BBL 3102
 INTRODUCTION TO THE
HISTORY OF
THE ENGLISH LITERATURE
 WEEK
8
 Introduction
 Romantic
poetry
• William Wordsworth
• S.T. Coleridge
• G.G. Byron
• P.B. Shelley
• John Keats
• William Blake
English
Romanticism begins in 1798 with
the publication of Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ends
in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death.
William Blake and Robert Burns also
belong to this literary genre, though they
live prior to the Romantic period.
English Romanticism is a revolt of the English
imagination against the neoclassical reason. The
French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English
Industrial Revolution exert great influence on
English Romanticism. The romanticists express a
negative attitude towards the existing social or
political conditions. They place the individual at
the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s
Byronic Hero. The key words of English
Romanticism are nature and imagination. English
Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the
greatest English writers. They argue that poetry
should be free from all rules.
 The
romantic period is an age of poetry.
Wordsworth and Coleridge are the most
representative writers. They explore new
theories and innovate new techniques in
versification. They believe that poetry could
purify individual souls and society.
 For further study of their literary theory, please
refer to Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical
Ballads & Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.
 Wordsworth
and Coleridge were known as
Lake Poets because they lived and knew one
another in the last few years of the 18th century
in the district of the great lakes in
Northwestern England.
Other greatest Romantic poets are: John
Keats, P.B. Shelley and G. G. Byron and
William Blake.
Feminist works
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman in 1792.
Gothic novel is a type of romantic fiction that
predominates in the late 18th century and continues
to show its influence in early 19th century. Its
principal elements are violence, horror, and the
supernatural. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary
Shelley and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by
Ann Radcliffe are masterpieces of English gothic
novel.
English fiction gropes its way amidst the
overwhelming Romantic poetry. It revives its
popularity in the hands of Jane Austen & Walt
Scott.
Walt Scott is noted for his historical novel based on
Scottish history and legends. He exerted great
influence on European literature of his time.
Jane Austen is the first and foremost English
women novelist. Following the neoclassical
tradition, she is unsurpassed in the description of
uneventful everyday life.
Essayists in English Romanticism
Essayists
Representative works
William Hazlitt
Familiar essays
Charles Lamb
Essays of Elia; Tales
from Shakespeare
Coleridge
Biographia Literaria
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth is the
most representative
poet of English
Romanticism. He was
born into a lawyer’s
family in 1770 at
Cockmouth,
Cumberland. His
parents died when he
was very young.
He was taken care of by his relatives. He got his
education at the Grammar School of Hawkshead
and then at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
He was a worshipper of nature from his
childhood. He frequently visited places of
beautiful scenery. A walking tour of the Swiss Alps
heightened his addiction to nature.
He had great sympathy with the French
Revolution. He paid 2 visits to France, during the
second visit he fell in love with Annette Vallon,
who bore him a daughter.
Wordsworth was totally disillusioned by the
Jacobin dictatorship and the French invasion of
other European countries. He became conservative
in politics. He was labeled as “negative Romantic
poet” by Karl Marx and was severely criticized by
Byron.
In 1795 he and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth
settled down in Racedown, Dorsetshire. In 1797 he
made friends with Coleridge. The three persons
became “three people with one soul” in literary
history.
Legend has it that Wordsorth and his sister lived a
kind of incestuous life during this period. Dorothy
helped Wordsworth turn his eyes to “the face of
nature” and “preserved the poet in him”. She
served as Wordsworth’s confidante and inspirer.
As Wordsworth put it in his poem:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.
In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published
their Lyrical Ballads. In 1798 and 1799, he made a
tour around Germany. Upon his return to England,
he and his sister moved to Dove Cottage in
Grasmere, the most beautiful place in the Lake
District. Coleridge & Robert Southey lived a
stone’s throw from their dwelling place. The three
poets came to be known as Lake Poets.
In 1802, Wordsworth got married to Mary
Hutchingson. In 1813, he got a sinecure job as
distributor of stamps.
In 1842, he received the government
pension and in the following year, he
succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate.
He died at Rydal Mount in 1850 and was
buried in the Grasmere churchyard.
 Wordsworth’s
fame lies chiefly in his short
poems. His short poems fall into 2 categories:
poems about nature and poems about human
life.
 He is a “worshipper of nature”. It is nature that
gives him “strength and knowledge full of
grace”.
