二零一二英国文学第三讲补充材料 Wordsworth,Romanticism

二零一二英国文学第三讲补充材料 Wordsworth,Romanticism 二零一二年英国文学第三讲补充材料 March, 2012 Part I Introduction on William Wordsworth WILLIAM WORDSWORTH —1850 1770 1791—92: In France during the early period of the Revolution. 1797: With his sister, Dorothy, Alfoxden House, Somersetshire, near Coleridge at Nether Stowey. 1798: Fist edition of Lyrical Ballads. 1799: William and Dorothy settle at Grasmere, in the Lake District. 1800: Second edition of Lyrical Ballads, in two volumes, with the famous Preface. 1807: Poems in Two Volumes; end of the great decade. William Wordsworth was born in Cokermouth in West Cumberland, just on the northern fringe of the English Lake District. When his mother died, the eight-year-old boy was sent to school at Hawkshead, near Esthwaite Lake, in the heart of that thinly settled region which he and Coleridge were to transform into the poetic center of England. William and his three brothers boarded in the cottage of Anne Tyson, who gave the boys simple comfort, ample affection, and freedom to roam the countryside at will. A vigorous, unruly, and sometimes moody boy, William spent his free days and occasionally “half the night” in the sports and rambles described in the first two books of the Prelude, “drinking in” (to use one of his favorite metaphors) the natural sights and sounds, and getting to know the cottagers, shepherds, and solitary wanderers who moved through his imagination into his later poem. He also found time to read voraciously in the books owned by his young headmaster, William Taylor, who encouraged him in his inclination for poetry. John Wordsworth, the poet?s father, died suddenly when William was thirteen, leaving to his five children mainly the substantial sum owned him by Lord Lonsdale, whom he had served as attorney and as steward of the huge Lonsdale estate. That harsh and litigious nobleman managed to keep from paying the debt until he died in 1802. Wordsworth was nevertheless able to go up to St. John?s College, Cambridge, in 1787, where he found very little in the limited curriculum of that time to appeal to him. He took his degree in 1791 without distinction. During the summer vocation of his third year at Cambridge, (1790), Wordsworth and his closest college friend, the Welshman, Robert Jones, journey on foot through France and the Alps (described in The Prelude 6) at the time when the French were joyously celebrating the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Upon completing is course at Cambridge, Wordsworth spent four months in London, set off on another walking tour with Robert Jones through Wales (the time of the memorable ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude 14), and then went back alone to France in order to master the language and qualifying as a traveling tutor. During his year in France (between November 1791 and December 1792) 1 Wordsworth became a fervent “democrat” and proselyte of the French Revolution—which seemed to him, as to many other generous spirits, to promise a “glorious renovation”—and he had a love affair with Annette Vallon, the impetuous and warm-hearted daughter of a French surgeon at Blois. It seems clear that ordsworth and Annette planned to marry, despite their difference in religion and W political inclinations (Annette belonged to an old Catholic family whose sympathies were Royalist). But almost immediately after a daughter, Caroline, was born, lack of funds forced Wordsworth back to England. The outbreak of war between England and France made it impossible for him to rejoin Annette until they had drifted so far apart in sympathies that a permanent union no longer seemed desirable. Wordsworth?s agonies of guilt, his divided loyalties between England and France, his gradual disillusion with the course of the revolution in France—according to his account in The Prelude 10 and 11—brought him to the verge of an emotional breakdown, when “sick, wearied out with contrarieties,” he yielded up moral questions in despair,” His suffering, his near-collapse, and the successful effort, after his sharp break with the past, to reestablish “a saving intercourse with my true self,? are the experiences that underline many of his greatest poems. At this critical point a young friend, Raisley Calvert, died and left Wordsworth a sum of money just sufficient to enable him to live by his poetry. He settled in a rent-free cottage at Racedown, Dorsetshire, with his beloved sister, Dorothy, who now began her long career as confidante, inspirer, and secretary. At the same time Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge; two years later he moved to Alfoden House, Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge, who lived four miles away at Nether Stowey. Here, his recovery complete, he entered at the age of twenty-seven on the delayed springtime of his poetic career. Even while he had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, Coleridge claimed that he had detected signs of genius in Wordsworth?s rather conventional poem about his tour in Alps, Descriptive Sketches, published in 1793. Now he hailed Wordsworth unreservedly as “the best poet of the age.” The two men met almost daily, talked fro hours about poetry, and composed prolifically. So close was their association that we find the same phrases occurring in the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as in the remarkable journals that Dorothy kept all the