Middle Romantic (1820-1837)

Question 1

Mid Romantic Period

Answer 1

Reign of George IV (1820-30) and William IV (1830 - 37)
Tennyson, Carlyle
(Americans: Cooper, Poe, Irving, Holmes)

Question 2

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Answer 2

Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Victorian Poet Laureate, after Wordsworth. Grieved death of friend A.H.H.( Arthur Hallam).

Question 3

“The Lady of Shalott”

Answer 3

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

lady can’t look out of tower—she just weaves—Sees Lancelot, looks out, is cursed. Floats down river and Lancelot compliments her face.

Question 4

“The Lotus Eaters”

Answer 4

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Spenserian stanzas. Allusion to Odyssey and island of lotus eaters. Odysseus’s men eat lotus’s and don’t want to go back home.

Question 5

“Ulysses” (not novel)

Answer 5

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Written in memory of Hallam. Allusion to Odysseus (aka Ulysses). Get famous quotes.

Question 6

In Memorium A.H.H

Answer 6

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Written in memory of Arthur Hallam.  Four lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter (abba)—called Memorium Stanzas.  Important segments: 	Prologue—Christ, faith, doubt
27—good to love and lose
56—nature red in tooth and claw
95—spiritual contact with Hallam
124—subverting and containing God

Question 7

“To Virgil”

Answer 7

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

T loved Virgil

Question 8

“Marianna”

Answer 8

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Allusion to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Marianna waits for lover who doesn’t come. Refrain: “The day is dreary, he cometh not. I would I were dead.”

Question 9

“Charge of the Light Brigade”

Answer 9

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

On Crimean War. A mistaken order. Theirs not to question why, theirs just to do or die.

Question 10

“Break, Break, Break”

Answer 10

Tennyson
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Question 11

Thomas Carlyle

Answer 11

Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Weird writer with a sense of the ridiculous, his prose can be berserk as his opinions. A student of German philosophy, including Kant and an early proponent of Goethe.

Question 12

Sartor Resartus

Answer 12

Carlyle
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

means “Tailor Reclothed.” Work addresses relationship of inward essences and outward appearances. Narrator: Teufelsdrockh. Look for other tell-tale words: Weissnichtwo (narrator’s hometown), Everlasting Yea, Everlasting No, Wanderer (refers to Teulfelsdrockh).

Question 13

Heroes and Hero-Worship

Answer 13

Carlyle
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Heros ought to use power in service of others. Although Carlyle recognized the achievements of Cromwell and Napoleon, he saw that in his own time the the hero needed was a thinker and writer.

Question 14

The French Revolution

Answer 14

Carlyle
Mid Romantic (Regency & William IV)

Question 15

James Fennimore Cooper

Answer 15

Early 1800’s American
(British Vict/Mid-Rom)

A pretty didactic author. His character Natty Bumppo, who appears in nearly all of his fiction, is regarded by some as an archetypal American literary character—like Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

Leatherstocking Tales

Question 16

The Leatherstocking Tales

Answer 16

James Fennimore Cooper
Early 1800’s Am (English Vict/Mid Rom)

• Last of the Mohicans *The Pioneers * The Pathfinder * The Deerslayer * The Prairie

Question 17

Edgar Alan Poe

Answer 17

American early 1800’s
(British early Vict.)

Known for morbid, creep stories and poems. Quest for metrical perfection in poems. Said the most beautiful thing in the world was the death of a beautiful woman.

Question 18

“The Gold Bug”

Answer 18

Edgar Alan Poe
Am. early 1800’s

Short story

Question 19

The “Poetic Principle”

Answer 19

Edgar Alan Poe
Am. early 1800’s

an essay that ETS likes. Emphasizes a “devastating excitement of the soul” rather than any aspirations to truth as the principle of poetry.

Question 20

Washington Irving

Answer 20

Am. Early 1800’s (British Vict./Mid-Rom)

Popularized shortstory in America. Worked for several newspapers. His alter-ego was “Geoffrey Crayon.”

Question 21

Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Answer 21

Washington Irving
Am. Early 1800’s

Short story
Ichabod Crane meets the Headless Horseman

Question 22

Rip Van Winkle

Answer 22

Washington Irving
Am. Early 1800’s

Rip goes up to a mountain to hunt, falls asleep, and walks back into town twenty years later. Everything’s changed.

Question 23

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Answer 23

Am. early 1800’s (British Vict./Mid-Rom)

A lawyer and poet

Question 24

“The Chambered Nautilus”

Answer 24

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Am. early 1800’s

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
30 As the swift seasons roll!
31 Leave thy low-vaulted past!
32 Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
33 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
34 Till thou at length art free,
35 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

Question 25

“Old Ironsides”

Answer 25

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Am. early 1800’s

“Oh, better that her shattered hulk 
18 Should sink beneath the wave; 
19 Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 
20 And there should be her grave; 
21 Nail to the mast her holy flag, 
22 Set every threadbare sail, 
23 And give her to the god of storms, 
24 The lightning and the gale!”