His best known poems of nature include: I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Tintern Abbey,
To the Cuckoo, My Heart Leaps up, To a
Butterfly, An Evening Walk, & The Sparrow’s
Nest.
His best known poems about human life
include: Lucy Poems, The Solitary Reaper
and The Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, &
To a Highland Girl.
Wordsworth wrote many sonnets. His famous
sonnets are: Earth Has Not Anything to Show More
Fair, On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,
& Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of
Switzerland.
His best known long poem is The Prelude. In this
poem Wordsworth analyses the growth of his
poetic genius during his childhood and youth, and
recalls the lessons he owes to nature.
Wordsworth’s greatest contribution to English
literature is his poems and his Preface to The
Lyrical Ballads.
Though The Lyrical Ballads is known as the
collaborated work of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
all the poems but one (The Rime of The Ancient
Mariner) are written by Wordsworth. Most of his
most quoted poem are taken from this collection.
 Wordsworth’s
Preface (1800) to Lyrical
Ballads is the manifesto of English
Romanticism. It is “one of the revolutionary
works of criticism, helping usher in the
Romantic Age in literature” (Dutton, 1984:50).
 He is primarily concerned to justify the kinds
of his poems which he had contributed to
Lyrical Ballads.
 Definition
•
of a poet
He ( poet) is a man speaking to men: a man,
it is true, endowed with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness,
who has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than
are supposed to be common among mankind.
Creative process of authentic poetry
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling: it takes its origin from emotion recollected
in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by
a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually
disappears, and an emotion, kindred (similar) to
that which before was the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does
itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood
successful composition generally begins……
Subject matter & poetic language
The principal object…was to choose incidents and
situations from common life, and to relate or
describe them, throughout, as far as was possible
in a selection of language really used by men , and
at the same time, to throw over them a certain
coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented in an unusual aspect……
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions of
the heart find a better soil in which they can attain
their maturity……
The language, too, of these men has been adopted
(purified indeed from what appear to be its real
defects, from all lasting and rational causes of
dislike or disgust) because such men hourly
communicate with the best objects from which the
best part of language is originally derived.
 Wordsworth
is the representative poet of
English romanticism
 Wordsworth’s poetry is distinguished by the
simplicity and purity of his language.
 Wordsworth’s theory on versification has
exerted profound influence on later poets.
So, What is a Poet in Romantic Poetry?
• According to Wordsworth, “He is a man speaking to
men.”
• The speaker is an ordinary man, a democratic
concept.
• The speaking in lyrical poetry is a passionate
speaking from the heart.
• It seems to be more of an “overhearing” – as if we are
privy to a private conversation or someone speaking
to himself.
• A language of the heart
• According to Keats, “What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be the truth whether it existed before or
not.”
 Much
of the literature of this time embraced
nature
 However, the Romantics prized experiences of
beauty and majesty that could be found in
nature.
 According to Wordsworth, he “considers man
and nature as essentially adapted to each other,
and the mind of man as naturally a mirror of
the fairest and most interesting properties of
nature.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 Coleridge
was born into a clergyman’s family
in 1772. He was a great genius. At the age of
six, he had read the Bible, Robinson Crusoe
and Arabian Nights. He was a mentally
precocious boy, full of fantasy and dreams in
his mind. During his Cambridge years, he
made friends with Charles Lamb, the great
essayist of English Romanticism.
But the campus life bored him. He ran away
from the university and enlisted in the army
but discharged after a few months and he
returned to Cambridge. He joined Robert
Southey in a utopian plan of establishing an
ideal democratic community (named
Pantisocracy) in America. The plan resulted in
nothing but his marriage to Sara Fricker,
which turned out to be an unhappy marriage.
In 1797 he began his friendship with
Wordsworth. In 1798 they published The
Lyrical Ballads.
In 1798 he traveled to Germany with Wordsworth
and began to take to Germany philosophy. Upon
his return to England, he became addicted to
opium with a view to relieving his headache. He
quarreled seriously with Wordsworth in 1810.
Though they were reconciled to each other later,
their friendship had never reached its former
intimacy.
In his later years, he turned conservative and
resorted to theology for his spiritual support.
 Demonic
poems
• The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner
• Kubla Khan
• Chtristabel
 Conversational
poems
• Frost at Morning
• Dejection: An Ode
 Essays
• Biographia Literaria
• Lectures on
Shakespeare.