time; the two poets collaborated in some writings and freely traded thoughts and passages for others; and Coleridge even undertook to complete a few poems that Wordsworth had left unfinished. The result of their joint efforts was a small volume, published anonymously in 1789, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. It opened with Coleridge?s Ancient Mariner, included three other poems by Coleridge, a number of Wordsworth?s verse anecdotes and psychological studies of humble people, and some lyrics in which Wordsworth celebrated impulses from a vernal wood; and closed with Wordsworth?s great descriptive and meditative poem in blank verse (not a “lyrical ballad,” but one of the “other poems” of the title), Tintern Abbey. No other book of poems in English more plainly announces a new literary departure. William Hazlitt said that when he heard Coleridge read some of these newly written poems aloud, “the sense of a new 2 style and a new spirit in poetry came over me,” with something of the effect “that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring.” The professional reviewers were less enthusiastic. Nevertheless Lyrical Ballads sold out in two years, and Wordsworth published under his own name a new edition, dated 1800, to which he added a second volume of poems, many of them written in homesickness during a long, cold, and friendless winter that he and Dorothy had spent in Coslar, Germany, 1798—99. In his famous Preface to this edition, planned, like so many of the poems, in close consultation with Coleridge, Wordsworth enunciated the principles of the new criticism that served as rationale for the new poetry. Notable among the other words written in this prolific period is his austere and powerful poem The Ruined Cottage. Late in 1799 Wordsworth and Dorothy moved back permanently to their native lake, settling at Grasmere in the little house later named Dove Cottage. Coleridge, following them, rented Greta Hall at Keswick, thirteen miles away. In 1802 Wordsworth finally came into his father?s inheritance and, after an amicable settlement with Annette Vallon, married Mary Hutchinson, a Lake Country woman he had known since childhood. The course of existence after that time was broken by various disasters: the drowning in 1805 of his favorite brother, John, a sea captain whose ship was wrecked in a storm: the death of two of his five children in 1812; a growing estrangement from Coleridge, culminating in a bitter quarrel (1810) from which they were not completely reconciled for almost two decades; and from 1830s on, the physical and mental decline of his sister, Dorothy. The life of his middle age, however, was one of steadily increasing prosperity and reputation, as well as of political and religious conservatism. In 1813 an appointment as Stamp Distributor (that is, revenue collector) for Westmorland was concrete evidence of his recognition as a national poet. Gradually his residences, as he moved into more and more commodious quarters, became standard stops for tourists; he was awarded honorary degrees and, in 1843, was appointed poet laureate. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty; only then did his executors published his masterpiece, The Prelude, the autobiographical poem that he had written in two parts in 1799, expanded to its full length in 1805, and then continued to revise almost to the last decade of his long life. Most of Wordsworth?s greatest poetry had been written by 1807, when he published Poems in Two Volumes; and after The Excursion (1814) and the first collected edition of his poems (1815), although he continued to write voluminously, there is an overall decline in his powers as a poet. The cause of the decline has been much debated; an important one seems to be inherent in the very nature of his most characteristic writing. Wordsworth is above all the poet of the remembrance of things past, or as he himself put in, of “emotions recollected in tranquility.” Some object or event in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth; the result is a poem exhibiting the sharp discrepancy between what Wordsworth called “two consciousnesses”: himself as he is now and himself as he once was. But the memory of one?s early emotional experience is not an inexhaustible resource for poetry. As Basil Willey has remarked, Wordsworth as a poet “was living upon capital” and he knew it. As he says in The Prelude 12, while describing the recurrence of 3 “spots of time” from his memories of childhood: The days gone by Return upon me almost from the dawn Of life: the hiding places of Man?s power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all The past that Wordsworth recollected was one of moments of intense experience, and of emotional turmoil which is ordered, in the calmer present, into a hard-won equilibrium. The result was a poetry of excitation in calm; genius, as Wordsworth said, is “born to thrive by interchange / Of peace and excitation” (Prelude 13. 