General Info Flashcards
1
Q
William Wordsworth
A
- 1770-1850
- lived by the Lake District
- wrote on nature
- worked and was friends with Coleridge
2
Q
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A
- 1772-1834
- intellectual of the group
- wrote on abstract ideas
- attraction to opium
3
Q
Lord Byron
A
- 1788-1824
- the mad, bad and dangerous
4
Q
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A
- 1792-1822
- extremely controversial ideas
- was thrown out of university
5
Q
John Keats
A
- 1795-1821
- died young from TB
6
Q
John Clare
A
- 1793-1864
- farmer
7
Q
The concept of Romanticism
A
- posthumous construct
- circular idea
- a literary taxonomy includes
- name
- concept
- canon of work
- works from concept to canon and back
- trapped in a hermeneutic circle
- but the canon can change
- therefore changing concept
- constant interplay between these two which results in constant revision
8
Q
The Romance
A
- original definition - romance language
- French, Italian, Spanish, Latin
- decline of Latin and rise of romances
- written in a romance language - not Latin
- connotation of fantasy
- based on early romances’ knights and dragons
- medieval world and poetry
- decline of the medieval influence
- due to Wordsworth’s prominence an interest in nature is added
- due to focus on emotions
- suddenly became partly about love
9
Q
Historical Period and links to the French Revolution
A
- taken up by France
- strict aristocracy
- very strict class system - money matters less than class
- the revolution
- changing in ideas
- impact on the poets
- everything is connected to the revolution
- therefore their entire worlds were transformed
- the impart of the revolution then comes from a desire for local change
- 1st gen. Romantics
- work is full of political idealism, transformation etc.
- 2nd gen.
- too young to be moved by immediate events of 1789
- coexistence of hope and despair
- gave the idea that poetry could have an ideological function
- the idea of beauty as integral
10
Q
Common ideals
A
- favoured innovation instead of conservatism
- a yearning to see beyond the present moment
- poetry as spontaneous overflow of feelings and recollection in tranquility
- a balance between both
- probably value at least an illusion of spontaneity
- write about the external world - art, nature
- individual response
- the human spirit can achieve ‘anything’
- Blake - it’s not the world which reflects God, but God is a power of imagination, what reflects God in the world is an ability to create
- Keats - the mighty abstract ideal in all things, whether ‘positive’ or ‘negative’
- overall they seem to deify a particular force - nature, love etc.
- natural beauty is increasingly attractive
- children are sublimely innocent
- see and understand the world in which adults cannot
- idealisation - much like Augustans idealised nature
- focus more on process
- poems about writing poetry
- therefore rise in use of present and present continuous
- poet controlled by his art
- carefully controlled illusion
11
Q
Prosody
A
- still enjoyed iambic and trochaic forms
- but structure becomes more fluid
- use of blank verse
- revival of the sonnet
- flexible stanzas
- revival of ballads and ballad sets
- 4 line stanzas
- alternating tetra- and tri-meter lines
- introduction of more 3 syllable feet
- lyric, ballads, song-lyrics
- increase in long poems dealing with poems
- historical events as well
12
Q
Key Ideas and Images
A
- imaginative freedom
- relatively free and informal language - valuing the ordinary
- impact of French Revolution
- interest in growth, progress and poetry
- profound response to nature
- inward focus towards individual responses to the world
13
Q
William Blake
A
- 1757-1827
- engraver and artist
- politically active in England
- wrote on ideas of corruption and the validity of education and received truth
