Romantic Quests vs. New
Criticism
Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson
and Felicia Hemans
Outline
Starting Questions & Romantic Quest
Defined
“Tinturn Abbey” & Wordsworth
John Keats & “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”;
the images
Tennyson & “The Lady of Shalott”
New Criticism
Keats and New Criticism – “Ode on
Melancholy” as an example
Felicia Hemans
Starting Questions
What do you think about the poems
you’ve read (“Tinturn Abbey” “La Belle
Dame Sans Merci” “Lady of Shalott”)? Do
you appreciate their concerns or find
them boring?
What does “Quest” mean? Are you
in any kind of quest?
Romantic Quests
The Sublime;
Transcending the “human”
Truth –in Nature, Democracy
Beauty
Art
Women, Nature,
Medievalism
Romanticism
Defined
The poets
Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey”
What is it about? How is this poem
similar to “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”?
To understand the poem, you need to
1) pay attention to changes of tenses;
2) Syntax (where subjects and verbs are)
and conjunctions (e.g. such as, so that,
nor)
reading
Cliffs
Visualization
Visualization
Cottages, Orchards, Hedgerow
“Tinturn Abbey”: Structure
1. Re-Visiting
2. The influences of memories of the
natural scenes; --from sensations to vision
on life;
3. Addressing the Wye river;
4. Back to the present moment, to think
over the future and the past.
5. Turn to his sister, to find hope in his
sister and to strengthen her against future
decay.
Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey”
1. Pay attention to the many repetitions
in this poem. Do they correspond to the
content of the poem? Are there beautiful
lines in this poem?
2. What do you think about the speaker’s
views of
1) nature’s influence on us (ll. 122-134), and
2) our different experiences of nature at
different ages of our lives (stanza 3)?
3. What role does the sister play in this
poem?
Wordsworth’s Quests in
“Tinturn Abbey”
Functions of repetition
– 1) (once again, how oft, ) to show changes;
– 2) (in which, in thy voice, so … so…) to
reinforce his beliefs
– 3) alternates with the vivid descriptions.
Attempts to deal with aging, losses and
even death.
Seeks comfort in nature, but ultimately in
the sister’s remembering him. In this
way, ‘Nature’ is finally displaced.
Actually, there are more displacements in
this poem.
“Tinturn Abbey” in Context
French revolution in 1789, which inspired
Wordsworth to visit France in 1791. He
returned in despair in 1792.
Two visits 1793 & 1798: W’s trip to
Salisbury Plain and North Wales in the
summer of 1793, and his return visit
particularly to the abbey, on July 13, 1798.
1793 – the publication of his first poems.
1798 – the conception of the idea for Lyrical
Ballads and then its publication.  The
poem, in this sense, is an important
example of his poetic quest (for Nature or
for Poetic Self).
Wordsworth & “Tinturn Abbey”
In the poem not a word is said
about –
the French Revolution,
the impoverished and country poor,
or—least of all—that this event and
these conditions might be
structurally related to each other. (J.
McGann 85-86)
Tinturn Abbey in 1790s
A favorite haunt of transients and displaced
persons—of beggars and vagrants of
various sorts, including “female vagrants.”
 Wordsworth observes the tranquil
orderliness of the nearby “pastoral farms”
and draws these views into a relation with
the “vagrant dwellers in the houseless
woods” of the abbey.
The poem’s method: to replace an image
and landscape of contradiction with one
dominated by “the power/Of harmoney”; or
a picture of the mind.
John Keats (1795-1821 age 26)
His poetic quest is both difficult and brief.
Family: His father died in a riding accident;
his mother involved in a lawsuit against
her own mother over inheritance. Keats
nursed her mother when she was ill with
T.B., and, later, his brother with T.B. Then
finally he contracted the disease.
clip on Keats
John Keats (1795-1821 age 26)
1810 -- Keats started out as an apprentice
to an apothecary (pharmacist).
1813 -- He was inspired by Spenser and
Homer.
1816 – promoted to assistant surgeon but
also started to publish his poems.
1817 – publishes his first book; met
Wordsworth, but didn't like him.