1—10). As time went by, however, the precarious equilibrium of his great creative period became a habit, and Wordsworth finally gained what, in the Ode to Duty (composed in 1904), he longed for, “a repose which ever is the same”—but at the expense of the agony and excitation which, under the calm surface, empowers his best and most characteristic poems. Occasionally, in his middle and later life a jolting experience would revive the intensity of Wordsworth?s remembered emotion, and also his earlier poetic strength. The moving sonnet Surprised by Joy, for example, was written in his forties at the abrupt realization that time was beginning to diminish his grief at the death of some years earlier of his little daughter Catherine. And when Wordsworth was sixty-five years old, the sudden report of the death of James Hogg called upon the memory of other and greater poets whom Wordsworth had loved and outlived; the result was his Extempore Effusion, written in a return to the simple quatrains of the early Lyrical Ballads and with a recovery of the great elegiac voice that had uttered the dirges to Lucy, thirty-five years before. Part II More poems of Wordsworth She dwelt among the untrodden ways She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know 4 When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! 1800 I travelled among unknown men I traveled among unknown men. In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee. „Tis past, that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem To love thee more and more. Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy?s eyes surveyed. ca. 1801 1807 To the Cuckoo O blithe new-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice: O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice? While I am lying on the grass Thy twofold shout I HEAR; From hill to hill it seems to pass, At once far off and near. Though babbling only to the vale Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale 5 Of visionary hours. Trice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; The same whom in my school-boy days I listen?d to; that Cry Which made me look a thousand ways In bush, and tree, and sky. To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou wert still a hope, a love; Still long?d for, never seen! And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. O blessed Bird! The earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place, That is fit home for Thee! 1 Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802 Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 2 A sight so touching in its majesty: 3This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 4Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 5 Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne?er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! 6The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; 7And all that mighty heart is lying still! 6 Notes: 1. According Wordsworth, this poem was composed in carriage on his way to France. Sonnet, the form of verse, was introduced to England in the sixteenth century and became a popular from for the Elizabethans and the poets of seventeenth century; however, sonnets were much neglected in the period of the Neo-classicism in the eighteenth century in England, and the form of sonnet was much revived in the Romantic period, especially by Wordsworth and Keats. 在这首诗里, 华兹华斯用朴实而充满感情色彩的语言描绘了夏秋之交从泰晤士河 上的威斯特敏斯特大桥眺望伦敦清晨的景色. 整个伦敦好象还在沉睡,清朗的天空中晨 光曦微, 泰晤士河缓缓流向远方, 一切是那样明净,庄严, 优美. 这首诗音韵和谐, 徐缓 的节奏能很好地传达庄重而恬静的情感 内容 财务内部控制制度的内容财务内部控制制度的内容人员招聘与配置的内容项目成本控制的内容消防安全演练内容 , 为十四行诗中的佳品. 2. Dull would be of soul… in its majesty: who that passed the bridge without feeling its majestic beauty would surely be a person of dull soul. 3. This City = London. 4. Open unto the fields: as the air was clear and there was no mist, the buildings of London were clearly visible from the suburbs. 5. steep = bathe. 6. The river = The Thames. 7. that mighty heart: London was the industrial, commercial center of England, a prosperous city full of vigor and activity. Here it was compared to the heart of the country. 1 The Solitary Reaper Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne?er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides. Will no one tell me what she sings?— Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, 7 And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again? Whate?er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o?er the sickle bending;— I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard nor more. Nov. 5, 1805 1807 Word Study: 1. One of the rare poems not based on Wordsworth?s own experience. The poet tells us that it was suggested by a passage in Thomas Wilkinson?s Tours to the British Mountains (1824), which he had seen in manuscript: “Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse (the Gaelic language of Scotland) as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I eve heard: her stains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.” 2. solitary 1) (a) (living) alone; without companion单独的;独自的 a solitary walk; lead a solitary life; (b) fond of being alone; used to be alone喜欢独处的;习惯独处的; 3. not often visited; in a lonely remote place人迹罕致的;荒僻的 a solitary valley; far-flung solitary village. 4. reap cut and gather (esp grain) as harvest 收割reap (a field of ) barley 5. behold(arch or rhet) (often imperative) see (esp sth unusual) 看(尤指不寻常之物)The babe was a wonder to behold. / Behold the king! 6. yon / yonder (arch or dialect) (that is or that can be seen) over there 那边Do you see yonder clump of trees? Whose is that farm (over). 7. strain (c usu pl) (fml) part of a tune or piece of music being performed (演出的) 音乐片段; 乐曲hear the strings of church organ; the angelic stains of choirboys singing. 