Romantic Poetry

1
Romantic Poetry

• Keats, Shelley and Byron

2
The Big Six

• William Blake (1757-1827)
• Willliam Wordsworth(1770-1850)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• John Keats (1795-1821)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
• Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Jane Austen 1775-1817
3
Romantic Age

• First Generation The emphasis on
• Nature and correspondence between Nature and
  human nature (e.g. US Whitman, Dickinson)
• Feeling (spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feeling)
• Imagination (e.g. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud)
  Vision
• Common people (Infant Joy Infant Sorrow)
• Individualism Quest

4
Romantic Age

• 2nd Generation The emphasis on
• Feeling
• Art Imagination (e.g. Ode on a Grecian Urn)
  Vision
• Individualism Quest for the remote (myth)
• Breaking down more boundaries (e.g. the sensual,
  the moral)
• against authority (Ozymandias)

5
John Keats

• October 31, 1795-February 23, 1821 died at the
  age of 25 of tuberculosis .
• Originally a surgeon and changed his mind in
  1813-1814.
• "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

6
Ode on a Grecian Urn

1. Using apostrophe to speak to the Urn in order to
   enter its realm (the realm of art and
   permanence)
2. The process question? empathy ? confirmation ?
   differentiation between the human and the
   artistic.

7
Percy Bysshe Shelley

• eloped with the 16-year old Harriet Westbrook
  disinherited because of this marriage.
• In 1814, Shelley traveled abroad with Mary
  Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the
  philosopher and anarchist William Godwin
  (1756-1836). Harriet committed suicide, and then
  Shelley married Mary.
• Shelley was Drowned in 1822.

8
Ozymandias

• The use of frames the travelers story
• Contradictions used to present the ironies of
  human ambition
• shatter visage? frown and sneer
• Passion on these lifeless things survives the
  hand and the heart (whose heart?)
• colossal wreck boundless sand.

9
Lord Byron

• See the video
• Born with a clubfoot
• Child Harold the disparity between Romantic
  ideals and reality
• Involved in affairs with a married woman and his
  half sister.

portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress by
Thomas Phillips, c1835 (source)
10
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

1. How is she described? With what images (of
   contradictions)? What does beauty means? And
   walk?
2. How do the sound effects help convey the meanings
   of the poem?

11
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

• SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY, like the night  
• Of cloudless climes and starry skies  
       And all that's best of dark and bright  
       Meet in her aspect and her eyes       
  Thus mellow'd to that tender light        Which
  heaven to gaudy day denies.  

12
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

• One shade the more, one ray the less,       
  Had half impair'd the nameless grace,       
  Which waves in every raven tress,        Or
  softly lightens o'er her face        Where
  thoughts serenely sweet express,        How
  pure, how dear their dwelling-place.    

13
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

• And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,       
  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,        The
  smiles that win, the tints that glow,        But
  tell of days in goodness spent,        A mind at
  peace at all below,        A heart whose love is
  innocent ! 

14
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

• she
• sheds tender light (combines darkness and
  light//aspect and eyes//appearance, heart and
  thought.)
• -- grace in motion on her dress and her face, and
  expressive of her pure mind and thought.
• -- cheeks and smile glow to reveal her goodness,
  mind and heart.
• rhythm iambs with one trochee
• Sounds m s o e