Dra.

Sonia Hernández Santano

Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez
 The Romantic conception of poetry
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1789)

 The first generation of Romantic Poets

 William Blake (1757-1827)
 William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

 The second generation of Romantic Poets

 Lord Byron (1788-1824)
 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
 John Keats (1795-1821)

 Women Romantic Poets

Fundamental ideas
Stonehenge, John Constable
 English Romantic poetry has certain qualities
which set it apart from the poetry written before
it.
 Most of them were hinted at in the Preface of
WilliamWordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge’s
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, 1798.

In thePreface to their collection of poems they

settled the ideological fundaments of the
Romantic poetry. It has been considered as a
manifesto of British Romanticism.
 I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (1): and though
this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never
produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being
possessed of more than usual organic sensibility (2), had also
thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling
are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the
representatives of all our past feelings (3); and, as by
contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each
other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the
repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be
connected with important subjects (4) till at length, if we be
originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will
be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the
impulses of those habits (5), we shall describe objects, and utter
sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each
other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in
some degree enlightened(6), and his affections strengthened and
purified.
 (1) The sublimation of emotions
 (2)The sublimation of Nature and sensorial
experience as evocative of the poet’s emotions
 (3) Sensorial experience evokes past memories
and leads the poet to their recreation in the
mind and in the poem.

 (4) Emotions are sublime because they are

connected with universal truths.

 (5) Poetry is a product of uncontrolled

inspiration. Some Romantic poets practiced
automatic writing.
 “ I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity (6) (7) the emotion is
contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually
disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the
mind (7). In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a
mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in
whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so
that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described,
the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment (8). If Nature be
thus cautious to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being so employed, the
Poet ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him (6), and ought especially
to take care, that, whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those
passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be
accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. (...) Nor let this necessity of
producing immediate pleasure (8) be considered as a degradation of the
Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgement of the beauty of the
universe (2) (8), an acknowledgement the more sincere, because not formal,
but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the
spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of
man (4) (9), to the grand elementary principle of pleasure (8), by which he
knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.”
 (6) Poetry does no longer consist in the imitation of
human actions, but it means the observation of the
self (to recollect memories and recreate them in
tranquility).

 (7) Creative process: Imagination recreates past

sensorial experience and becomes the source of new
poetic material.

 (8) Poetry does not have a social function like

Neoclassical poetry; it is a source of pleasure for the
poet and reader.

 (9) Celebration and sublimation of the self.

“What is a Poet? to whom does
he address himself? and  (10) The poet as a
what language is to be
expected from him?—He is a visionary whose duty is
man speaking to men: a man, to transmit to the readers
it is true, endowed with what only they are able
more lively sensibility, more to apprehend and learn
enthusiasm and tenderness, from Nature.
who has a greater
knowledge of human  He is not the ‘wit’ of the
nature, and a more Neoclassicism; but a
comprehensive soul, than ‘genius’.
are supposed to be common
among mankind (10); a man
pleased with his own
passions and volitions, and
who rejoices more than other
men in the spirit of life that is
in him”
 (11) Interest in folklore,
popular culture and rural
life.
A Mill, John Constable
 Humble and rustic life (2) (11) was
generally chosen, because, in that
condition, the essential passions of
the heart (9) find a better soil in
which they can attain their maturity,
are less under restraint, and speak a
plainer and more emphatic language;
because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings coexist in a state
of greater simplicity, and,
consequently, may be more
accurately contemplated, and more
forcibly communicated; because the
manners of rural life germinate from
those elementary feelings, and, from
the necessary character of rural
occupations, are more easily
comprehended, and are more
durable; and, lastly, because in that
condition the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature (2) (4).
 “The principal object, then,  (12) Subjects and themes:
proposed in these Poems From common and simple life.
was to choose incidents and
situations from common life
(12), and to relate or describe
them, throughout, as far as  (13) Poetic Language:
was possible in a selection of In contrast to the cultivated and
language really used by polished language of the
men (13), and, at the same Neoclassical poets like Pope,
time, to throw over them a Romantic poets use the
certain colouring of language of common men.
imagination, whereby
ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect. My purpose
was to imitate, and, as far as
possible, to adopt the very
language of men (13)”.
 William
Blake (1757-1827)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Thomas Cole, Romantic landscape with ruined

tower
William Blake
(1757- 1827)

“Man’s perceptions are not

bounded by organs of
perception; he perceives
more than sense (though
ever so acute) can
discover.”

