Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

The Romantic Age - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 1st generation (the Lake poets): Wordsworth and Coleridge (poetry as imitation of nature and comfort)
        
        Wordsworth
        
        born in Lake District, toured France and Alps, supported democracy and French Revolution but became disillusioned after Terror and cured his nervous breakdown by coming into contact with nature and with his sister Dorothy, became friends with Coleridge and wrote the Lyrical ballads, wrote his autobiographical poem The prelude, became more and more conservative
        
        The 1800 edition's Preface to the Lyrical ballads is the Manifesto of English Romanticism: situations from common life (closer to real passions) but with a certain colouring of imagination (presents the ordinary as extraordinary), language really used by men, poet is a man speaking to men but with greater sensibility, poetry is a spontaneous overlflow of powerful feelings that takes origin from emotion recollected into tranquillity which is transformed into a kindred emotion through the creative power of memory
        
        nature is good and a moral guide, child is good, nature is described but the focus is on the poet's reaction, Pantheistic view of nature (animate and alive, source of comfort)
        
        < associationist philosopher David Hartley: our character develops since we are children after our experiences, sensations lead to simple thoughts which are later combined into complex ideas
        
        in Wordsworth we talk about perception of nature and reconstructive power of memory ("that inward eye")
        
        Coleridge
        
        republican and supporter of the French Revolution, but disillusioned after Terror wanted to found a utopian community with public economy and no private property in Pennsylvania called "Pantisocracy" together poet Robert Southey (failed), became addicted to his prescription of opium, met Wordsworth and moved with him to Lake district, wrote The rime of the ancient mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria ("suspension of disbelief")
        
        The Rime of the ancient mariner (argument:short summary + 7 parts + captions to the right of the stanzas): during a wedding feast, the ancient mariner tells a guest the story of how, after killing an albatross, his crew was killed and his ship attacked by supernatural creatures like Death and Life-in-Death, only after repentance he will be saved
        
        mystery, supernatural + real, characters are more types than human beings and their adventures are universal, the mariner is an outcast and an actor-spectator
        
        ballad: dialogue + narration, 4-line stanza, repetitions, alliteration and internal rhyme, theme of travel, supernatural elements, BUT it has a moral (ballads don't)
        
        interpretations: dream (abrupt stages, 1 protagonist per passage), allegory of the soul (crime-punishment-redemption), poetic journey of Romanticism (mariner=poet that tells a story after an emotion, guilt, after man has killed nature and started the industrial revolution)
        
        Kubla Khan: < Coleridge was reading a book about travelling, geography and history, he fell asleep after a dream caused by opium and woke up and started writing lines he had dreamt, interrupted by a guest (unfinished poem),
        
        2 imaginations: primary imagination (used unconsciously, transforms perceptions into images and gives chaos a certain order), secondary imagination (used consciously, uses the data from reality to build new worlds, so art creates and does not re-create as thought during Enlightment)
        
        fancy: power of the poet to associate elements (metaphors, alliterations, other devices) into new beautiful unities and images
        
        nature is viewed in a neo-Platonic way (reflection of the world of ideas: nature carries abstract meanings ex. albatross)
        
        archaic language and old genres ex. ballads
        
        dramatic illusion: drama should never be verisimilar to reality but should produce illusion and put the audience in a state of dreaming (art is not copy but imitation of nature)
      - 2nd generation: Byron, Shelley, Keats (all died young and were disillusioned with politics and revolution, so they used poetry to challenge political and natural order)
        
        Byron
        
        aristocrat, rich and handsome, set out on the Grand Tour (Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece, Middle East) (1-2 cantoes of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), loved exotic settings and foreign customs, after the discovery of his relationship with his half-sister he moved to Lake Geneva with the Shelleys (3 canto), then to Venice (4 canto + Don Juan), to Milan (involved in plots vs Austrian rule), to Pisa with Shelley (he died) and to Greece (supported independence from Turkey)
        
        Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: 4 cantos united by noble protagonist Harold who leaves England because of boredom and travels through Europe (2: Spain, Portugal, Albania, Greece; glorious past and landscapes of these countries; 3: Switzerland, human ability to forget because creativity keeps away from reality, attraction to nature; 4: Italy, nature and sea as reflection of eternity and sublime and mirror of poet's melancholy
        
        didn't consider himself romantic (for him, good poetry ended with Pope), didn't like 1st generation+Keats, only poet to be famous throughout Europe (influenced Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Balzac)
        
        Byronic hero: passionate, moody, restless, mysterious with a horrible sin/secret in the past, individualistic, no social and moral rules, outsider and isolated, aristocrat but rough, sensitive to nature and beauty, refuses women and is envied by men
        
        Byron believed in individual liberty, disapproved constraints and tyrants
        
        witty and satyrical style, inspired by 18th century poetic diction (BUT with romantic themes): Spenserian stanza, ottava rima
        
        nature is not a consolation or joy, doesn't have any message
        
        Shelley
        
        radical thinker in a post-French revolution conservativist era, expelled from Oxford (pamphlet The necessity of Atheism vs existence of God), vs English rule in Ireland and vs Catholicism, laws and customs. He was a republican, a vegetarian and a supporter of free love, interest in occult and regular sciences. Separated from his wife and eloped with Mary Shelley to Switzerland where they met Byron, there he wrote The revolt of Islam (only love can save men from social unrest, key figure of the wanderer to explain history, violence as product of social inequity). When they moved to Italy, he wrote Ode to the west wind, Prometheus unbound (a lyrical drama about intellectual rebellion, spiritual liberty and love that overcomes evil) and Adonais (elegy for Keat's premature death). He died during a storm at sea.
        
