Romantic Poetry— Blake and Coleridge

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Romantic PoetryBlake and Coleridge

• World Literature 2
• Fall 2005
• Dr. Whipple

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What do we mean by Romantic?

• Not mushy
• Not (always) about love
• ABOUT nature
• ABOUT experience
• ABOUT deep feelings (about things)
• AGAINST modernism, mass technology, soullessness
• AGAINST rationalistic takeover
• NONCONFORMISTin poetry, social and sexual
  relations, in spirituality, in politics
• (When we mention poetry to people, this is often
  the kind of poetry they think of)

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Romanticism the Enlightenment

• Revolt against aristocratic social and political
  institutionsnot unlike Enlightenment
• Fulfillment of promise of Enlightenment
• Romantic musical movement (Beethoven, for
  example)
• Throwing off Classical models, more direct,
  simple, style derived from folk speech
• Utopian social thoughtFrench Revolution
• But

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Romanticism in Art

• Temeraire (Turner)
• Salisbury Cathedral (Constable)

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Nationalism

• Folk speechplebeian poets
• National languages
• Celebration of folklore, cultural identity
• Geography as determiner of national identity
• J. G. Fichte Those who speak the same language
  are joined to each other by a multitude of
  invisible bonds by nature herself
• National movements in Greece, Belgium, Italy,
  Americas (N and S), Germany between 1776-1870

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Nature

• Reaction, in part, to and against the beginnings
  of the Industrial Revolution (Blakes dark
  satanic mills)
• Nobility of nature (idea of noble savage)
• Industrial revolution represented progress to
  some, bad things to others
• The world is changing
• Concept of idyll

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Freedom (a la the Romantic poets)

• Freedom of spirit
• Freedom of conscience
• Freedom of action
• Freedom from conventional artistic aesthetic
• Freedom from social restraints
• The suffering of the Artist for the Art
• apotheosis
• Poetic experience as ultimate culmination
• Imagination as ultimate authority

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Major poets, major poems

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kubla Kahn, Rime of
  the Ancient Mariner)
• William Blake (The Tyger, Jerusalem)

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William Blake (1757-1827)

• The first multimedia poet revered for his
  poetry and his art
• Wrote, illustrated, engraved, and printed his own
  bookstotal control over the experience of
  reading his work
• Elements (ha!) of mysticism in his art and
  poetry claims to have had visions from
  childhood.
• Elemental themesredemption, renewal, the new
  Jerusalem, God, God in nature
• Imagination over the materialism and rationalism
  of the 18th century

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Blake and the mind

• This is your brain

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This is your brain after youve read BLAKE!

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Blake Links

• Blakes Jerusalem in a modern context (BBC)
• William Blake Archive
• Jerusalem RealAudio file (and other
  quintessentially English tunes)
• Garden of Love mp3 file
• Picture of the Tyger (Blake)
• Website of Tyger studies

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Coleridge (1772-1838)

• Yes, he did drugs. Specifically, opium.
• DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
• Kubla Khanallegedly written in a drug trance,
  broken when a friend interrupted himpoem is
  unfinished
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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Coleridge Links

• Rime of the Ancient Mariner (read aloud)
• Kubla Kahn (read aloud)