Poetry PDF

1. Poetry.
pdf
Annagg
Literatura inglesa del siglo XIX
3º Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación

Universitat de València
Reservados todos los derechos.

No se permite la explotación económica ni la transformación de esta obra. Queda permitida la impresión en su totalidad.
POETRY
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Autobiographical tendency: narcissist self

• Faith in the self
• Nature as a reflection of the self
• Many romantic poets are engaged with the idea of French revolution. They are
supporter of rebellions and disorder. Just as they did with literature and
romanticism.
• Sublime: this is the time when first Gothic novels emerge
• Children = Innocence – Adults = Corruption

• 1780s-1830s (average period, periodization was invented to facilitate literature
teaching)
• Poetry of consciousness
• National identity
• Poetry of the self and nature
TWO generations:
1. Early Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge (Lake poets, influence of
Nature in their lives)
2. Late Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley, Keats
WILLIAM BLAKE 1757-1827

He had a very religious background; he was inspired by their spiritualism. He broke the
distinction between text and image. He was trained as an engraver when he was a boy.
He merges image and text (the visual and the verbal).
He also was influence by Emmanuel Swedenborgà the world was divided into two
entities (heaven and hell). Blake claimed that these two sides are contrary but
complementary. Songs of Innocence and of Experience are contrary but
complementary.
Innocence= heaven, childhood. Experience= industrial revolution affecting people, hell,
corrupted state of the human soul, corruption of society and of human being because
of industrial and social revolution.
It is a collection of 19+26 lyrics. 19 à songs of innocence; 26à Songs of experience
Influenced by the hymnological tradition (à SONGS of experience) seen through
musicality (alliterations, repetitions).
Also influenced by children’s literature in which children are the main characters. In
that period this kind of literature boosted very much.
Characteristics of his poetry:
® Musicality
a64b0469ff35958ef4ab887a898bd50bdfbbe91a-5101864
Introduction
® Quatrains
® Heroic stanza (abab)
® Iambic pentameters
® Rhyming scheme: 1, 4 – ababa; 2,3,5 – abcb
® A mission statement (declaracion de intencion)
® First lyric person: piper
First image: the cloud and the child, the world of innocence
®
® Lamb: religious reference, Jesus Christ or the world of innocence
® Meaning of the poem: The piper (=artists) got inspired by children and their
innocence and by nature (rural pen) to create their works.
® Children are inspirational muses
The first lyric person of the poem is the Piper who represents the poet itself (William
Blake) and also every other artist which needed to escape reality. These artists are
inspired by children’s innocence in opposition to the world’s corruption of that time.
Children are artists’ muse and they are referred to as Lambs, the religious image
related with the world of innocence, against the Tyger, who represented the world of
corruption. As seen in “The Tyger”. So, the Piper begins to play a song for a child he

saw during his walk through the woods. The child is a muse because he vanishes when
he achieves to inspire the Piper to write a thus produce literary works.
The Chimney Sweeper

® 1789, Songs of Innocence (Children still have got salvation)
® Child labor was very much discussed. In 1788 an Act was passed for the better
regulation of Chimney Sweeper. He reflects this topic in the poem
® Rhyme: aabb exept in irregular lines. Imperfect rhymes
® Two parts of the poem. First three stanzas and las t three stanzas
® Stanza 3: the vision marks the division between the first part and the second
® Tom cries when he got shaved because it symbolizes that his innocence is taken
away. He had his hair curled like the wool of a Lamb.
® Critic whit the role of religion: the church abuses of children promising a
restoration when they are death.
® There is still hope but in Songs of experience there is no redemption and no
salvation
It is about child’s labor. At that time, though they were only kids, children were forced
to work as Chimney Sweeper. There, they were taken away of their innocence by
shaving their hair curled as a lamb’s wool. The world of Innocence is in contrast with
the world of Experience (curled hair/shaved hair, naked & white/black coffins & soot).
One of the children a vision: they are all set free by an Angel who took them to
paradise. In here, they are again innocent and without necessity to work. BUT there is
STRONG CRITICISM AGAINST THE CHURCH because the Angel said they did not have to
worry about redemption if they’d been good boys by working hard and behaving as
they were expecting to do. (Resignation, Submission, Working). Corruption of Church.
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London
® Critic to lots of institutions
The first lyric person, who is the poet itself, is wandering through London and he
meets a load of people. Each of these people is in some way related to a particular
institution that is corrupted.
The Tyger
Lamb vs Tyger à Innocence vs Experience.
Did God, who made the Lamb, create the Tyger as well?
Was he satisfied and happy of you being created?
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Walking, listening and writing became one single thing. We can hear his steps through
the poems.
**His relationship with NATURE
Went to university and had a very wide background. Dorothy, hius sister, was a very
important person in his life. She did not receive the same education as him. They were