        refusal of: social conventions, political oppression, tyranny. Belief in restless spirit, better future, freedom and love as remedies for social faults
        
        essay A defence of poetry: poetry is expression of imagination and revolutionary creativity and should change the world (that is becoming more and more material) but it is nearly impossible and the poet is bound to suffer and to isolate
        
        poet: prophet and titan who challenges the cosmos and helps humankind to reach an ideal world of freedom, love and beauty
        
        nature: veil that hides the Divine spirit, source of poetic images, refuge from ordinary world
        
        traditional verse forms (Spenserian stanza, couplet, blank verse, Dante's terza rima) and different genres (political ballad, classical elegy, lyric poetry)
        
        Keats
        
        personalized synthesis of: sensations, love for Middle Ages and the Greek culture, + fusion of Romanticism and Neo-Classicism, love for the unfamiliar and the remote in space and time
        
        died at an early age because of bad health, after losing his mother and brother and the possibility of a marriage with Fanny Brawne. He was not very well known, he will be reahabilitated at the end of the century (ex. Mattew Arnold: "He is with Shakespeare")
        
        wrote a series of Odes (ex Ode on a Grecian urn) about relationship between: pleaseure and pain, happiness and melancholy, art and life, reality and imagination
        
        wrote ballad La belle dame sans merci (medieval taste and form)
        
        more emphasis on facts and experiences than the subject: the "I" stands for universal subject (and NOT the poet, since he denies himself through negative capability)
        
        imagination: used to recreate in poetry and art the world that he experiences or how he would like the world to be
        
        disinterested love for beauty makes him a forerunner of Pre-raphaelites and Aesteticism
        
        Physical beauty: can be perceived through the 5 senses, seen in nature, mutable and subjected to decay and death
        
        Spiritual beauty: in love, friendship and poetry, gives joy (Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever"), immortal and frozen
        
        negative capability: ability of the poet to experience doubts without needing facts and reason, ability to deny himself to identify with the object described that inspires him. This is the premise to sensation, beauty and truth, and finally poetry
        
        influenced by philosopher Hazlitt: sensation- memory+imagination - art
  - - - about middle classes' manners, social behaviour and character
    - - spent her life at home with her family, she and her sister Cassandra never married, was homeschooled by her father and started reading and writing very early, published anonymously and then her brother Henry revealed her identity in the biography of the author in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, she was supported by Sir Walter Scott
        
        Sense and sensibily (3 books: 1 two sisters fall in love, 2 they go to London and maybe lose their man to another woman, 3 get married): Marianne and Elinor are sisters and their dad has just died so they move to the countryside, Marianne falls in love with Willoughby and Elinor of Ferrars, they move temporarily to London and discover that the two are already engaged, Ferrars announces the end of his engagement and marries Elinor, while Marianne settles (acquires more Sense) for another man, Colonel Brandon
        
        Elinor is Sense (cautious, rational, represents Jane Austen's pov and is never mocked vy the author), while Marianne is Sensibility (artistic, emotional, lively, sensitive, relies on first impressions), but in the end they become similar to one another
        
        Sense and sensibility need to be balanced and complementary (reshaping nature to allow society)
        
        Elinor's pov, introspection is more important than dialogue, irony to create characters and reading states of mind
        
        themes: decorum, politeness, marriage, money (pov of upper classes, and pov of a woman prevented from possessing it)
        
        Pride and prejudice: the Bennet family lives in a cottage, one day the rich Mr Bingley rents an estate nearby and falls in love with Jane, while his best friend Darcy with Jane's sister Elizabeth. She dislikes him for his Pride (she has Prejudice) and because he has separated Bingley and Jane and mistreated the son of his former steward Wickham. Darcy provides for Wickham's marriage and Elizabeth accepts his second proposal, Bingley comes back and marries Jane.
        
        descriptions, dialogues, reflections, letters, good characterization (ex Mrs Bennet)
        
        the heroine and the hero are unconventional protagonists of a sentimental novel, full of good qualities and weaknesses: she is proud (independent) and prejudiced (vs Darcy), he is proud (snob), and prejudiced (rich vs Elizabeth who is not aristocratic)
        
        themes: journey towards self-awareness, love, marriage, wealth, security and independence, physical (Wickham) vs sentimental love
        
        irony, double perspective (incomplete for characters and complete for the reader), 3rd person narrator with focus on Elizabeth's pov, dialogues, letters
      - master of the novel of manners: < 18th century novelists she learnt about psychology of characters, attention to ordinary events (balls, walks, tea-parties, friends' visits), < Fielding omiscient narrator, dialogue and irony. However she only focused on country gentry
      - country gentry (trading classes who were becoming part of gentility in that period) as protagonists (no aristocrats): property, decorum, money, marriage, south of England (lands, parks, country houses), social mobility and unscrupulous social climbers, gossip and adulteries, parenthood, love vs social code (money and social standing), restrain of impulses, heroine self reflection after a crisis (moral autonomy). Happy ending: marriage of hero and heroine.
      - analysis of character and conduct from 18th century pov and her own spontaneous feeling
        
        class distinction is a source of irony, comedy and social satire
  - - - history is not arbitrary but the product of human decisions
      - focus on Scottish history (especially historical or personal crises), with both aristocratic and low classes (new idea: history is also of ordinary people)
      - pattern of the journey: traveller enters a new ethnic group, lives with them for some time, returns home with new knowledge and mediates between the rival groups
      - influenced Manzoni: history+fiction, focus on conflicts (Lombardy vs Spain), BUT aimed at creating Italian language and consciousness
      - wrote in Scottish dialect
  - - - Edgar Allan Poe