8. notes a) single sound of a certain pitch and duration, made by a musical instrument, voice etc (乐器、嗓子等发出的)单音、鸣声、调、音调the blackbird?s merry notes) sing used to represent such a sound in manuscript or printed music(乐谱上的)音符Quavers, rotchets and minims are three of the different lengths of note in written music.八分音符、四分音符和二分 音符在乐谱上是不同长度的三个音符。 9. thrill a) (noun) wave of excited feeling; nervous tremor a thrill of joy, fear, horror, etc 兴奋; 激动;紧张;震颤He gets his thrills from rock-climbing. B) (verb) (esp passive) cause sb feel a thrill or thrills The Film thrilled the audience. / We were thrilled to hear your wonderful news. / I was thrilled by her beauty. 她的花容月貌我一见倾心。 8 10. plaintive sounding sad; sorrowful (听起来)哀伤的;悲哀的 a plaintive cry, melody, voice, etc. 11. number(c) (music) song, dance, etc, esp in a theatrical performance 一首歌，一段舞蹈(尤 指在剧场演出的)sing a slow, romantic number. 12. lay (arch) poem that was written to be sung; ballad 供吟唱的诗;民歌;民谣 Part III Introduction about the Romantic Period (1785-1830) 1789-1815: Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France. 1789: The Revolution beings with the assembly of the States-General in May and the storming of the Bastille on July 14. — 1793: King Louis XIV executed; England joins the alliance against France. — 1793—94: The Reign of Terror under Robespierre. —1804: Napoleon crowned emperor. —1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo. 1798: Lyrical Ballads published anonymously by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1811-1820: The Regency—George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for George III, who has been declared incurably insane. 1820: Accession of George IV THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND: REVOLUTION AND RECTION Following a widespread practice of historians of English literature, we shall denote by the “Romantic period” the span between the year 1785, the midpoint of the decade in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake and Burns published their first poems, and in 1830, by which time major writers of the earlier century were either dead or no longer productive. This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from primarily an agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, in which the balance of economic power shifted to large-scale employers, who found themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive working class. And this changed occurred in a context of the American Revolution and then much more radical French Revolution, of wars, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by heresy hunts and the repression of traditional liberties. …… “THE SPIRIT OF AGE” Attempts at a single definition of Romanticism fall far short of matching the facts of a time that exceeds almost all other ages of English literature in the range and diversity of its achievements. Writers in Wordsworth?s lifetime did not think themselves as “Romantic”; the word was not applied until half a century later, by English historians. 9 Contemporary critics and reviewers treated them as independent individuals, or else groups them (often invidiously, but with some basis in fact) into a number of separate schools: “the Lake School” of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey; “the Cockney School,” a derogatory term for Londoners Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and ssociated writers, including John Keats; and “the Satanic School” of Byron, Shelley, a and their followers. Many of the major writers, however, did feel there was something distinctive about their time—not a shared doctrine of literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some of them called “the spirit of the age.” They had the sense that (as Keats said in one of his sonnets) “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” and there was evidence of that release of energy, experimental boldness, and creative power that marks a literary renaissance. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley claimed that the literature of the age “has arisen as it were from a new birth,” and that “an electric fire burns” within the words of its best writers which is “less their spirit than the spirit of the age.” Shelley explained this literary spirit as an accompaniment of political and social revolution, and other writers agreed. Francis Jeffery, the foremost conservative reviewer of the day, connected “the revolution in our literature” with “the agitations of the French Revolution, and the discussions as well as the hopes and terrors to which it gave occasion.” William Hazlitt, who published a book of essays called “The Spirit of the Age, described how in his early youth the French Revolution had seemed “the dawn of a new era, a new impulse had been given to men?s minds.” The new poetry of the school of Wordsworth, he maintained, “had its origin in the French Revolution. … It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world—and of the letters.” The imagination of many Romantic writers was, indeed, preoccupied with the fact and idea of revolution. In the early period of the French Revolution all the leading English writers except Edmund Burke were in sympathy with it, and Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Mary Wollstonecraft were among its fervent adherents. Later, even after the first boundless expectations had been disappointed by the events in France, the younger writers, including Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley, and Byron, felt that its example, when