Industrial Revolution,
Romanticism, and individual
consciousness
• We saw how with the Scottish literary
revival looked for the authentic plowman
poet who performed and consolidated a
Scottish identity and created a folk identity
for a Anglo-American audience precisely at
a moment of social change (industrial,
political, and cultural).
Industrial Revolution,
Romanticism, and individual
consciousness
• With William Blake we see a similar
attention to these changes
• In Blake’s time, changes in childhood,
instruction, led to new modes of instruction
for children (similar to Wollstonecroft’s
concern for the education of women there
was beginning thought on the education of
children and children as having special
developmental needs.
William Blake
• Songs of Innocence
and of Experience
• “Shewing the two
contrary states of the
Human Soul”
• mostly composed
during 1789-94 in
1818 assembled an
authoritative print of
the book
Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
• An attempt to
articulate the changes
of individual
consciousness
• via antithesis
• in the context of
modern England
Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
•
•
•
•
A scene of instruction
mother and child
reading
tree of knowledge
Blake v. Isaac Watts (1715)
Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
• The Little Black Boy
Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
• The Ecchoing Green
Songs of Innocence and of
Experience
Holy Thursday
Poison Tree
• Psychology of guile
and deception
London
• Social Portrait of city
mentality
Sick rose
• Sexual secrecy
• invisibility
William Wordsworth
• 1770-1850
• born in the Lake
District in Northern
England
• Cambridge Educated
• 1790s becomes a
“fervant democrat” but
cools off of
revolutionary politics
William Wordsworth
• Meets Coleridge in the
1790s begins
collaboration that
would revolutionize
English poetry
• Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• opens with “The Rime
Ancient Mariner” and
closes with “Lines
Written above Tintern
Abbey”
William Wordsworth
• Most great poetry
written between 17981807
• 1843 named Poet
laureate
William Wordsworth
• The world is too much
with us
• Steamboats, Viaducts,
and Railways
Wordsworth’s double poetic
agenda
• from “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads”
• I have said that poetry
is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its
origin from emotion
recollected in
tranquillity:
• 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.
Wordsworth’s double poetic
agenda
• Observe that this is a reaction against enlightenment rationality
• Poetry is not about form or reason or controlled beauty or
proportion but spontaneous emotion
• and a kind of contemplation that reproduces that emotion
• revolution is one of the imagination
• social appeal to a new language and purpose for poetry.
•
Examples
in
the
poems
“I wander’d lonely as
a cloud”
• 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
Strange Fits of Passion
• In one of those sweet
dreams I slept,
• Kind Nature's gentlest
boon!
• And all the while my eyes
I kept
• On the descending moon.
• My horse moved on; hoof
after hoof
• He raised, and never
stopped:
• When down behind the
cottage roof,
• At once, the bright moon
dropped.
• What fond and wayward
thoughts will slide
• Into a Lover's head!
• "O mercy!" to myself I
cried,
• "If Lucy should be dead!"
Tintern Abbey
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
» These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
Tintern Abbey
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Tintern Abbey
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish
men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
Second part of the agenda
•
• “The language of
•
prose may yet be well
•
adapted to poetry… •
and no essential
•
difference”
•
•
• natural subjects in
•
states of excitement
Solitary Reaper
Will no one tell me what she sings?Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
• That has been, and may be again?
• .
Second part of the agenda
•
• “The language of
•
prose may yet be well
adapted to poetry… •
and no essential
•
difference”
•
• natural subjects in
•
states of excitement •
Solitary Reaper
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden
sang
As if her song could have no
ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;-I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill
• The music in my heart I bore,
• Long after it was heard no more.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• 1772-1834
• Wordsworth’s brilliant
collaborator
• advocate of the power
of the imagination, of
the mind as creative in
perception
On the Imagination (477)
• The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or
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 eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as
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 recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet
still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.
On Fancy (477-8)
• FANCY, on the contrary, has no other
counters to play with, but fixities and
definites. 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. But equally with the ordinary
memory it must receive all its materials
ready made from the law of association.
Kubla Khan
• The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of
great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's
own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than
on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
• In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had
retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the
Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a
slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects
of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading
the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's
Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built,
and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground
were inclosed with a wall.''
Kubla Khan
• The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at
least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid
confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to
three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which
all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production
of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or
consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have
a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper,
• instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At
this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business
from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to
his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though
he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport
of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered
lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the
surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without
the after restoration of the latter!
Kubla Khan
• Then all the charm
•
Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair
•
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
•
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awile,
•
Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes-•
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
•
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
•
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
•
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
•
The pool becomes a mirror.
• Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has
frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been
• originally, as it were, given to him. : but the to-morrow is yet to come.
• As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very
different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of
• pain and disease.
John Keats
• 1795-1821
• son of a London
stableman
• took up poetry at 18
• studied medicine
• 1819 was producing
great works and
gaining recognition
• Becomes ill with
consumption
• Dies in Rome in
search of health
George Gordon, Lord Byron
• 1788-1824
• most popular and dashing
of Romantic figures
• created mythic hero
• Byronic hero alien,
mysterious, gloomy,
superior
• self-reliant rebel, exile
• sexual scandals follow
him
• dies in Greece fighting the
Turks
Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 1792-1822
• radical nonconformist
always taking up radical
causes
• Harriet Westbrook
• Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin flees to France
with her
• a life of exile
• Dies in boating acccident
in Pisa
Ozymandias
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
• 1793 - 1835
• precocious daughter of
Liverpool merchants
• died at 41
• very popular
• known for her pieces
that became standard
recitation pieces
Casabianca
• The boy stood on the burning
deck
• Whence all but he had fled;
• The flame that lit the battle's
wreck
• Shone round him o'er the
dead.
• Yet beautiful and bright he
stood,
• As born to rule the storm;
• A creature of heroic blood,
• A proud, though child-like
form.
• The flames rolled onhe would
not go
• Without his Father's word;
• That father, faint in death
below,
• His voice no longer heard.
• He called aloud'say, Father, say
• If yet my task is done?'
• He knew not that the chieftain
lay
• Unconscious of his son.
Casabianca
• 'Speak, father!' once again he
cried,
• 'If I may yet be gone!'
• And but the booming shots
replied,
• And fast the flames rolled on.
• And shouted but once more
aloud,
• 'My father! must I stay?'
• While o'er him fast, through sail
and shroud,
• The wreathing fires made way.
• Upon his brow he felt their
breath,
• And in his waving hair,
• And looked from that lone post
of death
• In still yet brave despair.
• They wrapt the ship in
splendour wild,
• They caught the flag on high,
• And streamed above the gallant
child,
• Like banners in the sky.
Casabianca
• There came a burst of thunder
sound
•
The boyoh! where was he?
• Ask of the winds that far around
• With fragments strewed the
sea!
• With mast, and helm, and
pennon fair,
• That well had borne their part
• But the noblest thing which
perished there
• Was that young faithful heart.
• Notes:
•
1.Young Casabianca, a boy
about thirteen years old, son of
the admiral of the Orient,
remained at his post (in the
Battle of the Nile), after the
ship had taken fire, and all the
guns had been abandoned; and
perished in the explosion of the
vessel, when the flames had
reached the powder.