 It
is Coleridge’s contribution to The Lyrical
Ballads. It tells us a strange story in ballad
meter. Three guests are on their way to a
wedding party when an ancient mariner
stopped one of them. The mariner tells of
his adventures on the sea. When his ship
sails towards the South Pole, an albatross
comes through the snow-fog and alights
on the rigging.
The mariner shoots at it quite thoughtlessly.
Then misfortune befalls. The whole crew, with
the only exception of the old mariner, die of
thirst as punishment for the act of
inhospitality. The spell breaks only when the
mariner repents his cruelty.
The poem is famous for its beautiful cadence
and wonderful imagery. The combination of
the natural and supernatural, the ordinary
and extraordinary makes it one of the
masterpieces of Romantic poetry.
 During
an illness in 1797 Coleridge retired to a
lonely farmhouse. One day he fell asleep as he
was reading a passage about Kubla Khan from
Pilgrimage by Purchas. While dreaming he
composed a poem about 200 or 300 lines. On
waking he began to write down the poem. But
he was interrupted by a person on business
from Porlock and the vision faded. He left a
fragment of only 54 lines and never finished
the poem.
 It
tells a story of a sorcerer who casts a spell
over a pure young girl. It is written in ballad
meter. Its mysterious atmosphere and the
Gothic horror may freeze our blood.
 It
is Coleridge’s most influential book of
literary essays. The main ideas can be summed
up as follows.
 A poem should not be judged as a mirror of
truth—as we judge science--but as a thing in
itself, almost as a living organism.
Poets are born and not made. Poems should be
judged only according to their own lights and not
according to any established precept or precedent.
Coleridge envisages that the poet as a man of great
integrity as well as of special gifts, producing
poems which would offer profound insights into
man’s imaginative, psychological, and ultimately,
moral being.
 Coleridge
is a great Romantic poet. His poetic
imagination is unique. He is fond of unusual
and supernatural things.
 Coleridge is one of the first critics to pay close
attention to language of poetry. He maintains
that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure
“through the medium of beauty”.
George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
 Byron
was born into an aristocratic family. His
father is a profligate. His mother was a
passionate Scotswoman.
 He was born with a clubfoot, which made him
feel sore and unhappy all his life.
 He was a radical supporter of worker’s
movement.
In 1811, Byron took seat in the House of
Lords. He made vehement speeches to attack
English government’s policy for the Luddites
(workers who destroy machinery).
Byron left England for ever in 1816.
He first visited Switzerland, where he made
acquaintance with Shelley. He wrote Sonnet on
Chillon in Switzerland.
Then he moved to Italy, where he finished Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage and wrote his masterpiece
Don Juan.
Upon hearing the news of the Greek revolt against
the Turks, Byron plunged himself into the struggle.
The Greeks made him commander in chief of their
forces in 1824. Due to months’ hard work under
bad weather, he fell ill and died. The Greek people
mourned over his premature death.
Byron was regarded as the “satanic poet” by the
English government when he died. It was not until
1969 that a white marble memorial to Byron was
erected in Westminster Abbey.
Nowadays his name is put in the Poets’ Corner.
Long Poems or
Collections
 Hours of Idleness
 English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers
 Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage
 Don Juan
 Best
known single
poems in China
 When We Two Parted
 She Walks in Beauty
 The Isles of Greece
(from Don Juan)
 Sonnet on Chillon
 Byron’s
poetry is based upon his own
experience. His heroes are more or less
pictures of himself. His hero is known as
“Byronic Hero”, a proud, mysterious rebel
figure of noble origin. For such a hero, the
conflict is usually one of rebellious individual
against outworn social systems and
conventions.
The figure is, to some extent, modeled
on the life and personality of Byron.
Byron’s poetry exerts great influence
on the Romantic Movement. He stands
with Shakespeare and Scott among the
British writers who exert great influence
over the mainland of Europe.
P. B. SHELLEY (1792-1822)
 Shelley
was born into an affluent family at
Sussex. He got a very good school education,
first at Eton and then at Oxford.
 In 1811, while he was still a student at Oxford,
he wrote a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism,
repudiating the existence of God.
He was expelled from Oxford for his seditious
pamphlet. Then he eloped with Harriet Westbrook
to Edinburgh.
When he returned to London, he became a disciple
of William Godwin, a radical social philosopher.