separated in their childhood but managed to gather again when adults. They had a
very strong tight. (=legame). He married his sister best friend.
Due to the education, his works were published while hers were not. She wrote
journals mostly about everyday life of her brother and her and the influence of nature
in her world.
1795à relevant year for Wordsworth because he met Coleridge. They became friends
and worked together. They wrote together Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other
Poems in 1802. Many critics argued that this work marked the beginning of the
Romantic era. They have 23 poems (4 Coleridge + 19 Wordsworth). Also, they worked
together with Robert Southey and were called the LAKE POETS because they were
inspired by the Lake District.
Wordsworth went to France inspired by the idea of the French Revolution.
At some point in their life both friends broke their relationship because they had
different ideals.
NATURE: safety, calm, relax, resting…
Wordsworth believe very much in first experience, impression and reaction, so nature
and childhood would be related with this stage of safety. So, for him the act of poetry
was an act of RECREATION. They were not first experiences. Writing poetry would be a
way of remembering, but not experiencing.
The joy of living a first experience is not possible to recreate because you will always
be leaving something behind.
159 lines on Blank Verseà unrimed iambic pentameters
Advantages of BLANK VERSE: if you want to express your thoughts and feelings you
don’t have to care much about the length of the poem and other metrics.

Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
1-24 (recreation of peace); 88-111; 114-159 (direct address to an interlocuterà his
siter Dorothy)
First experiences can only be experience once in life. When you remember about those
happy moments, however, you are not feeling the same as the first time. So, the same
is with poetry. When you are writing something you are remembering something and
thus not experience first experience feelings.
* He would make the Ballads available to all people by using a colloquial language of
rural English.
He died in 1850, but some revisions of his poems were published posthumously by his
wife.
The Prelude
It is an epic poem in length with no heroic events. The hero of this poem is the poet
itself.
It has no stanzas.
Spots of time: moments of epiphany (=revelation) of a different perception of the
world. The structure of the Spot of Time is à Setting – Isolating – Epiphany

First, the poet is setting the time and the scene, then he leaves the crowd. He is
isolating and the moment in which he gets REVELATION (epiphany)
It relates an experience of the poet’s past, when he was a child.
Published by his wife.
The memories he is recalling will never be as the first time he experienced them.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

As Wordsworth he received an education, but he was not a very good student as his
friend. He was quite of a rebel and quit university. He was friend with Robert Southey.
His addiction to alcohol and drugs will affect his personal life. He met with Coleridge
and became friend although their friendship soon ended.
Opium addiction: he was in contact with Thomas Sequency.
He is a much rhetorical poet with a rhetorical style.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In the second edition he modifies the language and makes it moderner, in the third
edition he added comments (=glosses) to the text. Some critics believed that these
glosses were the explanations of the poet, while others believed they were
explanations of some other poets/people.
Style: archaism (highly rhetorical language), he would favor the musical effect over the
plainness of the common speech (much typical of Wordsworth). He emphasizes
imagination and the rural world. In this poem there are also exotic elements, gothic
landscape, the sublime (finding pleasure which is not beautiful in the classical sense)

