LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

2. NATURE, FARAWAY PLACES, AND MELANCHOLY

♣ Romantics: back to nature

Nature:

-As a reflection of the poet’s internal state

-A reaction to its destruction
-Pure, clean, healing, spiritual, lonely
-They go to nature to be alone, not to be part of the community.

To contemplate nature is the romantics’ way to think

-Not only about nature, but also using nature to speak about: thoughts, emotions, the self.
-Conceptual opposites: spirituality, art, civilization, cities, machines

e.g. Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

-Sublime (greatness, awe, terror)

-Glories of nature, long walks.
-Alienation by city dweller.
-A stranger and a conqueror.

Reaction to nature destroyed by capitalism

-Nature: water/ wind power, artisans, countryside, survival/skilled labour

-Capitalism: steam engine + coal, industries, cities, unskilled labour

Nature: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by George Gordon Byron, 1788 -1824

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more. (…)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
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BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

♣ Far away places

-Far away places

-Supernatural beings
-A time of exploration
-Travel writings published
-The noble savages

‘perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’ – Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

‘addition of strangeness to beauty’ –Walter Pater

Touring in the countryside, a new activity.

♣ Melancholy

Romantic melancholic (…) is the product of moments of depression inherent in almost

every optimistic philosophy or attitude towards life. – P. Naeem

Reasons for melancholy

-Distance between the real world and their imagination

-Impossibility of perfection, of permanence
-Not fitting in society
-Political disillusionment
-Melancholy and mental health (not depression, not sadness)
-Prioritising feelings
-The speaker is the author
-The tortured artist

(…)
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those
that tell of saddest thought.
(…)

Percy Shelley, To a Skylark

LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Melancholy is:

-An aesthetic emotions.

-Based on reflection or contemplation
-Comes up as a reaction to memories, thoughts, a narrative
-There is some pleasure involved (not much)

‘Melancholy is a mature emotion in which reflection calms a turbulent soul. –Brady and
Haapala

Melancholy vs Sadness

No crying, subtle Crying might be involved

Harmony Unbalance
Complex Simple
Slight pleasure Not pleasurable
A mood (no specific object) Directed to an object
Often experienced alone Experienced anywhere
Distance, connected to Proximity with loss of something we value
imagination/memories

Ode on Melancholy –Keats

(…) But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (…)

Tintern Abbey –Wordsworth

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a soft inland murmur. –Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress
LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connected

The Landscape with the quite of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts (…)

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and left along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: –feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure…

Sensibility and gender in the Romantic Period

Byron to Lady Blessington:

the ideal woman should have ‘talent enough to be able to understand and value’ his own
‘but not sufficient to be able to shine herself.’

Women in the Romantic Period

-Limited schooling
-Rigid code of sexual behaviour
-No legal rights
-Even less rights after marriage
-Public discourse on sex/gender differences lead to difference in roles
-Roles: housekeeping, child rearing
-But: slaves, factories, abolitionism

The Romantics themselves

‘The Lake School’

-Wordsworth
-Coleridge
-Robert Southy

‘The Amazonian Band’

-Mary Wollstonecraft
-Mary W. Shelley
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BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

-Mary Robinson
-Ann Laetitia Barbauld
-Charlotte Smith

‘The Cockney School’

-William Hazlitt
-Keats
-Leigh Hunt

‘The Satanic School’

-Byron
-Percy Shelley
-Leigh Hunt

Women Romantic Poets

There were thousands of women publishing poetry during this period.

-Mary Robinson ‘Perdita’

-Anne Laetitia Barbauld
-Charlotte Smith
-Anna Seward
-Helen Maria Williams
-Felicia Dororthea Hemans
-Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL)
-Mary Blanchford
-Jane Taylor (The Star)
-Anne Lister (‘first modern lesbian’)

They wrote about: politics, feats of the rational mind, instinct, duty, community, care,
practical responsibilities…

Washing Day –Barbauld

Come, Muse; and sing the dreaded Washing-Day.

Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend,
With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on Too soon;
- for to that day nor space belongs
Nor comfort; - ere the first gray streak of dawn,
The red-armed washers come and chase repose.

First generation

-Blake
-Wordsworth
-Coleridge
LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

William Blake (1757-1827)

-Trained in art only

-Painter, engraver, illustrator, printer
-Illustrated his poems (pre-comic books)
-Works: London, Songs of Innocence (‘The Lamb’), Songs of Experience (‘The Tyger’).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

-Orphan (his mother died when he was 8, and his father when he was 13).
-Cambridge graduate
-Abandoned girlfriend (Annete Vallon) and child (Caroline) in France.
-Good friend and collaborator of Coleridge.
-Lived with his sister, poet Dorothy Wordsworth.
-Marries Mary Hutchison after inheriting and reaching a settlement with Annette Vallon.
-In 1810 stops speaking to Coleridge for 20 years.
-Turns more conservative with age.
-Works: Lyrical Ballads (We are Seven, The World is Too Much with Us, Tintern Abbey, I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, It is a beauteous evening).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

-Collaborated with Wordsworth.

-Dropped out of college, joined the cavalry under a false name, came back, left again…
-Wanted to create an ideal democratic community in America, but failed –then turned very
conservative.
-Moved to Lake District to be near Wordsworth.
-Fell in love with Wordsworth’s sister in law.
-Was sick, took laudanum for medical reasons, became an addict, had troubles.
-Moved to Malta for two years.
-Wrote a lot, even during illness.
-Moved with Dr Gillman and his wife, got laudanum under control.
-Finally reconciled with his wife and Wordsworth.
-Was very famous
-Also infamous for plagiarism.

Defending himself from probable plagiarism accusations:

Tis mine and it is likewise yours;

But an if this will not do;
Let it be mine, good friend! for I
Am the poorer of the two!

(From the preface of the unfinished Christabel)

LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

-Friend of Godwin: Mary W. Shelley, then a child, heard The Ancient Mariner from behind a
sofa during a visit (she got in trouble for escaping from her bed).
-Works: Kubla Khan, Ancient Mariner.

Second generation

-Byron
-Percy Shelley
-Keats

Lord Byron (George Gordon) (1788-1824)

-Grew up poor after his father died.

-Inherited his title from an uncle.
-Studied in Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated.
-Took his seat in the House of Lords.
-Tendency to obesity, develops eating disorder.
-Quite clearly what we today would call bisexual.
-Married to Anne Isabella Milbanke.
-Has child Augusta Ada, later known as Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer.
-Affair with half-sister Augusta Leigh.
-Leaves Britain never to come back.
-Where he does, scandal follows.
-Leaves debtors everywhere.
-Had child with Mary W. Shelley’s step-sister Claire Clairmont, Allegra (1814-1822 died at
11 in a Catholic convent, on the same year Percy Shelley drowned).
-Moves to Venice, then Pisa (where the Shelleys join him)
-Joined the Greece-Ottoman Empire war and died of a fever in Missolonghi at 36 years
old.
-The Byronic hero is his creation and his public persona.
-Also Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) is based on him… so, every vampire is –in a way –
based on Byron.

‘The Lord Byron I find there is our Lord Byron – the fascinating – faulty – childish –
philosophical being – daring the world – docile to a private circle – impetuous and indolent
– gloomy and yet more gay* than any other.’ –Mary Shelly

*Here gay is meant in the old meaning

‘so beautiful a countenance (…) I scarcely ever saw… his eyes the open portals to the sun
– things of light and for light.’ –Coleridge

‘There are but two sentiments to which I am constant –a strong love of liberty, and a
detestation of cant.’ –George Gordon, Lord Byron

cant: hypocrisy
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Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a radical and atheist. He wrote ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, this
got him expelled from Oxford, terminating his university career. Courted, escaped with,
and married Harriet Hogg when he was 18 (even being against marriage).
He ‘drifts’ away from her.
He becomes a friend of William Godwin.
-He fell in love with Mary, Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s daughter, flees to France with her
and Claire Clairmont.
-As he believes in nonexclusive love, invites Harriet to live with them as another sister, but
she does not accept.
-Harriet later becomes pregnant with another person and suicides.
-His first child with Mary dies in 1815, when he is 23, and his sencond one when he is 25
in 1817.
-Courts deny him custody of their two previous children.
-In 1816 married Mary
-In 1818 they move to Italy.
-Constantly move to avoid paying their debts.
-In 1819 Percy Florence is born (he survives childhood)
-‘Pisan circle’
-At 29 years old he drowns while sailing.
-Mary W. Shelley makes him ‘immortal’ by selecting, prologuing and publishing his works
posthumously.
-Works: Ozymandias, To a Sylark, To Jane.

John Keats (1795-1821)

-Lived for 25 years only

-Surgeon studies, graduated as a licensed apothecary.
-Romance with Fanny Brawne
-Was never famous while alive
-Sold about 200 of his three books
-In 1819 he contracted tuberculosis, and died in Rome after much pain and a bad
treatment.
-His friends made him famous posthumously
Works: La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A Ballad, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Mary Robinson ‘Perdita’ (1757? -1800)

-Poet, novelist (7 novels), editor, actress (in more than 30 plays, of those by Shakespeare)
-School teacher at 14
-Marries off at 16 to a gambler who got her and her baby into debtor’s prison
-There she starts writing poetry
-Mistress of George IV while he was still Prince of Wales
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-Admired by Coleridge, admirer of Coleridge

-To the poet Coleridge, a comment on Kubla Khanwritten about 20 years before it was
published.
-Author of Sapho and Phaon, poem about a straight love by Sapho

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

-Married off at 15 to abusive husband ‘this is legal prostitution’ she complained
-Had 12 children (3 died)
-Started writing when he was imprisoned for debt
-Was a very successful author
-Work: brought back the sonnet
-Themes: sentiments, melancholy, nature

Anne Laetitia Barbauld (1788-1824)

-Her father gave her an unusual education
-Married a minister and together they founded a school
-When her husband’s health deteriorated, they closed the school
-She taught young children and wrote
-She stopped publishing after the backlash to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.
-Works: Children’s books, poetry, political texts.
-First admired, then rejected by Coleridge and Wordsworth (when they became more
conservative than her)

Anne Laetitia Barbauld (1788-1824)

-Washing Day
-The Rights of Women
-To a Little Invisible Being Who is Expected Soon to Become Visible
-Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
-Against war, corruption, consumerism

Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838)

-Learned to read at a very early age.
-Wrote numerous works (poetry, novels, a play)
-Became an editor of Literary Gazette, a magazine she had contributed to for a long time
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-Active social life, famous and successful, rumours of affairs

-Died young of an illness (medicine/poison overdose?) in now Ghana after marrying the
British governor of then Cape Coast Castle
-Works: Collection of poems (‘The Fate of Adelaide’, ‘The Improvisatrice’)

Jane Taylor (1783-1824)

-Her mother was a writer too, Ann Taylor

-Jane published her poems together with her sister, also called Ann Taylor, so often they’re
credited together
-Her poem The Star is known as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and considered folklore, but it
is not.
-The poem has often been shortened, parodied, etc.
-Died of breast cancer at 40

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

When the blazing sun is gone,

When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
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