Emily Dickinson & Romanticism

Emily Dickinson

& Romanticism

~Marianne Moore, after reading Emily Dickinson

“She saw no comfort in refusing to question that about which she wished most to be sure.”

Classicism and Neo-Classicism

Classicism

As a critical term, a body of doctrine thought to be derived from or to reflect the qualities of ancient Greek and Roman culture, particularly in literature, philosophy, art, or criticism. It is commonly opposed to Romanticism and Realism, although these terms overlap in their “characteristics” and are not mutually Exclusive. It is dangerous to classify writers or types as perfect exponents of classicism. Ben Jonson, for example, was a self-proclaimed advocate of classicism as a critic and dramatist, yet his Classical Tragedy, contain non-classical elements, such as Comic Relief. Likewise some of the “romanticists” of the eighteenth century cultivated Classical qualities, just as such a “neo-classicist” as Alexander Pope exhibited some “romantic” traits.

Neo-Classicism

The period in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. It falls into three relatively distinct segments; the Restoration Age (1660-1700), and the Age of Johnson (1750-1798).

Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830

Lyric Ballads

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

William Wordsworth

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Wor2Lyr.html


Lyric BalladsLONDON: J. and A. ARCH, 1798

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads.

The poets William Wordsworth) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge first met in Bristol in August 1795. The most fruitful period of their association came two years later, when they lived within walking distance of each other in western Somerset, Coleridge with his wife and infant son at the small village of Nether Stowey, Wordsworth with his beloved sister Dorothy at nearby Alfoxden. Although in later life Wordsworth's politics became increasingly conservative, at this stage of his career he shared Coleridge's republican zeal. Both poets were convinced of the need to replace the artificial diction of late eighteenth-century verse with a fresher language more attuned to everyday speech.

In financial strife, Cottle changed his mind about publishing after all the pages had been printer and transferred the edition of about 500 to the Arch brothers of London, who replaced the original title-page with one bearing their imprint. Despite some negative reviews, the book sold well enough for revised two-volume editions to prove viable in 1800, 1802 and 1805. These added a lengthy introduction and many new poems by Wordsworth but only one further poem (‘Love’) by Coleridge. Deemed too obscure to be an inviting opener, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which had pride of place in 1798, was moved further back in subsequent editions.


Lyric Ballads

Imagination! Lifting up itselfBefore the eye and progress of my SongLike an unfather’d vapour; . . . . . . In such strengthOf usurpation, in such visitingsOf awful promise, when the light of senseGoes out in flashes that have shewn us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode, . . The mind beneath such banners militantThinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aughtThat may attest its prowess, blest in thoughtsThat are their own perfection and reward,Strong in itself, and in the access of joyWhich hides it like the overflowing Nile.

(The Prelude, VI, 591-614)~ William Wordsworth


Lyric Ballads

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834)

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.


Lyric Ballads

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850)

Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work wasposthumously titled and published, prior to whichit was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge".Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Emily Dickinson: Romantic Influences Then & Now

"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."

The Poet "considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature."

~William Wordsworth

Emily Dickinson: Then & Now

A little Road –– not made of Man ––Enabled of the Eye –Accessible to Thill of Bee –Or Cart of Butterfly –

If Town it have – beyond itself –‘Tis that – I cannot say –I only know – no Curricle that rumble thereBear Me –

Poem 647c. 1862

Johnson, 321 (Air)


Air has no Residence, no Neighbor,No Ear, no Door,No Apprehension of AnotherOh, Happy Air!

Ethereal Guest at e’en an Outcast’s PillowEssential Host, in Life’s faint, wailing Inn,Later than Light thy Consciousness across meTill it depart, persuading Mine –

Johnson, 483 (Air)

Poem 1060c. 1865

Jean Jacques Rousseau: Founder of Romanticism & Anti-Enlightenment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 in

Geneva, Switzerland. His mother died shortly after his

birth. When Rousseau was 10 his father fled from Geneva

to avoid imprisonment for a minor offense, leaving young

Jean-Jacques to be raised by an aunt and uncle. Rousseau

left Geneva at 16, wandering from place to place, finally

moving to Paris in 1742. He earned his living during this

period, working as everything from footman to assistant

to an ambassador.

Rousseau's profound insight can be found in almost

every trace of modern philosophy today. Somewhat

complicated and ambiguous, Rousseau's general

philosophy tried to grasp an emotional and passionate

side of man which he felt was left out of most previous

philosophical thinking.