Divided into 7 parts/sections. Structured as a BALLAD. Rhyme ABCCB (quinces) and
ABCB (quatrains). Why a Ballad and not Blank Verse? à because he is telling a story
related to the past when stories were told orally.
Archaism: “ancient mariner”, “stoppeth”, “thy”
Through the punctuation he gave a lot of musicality to the poem.
The mariner is a kind of strange gothic figure that resembles to a ghost maybe due to
his physical description.
When he kills the albatross, the crew is against him and nature as well. Life in death
appears as ghostly character, the rest of the crew dies, and the Mariner is haunted by
the ghost. The mariner arrives at a port and finds someone that tells him he will be
saved if he continues to tell the story again and again.
Albatross=salvation: he broke the ice and took away the wind.
The killing of the albatross: corruption (?), religious meaning. In the glosses: there’s a

strong emphasis on religion. The albatross was a pious figure like Jesus Christ. So,
killing the albatross would mean killing the Son of God. Some other critics will say that
the albatross is a metaphor of salvation. More other critics claim that the albatross is
an example of the extension of the poem. [search for some explanation].
Kubla Khan: Or a Vision in a Dream

Was written under the effect of opium. There are many commonplaces in the poem.
SECOND GENERATION ROMANTIC POETRY

Lord Byron, Persey B. Shelley & John Keats
They died very young as a consequence of their lifestyle. They are going to be
themselves in their works. Nature is not going to be as relevant as in the first
generation. Indeed, they are against the first-generation poetry.
Volcano Tambora in Indonesia (5 April 1815) à climate change. A group of writers
(Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley and John Polidori) in 1860 gathered
together in Ireland in Vila Diodati in Genova. 1860 is the year without a summer. Mary
and Percy eluded together with the sister of her who had had an affair with Lord
Byron. So that summer they stayed inside that villa because of the Volcano. [à These
are the origins of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley had a dream]. They write horror stories.
Polidori wrote the Vampire.
VIDEO: The creature with no name. exaggeration. The monsters they had to face. Mary
believed in the power of poetry to save the world.
LORD BYRON
He is not going to be the poet of Nature as their predecessors, he is the poet of the
exaltation of the individual, more precisely of himself. He was married to Annabella
Milbank (she was a mathematician and had a daughter together Ada Lovelaceà the
precursor of computing).
He was a very adventurer character; he travelled a lot. He decided to go on a Grand
Tour (a custom of the wealthy family who travelled around exotic place in order to be
inspired by the culture and art of those places) and he got inspired by many of the
place he travelled to. We can see these inspirations in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage where,
in canto 3 he tells the story of Child Harold, a medieval character. In Canto 4 he tells
the reader about himself. Also, in this literary work we can see the BYRONIC hero, who
is not a standard hero but rather a hilarious character.
He was contacted to fight in the Greek war, he wanted to be remembered as an hero,
but finally died of an illness.
He considered earlier Romantic poets as archaic and also largely criticised their lure for
(= atracción hacia) Nature. On the contrary he was inspired by real people, places, and
events, and by his own persona and life experiences.
Don Juan
He is challenging the world and breaking boundaries. He is going to be mocking the
figure of Don Juan, which appears here as a weak character.
Structure of the poem à Mock epic where there is not an ordinary hero. In this poem
he is going to be seduced by women and not the other way round. Stanzas are called
Ottava Rima à Eight lines rhyming ab-ab-ab-cc. the last couple ‘cc’ is called Bathos,
used to make a summary of his ideas or to make a change of tone.
Iambic pentameter.
1st edition: there are 16 cantos. He published the first 2 cantos in 1819. The whole