He fell in love with Godwin’s daughter. Harriet’s
drowning enabled him to marry Godwin’s
daughter, but left him a bad reputation as an
immoralist.
He left England and went to the Continent.
He made friends with Byron while they were in
Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote his best poems
during this period.
On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small
boat along the coast of Italy, a tempest struck her
boat and he was drowned. He was buried in Rome.
The inscription on his tombstone reads: “Percy
Bysshe Shelley, COR CORDIUM”. ( meaning
heart of hearts)
Upon his untimely death, one of his opponents
writes, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry,
has been drowned; now he knows whether there is
a God or not.”
Engels thinks highly of Shelley and Byron, He
writes, “Shelley, the genius, the prophet, Shelley,
and Byron, with his glowing sensuality and his
bitter satire upon our existing society, find most of
their readers in the proletariat.”
 Ode
to the West Wind
 To a Skylark
 The Cloud
 Prometheus Unbound
 Queen Mab
 The Masque of Anarchy
 The Necessity of Atheism
 A Defence of Poetry
 Shelley
grew up with revolutionary ideas under
the influence of Hume and Godwin. He held a
life long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority
and institutional religion.
 Shelley is one of the greatest English lyrical
poets. He expresses his love for freedom and
his hatred towards tyranny.
His poems abound with personification, metaphor
and other figures of speech.
Shelley is one of the most important dramatists of
English Romanticism. His greatest achievement in
theater lies in his poetic drama Prometheus
Unbound.
William Blake (1757 – 1827)
Blake
is famous not only for his
poems, but for the illuminated plates
on which he printed them.
His poetry is highly visual, and
reading only the text of the poems
without medium of the illuminated
plate is an incomplete experience.
 Blake’s
personal spirituality and his views of
theological issues frequently filter into his work,
perhaps most famously in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell and in Jerusalem.
 His most famous works are likely those in Songs of
Innocence and of Experience. The poems often
function in pairs, one from the perspective of childlike
“innocence,” the other from the perspective of
disillusioned “experience.”
John Keats: (1795 – 1821)
 Keats
was the prodigy of the Romantics.
Though dead at age 25, he was enormously
prolific. During his brief career, he was
stubbornly (tough fairly successfully) insistent
on maintaining his artistic independence and
originally, even going so far as to refuse to
befriend Percy Shelley out of fear that the
slightly older, more established poet might
influence his writing.
 As
a result, Keats's poetry, though distinctly
Romantic in flavor, is unlike any of his
contemporaries. He is best known for his
sonnets and odes, particularly "Ode to a
Nightingale" and Ode on a Grecian Urn." He is
also well-known for his love of the classics of
antiquity, which often filters into his poetry.
NOVELS ROMANTICISM ERA

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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft
The only daughter of William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft, she met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
in 1812 and eloped with him to France in July 1814. The
couple were married in 1816, after Shelley’s first wife had
committed suicide.
After her husband’s death in 1822, she returned to England and
devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and to
educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
She published her late husband’s Posthumous Poems (1824);
she also edited his Poetical Works (1839), with long and
invaluable notes, and his prose works. Her Journal is a rich
source of Shelley biography, and her letters are an
indispensable adjunct.
Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein or,
The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831), a text
that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel;
it is also often considered an early example of science
fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise
after a scientist has artificially created a human being.
(The man-made monster in this novel inspired a
similar creature in numerous American horror films.)
 She wrote several other novels, including Valperga
(1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830),
Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837); The Last Man
(1826), an account of the future destruction of the
human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best
work. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
(1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley
took in 1814 following their elopement and then
recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.
 Mary
JANE AUSTIN
 Although
Jane Austen wrote in a time when the
Romantic Period had already begun, there can’t be
found any of the outbursts of feelings and flights of
the imagination like in the books of other great writers
of her time.
 The French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the
Industrial Revolution all seem to have passed her by.
 The moment you open her books you are transported
into a quiet and well-ordered world of reason and
common sense that is much closer in spirit to the
eighteenth century (the age of reason) than to the
early ninetheenth.
 The
cause of this can be found in Jane Austen’s
life. Jane Austen just wrote about the world as
she knew it, and her world was a small one.
 She didn’t see much more of England than a
few small villages and towns in the south of
England.
 She remained unmarried, which made her life a
retired and protected one amidst family and
friends.
 During
her life, Jane Austen has written six
books:
Northanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Emma
Persuasion