1818 – nursed his brother; met Fanny
Browne
1819 – The Great Odes, and several other
poems. Engaged to Fanny Brown; Fell ill.
Keats: Main Concerns in his
Poetic Quest
Truth and Beauty vs. Mortality (“vale
of soul-making”)
Intense but Transient Sensual
Pleasures in Nature
He is always keenly aware of,
or even relishes, the possible
contradictions.
“La Belle Dame” reading
1. Plot & Theme: Is the woman real or not?
What does she represent? Can you think of
any similar experience to this? In other
words, can the woman be symbolic of
some ideal you pursue?
2. Plot & Theme: What are the functions of
the dream(s)?
3. Structure: Beginning, middle and end?
4. Narration/Narrative Frames: Why
doesn’t the knight tell the story to us
directly in a first-person narrative? Why is
there another speaker in the poem? What
does this speaker add to the poem?
“La Belle Dame sans Merci?”
Theme: Unrequited love, or obsession
in an impossible quest?
– The woman – beautiful and weak, to be
protected and decorated, love,.
– Impossible quest – offers sweetness &
love; a fairy’s child; ‘as’ she did love;
strange language; sigh full sore. ‘sweet
moan’?
Images of la Belle Dame
John William
Waterhouse
The latter painting
reveals Waterhouse's
growing interest in
themes associated
with the PreRaphaelites,
particularly tragic or
powerful femmes
fatales.
Images of la Belle Dame
Left: Sir Frank Dicksee (British,
1853-1928)
Right: Arthur Hughes (British, 18321915) Pre-Raphaelite Painter.
Images of la Belle Dame
Frank Cadogan Cowper, the last of the Pre-Raphaelites
“La Belle Dame”: theme & structure
The ‘latest’ dream –not the only
dream, not only dreamed by him.
The stranger– describes the knight as
well as the environment, thus
provides a sense of reality (which can
be abundant).
“La Belle Dame” vs.
traditional ballads
Traditional ballads (“Thomas the
Rhymer”): lack of self-consciousness.
Keats: estranged persons—the
knight by virtue of his experience
with the elfin lady, and the balladeer
by virtue of his narration of that
experience.  the irrevocable loss of
an entire area of significant human
experience as well as its meaning.
Tennyson
Representative of the Victorian views of
literature/art’s social functions.
“The Lady of Shalott” significance:
– –reflects “The Woman’s Question”
– Two versions: 1833 and 1842
– The most favoured of all Tennysonian subjects
among the PRB.
Question I: what is the story about and
how does the form help convey its
meaning?
“The Lady of Shalott”
1. Structure:
Part 1 – 1) Setting: the river & the fields,
the road and the island;
2) Lady of Shalott observed and
listened to;
3) Form: alternation of short and long lines.
Part 2 – Shalott in her tower, weaving and
looking at the shadows on the mirror;
sick when seeing funeral procession or
lovers pass by.
Form: long lines with mellifluous sounds.
“The Lady of Shalott”
1. Structure:
Part 3 –Lancelot passes by and Shalott turns
to see him.
Form: explosives + alliteration; images of
light; ends with rep. of ‘she’ in action.
Part 4 – Shalott leaves her tower to go to
Camelot. Action (writing her name and
singing).
Form: explosives + mellifluous sounds and
feminine rhymes.
“The Lady of Shalott”
1. Theme: What can the mirror be
symbolic of? What does the lady want?
2. Does it matter why we don’t know why
the lady is cursed?
3. There are two versions of this poem:
1833 and 1842 versions. Compare the
endings of these two versions.
4. Compare this poem with “La Belle Dame”
by Keats. What aspects of Quest are
presented in these two poems? Does
gender make a difference here?
“The Lady of Shalott”
1833 version: the ending.
They cross’d themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest,
The wellfed wits at Camelot.
’The web was woven curiously,
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not,--this is I,
The Lady of Shalott.’