work was published in series so that he could see the reaction of the readers. In this
case also, he could taste the reception of the readers, whether they considered it
scandalous or not. The first two cantos were published anonymously. In the first two
cantos he removed the dedication because they included critics about members of the
society of that time including the Lake Poets.
The cantos were addressed to high classes.
The form and the tone are not typical of a heroic epic but rather of this new type of
literary production.
PERCEY B. SHELLEY
HE RECEIVED AN EDUCATION BUT WAS EXPELLED FROM UVNIVERSITY BECAUSE he
wrote “the necessity of atheism”. He rejected Christianity and was for free love. He
was already married when he met with Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft. He believed in
atheism and was a radical thinker. In 1814 they met for the first time and in 1816 they
eluded.
Many of his poetry was published posthumously by Mary Shelley.
He believed in the power of poetry and in the figure of the poet as a thinker who
could guide the word. He also believes in poets as prophets who can change society.
In comparison to Byron is going to be a Platonic and Idealistic poet.
Ozymandias
Was not the most popular poet at the time of publication.
Horace Smith published a sonnet called the same way as this in the Examiner. It is
believed that the two poets made a contest: they met, decided about a topic and
wrote both a sonnet on the same topic.

The last five verses are just the same as in Horace’s poem, this means that they
probably are the key point that they decided to discuss.
Structure: it is a sonnet but not in the sense of Petrarchan tradition nor in
Shakespeare’s one. In this sonnet we have an Octet + a Sestet rhyming ababacdc +
edefef.
Main idea/topic of the poem: the poet meets a traveller, and the traveller tells a story.
The traveller founds a statue that is in pieces.
It represents the passing of time (sand in sand clocks)
Topic of the UBI SUNT à where go those who die?
MEMENTO MORI à remember we are all going to die
VANITAS VANITATIS à
Ephemeral power of politics and human being.
ART in general is bound to last forever. (We can still see the cold command even if a lot
of time have passed because the sculptor had done his work very well).
Ode to the West Wind

Odes are to praise somebody. In this poem it is praising the Wind.
Form: it has got different lines stanzas; in this case the poet has chosen to imply Terza
Rima. The whole of the poem has got 5 main parts, each part has got five stanzas with

4 triplets + 1 couplet. The rhyming scheme: aba-bcb-cdc-ded-ee (Iambic Pentameter).
Why an Ode to the WIND?
There is not a story, just the wind blowing and its effect. An invocation of the wind.
The wind is driving the dead leaves which are yellow and multitude. The wind is
transporting the leaves from season to season until his sister the Spring comes.
Why is he DESTROYER and PRESERVER? Because he is destroying and preserving life.
He carries life and death (the leaves).
The poet wants to merge with the wind. He wishes to be like the leaves and be carried
with the wind.
Shelley is always thinking philosophically about art.
JOHN KEATS
He had a very sad life. His parents died when he was very young, and his brother died
of tuberculosis as well as him. He was a sensitive poet influenced by Coleridge as we
can see in the Negative Capability. He wanted to become a doctor but then realised he
could better fulfil his life with literature and became a writer. He was in love with
Fanny Brown (unfulfilled love because they were not married). He wrote Bright Star to
her. Between 1819 and 1820 he wrote the most known Ode of English literary
tradition: the Romantic Odes.
He was influence by Coleridge, but this idea of Negative capability can be opposed to
the Egotistical Sublime (the presence of the poet in Nature) that we might find in
Wordsworth (the presence of the poet is everywhere, Nature is an extension of the
poet’s feeling). In contrast with this Keats introduces the idea of the Negative
Capability.

Even if he expresses his thoughts this is not going to be through his poetical person,
but through external elements. In la Belle Dame sans Merci these external elements
are 2 characters.
La Belle Dame sans Merci

It is based on another poem with the same name by Alain Chartier.
Total of 12 stanzas with Quatrains alternating iambic tetrameters & dimeters.
In stanzas he was influenced by Coleridge so he uses a very rhetorical language.
As in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner this is a Ballad telling a story of a lady relying
on the past.
The lady seduces him into the cave and then she abandoned him. SHE takes him into
to cave with the horse, she is riding the horse
This poem is an image of not corresponded love and sadness of the `poet himself. His
own personal rebellion against the pains of love. Keats’ voice was the Knight’s voice à
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY à he was in love with that girl but not corresponded.
Negative capability is the distance of the poet to the poem. He is describing his
personal feelings through another character, in this case the knight.
Femme Fatale: usually red long hair, often loose. The knight is slave to the lady. The
knight is seduced by the lady. The Femme Fatale enslaves the knight.

