Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Family: born to a very wealthy family of country gentry (his grandfather was made a baronet in 1806, his father
Sir Timothy Shelley was a member of the House of Commons);
Education: Eton, University College, Oxford – expelled after 6 months because he co-authored and published a
pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’;
Eventful life:
- London: met Leigh Hunt, mixed in radical circles and eloped with Harriet Westbrook (sixteen-year-old
friend of one of his sisters);
- declared himself the faithful disciple of William Godwin; political writing and activity;
- eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to the continent in 1814;
- 1816: Geneva: friendship with Byron – found his true voice through a critical reading of Wordsworthian
ideas: ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’;
- Harriet drowned herself – he legalised his relationship with Mary;
- 1817: he was refused custody of his two children by Harriet; 1818 he went to exile to Italy never to return;
- he never settled, his life was a long series of journeys;
His death: he died in a sailing accident in 1822, his ashes buried in Rome;
His works: between 1818 and 1822 he wrote his best work in Italy: ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Prometheus Unbound,
The Cenci, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘Epipsychidion’, ‘Adonais’, ‘Hellas’, ‘The Triumph
of Life’, ‘A Defense of Poetry’. In his life few published works.
Critical reception: his poetry unfavourably received by his contemporaries (criticized on moral grounds); later
his poetry was criticized on aesthetic grounds (Eliot, Leavis, Tate, Auden); today he is recognized as one of
the greatest romantic conceptualizers (his achievement comparable to Blake’s)
His central themes: the ideal/absolute, mutability
The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies;
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning, that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright. –
Virtue, how frail it is! Friendship, how rare! Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But these though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call. -
ASIA
while yet his [Jupiter’s] frown shook Heaven, ay, when
His adversary [Prometheus] from adamantine chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is his master? Is he too a slave?
DEMOGORGON
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil:
Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no.
…
ASIA
Who is the master of the slave?
DEMOGORGON
If the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets. … But a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;
For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
***
PANTHEA
I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
– Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
(from Prometheus Unbound)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Family:
– he was the first of four children in the family of a prosperous coachman (his mother the daughter of a
respectable and wealthy middle class family – Frances Jennings);
– lost his parents early: his father died in 1804 – his mother re-married: children were looked after by the
grandparents and later by guardians; his mother died of tuberculosis in 1810;
Schools:
– Enfield, the Rev. John Clarke’s school (1803-1811);
– 1811: apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon;
– 1815-1816: Guy’s hospital; eligible to practice as apothecary, physician, or surgeon;
His poetry:
– first attempts at the age of 19; influence of Spenser (early poetry mawkish, sentimental);
– other influences: Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt;
– his thoughts on poetry (documented in his letters) much in advance of his practice;
– this might explain his rapid development from the Autumn of 1818 (between this time and AugustSeptember 1819 he composed almost all of his greatest poems);
– biographical background: August 1818 he had to come back from a walking tour because of the first
signs of tuberculosis; spent the next months nursing his brother who died of tuberculosis in December;
1818 met Fanny Brawne, engagement in 1819 – their love could not be fulfilled because of his illness;
– 1820: he began to spit blood – ultimate despair ended his poetry (travelled to Rome where he died in
1821 – buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery)
Some of his most famous poems: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Lamia’, ‘La
Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘When I Have Fears’, the Hyperion fragments
The nature of his poetry:
– his version of Wordsworth’s naturalistic humanism; a sense of tragic acceptance;
– unparalleled detachment, disinterestedness: in a letter to his brothers George and Tom he talks about a
Negative Capability: a quality ‘which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative
Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason –.’
Victorian Poetry
The times were changing:
- By the mid thirties almost all the great Romantics died (Wordsworth alone survived)
- 1832: the first Reform Bill – changes in the reactionary politics
- 1837: the accession of Queen Victoria who ruled England until 1901
- A new generation of poets emerged: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Family background:
- born in Somersby (Lincolnshire) to George Clayton Tennyson, a clergyman: unhappy home
environment
- starts writing poetry early: Poems by Two Brothers (1827)
Education:
- educated at home and in a local grammar school
- 1827: Trinity College, Cambridge – happiest period of his life
- friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam: a very intense emotional experience
- 1830: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical – uneven quality but this volume contained “Mariana”
- 1831: Tennyson’s father dies – he has to leave Cambridge without taking his degree
Career:
-
1832: Poems – contains “The Lady of Shalott”, “A Dream of Fair Women”, “The LotosEaters”, “Mariana in the South” – very unfavourable reception
1833: Hallam dies of an apoplexy in Vienna: “I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my
life so that I desired to die rather than to live.” – refuses to publish anything for ten years
poems inspired by Hallam’s death: “Tithonus”, “Ulysses”, “Morte d’Arthur”, “Break, break,
break”, most important: In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
1837: engagement with Emily Sellwood but in 1840 he broke off the engagement
1842: Poems – very good reviews: Edgar Allen Poe: “I am not sure that Tennyson is not the
greatest of poets.”
1847: The Princess – his first attempt at a long narrative poem containing “Come down, O
maid” and “Tears, idle tears”
1850: In Memoriam A.H.H. published; soon afterwards he married Emily Sellwood
1851: made Poet Laureate
1853: the Tennysons move to Farringford house on the Isle of Wight
1859: Idylls of the King – his most ambitious poetic enterprise
1874-82: dramatic writing with little success
1883: he was made Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Family background:
- born in Cumberwell, London as the first and only son of a clerk in the Bank of England
- father interested in art, scholarship and poetry, owned a library of 6,000 books
- affectionate family atmosphere
Life and career:
little formal education – acquiring an unconventional range of knowledge from his father’s
library
Incondita: his first volume of poetry written at the age of 12
at the age of 14 Shelley's influence
1833: Pauline
1835: Paracelsus; 1840: Sordello – acquires a reputation for obscurity
friendship of William Charles Macready – theatrical writing
1841-46: Bells and Pomegranates – a series of 8 pamphlets mostly containing the plays, but
also Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (containing “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess”)
1845-46: courtship of Elizabeth Barrett, elopement to Italy (Pisa, later Florence)
1849: Robert Wiedemann Browning born
1855: Men and Women (fifty dramatic monologues)
1861: death of his wife
1862: settled in London
1864: Dramatis Personae,
1868-69: The Ring and the Book - Browning is famous
The dramatic monologue:
- objectivity aimed at;
- in the advertisement to Dramatic Lyrics: the poems are ‘though for the most part Lyric
in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many
imaginary persons, not mine.’
- an imaginary person addressing an audience and involuntarily revealing his own self
(the speakers are typically frustrated, corrupt, weak, unsuccessful men: failed questers,
mediocre artists)