Images of Shalott
William Holman Hunt,
The Lady of Shalott,
allegorical
elements:
Please pay attention to the
wall's dark tapestries,
"upon which swirl the
twisting bodies of angelic
and allegorical figures,
while the two roundels
supporting the great mirror
feature scenes of the Fall
and the nativity
[Wadsworth]" (Pearce 79)
exotic elements:
sandals & samovars
(Russian urn)
Images of Shalott
William Holman Hunt,
The Lady of Shalott,
Images of Shalott
Elizabeth Siddal, The
Lady of Shalott
Images of Shalott
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
The Lady of Shallott,
1857
Wood engraving, 35/16 x
31/16 in.
Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
New Criticism:
Methodology (1) Poetry
Parts
Figurative Language
Denotations,
connotations
and etymological roots
Allusions
Prosody
Relationships
among
the various elements
Whole
Themes
pattern, tension,
ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions
New Criticism: Methodology (2)
Narrative
Parts
Narrator
(Point of view),
dialogue,
setting,
Plot
Characterization
Relationships
among
the various elements
Whole
Themes
harmonized
pattern, tension,
ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions
John Keats -- & the New Critics
T.S. Eliot cited “Ode to a Nightingale” a
case of “impersonal” art that he elevated
over the Wordsworthian effect of
expressing a “personality.”
Keats: poet as camelian
Wordsworth—egotistical sublime;
Keats: negative capability (an ability to
negate self-interest)
The Great Odes – “integration of intellect
and emotion”; form and content.
Ode on Melancholy
Note: To the Romantics, the word no
longer signified a state of clinical
gloominess, strangeness, and
solitary wanderings. It implied a
positive, heightened sensibility which
could, of course, bring inspiration to
the artist.
Ode on Melancholy
3 parts
Part I: Do not use drugs or poison
(traditional symbols of death &
melancholy) to ease your pains;
Part II: Rather savor melancholy to the
fullest (through appreciating transient
natural beauties or the mistress’s anger).
Part III. Because melancholy is
inseparable from transient beauty, joy,
painful pleasure, appreciated only by the
one with fine palate.
Ode on Melancholy
Paradoxes
1. Negative imperative + active verbs;
“active pursuit” of these easy means of
escape will, in the end, get the soul
‘drowned.’
2. Paradox of birth+ death; beauty +
transience; observation + eating;
3. Active pursuit of pleasures and pains 
turns the poet into something passive.
Keats’ Odes in the Eyes of
New Critics & Deconstructionist
Its density suitable for close analysis;
“a totalizing principle as the guiding
impulse”
Ironies—” a discontinuous world of
reflective irony and ambiguity”  Paul De
Man: “Almost in spite of itself, this
unitarian criticism finally becomes a
criticism of ambiguity, an ironic reflection
of the absence of the unity it has
postulated.” (Wolfson 191-92)
Keats’ Odes in the Eyes of
New Critics & Deconstructionist
Example:
‘Ode to a Nightingale’—an organic
form, a unity encompassing the
‘interrelation’ of its parts, its ‘formal
elements’ and its subject. (Brooks)
“a turmoil” of “disintegration”
(Wasserman)
Keats’ Odes – engagement with “a
state of perpetual indeterminacy”
Women’s Roles in Romantic
Quests?
Felicia Hemans
-- seen as angel by her contemporaries
“She seems to me to represent and unite
as purely and completely as any other
writer in our literature the peculiar and
specific qualities of the female mind. . .
The delicacy, the softness, the pureness,
the quick observant vision, the ready
sensibility, the devotedness, the faith of
woman's nature” (source:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hemans/rfhemans.html )
-- Poetess, whose duties are to sing of
domestic bliss e.g. “The Homes of
England”
-- exception “Casabianca”
Note: Romanticism
A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the
Neoclassicism of the previous centuries… . .
Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly
the focal points of romanticism. Any list of
particular characteristics of the literature of
romanticism includes subjectivity and an
emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom
from rules; solitary life rather than life in society;
the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason
and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of
nature; and fascination with the past, especially
the myths and mysticism of the middle ages.
(source: http://www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism/ )
Back
Outline
References
Walfson, Susan J. Formal Charges: The
Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism.
Stanford 1997.
McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology:
A Critical Investigation. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1983.
Pearce, Lynn. Women/Image/Text.
London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Images of “La Belle Dame Sans Meric”
http://www.artmagick.com/themes/theme4.aspx