VICTORIAN POETRY
Victorian poetry is not a movement, but a period in literature. Instead, the Pre-
Raphaelites are a movement.
This is poetry published around the Victorian period. 1837-1901 is the spot of time.
From the 1820-30 we have a big explosion of the novel. This meant that even if poetry
is not the big genre of the century it is still going to be published by authors of that
period.
Victorian poets came from very different social classes. Also, many different genres
within the Victorian period. There will be new characters, like ordinary people like you
and I.
Poets published in magazines, journals, through songs. So, poetry is going to be much
more immersed in the society than we think. Scrap books à with middle/upper class
ladies writing their own poems.
Poetry was consumed by the popular classes.
In romanticism poets wanted to find an explanation through their poems, Victorian
poets are experimenting all different genres.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the most famous poet of that period. She began
writing at the age of 6 and had inspired lots of great writers like Emily Dickinson. She
tried every kind of Stanzas.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON 1809-1892
The lady of Charlotte is his most well-known poem.
He grew up in a wealthy family but then impoverished. He went to the same college as
Lord Byron. In 1827 he published his first literary work Poems by two Brothers.
At the university he met his best friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died very early and
unexpectedly from a disease. This shocked Alfred a lot, who was not able to write in a
long time. Afterwards, he wrote the most beautiful elegy in English literature, which is
In Memoriam A. H. H.
He received mixed reviews to Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In the 40s with Poems
collection of poems he becomes much more popular as a poet. In the 1850s he is also
nominated to the poet laureate. Nowadays they are the official poets of the kingdom,
and they usually write poetry for big occasion of the country. Carol Ann Duffy was
nominated Poet Laureate of UK. Nowadays it is Simon Armitage.

While being poet laureate, he wrote Idylls of the King going back to Arthurian literature
in order to praise the names of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. This idea of going to
the past in order to speak of the present is an important feature to Alfred’s literature.
He is influenced by the Romantics; the early poems have got the lyric intensity of
romanticism but also, he shows social concerns in the poem The Princess (1847). It
deals with the woman question. Its publication date coincides with the publication of
Jane Eyre. It is an example of how he is engaged with social concern.
The Lady of Shalott

It is a ballad divided into 4 main parts.
The first 2 parts show how the world see the lady while the last 2 part show how she
sees the world
Meaning: Ladies, do not involve in public sphere, do not go outside or you will end up
dead.
Other critics believe that the poet is dealing with the concealment of women to the
private sphere.
Another meaning is that the lady is an artist and when she got in touch with society as
an artist she got ignored because she is a woman.
Then, shall I stay within my own thinking without getting involved with the outside
world? What will happen if I do engage with public sphere? Will I get banned?
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING & ROBERT BROWNING

