Early Romantic (1790-1820) Flashcards
Early Romantic Period
Second 30 years of George III
Sturm & Drang in Germany
1790 - 1820
Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelleys, Keats, Austen, Thomas Morton
Charles Lamb
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Bio: *Worked for East India Company
- Friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge (went to school w/ Col)
- Reviewed above poets’ Lyrical Ballads
- Went by Elia and published in a London magazine
- In letter to Wordsworth, wrote that he loved London rather than country
- Said two kinds of men: men who borrow and who lend (borrowers better)
- Loved the city, as opposed to the countryside, which Wordsworth loved.
- -“Christ’s Hospital”—sketch of Coleridge in character of Elia
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Wants to form Pantisocracy as a youth. Goes to Europe and studies Kant. Collaborates with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads. Col wants to represent supernatural as nature, Wordsworth wants to show natural as supernatural. Noted for borrowing books and returning them annotated. Known as a “Lake Poet.”
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
narrator stops man on way to wedding, tells man a story of killing an albatross.
Autobiographia Literaria
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Long prose mixture of autobiography, criticism, philosophy, lectures, etc.
“a poem’s purpose is pleasure, not truth.” Talks about “imagination.”
“Frost at Midnight”
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Christabel
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
At the poem’s opening, it is midnight in Landdale Castle. Everyone is asleep except Christabel, the lovely daughter of Sir Leoline, the lord of the castle. Christabel is roaming in the woods, thinking about her lover, a knight to whom she is betrothed but who is now far away. Hearing a moaning coming from the other side of an oak tree, Christabel discovers a beautiful pale lady, barefoot and with jewels in her hair, who begs for help. Her name is Geraldine. She tells Christabel that she was abducted from her home by five warriors, who tied her to a white horse and brought her to this oak tree and left her, vowing to return. Geraldine begs Christabel for help. They walk back to the castle of Sir Leoline, at the entrance to which Geraldine falls down and must be lifted over the doorstep. This is the first of several hints that Geraldine is an evil spirit, because such beings cannot pass on their own through a doorway that has been blessed. Likewise, when Christabel utters a prayer of thanks to “the Virgin” that they are safe inside, Geraldine cannot join in the prayer. The old watchdog does not bark at this stranger; he only mutters in his sleep, and the ashes in the fireplace suddenly flame up as Geraldine passes by.
In Christabel’s chamber the two ladies undress for sleep. They lie down together, Christabel wrapped in the arms of Geraldine. As Christabel sleeps, the guardian spirit of her dead mother is driven away by Geraldine. Thus, by the end of the first part, the poet has led the reader to the conclusion that Geraldine is entrapping Christabel or trying to seduce her, to capture her soul. But he reminds us that “saints will aid if men will call.”
PART 2. It is morning. Geraldine and Christabel rise and dress, but Christabel retains an uneasy sense of the sinister influence of Geraldine. They visit Sir Leoline, to whom Geraldine introduces herself as the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, a man who had once been Sir Leoline’s closest friend but had since become a bitter enemy. Captivated by the beauty of Geraldine, who embraces and kisses him, Sir Leoline tells his bard Bracey to travel to the castle of Lord Roland and invite him to come back to Langdale Castle.
Meanwhile, Sir Leoline challenges the five scoundrels who abducted Geraldine to appear at a tournament one week later to defend, if they can, their honor. But, seeing Geraldine’s influence over her father, Christabel asks that the guest be sent home at once. Sir Leoline, captivated by Geraldine and in a fury at this breech of hospitality, responds angrily to his daughter. Christabel cannot explain her fears because her tongue has been bewitched by Geraldine. The second part ends with the poet’s meditation about the irrational anger of a parent toward an innocent child.
“Dejection: An Ode”
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Failure of Health
“Kubla Khan”
Coleridge Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“stately pleasure dome”
William Wordsworth
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Lived with sister Dorothy. Known, with Coleridge, as a “Lake Poet.” Known for writing the “Lucy Poems.”
Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Collaborates w Coleridge on various eds
Preface: champions voice of the common shepherd swain. Says poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” “He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued 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; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”
- “Simon Lee”
- “We are Seven”
- “Tintern Abbey”
- “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” Lucy poem
- “The Tables Turned”—
- “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” Lucy poem. All twelve lines famous.
- “Michael” Shepherd and son, Luke. Luke gets sent to the city.
- “Nutting”
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“Resolution and Independence”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“The World is Too Much With Us”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“Intimations of Immorality”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Prelude
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Autobiographical poem
“London, 1802”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Note differences between this and Shelley’s London poem
“Westminster Bridge”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“On Mutability”
Wordsworth Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
William Blake
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Classified as Romantic, but lived a bit earlier and didn’t associate with any of them. Two sections of life: Songs time and mythology time. Reconciliation of opposites is cornerstone of Blake’s poetry.
Songs of Innocence & Experience
Blake Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Blake Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
deals with slavery and transatlantic crossing.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Blake Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
a book of paradoxical aphorisms and his principal prose work. “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) The work expressed Blake’s revolt against the established values of his time: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.”
Some of William Blake’s cosmology
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
- Tharmas—emotion
- Urizen—reason
- Urthona—spirit
- Luva—body
- Los—archetype of creative artist
- Albion—universal man, England
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Didn’t like Southey. Known, with Shelley, as part of the “Satanic School.”
“So We’ll Go No More a Roving”
Byron Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
“Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”
Byron Early Romantic (2nd 30 yrs of GIII)
Allusion to Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Leander only died, but Byron got the ague (a fever).