Jean Jacques Rousseau(1712 – 1778)

Romanticism in America: 1830 - 1865

Emily Dickinson & Romanticism

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals,she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poemsdeal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Metaphysical Poetry

The metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them. The label "metaphysical" was given much later by Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley. These poets themselves did not form a school or start a movement; most of them did not even know or read each other. Their style was characterized by wit, subtle argumentations, ”metaphysical conceits", and/or an unusual simile or metaphor such as in Andrew Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew. Several metaphysical poets, especially John Donne, were influenced by Neo-Platonism. One of the primary Platonic concepts found in metaphysical poetry is the idea that the perfection of beauty in the beloved acted as a remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm. In a famous definition Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist critic, described the school's common trait of "looking beyond the palpable" and "attempting to erase one's own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here"as foreshadowing existentialism (as quoted in The Aesthetics of Georg Lukács by B. Királyfalvi (1975). Though secular subjectsdrew them (in particular matter drawn from the new science, from the expandinggeographical horizons of the period, and from dialectic) there was also a strong causal element to their work, defining their relationship with God.


Johnson, 484 (Fire)

Poem 1068c. 1865

Ashes denote that Fire was ––

Revere the Grayest PileFor the Departed Creature’s sakeThat hovered there awhile ––Fire exists the first in lightAnd then consolidatesOnly the Chemist can discloseInto what Carbonates.


Johnson, 259 (Fire)

Poem 530c. 1862

You cannot put a Fire out ––A Thing that can igniteCan go, itself, without a Fan ––Upon the slowest Night ––

You cannot fold a Flood ––And put it in a Drawer ––Because the Winds would find it out ––And tell your Cedar Floor ––


Johnson,508 (Fire)

Poem 1132c. 1868 (unfinished)

The smouldering embers blush ––Oh Hearts within the CoalHast thou survived so many years?The smouldering embers smile ––Soft stirs the news of LightThe stolid seconds glowOne requisite has Fire that lastsPrometheus never knew ––

Transcendentalism

Brook Farm

A reliance on the intuition and the conscience, a form of idealism; a Philosophical Romanticism reaching America a generation or two after it developed in Europe. Transcendentalism, though based on doctrines of ancient and modern European philosophers (particularly Kant) and sponsored in America chiefly by Emerson after he had absorbed it fromCarlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, and others, took on especial significance in the United States, where it so largely dominated the New Englandauthors as to become a literary movement as well as a philosophic conception.

Brook Farm, a celebrated nineteenth-century New England utopian community, was founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley and other progressive, Transcendentalist Unitarians, to be, in Ripley's words, a new Jerusalem, the "city of God, anew." From its founding in 1841 until it went bankrupt in 1847, Brook Farm influenced many of the social reform movements of its day: abolitionism, associationalism, the workingmen's movement, and the women's rightsmovement. It represented both a test of Transcendentalist dreams and a challengeto Transcendentalist individualism.


Johnson, 294 (Water)

Poem 598c. 1862

Three times – we parted – Breath – and I –Three times – He would not go –But strove to stay.

Three Times – the Billows tossed me up –Then caught me – like a Ball –Then made Blue faces in my face –And pushed away my sail

That crawled Leagues off – I liked to see –For thinking – while I die –How pleasant to behold a ThingWhere Human faces – be –

The Waves grew sleepy – Breath –– did not –The Winds – like Children – lulled –Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis –And I stood up – and lived –


Johnson, 661 (Water)

Poem 1599c. 1862

Though the great Waters sleep,That they are still the Deep,We cannot doubt –No vacillating GodIgnited this AbodeTo put it out ––

Naturalism

A term sometimes applied to writing that demonstrates a deep interest in Nature, such as Wordsworth and other Romantic writers had; and sometimes used to describe any form of extreme Realism, although this usage is a very loose one. It should properly be reserved to designate a movement in the Novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, America, and England.

In its simplest sense Naturalism is the application of the principles of scientific Determinism In Fiction. It draws its name from its basic assumption that everything that is real exists inNature; Nature being conceived as the world of objects, actions, and forces which yieldthe secrets of their causation and their being to objective scientific inquiry. The fundamental view of man which the naturalist takes is of an animal in the natural world, responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which he has control and none of which he fully understands. It tends to differ from Realism, not in its attempt tobe accurate in the portal of its materials but in the selection and organization of thosematerials, selecting not the common place but the representative and so arranging the materialin that the structure of the Novel reveals the pattern of ideas –– in this case, scientific theory –– which forms the author’s view of the nature of experience.


My Garden – like the Beach –Denotes there be – a Sea –That’s Summer –Such as These – the PearlsShe fetches – such as Me

Poem 484c. 1862

Johnson, 233 (Garden)

RealismIn the broadest sense, Realism is imply fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature; a term loosely synonymous with Verisimilitude; and in the sense it has been a significant element in almost every school of writing in human history. In order to give it more precise definition, however, one needs to limit it to the movement which arose in the nineteenth century, at least partially in reaction to Romanticism, which was centered in the Novel, and which was dominant in France, England, and America from roughly mid-century to the closing decade, when it was replaced by Naturalism In this latter since, realism defines a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter.