One of the biggest writers of the 19th century. She was included into the curricula of
high school on England. She is the most complete author as per genres even if she is
not so well known at the moment. She was candidate to poet laureate, but Alfred L. T.
took this place, maybe because he was a man and it was 19th century.
She experimented a hybrid form into a poem which she calls Aurora Leigh.
She didn’t go to university; she received an education at home even though she came
from a wealthy family. She criticized this in her works. She started writing at the age of
6, very young. She published her first book at the age of 12/14 The battle of Marathon
in a form of an epic poem.
She had health problems and thus spent half of her life under lockdown. She had an
influence in Emily Dickins, Oscar Wilde and most of the 2nd half century writers.
She got a virus which affected her lungs and died of pneumonia. She kept in touch with
the world while in lockdown through letters. She could be one of the pioneers of social
media because she kept in contact with the world from a self-isolated position.
An Essay on Mind and Other Poems was the first collection of poems which brought
her popularity. She challenged poetry and canons of that time. She represented her
philosophical thinking with long and complex lines.
1844 she published a collection of poetry which grasp the attention of Robert
Browning. Two years later they eloped to Florence and got married. In these two years
they exchanged a lot of letters of love and other topics. They had one son and he
published this correspondence when they both died.
Sonnets from the Portuguese is a collection of love poems dedicated to her husband.
For Victorian society being a woman and writing poems to your husband was the
perfect stereotype of the angel in the house.
She broke conventions. She wrote about many topics including slavery, politics and
what was going on at that time. She did this in isolation. A clear example of her
challenges is the poem, Aurora Leigh.

Aurora Leigh
First translation of this in Spanish is dated 2000. She was silenced as a writer in the 20th
century. It is a novel poem/unconventional epic about an ordinary girl from her
childhood to her adulthood (bildungsroman). It is written is BLANK VERSEà unrhymed
iambic pentameters. The protagonist is an orphan who lives in Italy. She has to face
with the strict rules of Victorian society.
She criticizes prostitution and emphasizes with fallen women as a victim of society. ´
The protagonist wants to become a writer, a well-known writer.
Here Elizabeth is challenging the genre by deconstructing it from a female perspective.
Which is not the same as Don Juan.
ROBERT BROWNING
He met William Macready and they attempted to write for the stage, but Robert was
not very successful.
Dramatic monologue à George Thurnbury 1857. Also known as Lyrical Monologues
and Monodramas.
Dramatic monologue share elements of the three main genres:
1. The lyricism of poetry (verses) Reader: will always need to feel gaps of
information. Implied auditor
2. Novel: we have a plot
3. Drama
My last Duchess
Alfonso II duke of Ferrara and his wife Lucrezia. He goes to the past to speak about the
present. It is a dramatic monologue. The story is set in Ferrara, Italian renaissance.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI & CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
It is the only movement we are going to see. Within this Brotherhood we are going to
see these two poets. The first is the one who created it while the second just got
influenced by them but never had she been part of it.
Pre-Raphaelites are composed by poets and painters (1848).
But what means its name? It refers to the period before Raphael the painter. They
were inspired by John Ruskin and its idea that poets should go to nature and find their
inspiration and models.
Nature is not going to be an expression nor an extension of the self as we have seen in
previous poets. Nature is not going to hold the sentiments, but it is the source of
sentiments and symbolism. There is going to be also a realistic approach in relation to
modern painter and John Ruskin.
Sr. Joshua Reynolds is a leading figure in the Royal Academy of Arts which was the one
who set the canon and standards at that time.
They were inspired by the perfection of the forms which is in line with the idea of the
classics.
The first three names (in Perusall) were influenced by Carlos Lasinio’s engravings which

was influenced by Giotto and Luskin.
Characteristics of the movement

1. Objectional and morally shocking
a. Topics: poverty, double standard, sexually explicit, standard and
challenging representation of religion
b. Approach to religion (realism)
c. Vivid sensuality: women are depicted as being very sensual with long
loose hair, etc.
2. Symbolism
a. Simplicity of nature provides symbols
3. Archaic atmosphere (also in romanticism so they go back o the past)
4. Female models (Elizabeth Siddal. She was the model for Rossetti’s paintings
and also his wife) gain lot of importance.
How started the Brotherhood?

It is a movement of the 19th century. Movement when we got a MANIFESTO
stating their intentions. Thus, in 1848 PRB was signing their works. Poets states
their idea of art in the journal The Germ in 1850. The subtitle of the journal is
Thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature and art. It clearly shows the influence
of Ruskin through the subtitle.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

He is the main figure of the movement. Born in London but son of an Italian scholar
Gabriel Rossetti and also the son of Frances Polidori. (Her brother has already
appeared in Villa Diodati together with Romantic poets).

