Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
2012
Contents
I.
II.
Romanticisms: Preliminaries
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
I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries
1.
2.
3.
4
5
6
7
8
Romantic: etymology
19th century: cultural milieu
Elements of Romantic poetics.
Defining Romanticism.
Romanticism vs. Classicism.
Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics.
Recent influential studies on Romanticism.
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.
8. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.
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 Lucys 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 poets job in terms of restoring the equilibrium
in which pleasure consists (Preface), discuss the poets solution to the essence of identity in
the last two stanzas of the poem, ll. 168-203. Reflect upon the following constituents of
Wordsworths poetics.
1. The conflicting constituents of the principal themes and categories within the text.
2. The poets 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.
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Then sing, ye Birds, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabors 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.
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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 oer mans 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,
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 Coleridges 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 selfdoubting 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 eer 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,
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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)
Explore the sources that might have contributed to its being an intertext.
Detect intertextual traces within the text.
Consider some on-going appeals of the poem.
Think of points of similarity and difference between Byrons 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.
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I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts 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 < Platos theory of the Daimon.
2.
3.
Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, not naming
things but suggesting them.
Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts:
Beauty and Truth.
Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work:
The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave 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 minds 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 Coleridges 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)
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7.
The selfs 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 Mans 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. (Shakespeares 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 Students 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
Keatss 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.
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1.
Conservatives
Uncommitted
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SCIENCE (Darwin)
LOSS OF FAITH
DOUBT / BELIEF
Utilitarianism
Philosophical Conservatives
(J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill)
EDUCATION
Agnosticism
RELIGION
FAITH
Tractarianism
T.H. Huxley(1825-1895)
controversialist
On the Physical Basis of Life
J.H.Cardinal Newman
(1801-1890)
Oxford Movement
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Th. Macaulay
(1800-1859)
History of England from
the Accession of James II
(Great debater of progress)
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Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare
(1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the
temptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I should
judge the conflict in the knights 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, Ill tell my state as thought 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
Praxeds 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.
Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the greater
the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth.
Brownings 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 minds deviance.
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Every true poetmust 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
Instress
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.
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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 Scotuss 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 artists 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 poets own theory of verse making.
2. Sprung Rhythm and the wave of anapests in the 19th century.
3. Explain how I.A. Richardss 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 Hopkinss stumbling blocks. (Bridges)
7. Suggest ways of overcoming difficulties with Hopkinss poetic discourse.
8. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of G. M. Hopkins.
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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**
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