From :
There Is No Natural Religion
(1788)
(A collection of
Philosophical aphorisms)
 Blake’s view of the American and French revolutions is
associated with his hatred of established forms of
government and justice.

 He is admired as a visionary and revolutionary. He takes

nothing of the material world for granted and does not
accept certain realities.

 He transforms his visions of the material world into

heavenly elements. Creative power of his imagination:

“Seeing through the eye, not with the eye”

(‘Auguries of Innocence’)
 Where ‘with the eye’ aludes to the material world, and
‘through the eye’ to the ability of the imagination to reveal the
latent wonders in the material world.
 William Blake
(1757- 1827)

WORKS:

Songs of Innocence (1789)

Songs of Innocence and

Experience, Shewing the Two
Contrary States of the
Human Soul (1794)

America, a Prophecy (1793;

pub. 1794)

The French Revolution

(1791)
 William Blake creates his own theory of the
harmonious balance of the universe:

 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793):

“Without contraries there is no progression.
Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love
and hate, are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call
good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys
reason. Evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell”
 These contraries were depicted in

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

 Songs of Innocence are concerned with the relationship of the protector and
the protected (the shepherd and the lamb, the mother and the child..)
 Songs of Experience : Innocence can not be fullly understood without
‘Experience’, the familiar reality of life in a fallen world.
Themes in Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
 Racial prejudice

 Loss of innocence of working children (‘The

Chimney Sweeper’, ‘Holy Thursday’)
 The coexistance of good and evil (The
Lamb/The Tyger)
 The vulnerability of innocence in the present
world
 Innocence is an ideal to be struggled for in a
corrupt and wicked world.
My mother bore me in the southern wild, For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear
And I am black, but O! my soul is white; The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
White as an angel is the English child: Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
But I am black as if bereav’d of light. And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

My mother taught me underneath a tree Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And sitting down before the heat of day, And thus I say to little English boy;
She took me on her lap and kissed me, When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And pointing to the east began to say. And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Look on the rising sun: there God does live I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear,
And gives his light, and gives his heat away. To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
Comfort in morning joy in the noon day. And be like him and he will then love me.

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
 William Wordsworth (1770- 1850)

“When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude”
-From The Prelude

“For I have learned to look on nature, not as in

the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing
oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.”

― From Lines Composed a Few Miles Above

Tintern Abbey.
 Wordsworth is always known as the poet of nature,
although he thought of himself as writing principally about
humanity.

 His two main concerns are the predicaments of human life

and the beauty of the natural world.

 He develops an extraordinary insight into the nature of man,

both individually and in society.

 Interested in the present problems of human beings in

society,the problems of living in the cities, in the way that
certain pressures tend to reduce the individual to a machine.

 His preoccupations lie at the heart of the human reaction to

a technological, urbanized and industrialized society.
(Industrial revolution)
 His best known poem is a manifesto of his individual perception of the
function of poetry:
“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”
(1798):

 He explores the effects of memory, time, and the landscape upon

the human heart.

 He is prophetic as he transforms experience, however painful,

into instructive and inspiring poetry.

 Some passages move towards the sublime:

“While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things” (ll. 47-49)
DAFFODILS
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
 S. T. Coleridge (1772- 1834)

“Language is the armoury of the human

mind, and at once contains the trophies of
its past and the weapons of its future
conquests.”

“ No man was ever yet a good poet,

without being at the same time a
profound philosopher”
 William Turner, Shipwreck

Biographia Literaria, 1817

(Chapter XIII)
He distinguishes between fancy/ imagination:

IMAGINATION: Primary and secondary:

“The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent
of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
external act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider an
echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as
identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in
degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,
in order to re-create”

FANCY: “The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory

emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and
modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by
the word choice.”
 His most representative poems:
A) KUBLA KHAN
 A dream-poem full of images of beauty and terror.

