WILLIAM BLAKE
William Blake’s insistence on the need to remake ancient legends and the need to find a new language for expressing them pointed the way for the Romantics. His first published poems, entitled Poetical Sketches, showed poet’s dissatisfaction with the reigning poetic tradition. Songs of Innocence and later Songs of Experience consider innocence and experience as states of perception and conditions of the soul, naturally interrelated. In poems as “The Tiger” and “London” (both belonging to Songs of Experience) Blake achieved his mature lyric technique of compressed metaphor and symbol which explode into a multiplicity of reference. In “London”, for example, a materialistic society is presented which portrays Blake’s anguished vision of society dominated by money.
In “The Lamb” symbol of Innocence and “The Tiger” the corresponding image of Experience, the question of opposites has religious and philosophical roots: the lamb and the tiger are the symbols of the two sides of God: merciful, lamb and wrathful, tiger. Many of the poems set the world of pastoral innocence and childhood against the world of adult corruption and repression as in “The Chimney Sweeper”, “Infant Joy”, and “A Cradle Song”. His further works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, formed a mythology created by Blake himself and The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem represent his major prophetic works showing Blake’s thinking about human’s history and his experience of suffering and experience.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth’s merit consists in being the great innovator of poetry, and together with Coleridge, the stimulator of the Romantic Movement in Britain by means of the Romantic Manifesto included in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. According to it, the poet’s language represents non-mediated expression of feelings and emotions. In this respect, he was enthusiastic about the use of primitive tradition and rural dialects.
As far as the form of the poem in Lyrical Ballads is concerned, the artist’s role is not to decorate but to remove any artificiality. However, he doesn’t reject metre and rhyme altogether but accepts them as long as they are not conventional, used to give body to a spiritual passion or emotion. The most famous and representative of Wordsworth’s poems from Lyrical Ballads are: “Tintern Abbey” which is considered a lesson to his sister through a process in which the poet advances from childhood to adulthood, “The Thorn” and “The Tables Turned”, apart from Coleridge’s four poems.
Among his best sonnets are “Westminster Bridge” and “London”, this latter a cry for help in the troubles of the world. Well known are also his short poems as “The Daffodils”, “The Solitary Reaper” and “Lucy”.
Other relevant poems by Wordsworth include “The Prelude” a record of Wordsworth’s own progress in poetry and thought and “The Excursion” which belongs to the middle part of a philosophical work which the author planned but never finished. Important views on poet’s work, referring to mysticism, were included in a longer and more important poem “The Ode on Intimations of Immortality” from Recollections of Early Childhood.
SAMUEL COLERIDGE
Personal problems and drug addiction were responsible for the fact that Coleridge’s reputation as a poet is secured by a small, though radiant corpus of major works. His theory of poetic imagination as a unifying and mediating power within divided modern cultures provided one of the central ideas of Romantic aesthetics.
Coleridge’s most important contribution to the above mentioned Lyrical Ballads was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Despite its metrical and verbal simplicity of the traditional ballad form, the poem is a psychodrama concerned with the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure. This is one of Coleridge’s most famous poems; it catches the reader’s attention not through meaning but through the beauty of form. The mariner symbolizes the poet; the albatross can be considered a reflection of God and the symbol of creation. Apart form this, there are more typical Romantic images in the poem as death, the ship, the imagery of exotic countries, sleep and dream. Two other important poems by Coleridge (not in the Lyrical Ballads) are “Christabel” (1816) and “Kubla Khan” (1816). Neither of them was finished, but there is again magic in each. “Kubla Khan”, derives much of its exotic imagery from Coleridge’s wide reading of mythology history and religion. Later in his career Coleridge devoted himself to literary criticism.
JOHN KEATS
Some of his poems are the best known examples of Romantic poetry. His first published volume include I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill and Sleep and Poetry, both chiefly memorable for the minute observation reflected in their delicate imagery. In his allegorical poem Endymion Keats’s consistent ambition to move beyond the lyrical to the narrative and the epic finds its first significant expression. Isabella or the Pot of Basil marks a great advance in his poetic technique. Hyperion was another unfinished project of Keats’s due to unfavourable reception of his earlier works. Finally, Keats’s astonishing development and productivity came with The Eve of St Agnes (a narrative poem), Lamia, and the popular reflective odes: On a Grecian Urn, On a Nightingale, On Melancholy. The themes of these odes include transience of beauty and the process of aging and decay.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
His private life was colourful and full of problems due to his declared atheism (his pamphlet “The Necessity of Atheism”). His work continues and revitalizes the radical tendencies of earlier Romantic writing, fusing them to serve his political and social criticism. His most remarkable works include: Queen Mab (known as the “Chartist Bible” due to an open attack on contemporary England), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam (again indirect attack on conditions in England), Prometheus Unbound (a classical drama, in part considered Shelley’s masterpiece). His shorter and well known poems are Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, as well as Adonais, written to commemorate Keats’s death among others.
LORD GEORGE BYRON
Byron created a legend and a new type of character, the Byronic hero. This type of hero appeared in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a long poem which made Byron famous, in Cain and in Manfred. It was an outcast from his own kind and a wanderer in foreign lands, gloomily absorbed in the memory of his past sins and the injustices done to him by society. Don Juan is Byron’s masterpiece. It is an “epic satire” and changes Childe Harold’s melancholy for modern ideas of fostering nature and picturesque journeys and the faith in the basic human goodness.