He was very interested in Dante and Vida Nova. Up to him, the work of art should
be a complete work of perfection and art.
Ekphrasis in Double works is used in the history of art and literate to refer to those
works which refer to poetic or lyric description of a visual work. For example, we
are going to find poems both written and painted by himself as it is the case of The
blessed Damozel. First, he wrote the poem and then the painting.
The blessed Damozel
The woman in Paradise.
Seven stars of heaven, the angels. The two lovers cannot come together
Archaic atmosphere in the title à Damozel
They are separated by a frame which reminds to the retablos.
Both lovers are moaning for each other.
The poem was inspired by Dante’s Vita Nuova in which the man is moaning for the
love of the woman who is lost. Also, it is inspired by The Raven of Edgard Allan Poe
moaning for the same lost love.
It was first written in 1847, published in The Germ in 1850 and then published
again with the painting in 1871.
It is a BALLAD, again telling a story as we have already seen in previous poems.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
She had been educated at home by her mum Frances Polidori. Her dad died so her
mum had to provide for the family. This meant that she had to work as a governess
outside home and thus affected the life of Christina. In terms of poetry, she
experimented with forms, and she was a poet by imitation and one of the authors
she was influenced by was Elizabeth B. Browning.
In Goblin Markets we can see experimentation. John Ruskin criticized the
irregularity of her forms in this poem.
The first poems of Christina were published in the journal The Atheneum in 1848
but she became a successful writer only in the 60s with the Goblin Market
Goblin Market
Influenced by Gothic literature, children’s literature, fantasy and the biblical
tradition. It was illustrated by her brother Dante in a painting. She draws on natural
symbols for the symbolism of the poem. The main topics are temptation, sacrifice
and salvation. Topics which are normally related with religious poetry.
It tells the story of two sisters: Lora and Lizzie. they are tempted by goblins in a
market. They sell food and they are tempted by the food. They are so much
tempted that Lora wants to buy the fruit, but she hasn’t got any money with them.
The goblins asked for their golden lock instead of money. So, a lock of hair (purity)
is given in exchange of the forbidding fruit (temptation). Published in 1862 and
Alice in wonderland in 1865 à Alice has been inspired by Goblin Market.
Sisterhood & Sorority
Sexual connotations in the fruits that have double meaning, and they suck them.

Goblins are described in a very animalistic way.
The form of the poem was highly criticized because of irregularity and the rhythm
is like a nursery rhyme which here is tempting and directing the reading towards
the climactic moment in the poem. Before this moment there are lots of
repetitions to prepare the reader to the important moment.
Relations with the garden of Eden: Adam and Eva eating the prohibited fruit. In the
Bible à Temptation, sin, Jesus Christ sacrifice and redemption. So, the poem is
challenging religious tradition by the moment of REDEMPTION. Laura is redeemed
by the kiss of her sister. By the connection of the two female bodies Laura is
redeemed. Christina is challenging traditions by changing the tale of traditional
salvation and introducing the touching of two female bodies.
Fallen women in 19th century literature usually died or were redeem and brought
back into society. Also, men abused women by raping them. Women saved

other women.
FRUIT: Alice in wonderland was published 3 years later than this poem. In both
poems the girls are tempted by food. Some critics have interpreted this food as
drugs.

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1. Poetry.

Literatura inglesa del siglo XIX

3º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación

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• Autobiographical tendency: narcissist self

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WILLIAM BLAKE 1757-1827

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The Chimney Sweeper

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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Kubla Khan: Or a Vision in a Dream

SECOND GENERATION ROMANTIC POETRY

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Ode to the West Wind

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La Belle Dame sans Merci

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The Lady of Shalott

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING & ROBERT BROWNING

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Characteristics of the movement

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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

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The blessed Damozel

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