 Full of enigmatic symbols

 The most imaginative of his poems: full of magical

power.
 Themes:

 The process of poetic creation: mechanic writing

caused by opium.
 The concept of imagination

 Balance between contraries

 The transcendence of history

 Coleridge describes the process of composition of
this poem thus:
He had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne”
prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition”
(this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge
was known to be addicted).
Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in
which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a
new palace; Coleridge claims that while he slept, he
had a fantastic vision and composed
simultaneously—while sleeping—some two or
three hundred lines of poetry which he wrote when
he woke up. But as he was interrupted by a visit, his
poem remained unfinished.
 The poet describes a
mythical and legendary
place where a pleasure
dome is built (Xanadu), a
sacred river flows,
and runs “through
caverns measureless to
man / Down to a sunless
sea”.
B) THE RIME OF THE
ANCIENT MARINER  Watch a fragment of a
show inspired by the
- A Ballad concerned with a long poem here:
journey through the sea. This poetic http://vimeo.com/49457050
genre allows him to convey intense
personal feelings of suffering,
loneliness, longing, horror, fear…

-The Mariner shoots an albatross that

had been keeping company to the
ship, and the whole crew are
subjected to evil forces and are
condemned to live eternally in
death.
-Coleridge again introduces elaborate
symbolism that cannot be definitely
interpreted.
 It has been interpreted as an allegory of
Coleridge’s own feelings of guilt and
loneliness.
 Another interpretation is that shooting the
albatross the mariner commits a crime against
the ‘one life’ that is ‘within us and abroad’,
against the created world and also against
himself.
 The crime is part of the human experience;
the mariner’s journey is not just geographical,
but also into strange worlds of the mind.
GeorgeGordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-
1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Keats (1795-1821)
LORD BYRON (1788- 1824)

“The great object of life is

sensation- to feel that we exist,
even though in pain.”

“Are not the mountains, waves,

and skies as much a part of me, as
I of them?”

“Let us have wine and women,

mirth and laughter, sermons and
soda water the day after.”
 Byron was the most various of poets, for he tried
everything in poetry and in life. Poetry was only
one of his activities: politics, a player of cricket, a
swimmer, he enjoyed the company of men and
women.

 He created a different persona for every poem; they

are all part of his shifting self, his explorations of
life.

 He created the popular Romantic hero

(melancholic, tormented by a secret guilt)
 Byron’s poetry is fundamentally Romantic, partly because in
his difference with the other poets he is asserting his
individuality, and partly because of his out-of the-ordinary
subject matters and characters:

 Lonely wanderers
 Heroes and heroines of old tales
 Courageous, glamourous and mysterious figures

 They are unsual, deeply sensitive, outside of the normal

simplicities of thinking and feeling.

 He invites the reader to sympathize with those who are

imprudent, exciting, sensitive and courageous.
 Genres: He wrote satire, verse narrative, odes,
historical tragedy, dramatic monologues…
 Language and style: he was a traditionalist on
this regard
 he preferred the couplet and the Spenserian stanza
and was not interested in the stylistic innovations of
Wordsworth and Coleridge;
 (he did not subscribe to the idea of the relevance of
the imagination or the poet as a prophet either)
 Works:
Hours of Idleness (1807)
Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage
The Bride of Abydos
The Corsair
The Siege of Corinth
Don Juan

Abydo’s fiancée, by Eugéne Delacroix

 His heroes and heroines are passionate, active.
 Byron depicts ways of life totally outside of the
ordinary English experience.
 They represent a side of Byron which was dissatisfied
with the triviality of London society.

 That is the reason why he wrote about pirates,

buccaneers and lovers and travelled to Spain,
Greece, Albania and Turkey in search of
adventures and exotic sites.
Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed
From a Skull
Start not -nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaffed like thee;
I died: let earth my bones resign:
Fill up -thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than
thine.
Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm's slimy
brood,
And circle in the goblet's shape
The drink of gods than reptile's
food.
Where once my wit, perchance, hath
shone,
In aid of others' let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone
What nobler substitute than wine?
Quaff while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth's embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Why not -since through life's little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.
http://vimeo.com/73132012
 Lord Byron’s Skull Cup
Lord Byron used a skull his gardener had
found at Newstead Abbey as a drinking
vessel:
"There had been found by the gardener, in
digging, a skull that had probably
belonged to some jolly monk or friar of
the Abbey, about the time it was
demonasteried. Observing it to be of giant
size, and in a perfect state of preservation,
a strange fancy seized me of having it set
and mounted as a drinking cup. I
accordingly sent it to town, and it
returned with a very high polish and of a
mottled colour like tortoise shell".