Realism has been defined as “the truthful treatment of material” by one of its more vigorous advocates, William Dean Howells, but the statement means little until the realist’s concept of truth and his selection of materials are designated. Generally, the realist is a believer in Pragmatism and the truth he seeks to find and express is a relativistic truth, associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience. Generally, too, the realist is a believer in democracy, and the materials he elects to describe are the common, the average, the everyday. Furthermore, realism can be thought of as the ultimate of middle-class art, and it finds it subjects in bourgeois life and manners. Where the romanticist transcends the immediate to find the ideal, and the naturalist plumbs the actual to find the scientific laws which control its actions, the realist centers his attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence.

“I have said that this is a poem of exquisite ironies. It is, indeed, through in a very different mode, related to Dickinson’s “little girl” strategy. The woman who feels herself to be Vesuvius at home has need of a mask, at least, of innocuousness and of containment.”

~Adrienne RichExcerpt from: “Vesuvius at Home - The Power of Emily Dickinson”


On my volcano grows the GrassA meditative spot –An acre for a Bird to ChooseWould be the General thought –

How red the Fire rocks below –How insecure the sodDid I discloseWould populate with awe my solitude.

Poem 1677c. unknownMcQuade, 45 (Volcanoes)


Johnson, 708 (Volcanoes)

Poem 1748c. unknown

The reticent volcano keepsHis never slumbering plan –Confided are his projects pinkTo no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the taleJehovah told to herCan human nature not surviveWithout a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lipsLet every babbler beThe only secret people keepIs Immortality.

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.

Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. This is not to say that all modernists or modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age.

“Dickinson’s poems, her dangers, are also often authenticated by her losses. So many of them ––battles with those emissaries of silence which are the ocean, the wind, the light of day (with its terrible raised expectations – unfulfilled promises –– or vision) and the speechlessness of pain, of fear –– end on great failures of human speech, victories of “the Tooth/That nibbles at the Soul.” It has the last word everywhere, as one can see in these seven instances:

~Jorie GrahamExcerpt from: “Some Notes on Silence”


Interrupt –– to die ––

Until the Moss had reached our Lips ––And covered up –– our Names ––

Withdraws –– and leaves the dazzled SoulIn her unfurnished Rooms

Then – close the Valves of her attention ––Like Stone ––

When orchestra is dumb …And Ear –– and Heaven –– numb ––

The Heavens with a smileSweep by our disappointed HeadsWithout a syllable ––

The Tapestries of ParadiseSo Notelessly –– are made!

“Punctuation re-invents an original privacy in the social space between words.

A dream manages it like this: a woman is about to write something but first she needs surgery on her throat. She must drive to a hospital near and ocean. At the edge of the ocean she stops: a van has been carried up by the waves and people are dragging out a hurt man–– dark, broken into discrete black parts, each shape. Like a punctuation mark: an arm, severed legs, not just two, a penis, a curled piece of chest hair. The helpers put him into a cardboard box where he stays a short time. Soon he is taken out of the Box whole, not broken anymore. The woman can then write her poem.”

~ Brenda HillmanExcerpt from: A Cadenced Privacy(some thoughts on punctuation in contemporary poems)


ImaginationThe imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping” or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Nature"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics.As suggested above, it was often presented as Itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination In emblematic language. For example,throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items innature--"ants,” "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard tonature varied considerably--nature as a healing power,nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization,including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unifiedwhole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of”mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself.

At the same time, Romantics gave Greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and thisis as true of Romantic landscapepainting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetryis essentially a poetry of meditation.

Symbolism Myth&

Symbolism and Myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols werethe human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic languageThey were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory.

Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

Other Concepts:Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components.

It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.

“Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door with an imaginary key, turned and said: ‘Matty: here’s freedom.’”

~Adrienne RichExcerpt from: “Vesuvius at Home - The Power of Emily Dickinson”(Mcquade, 33)

Bloom, Harold, Ed. Romanticism and Consciousness, Essays in Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1970

Graham, Jorie.. “Some Notes on Silence) (pp. 173 - 171). McQuade, Molly, Ed. By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. 2000

Hillman, Brenda. “A Cadenced Privacy (some thoughts on pumctuation in contemporary poems)” (pp. 182 - 186). McQuade, Molly, Ed. By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. 2000

Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. Based on the Original by William Flint Thralland and Addison Hibbard Third Edition. Indianapolis: The Oddysey Press, A Division of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1975

Leavell, Linda. “Marianne Moore's Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal - Volume 12, Number 2, Fall 2003, pp. 1-20; E-ISSN: 1096-858X Print ISSN: 1059-6879; DOI: 10.1353/edj.2003.0009

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge 2009

Metaphysical Poets Wikipedia.org. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets> 2009

Modernism: Wikipedia.org < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism>. 2009

Jean Jacques Rousseau

VoS: Voice of the Shuttle <http://vos.ucsb.edu/> Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jacque_Rousseau. 2009

William Wordsworth Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth. 2009

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Carole S. MoraENG 475

An Introduction to Emily DickinsonProfessor Wendy Martin

November 16, 2009Claremont Graduate University

Emily Dickinson & Romanticism

Emily Dickinson & Romanticism

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