REVIEW OF ENTIRE COURSELecture 32

Romantic period

• Shifts in the view of nature and poetry as well as role of poet.

• From “imitation” of human nature, the major function becomes the expression of the poet’s emotion.

• The relation of the poem to the poet is more significant than its relation to its audience.

• The language of the ordinary is preferred over the artistic style of the previous century.

Romantic period

• The extension of horizon was social as well as chronological.

• Primitive and heroic societies become more and more objects of interest.

• People living outside urban gentility are regarded as proper subject matter for poetry.

• Wordsworth, “humble and rustic life was generally chosen because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better

Romantic period

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 state of greater simplicity, and consequently, can be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.”

Romantic period

• The romantics moved beyond the polished life of the men in cities and their sensibilities, to explore ballads and folklores in literature.

• New political and social ideas also shaped new beliefs; the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and notions in psychology all played their part.

• The poem becomes an organic whole and Coleridge is the first romantic poet to

Romantic period

emphasize it and discussions of “propriety” and “rules” become irrelevant.

• The poem refer back to the poet out of whose experience it is generated rather than forward to the audience.

• The romantic poet is isolated from society, and desires to escape from his loneliness not by human companionship but by discovering man through external nature.

Romantic Poetry

• William Wordsworth

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• John Keats

• Percy Bysshe Shelley

William Wordsworth

• Poetry for him was the record of the state of mind which the poem recorded.

• A poet for him was a man of unusual emotional sensibility, whose emotions were later recollected and produced an awareness of human and universal significance.

• Tintern Abbey reveals the development of his attitude to nature.

S. T. Coleridge

• He displays a romanticism quite different from Wordsworth; he combines the meditative and the magical.

• In Ancient Mariner he presents a symbolic adventure in which the handling of visual detail, the selection and ordering of the incidents, the manipulation of the meter, the control and the deliberate varying of the mood and tone, and the combination of the familiar and the exotic

S. T. Coleridge

combine to produce a powerful poem.• Kubla Khan is the most perfect example of

what might be called the purely magical strain in Coleridge’s poetry.

• The poems that were studied included “The Ancient Mariner” & “Kubla Khan”.

P. S. Shelley

• Shelley’s political and social hopes were increasingly associated with his transcendental view of the universe.

• There is a visionary integrity and a rhetorical force in his poetry.

• The poems that were studied included “Ode the West Wind” & “Ode to a Skylark”.

John Keats

• He is a romantic in his relish of sensation, his feeling for the Middle Ages, his Hellenism, his conception of the role of the poet, but made his own synthesis.

• The poems that were studied were: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale” & “Ode to Melancholy”.

Victorian Period

Victorian Poetry

• The Victorian poetry echoes the romantic sense of isolation; the poet is cut off by private grief from the world.

• Tennyson worried about God and Nature and man; about modern science and its effect on belief; and about the meaning of life.

• In some of his poems, the theme is an abiding sense of personal loss and overwhelming grief.

Alfred Tennyson

• Tennyson’s poetry renders a mood rather than to explore it. the images move outward, to create a generalized mood, rather than inward, to build up a more complex meaning within the poem.

• The poems that were studied included “Break, Break, Break”, “Tears, Idle Tears” and “St. Agnes Eve”.

Robert Browning

• He broke away from the handling of sensory images and brings back a colloquial vigor.

• He is known for his dramatic monologues; the ability to explore characters argumentatively.

• The poems that were studied included “A Grammarian’s Funeral” and “My Last Duchess”.

Mathew Arnold

• He is the true voice of the sensitive Victorian intellectual brooding over inevitable loss of faith and the meaning of life.

• Some elements of his poetry are: 19th C Hellenism, romantic interest in folk tale and legend, the preference for solitary meditation in evocative surroundings.

• His poems included “Dover Beach”, “Last Word” & “Growing Old”.

Modernism

Modernism & Symbolist Movement

• In the 20th C, the Symbolists had a more revolutionary effect and their influence was absorbed in a more radical manner.

• The French Symbolist Movement shared the interest of the Imagist Movement in emphasizing clear and precise images, elimination of word that did not contribute, and a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity.

Modernism

• Modernism in literature reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style.

• It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it.

Modernism & T.S. Eliot

• T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a foundational text in modernism. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative (narrative challenging traditional conventions & calling attention to itself to convey meaning to an audience). The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images.

Modernism & T.S. Eliot

• The reader has to make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation; this construction of elusive meaning is essential to modernism.

William Butler Yeats

• The imagery in Yeats’ poetry is arranged in pairs of contrasts: man and Nature, the human world and fairy world, the transient and the eternal, are paired against each other.

• He was fascinated by both Irish legend and the occult.

• His poems included “Easter 1916”, “The Rose Tree”, “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium” & “Wilde Swoone at Coole”.

W. H. Auden

• Auden has shown himself inventive and exploratory.

• His ability to make arresting verse out of informal observation or a confession, combine to make him one of the most continuously interesting of modern poets.

• His poems included “The More Loving One” & “As I Walked Out One Evening”.

Dylan Thomas

• His breathless and daring imagery, his compound adjectives, suggested a liberating verbal energy.

• His poems included “Death Shall Have No Dominion” & “Clown in the Moon”.

Philip Larkin

• His poetry is often seen as typically ambivalent with their prolonged debates with despair and the energy of their language and form which give them transcendent beauty.

• His poems included “The Whistsun Weddings” & “An Arundel Tomb”.