Byron even wrote a darkly witty drinking

poem as if inscribed upon it, “Lines
Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a
Skull”. The cup, filled with claret, was
passed around "in imitation of the Goths
of old", among the Order of the Skull that
Byron founded at Newstead, "whilst
many a grim joke was cut at its expense",
Byron recalled to Thomas Medwin.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 1822)

“A poet is a nightingale who

sits in darkness and sings to
cheer its own solitude with
sweet sounds.”
 Shelley was known as a radical in his poetry and in his
social and political beliefs.

 He abhorred the political establishment of his day and

felt a deep distrust of monarchy, the church, and the
law.

 Independent spirit and discontent with the values of

traditional education.

 All his poems are seeking a better world, a new life to

replace the old system and old corruptions.

 His best poems underpin the anti-tyranical stance with

an idealism which continually emphasizes the
importance of making a new world of love.
 Recurrent symbolism:
 The veil is a recurrent symbol in his poetry: reality
is hidden from humankind by a world of
appearances, transitory and misleading
 (Influence of Plato’s myth of the cavern)

 The cloud
 The skylark
 The wind of autumn: Frequently a symbol of a cleansing power

 They are emblems of a Platonically conceived

nature. The poet is capable of seeing beyond their
material shape and of enjoying the spiritual beauty
that natural elements embody.
 WORKS:

Ozymandias
Ode to the West Wind
To a Skylark
The Cloud
The Mask of Anarchy
Queen Mab: A Philosophical
poem (1813)
Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Queen Mab, by Henry Meynell

 From ‘To the Skylark’
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated
art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and
soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is
just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy
shrill delight...
(. . . )
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream
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.
(.. . )
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
JOHN KEATS (1795- 1821)

“With a great poet the sense

of Beauty overcomes every
other consideration, or
rather obliterates all
consideration”
 Keats’ ideas on IMAGINATION and BEAUTY:
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be
truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have
the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love[:] they
are all in their sublime, creative of essential
Beauty. (…) The Imagination may be compared to
Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.”

(From letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November, 1817)

 Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley,
with him poetry existed not as an instrument of
social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine but for
the expression of beauty.

 Beauty was Keats’ great passion and the main

object of his poems.

 He identified Beauty with Truth; Poetry had to be

the incarnation of Beauty (not the expression of
political ideals or a mode of didacticism).

 Keats considers that Beauty was everywhere and in

every object and he associates these objects with a
heightened emotional appeal: flowers, clouds, the
song of a bird, old objects and legends…
'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know.‘

From Ode on a Grecian Urn

 WORKS:
Sleep and Poetry
Endymion
The Eve of St Agnes
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Lamia
Hyperion
Ode to Psyche
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Indolence
La Belle Dame sans Merci, by John W. Waterhouse
 In conventional literary history, ’Romantic
Poetry’ has been considered an all-male
preserve.
 Women authors during the Romantic period
generally belonged to two categories:

 Women of letters who attempted to fulfill themselves

in their vocation

Joanna Baillie
Hannah More
Anna Seward
Elizabeth Moody
 Working women who sold their poetry with the help
of a middle-class patron.

Anna Barbauld
Anne Grant
Christian Milne
Charlotte Smith

Themes: domesticity, satire on poetic

conventions, verse letters, love poems.
Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against
Walking on an Headland Overlooking the
Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic
Is there a solitary wretch who hies
To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

 The Romantic conception of poetry
 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1789)

 The first generation of Romantic Poets

 William Blake (1757-1827)
 William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

 The second generation of Romantic Poets

 Lord Byron (1788-1824)
 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
 John Keats (1795-1821)

 Women Romantic Poets

 Watson, J. R. ed. English Poetry of the Romantic
Period 1789-1830. Burnt Mill: Longman Group,
1992 (2nd edition).
 Curran, Stuart. ‘Romantic poetry: why and
wherefore?’, in Curran, Stuart, ed. The
Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Dra. Sonia Hernández Santano
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez