ROMANTICISM: THE SECOND GENERATION

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
JOHN KEATS (1795-1822)

History of English Literature (by the French critic, Hyppolite Taine, 1863) only a few pages on Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley and Keats but a long chapter on Lord Byron, ”the greatest and most English of these
artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his
age than from all the rest together.”
Immense European reputation (Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Melville, Delacroix,
Beethoven, Berlioz) but (after his early appeal) acknowledged by very few in England (most notably by
Shelley)

„Second generation” (1810s): retrospectively we see the overlaps in their poetic style (rich poetic language;
elaborate forms, metaphors; classical allusions; fascination with Greece and the Mediterranean; cosmopolitan,
European context)
„Satanic School”: Byron and Shelley
„Cockney School”: Keats

GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824) LIBERTY; DETESTATION OF CANT

Byron is „mad, bad and dangerous to know” (Lady Caroline Lamb)

Trinity College, Cambridge (1805-1808) extravagant life

CAREER:
I. 1807-1812
Hours of Idleness (1807) conventional verses, pastime activity of a young aristocrat („It is highly improbable,
from my situation and pursuits hereafter, that I should ever obtrude myself a second time on the public”)
very harsh criticism from The Edinburgh Review („so much stagnant water”): provoked the writing of his first
important poem:
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) : uncompromising satire on contemporary literary life in the
couplet style of Pope; tactlessly ridiculing the famous contemporaries (incl. Scott, Wordsworth and Coleridge)
Crucial to Byron’s aesthetics; neoclassical tradition represents true poetry; the Lake Poets rejected entirely
„It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call „imagination” and „invention”, the two
commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more that
would furnish forth a modern poem.” (from Letters and Journals, 1819)
1809-1811: “Grand Tour” Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania and Greece

II. 1812-1816
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II: the travels and experiences of a pilgrim, who, sated with his past
life of sin and pleasure, finds distraction in his travels through Portugal, Spain, Greece and Albania.
dramatis persona: the Byronic hero
Byronic hero: Alien, mysterious, gloomy spirit, superior in his passions and powers to the common run of
humanity, whom he regards with disdain. He harbours the torturing memory of an enormous, nameless gilt
that drives him toward an inevitable doom. Isolated, self-reliant, pursuing his own ends according to his self-
generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural. Archrebel in a non-political form with a
strong erotic interest.
Literary descendants: Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), Captain Ahab (Moby Dick), Pushkin’s Onegin.
Forerunner of Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the hero who is not subject to the ordinary criteria of
good and evil.
Identification of Byron with his poetic persona: London alive with rumours of Byron’s private life: he is
practically ostracized from society: left England forever in 1816.

III. 1816-1818 (Swiss period)

1816: Met Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley in Geneva – remarkable moment in literary history
(Prometheus in the centre of discussions)
Childe Harold the final two Cantos (III-IV)
Manfred (1816-1817) verse drama (similarities with Goethe’s Faust)

III. 1818-1824 (Italian period)

Don Juan: satirical novel in verse (influenced Onegin; Bolond Istók, Délibábok hőse)
Picaresque
Doubt, scepticism
a panorama of contemporary life; attacks the sexually prudish, religiously orthodox and politically
conservative parties in England, Satirical realism
But now I’m going to be immoral, now
I mean to show things really as they are
Not as they ought to be (XII)

provoked an outrage as nothing in it is sacred, everything is reduced to the same materialistic level, everything
is profane (e.g. Canto I, Stanzas 192-197; Julia’s farewell letter, later upstaged with Juan’s vomiting
overboard)

Donna Julia’s letter (cf. Tatiana’s letter in Onegin)

They tell me 't is decided; you depart:
'T is wise -- 't is well, but not the less a pain;
I have no further claim on your young heart,
Mine is the victim, and would be again;
To love too much has been the only art
I used; -- I write in haste, and if a stain
Be on this sheet, 't is not what it appears;
My eyeballs burn and throb, but have no tears.

"I loved, I love you, for this love have lost

State, station, heaven, mankind's, my own esteem,
And yet can not regret what it hath cost,
So dear is still the memory of that dream;
Yet, if I name my guilt, 't is not to boast,
None can deem harshlier of me than I deem:
I trace this scrawl because I cannot rest --
I've nothing to reproach, or to request.

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,

'T is woman's whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart;
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.

"You will proceed in pleasure, and in pride,

Beloved and loving many; all is o'er
For me on earth, except some years to hide
My shame and sorrow deep in my heart's core;
These I could bear, but cannot cast aside
The passion which still rages as before --
And so farewell -- forgive me, love me -- No,
That word is idle now -- but let it go.

"My breast has been all weakness, is so yet;

But still I think I can collect my mind;
My blood still rushes where my spirit's set,
As roll the waves before the settled wind;
My heart is feminine, nor can forget --

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 To all, except one image, madly blind;
So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,
As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul.

"I have no more to say, but linger still,

And dare not set my seal upon this sheet,
And yet I may as well the task fulfil,
My misery can scarce be more complete:
I had not lived till now, could sorrow kill;
Death shuns the wretch who fain the blow would meet,
And I must even survive this last adieu,
And bear with life, to love and pray for you!"

Wordsworth on Don Juan: (Byron is a “monster … a Man of Genius whose heart is perverted”)
Byron on Don Juan: “˝I maintain that it is the most moral of poems; but if people won’t discover the moral,
that is their fault, not mine.”
Of the great contemporaries only Shelley is appreciative: “every word of it is pregnant with immortality”

Don Juan left unfinished by Byron’s untimely death in the fight for Greek Independence

Posterity:
Tom Stoppard: Arcadia (drama)
Musical settings of, or music inspired by, poems by Byron
Giuseppe Verdi - Il corsaro (1848) Opera in three acts
Giuseppe Verdi - I due Foscari (1844) Opera in three acts
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Manfred Symphony in B minor, Op.58 (1885)
Arnold Schoenberg - "Ode to Napoleon" (1942) for Voice and String Quartet
Ariella Uliano - "So We'll Go No More A'Roving" (2004)
Cockfighter (band) - "Destruction" (2005)
Leonard Cohen - "No More A-Roving" (2004)
(British black metal band) Cradle of Filth: The Byronic Man

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) LOVE; BELIEF IN THE PERFECTABILITY OF MAN

Like Blake, practically no impact on his contemporaries

radical nonconformist from a solidly conservative background; father:baronet and Whig MP
thorough grounding in the classics; interest in science (electricity, magnetism, chemistry, telescopes) and
radical political and philosophical ideas (Thomas Paine, William Godwin)
expelled from Oxford because of his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism “Every reflecting mind must allow
that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.”
Queen Mab (1813) first important work (institutional religion and codified morality are the roots of social
evil; prophesies that all institutions will wither away and humanity will return to its natural condition of
goodness and felicity)
Intellectual maturity: 1816-1822
Major influences: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Plato and Neoplatonism
1816 in Geneva with Byron: intellectual and creative collaboration
Mont Blanc (1816): “local” poem; major influence is Tintern Abbey; landscape: emblem of the human mind;
Shelley’s position about the creator: “awful doubt”, a feeling of awe for the power (sometimes frighteningly
destructive) evident in the natural world, mixed with skepticism as to whether it reveals a divine presence.

The Mask of Anarchy (1819) greatest poem of political protest in the language, satire medieval dream
allegory with surrealistic effects
Stanzas 34-63: a maid who has risen up to halt Anarchy, addresses the crowd, telling them of false and then of
true freedom; in the concluding section she calls on them to stand up for their rights using passive resistance:

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Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of an unvanquished war;
…
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.
…
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanqushable number;
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many, they are few.

Ode to the West Wind (October 1819) a month after The Mask of Anarchy; 5 sonnet-like verse paragraphs in
terza rima
Statement of faith in the ability of human beings to resist the oppression of church and state, and to realize
their power of self-determination; a call on the ‘pestilence-stricken multitudes’ to participate in the millennial
vision of ‘new birth’; the poem goes further than that: it insists on the primacy of the poet as the central
agency, the saviour-like prophet, who will awaken the masses to their potentials
… Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Prometheus Unbound (1818-19) lyrical drama, partly psychodrama, partly political allegory; several levels of
interpretations: political, scientific, psychological and spiritual; simultaneously external and internal
reflections
Prometheus: remaking of the poet-figure of the Ode to the West Wind; stands for the desire in the human soul
to create harmony through reason and love; when love and reason are united, evil is doomed

A Defence of Poetry (1821, publ. 1840)

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sound. …
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Adonais (1821) elegy on Keats’s death

Keats (Christ-like figure, doomed and neglected, suffering for the benefit of art) is lamented under the name
Adonais, Greek god of beauty and fertility;
Belief in Neoplatonic resurrection in the eternal beauty of the universe:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird,
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may prove
Which has withdrawn his being to his own,
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

Tragically early death on 7 July 1822 (sudden storm sunk their boat Don Juan/Ariel)
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POSTERITY:
William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Nobel were admirers of
his works.
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Roger Quilter, Samuel Barber, Ralph Vaughan Williams composed music based on his
poems.
Films: Gothic (directed by Ken Russell); Haunted Summer (dir. by Ivan Passer)

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) BEAUTY AND TRUTH

“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.” (Keats’s letter; 22 November
1817)

Influences: Dante, Spenser (Epithalamion, The Faerie Queene), Shakespeare, Milton, Byron
+ Influence of painting (Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Titian)
+ Influence of Hellenism (“religion of joy”)
Elgin marbles (Sonnet: On First Seeing the Elgin Marbles)
Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary
Homer

Apprenticed to a surgeon, medical studies but abandoned medicine for poetry

Rapidly deteriorating health; foreboding of death
1818: love for Fanny Brawne

ANNUS MIRABILIS: September 1818-September 1819

The Eve of St Agnes
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Lamia
Ode to Psyche
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Indolence
On Melancholy
Hyperion – The Fall of Hyperion

Distinctive qualities of his poems:

richly sensuous surface (all senses combine to give a total apprehension of an experience)
the poet totally identifies himself with the object he contemplates (almost loses his own identity cf. Ode to a
Nightingale)
slow-paced movement
melancholy in delight; pleasure in pain
imagination: often expressed in the combined metaphor of consummated love and death

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
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To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821, in Rome.

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.' (Keats remarked in1818)

"If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me -  nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but
I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd."   (Letter to Fanny
Brawne; February, 1820)

POSTERITY:
Two films about Keats's life are in pre-production as of July 2007: Bright Star (directed by Jane Campion), and
Negative Capability (directed by Daniel Gildark)
Tennyson, Yeats, Pre-Raphaelites (second in their “List of Immortals”)