purged of its terror, still constituted humanity?s best hope. The Revolution generated a pervasive feeling that this was an age of new beginnings when, by discarding inherited procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible, and not only on political and social realm but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well. In his Prelude Wordsworth wrote the classic description of the spirit of the early 1790s, with “France standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again,” so that “the whole Earth, / The beauty wore of promise.” Something of this sense of limitless possibilities survived the shock of the first disappointment at the events in France and carried over to the year 1797, when Wordsworth and Coleridge, in excited daily communion, revolutionized, on grounds analogous to the politics of democracy, the theory and practice of poetry. The product of these discussions was the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. 10 POETIC THEORY AND POETIC PRACTICE Wordsworth undertook to justify the new poetry by a critical manifesto, or statement of poetic principles, in the form of extended Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, which he enlarged still further in the third edition of 1802. In it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancient regime, those writers of the preceding century who, in his view, had imposed on poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural expression. Many of Wordsworth?s later critical writings were attempts to clarify, buttress, or qualify points made in his first declaration. Coleridge declared that the Preface was “half a child of my own brain”; and although he soon developed doubts about some of Wordsworth?s unguarded statements, and undertook to correct them in Biographia Literaria (1817), he did not question the rightness of Wordsworth?s attempt to overturn the reigning tradition. In the course of eighteenth century there had been increasing opposition to the tradition of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, and especially in the 1740s and later, there had emerged many of the critical concepts, as well as a number of the poetic subjects and forms, that were later exploited by Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Wordsworth?s Preface nevertheless deserves its reputation as a turning point in English literature, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory based on explicit critical principles, and made them the rationale for his own massive achievements as a poet. We can conveniently use the concepts in this influential essay as points of departure for a survey of distinctive elements in the theory and poetry of the Romantic period. 1. The Concept of Poetry and Poet Representative eighteenth-century theorists had regarded poetry as primarily an imitation of human life — in a frequent figure, “ a mirror held up to nature”—that the poet artfully renders and puts into an order designed to instruct and give artistic pleasure to the reader. Wordsworth, on the other hand, repeatedly described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Reversing earlier theory, he thus located the source of a poem not in the outer world, but in the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were not external people and events, but the inner feelings of the author, or external objects only after these have been transformed or irradiated by the author?s feelings. Other Romantic theories, however diverse in other aspects, concurred on this crucial point by referring primarily to the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet, instead of to the outer world as perceived by the senses, for the origin, content, and defining attributes of a poem. Many writers identified poetry (in metaphors parallel to Wordsworth?s “overflow”) as the “expression” or “utterance” or “exhibition” of emotion. Blake and Shelley described a poem as an embodiment of the poet?s imaginative vision, which they opposed to the ordinary world of common experience. Coleridge, following German precedents, introduced into English criticism an organic 11 theory of the imaginative process and the poetic product based on the model of the growth of a plant. That is, he conceived a great work of literature to be a self-originating and self-organizing process that begins with a seedlike idea in the poets? imagination, grows by assimilating both the poet?s feelings and the diverse materials of sense-experience, and evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each other and to the whole. …… 2. Poetic Spontaneity and Freedom Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as “the spontaneous overflow” of feelings. In traditional aesthetic theory, poetry had been regarded as supremely an art—an art that in modern times is practiced by poets who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the “rules” governing the kind of poem they are writing, and (except for the felicities that, as Pope said, are “beyond the reach of art”) deliberately employ tested means to achieve foreknown effects upon the audience. But to Wordsworth, although the composition of a poem originates from “emotion recollected in tranquility” and may be preceded and followed by reflection, the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous—that is, arising from impulse, and free from all rules and the artful manipulation of the means to foreseen ends—if the product is to be a genuine poem. Other important Romantic critics also voiced declarations of artistic independence from inherited precepts. Keats listed as an “axiom” that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Blake insisted that he wrote from “Inspiration and Vision” and that his long “prophetic” poem Milton was given to him by an agency not himself and “produced without Labor or Study.” Shelley also maintained that it is “an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study,” and suggested instead that they are the products of an unconscious creativity: “A great statue or picture under the power of the artist as a child in the mother?s womb.” “The definition of genius,” Hazlitt remarked, “is that it acts unconsciously.” The surviving manuscripts of the Romantic poets, however, as well as the testimony of observers, show that they worked and reworked text no less arduously—if perhaps more immediately under the impetus of first conception—than the poets of earlier ages. Coleridge, who believed that truth lies in a union of opposites, came closer to the facts of Romantic practice when he claimed that the act of composing poetry involves the psychological contraries “of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose.” The emphasis in this period on the free activity of the imagination is related to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of “the heart” to supplement the judgments of the purely logical faculty, “the head,” whether in the province of artistic beauty, philosophical and religious truth, or moral goodness. “Deep thinking,” Coleridge wrote, “is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation”, hence, “a metaphysical solution that does not tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal.” 12 3. Romantic “Nature Poetry” In his Preface, Wordsworth wrote that “I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject,” and in a supplementary Essay he complained that from Dryden through Pope there is scarcely an image from external nature “from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed on his object.” A glance at the table of contents of any collection of Romantic poems will show the degree to which the natural scene has become a primary poetic subject, while Wordsworth, Shelley, and even more Coleridge and Keats, described natural phenomena with an accuracy of observation that had no earlier match in its ability to capture the sensuous nuance. Because of the prominence of landscape in this period, “Romantic poetry” has to the popular mind become almost synonymous with “nature poetry.” Neither Romantic theory nor practice, however, justifies the opinion that the aim of this poetry was description for its own sake. Wordsworth in fact insisted that the ability to observe and describe objects accurately, although a necessary, is not at all a sufficient condition for poetry, “as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects.” And while many of the Romantic lyrics—Wordsworth?s Tintern Abbey and Ode: Imitations of Immortality, Coleridge?s Frost at Midnight and Dejection, Shelley?s Ode to the West Wind, Keats?s Nightingale—begin with an aspect or change of aspect in the natural scene, this serves only as a stimulus to the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking. The longer Romantic “nature poems” are in fact usually meditative poems, in which the presented scene serves to raise an emotional problems or personal crisis whose development and resolution constitute the organizing principle of the poem. As Wordsworth said in his Prospectus to The Recluse, not nature but “the Mind of Man” is “my haunt, and the main region of my song.” In addition, Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness. In part such descriptions represent the poetic equivalent of the metaphysical concept of nature, which had developed in deliberate revolt against the world views of the scientific philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who represented the ultimate reality as a mechanical world consisting of physical particles in motion. What is needed in philosophy, Coleridge wrote, is “the substitution of life and intelligence … for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of human intellect, strikes Death.” But for many Romantic poets it was a matter of immediate experience to respond to the outer universe as a living entity that participates in the feelings of the observer. …… 4. The Glorification of the Commonplace In two lectures on Wordsworth, Hazlitt declared that the school of poetry founded by Wordsworth was the literary equivalent of the French Revolution, translating political changes into poetical experiments. “Kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere … The paradox (these poets) set out with was that all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference to be given, those that are the 13 meanest and most unpromising are the best.” Hazlitt had in mind Wordsworth?s statement that the aim of Lyrical Ballads was “to choose incidents and situations from common life” and to use a “selection of language really spoken by men,” for which the source and model is “humble and rustic life.” As Hazlitt shrewdly saw, this was more social than a distinctively literary definition of the proper materials and language for poetry. Versifiers of the late decades of the eighteenth century had experimented with the simple treatment of simple subjects, and Robert Burns—like Wordsworth, a sympathizer with the French Revolution—had achieved great poetic success in the serious representation of humble life in a language really spoken by rustics. But Wordsworth underwrote his poetic practice by a theory that inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects, and the style by elevating humble and rustic life and the plain style, which in earlier theory were appropriate only to the lowly pastoral, into the principal subjects and medium for poetry in general. And in his own practice, as Hazlitt also noted, Wordsworth went even further and turned for the subjects of his serious poems not only to humble people but to the ignominious, the outcast, the delinquent—“to convicts, female vagrants, gypsies … idiot boys and mad mothers,” as well as to “peasants, peddlers, and village barbers.” Hence the outrage of Byron, who alone among his great contemporaries insisted that Dryden and Pope had laid out the proper road for poetry, and who—in spite of his liberalism in politics—maintained his literary allegiance both to aristocratic proprieties and to traditional poetic decorum: “Peddlers,” and “Boats,” and “Wagons”! Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? But Hazlitt insisted that, in his democratization of poetry, Wordsworth was “the most original poet now living.” And certainly Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads was, in this respect, more radical than any of his contemporaries. He effected an immense enlargement of his readers? imaginative sympathies and brought into the province of serious literature a range of materials and interests which are still being explored by writers of the present day. It should be noted, however, that Wordsworth?s aim in Lyrical Ballads was not simply represent the world as it is but, in his Preface, to throw over “situations from common life … a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.? As this passage indicates, Wordsworth?s concern in his poetry was not only with “common life” but with “ordinary things”; no one can read his poems without noticing the extraordinary reverence with which he invests words that in earlier writers had been derogatory—words like “common,” “ordinary,” “humble,” whether applied to people or to objects in the visible scene. His aim throughout is to shatter the lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder—indeed, of divinity—in the everyday, the commonplace, the trivial, and the lowly. ……. 14 5. The Supernatural and “Strangeness in Beauty” In most of his poems Coleridge, like Wordsworth, dealt with the everyday things of this world, and in Frost at Midnight he showed how well he too could achieve the effect of wonder in the familiar. But Coleridge tells us (Biographia Literaria, chapter 14) that according to the division of labour in Lyrical Ballads, his special function was to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events in poems of which “the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural.” And in The Rime of Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, Coleridge opened up poetry to the realm of mystery and magic, in which materials from ancient folklore, superstition, and demonology are used to impress upon the reader the sense of occult powers and unknown modes of being. Such poems are usually set in the distant past or in faraway places, or both; the milieu of Kubla Khan, for example, exploits the exoticism both of the Middle Ages and of the Orient. Next to Coleridge, the greatest master of this Romantic mode—in which supernatural events have a deep psychological import—was John Keats. In La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes he adapted the old forms of ballad and romance to modern sophisticated use and, like Coleridge, established a medieval setting for events that violate our sense of realism and the natural order. Hence the term medieval revival, frequently attached to the Romantic period, which comprehends also the ballad imitation and some of the verse tales and historical novels of Walter Scott. Another side of the tendency that Walter Pater later called “the addition of strangeness to beauty:was the Romantic interest in unusual modes of experience, of a kind that earlier writers had largely ignored as either too trivial or too aberrant for serious literary concern. Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge in their poetry explored the visionary states of consciousness that are common among children but violate the standard categories of adult judgement. Coleridge was interested in mesmerism (which we now call hypnotism) and, like Blake and Shelley, studied the literature of the occult and the esoteric. Coleridge also shared with De Quincey a concern with dreams and nightmares; both authors exploited in their writings the altered consciousness and distorted perceptions they experienced under their addiction to opium. Byron made repeated use of the fascination with the forbidden and the appeal of the Satanic hero. And Keats was extraordinarily sensitive to the ambivalences of human experience—to the mingling, at their highest intensity, of pleasure and pain, to the destructive aspect of sexuality, and to the erotic quality of the longing for death. These phenomena had already been explored by eighteenth-century writers of terror tales and Gothic fiction, and later in the nineteenth century all of them, sometimes exaggerated to perversity, became the special literary province of Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and writers of European “Decadence.” INDIVIDUALISM, INFINITE STRIVING, AND NONCOMFORMITY Through the greater part of eighteenth century, humans had for the most part been 15 viewed as limited beings in a strictly ordered and essentially unchanging world. A variety of philosophical and religious systems in this century coincided in a distrust of radical innovation, a respect for the precedents established through the ages by the common sense of humanity, and the recommendation to set accessible goals and avoid extremes, whether in politics, intellect, morality or art. Many of the great literary works of the period joined in attacking “pride,” or aspirations beyond the limits natural to our species. “The bliss of man,” Pope wrote in An Essay on Man, “(could pride that blessing find / Is not to act or think beyond mankind.” This kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee. Submit. The Romantic period, the age of burgeoning free enterprise and revolutionary hope, was also the age of radical individualism in which both the philosophers and poets put an immensely higher estimate on human potentialities and powers. In German post-Kantian philosophy, which generated many of the characteristic ideas of —what was called the “Subject” or European Romanticism, the human mind “Ego”—took over many various functions that had hitherto been the sole prerogative of Divinity. Most prominent was the rejection by philosophers of a central eighteenth-century concept of the mind as a mirrorlike recipient of a universe already created, and its replacement by the new concept of the mind as itself the creator of the universe it perceives. In a parallel fashion, the English founders of the new poetry also described the mind as creating its own experience. According to Blake, the mind creates its proper milieu only if it totally rejects the material world; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, the mind created in collaboration with something given to it from without. Mind, wrote Coleridge in 1801, is “not passive” but “made in God?s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator.” And Wordsworth declared in The Prelude (2.258-61) that the individual mind Doth, like an Agent of the one great Mind, Create, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. Many Romantic writers also agreed that the mind has access beyond sense to the transcendent and the infinite, through a special faculty they called either Reason or Imagination. In The Prelude (6.600ff.) Wordsworth describes a flash of imagination “that has revealed / The invisible world,” and affirms: Our destiny, our being?s heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, 16 And something evermore about to be. The desire beyond human limits that, to the moralists of the preceding age, had been an essential sin, or tragic error, now becomes a glory and a triumph: the human being refuses to submit to limitations and, through finite, persists in setting infinite hence inaccessible, goals. Wordsworth characteristically goes on to declare that “under such banners militant, the soul / Seeks for no trophies, struggle for no spoils”; for him the infinite striving ends in physical quietism and moral fortitude. But for other writers, a “Steben nach especially in Germany, the proper human aim is ceaseless activity— dem Unendlichen,” a striving for the infinite. This view is epitomized by Goethe?s Faust, who in his quest for the unattainable violates ordinary moral limits, yet wins salvation by his very insatiability, which never stoops to contentment with the possibilities offered by his finite world. Infinite longing—in Shelley?s phrase, “the desire of a moth for the star”—was a recurrent theme also in the English literature of the day. “Less than everything,” Blake announced, “cannot satisfy man.” Shelley?s Alastor and Keats Endymion both represent the quest for an indefinable and inaccessible goal, and Byron?s Manfred has for its hero a man whose “power and will” reach beyond the limits of that human clay “which clogs the ethereal essence,” so that “his aspirations / Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth.” In a parallel fashion, Romantic theorists of art rejected the neoclassic ideal of a limited intention, perfectly accomplished, in favour of “the glory of the imperfect,” in which the very failures of artists attest the unlimited reach of their aims. And in their own work, Romantic writers deliberately put themselves in competition with the greatest of their predecessors and experimented boldly in poetic language, versification, and design. Especially in their longer poems they struck out in new directions, and in a space of few decades produced an astonishing variety of forms constructed on novel principles of organization and style. Blake?s symbolic lyrics and visionary “prophetic” poems; Coleridge haunting ballad-narrative of sin attribution, The Rime of Ancient Mariner; Wordsworth?s epiclike spiritual autobiography, The Prelude; Shelley?s cosmic symbolic drama, Prometheus Unbound; Keats?s great sequence of Odes on the irreconcilable conflict in basic human desires; Byron?s ironic survey of all European civilization, Don Juan—one can say of each of them, as Shelley said of Byron?s poem, that it was “something wholly new and relative to the age.” 17