William Blake’s insistence on the need to remake ancient legends and the need to find a new language for expressing them pointed the way for the Romantics. His first published poems, entitled Poetical Sketches, showed poet’s dissatisfaction with the reigning poetic tradition. Songs of Innocence and later Songs of Experience consider innocence and experience as states of perception and conditions of the soul, naturally interrelated. In poems as “The Tiger” and “London” (both belonging to Songs of Experience) Blake achieved his mature lyric technique of compressed metaphor and symbol which explode into a multiplicity of reference. In “London”, for example, a materialistic society is presented which portrays Blake’s anguished vision of society dominated by money.
In “The Lamb” symbol of Innocence and “The Tiger” the corresponding image of Experience, the question of opposites has religious and philosophical roots: the lamb and the tiger are the symbols of the two sides of God: merciful, lamb and wrathful, tiger. Many of the poems set the world of pastoral innocence and childhood against the world of adult corruption and repression as in “The Chimney Sweeper”, “Infant Joy”, and “A Cradle Song”. His further works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, formed a mythology created by Blake himself and The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem represent his major prophetic works showing Blake’s thinking about human’s history and his experience of suffering and experience.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth’s merit consists in being the great innovator of poetry, and together with Coleridge, the stimulator of the Romantic Movement in Britain by means of the Romantic Manifesto included in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. According to it, the poet’s language represents non-mediated expression of feelings and emotions. In this respect, he was enthusiastic about the use of primitive tradition and rural dialects.
As far as the form of the poem in Lyrical Ballads is concerned, the artist’s role is not to decorate but to remove any artificiality. However, he doesn’t reject metre and rhyme altogether but accepts them as long as they are not conventional, used to give body to a spiritual passion or emotion. The most famous and representative of Wordsworth’s poems from Lyrical Ballads are: “Tintern Abbey” which is considered a lesson to his sister through a process in which the poet advances from childhood to adulthood, “The Thorn” and “The Tables Turned”, apart from Coleridge’s four poems.
Among his best sonnets are “Westminster Bridge” and “London”, this latter a cry for help in the troubles of the world. Well known are also his short poems as “The Daffodils”, “The Solitary Reaper” and “Lucy”.
Other relevant poems by Wordsworth include “The Prelude” a record of Wordsworth’s own progress in poetry and thought and “The Excursion” which belongs to the middle part of a philosophical work which the author planned but never finished. Important views on poet’s work, referring to mysticism, were included in a longer and more important poem “The Ode on Intimations of Immortality” from Recollections of Early Childhood.
SAMUEL COLERIDGE
Personal problems and drug addiction were responsible for the fact that Coleridge’s reputation as a poet is secured by a small, though radiant corpus of major works. His theory of poetic imagination as a unifying and mediating power within divided modern cultures provided one of the central ideas of Romantic aesthetics.
Coleridge’s most important contribution to the above mentioned Lyrical Ballads was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Despite its metrical and verbal simplicity of the traditional ballad form, the poem is a psychodrama concerned with the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure. This is one of Coleridge’s most famous poems; it catches the reader’s attention not through meaning but through the beauty of form. The mariner symbolizes the poet; the albatross can be considered a reflection of God and the symbol of creation. Apart form this, there are more typical Romantic images in the poem as death, the ship, the imagery of exotic countries, sleep and dream. Two other important poems by Coleridge (not in the Lyrical Ballads) are “Christabel” (1816) and “Kubla Khan” (1816). Neither of them was finished, but there is again magic in each. “Kubla Khan”, derives much of its exotic imagery from Coleridge’s wide reading of mythology history and religion. Later in his career Coleridge devoted himself to literary criticism.
JOHN KEATS
Some of his poems are the best known examples of Romantic poetry. His first published volume include I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill and Sleep and Poetry, both chiefly memorable for the minute observation reflected in their delicate imagery. In his allegorical poem Endymion Keats’s consistent ambition to move beyond the lyrical to the narrative and the epic finds its first significant expression. Isabella or the Pot of Basil marks a great advance in his poetic technique. Hyperion was another unfinished project of Keats’s due to unfavourable reception of his earlier works. Finally, Keats’s astonishing development and productivity came with The Eve of St Agnes (a narrative poem), Lamia, and the popular reflective odes: On a Grecian Urn, On a Nightingale, On Melancholy. The themes of these odes include transience of beauty and the process of aging and decay.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
His private life was colourful and full of problems due to his declared atheism (his pamphlet “The Necessity of Atheism”). His work continues and revitalizes the radical tendencies of earlier Romantic writing, fusing them to serve his political and social criticism. His most remarkable works include: Queen Mab (known as the “Chartist Bible” due to an open attack on contemporary England), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam (again indirect attack on conditions in England), Prometheus Unbound (a classical drama, in part considered Shelley’s masterpiece). His shorter and well known poems are Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, as well as Adonais, written to commemorate Keats’s death among others.
LORD GEORGE BYRON
Byron created a legend and a new type of character, the Byronic hero. This type of hero appeared in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a long poem which made Byron famous, in Cain and in Manfred. It was an outcast from his own kind and a wanderer in foreign lands, gloomily absorbed in the memory of his past sins and the injustices done to him by society. Don Juan is Byron’s masterpiece. It is an “epic satire” and changes Childe Harold’s melancholy for modern ideas of fostering nature and picturesque journeys and the faith in the basic human goodness.