General romantics criticism Flashcards
Why, simply by being poets, were Romantics fated to be reactionaries?
Because the enlightened, bourgeois, liberal “doctrine of progress” undermined the “poetic values of love and pleasure”, tradition, etc. to which they were dedicated.
Who wrote ‘Poetry in an Age of Revolution’?
P.M.S. Dawson
What did Hazlitt set against ‘imagination’?
‘Understanding’
What was Hazlitt’s binary of the mind’s faculties?
- The imagination, “a monopolising faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion,” versus the understanding, “a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion.”
- Imagination as opposite to understanding or reason is commonplace in Romantic thought
What is Dawson’s opinion of the most sympathetic view of the Romantics?
They had a position of responsibility without power.
What was the Romantics’ chief error, according to Dawson?
- To depend on the imagination as a transformative power.
- To call on their readers to imagine the world in a new way in order to transform it into that newness.
- When really the social world needed to be materially transformed first in order for imaginative vision to be readily available to most people.
What was a positive side of the Romantics’ error?
It allowed them to at least record their protest against inhuman conditions and it preserved them from despair.
What is another way to consider the “escapism” of which Romantics are often accused?
As consolation or compensation for being unable to transform the world; instead they lodge themselves and their readers in imaginary, ideal worlds.
Explain the danger about vision.
- There was a danger that the poets’ resort to vision would in turn help to cut the visionary off from the ordinary person, the human community.
- Unable to change the world, the privileged hid in comforting, invented worlds while leaving the rest to suffer.
- Present in the works, Excursion, Kubla Khan, Ancient Mariner, Alastor, Triumph of Life, Childe Harolde, Manfred, Cain, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Fall of Hyperion
Why was this danger of excluding others always present?
Because the alternative to visionary escape was acquiescence in the conditions of the world as it was and a lapse into custom and habit.
What might allow us to consider a poet as essentially progressive rather than essentially reactionary?
- Because in a society whose practices and beliefs constituted a denial of human imagination and creativity - the enlightenment society - it was the poets’ role to keep open a sense of alternative possibility.
- This perhaps is the crucial political function of the imagination, and in this respect all true poets are, as Shelley argued at the end of ‘A Defence of Poetry’, politically progressive, whatever their ostensible political beliefs.
Who wrote ‘Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination’?
Jonathan Bate
What does Nachkömmling mean?
Either ‘aftercomer’, ‘latecomer’, or in its different sense, ‘descendant’
What were the main points of Goethe’s remark to Johann Peter Eckermann?
That having studied Shakespeare “a dramatic talent of any importance … must be aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies” and that “there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do”.
And how much courage it must take to then put pen to paper knowing such “unattainable excellencies were already in existence!”
What did Harold Bloom say about Goethe’s remark?
- He alighted on the ‘anxiety’ of the thought ‘What is there left to do?’ in his Oedipal theory of poetry as a history of encounters between the poet and their father, ‘strong poets’ and their even stronger precursors.
- For Freudian Bloom, “belatedness is a problem; the precursor has to be confronted aggressively, he cannot be acknowledged and accepted.”
What does Bloom’s theory leave out?
- That nachkömmling also means descendant.
- The hope that one might eb the descendant of a great poet rather than just one who came after, might bring confidence rather than anxiety.
How did Keats imagine Shakespeare?
- As a ‘presider’, watching over his poetic endeavour.
- Also that ‘the count / Of Mighty poets is made up’, that ‘the sun of poesy is set’ (Endymion).
Talk about worthiness and Shakespeare
There was a shared dread of being unworthy of Shakespeare juxtaposed with the hope of one day being worthy of him, and gain an immortality like his.
What is Bate’s opinion of the single concept at the heart of English Romanticism?
The ascription of a central place to the power of the creative imagination, and a belief that imagination, genius, and poetry are closely associated with each other.
How did 18th century critics and aestheticians pave the way for the Romantics?
By exploring the creative power of the imagination.
