling blocks’. (Bridges) 7. Suggest ways of overcoming difficulties with Hopkins’s poetic discourse. 8. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of G. M. Hopkins.

24

Bibliography

English Literature and its background, 1780-1900

I. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory 1. D. Buchbinder, Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry, Macmillian, 1991 2. H. Bloom, (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness, 1970 3. D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975 4. M. S. Day, History of English Literature, Doubleday & Company, N.Y., 1963 5. B. Ford, (ed.) The Pelican Guide to English Literature 6. E. Gavriliu, Lectures in English Literature from the Rise of the Realistic Novel in the 18th

century to the Crisis of Aestheticism in the 19th century, Galati, 1980 7. D. Lodge, (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, 1988 8. J. Peck, How to Study a Poet, Macmillan, 1988 9. C.Racovita, Lectures in English Literature (The Victorian Novel and the 20th century English

Literature), Galati, 1981 10. J. Stevens & R.Waterhouse, Literature, Language and Change, from Chaucer to the Present,

London and N.Y., 1990 11. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, An Anthology, Blackwell, 1994 12. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1995 13. M. Toolan, Narrative, A Critical Linguistic Introduction, Routledge, 1992 14. G. Leech & M. Short, Style in Fiction, A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose,

Longman, 1994 15. G. Cook, Discourse and Literature, O.U.P. 1994 16. R. Pope, Textual Intervention. Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, Routledge,

London, 1995 17. R. Bontila, Readings from 19th Century English Novel, Alma, Galati, 1999 II. Biblical and Classical Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey (translated in The World's Classics, Oxford) The Bible, Genesis; Exodus; The Psalms; The Songs of Songs; Ecclesiastes; The New Testament III. Individual Authors: 1780-1900 1. W. Wordsworth , Lyrical Ballads ***; The Prelude ***; Preface to Lyrical Ballads ***; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ***. 2. S. T. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner***; Christabel ***; Kubla Khan ***;This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison***; Dejection: an Ode***; Frost at Midnight***; The Aeolian Harp***; Biographia Literaria***; Lectures on Shakespeare ***. 3. Lord Byron , English Bards and Scotch Reviewers**;The Vision of Judgement**; Childe

Harold's Pilgrimage**; Manfred***; Don Juan***. 4. P. B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life***; Hymn to Intellectual Beauty***; Ode to the West

Wind***;To a Skylark***; Ozymandias***; Mutability***; Prometheus Unbound*** Preface to Prometheus; A Defence of Poetry ***.

5. J. Keats, Sleep and Poetry***; The Eve of St.Agnes***; Lamia***; La Belle Dame Sans

Merci***; To Autumn***; Ode to Psyche***; Ode to a Nightingale***; Ode on Melancholy**; Ode on a Grecian Urn***;Endymion, Book I***; Hyperion;The Fall of Hyperion***;Letters***.

6. Th. Carlyle, The Hero as Poet **; Carlyle's Portraits of His Contemporaries***. 7. J. S. Mill, What Is Poetry**; Coleridge***; On Liberty***. 8.J. Ruskin, Of the Real Nature Of Greatness of Style**

25

9. A.Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters**; Ulysses**; In Memoriam**; Maud***; The Lady of Shalott***; Mariana***; The Princess***; Idylls of the King***.

10. R. Browning, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix***; My Last Duchess***; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church***; Fra Lippo Lippi**; Andrea del Sarto**; Caliban upon Setebos.

11. M. Arnold , The Function of Criticism at the Present Time**; The Study of Poetry**; Culture and Anarchy, ch.I***; Dover Beach***; Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse***; Thyrsis***; The Scholar Gypsy***.

12. G. M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night***; Spring***; The Windhover***; Pied Beauty***; Binsey Poplar***; As Kingfishers Catch Fire***; Carrion Comfort***.

**The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol.II, ***The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol.2