The Romantic Poets From “Lives and Works of the English Romantic
Poets” by Professor Willard Spiegelman turned into a Power Point Presentation by
Kathleen Curran for Advanced Placement Literature
Common concerns
among the Romantics: • They wrote about Man's relationship to
nature, which, with the universe, they considered active, dynamic entities. There is, though, a counter-‐desire to escape from nature and to deny Man's connection to it.
• There is a concern with society and politics, and an idealistic notion that humanity can transcend its enslaving traditions.
The Romantics were conscious of
consciousness itself—of the power of the mind as a force for self-‐glorification
and a seed of self-‐destruction.
Lord Byron
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Lord Byron was a dashing, swashbuckling figure, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" said a woman who did know—and loved—him. A man of monstrous appetites and ambitions, his insouciance and supreme self-‐confidence are reflected in his agile turns of phrase and his audacious, almost cheeky rhymes.
But there are other sides to Byron: the brooding Byronic hero, morose and reclusive, and his tender, generous, and stoic side. This is the man who would write to his sister, in the twilight of his truncated life:
But there are other sides to Byron: the brooding Byronic hero, morose and reclusive, and his tender, generous, and stoic side. This is the man who would write to his sister, in the twilight of his truncated life:
Though the day of my destiny's over, And the star of my fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults that so many could find. From “Stanzas to Augusta” 1816
William Blake
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William Blake never achieved even the limited fame of his Romantic counterparts, but his radical, idiosyncratically Christian vision inspired many in the counter-‐culture movements of the 1960s.
An advocate of free love who remained happily married for all of his adult life, whose poetry was caustic social and political protest, Blake was an individual in the extreme. Much of his poetry, notably the Songs of Innocence and Experience, seems simple, but it contains layers of complexity and theological sophistication. As Dr. Spiegelman puts it, "difficulty is not the same thing as depth."
Here Blake ruminates on the nature of darkness and evil in these lines from "The Tyger": When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
William Wordsworth
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William Wordsworth was a bundle of contradictions. Beginning his career, Wordsworth was involved in radical political circles; some speculate that, in Germany, he was an agent for the British Foreign Office.
His poetry is marked by guilt, loss, and inward reflection. Dr. Spiegelman puts it this way: "Wordsworth has struck many readers as sane, haughty, and impossible to know. The man who called the poet 'a man speaking to men' in the preface to Lyrical Ballads often seems troublingly opaque." Later in life, though, Wordsworth found himself comfortably ensconced as a minor celebrity, an elite country gentleman and the Poet Laureate, light years removed from the anxiety of his youth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge formed one half of the greatest intellectual friendship in literary history, but, for good and for ill, he stood apart from his protégé Wordsworth. In several handfuls of poems, 15 at most, he transformed English poetry.
Perhaps no other writer so gifted as Coleridge was ever plagued by so much neurosis and self-‐doubt. Plastic and vast, his mind contained multitudes, yet, hobbled by an addiction to laudanum and paralyzed by the contradictions of his own self-‐examining processes of thought, he constantly berated himself for laziness.
Coleridge could never be pigeon-‐holed, and his output ranged from the somber tale of crime and punishment that is "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to his gentle, expansive conversation poems, such as "This Lime-‐Tree Bower My Prison."
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Percy Bysshe Shelley similarly resists containment or easy definition, exploding as he did with talent and creativity. Possessed of almost unnatural physical beauty, Shelley wrote poetry that inclined toward the metaphysical, occupying the realms of dense, abstract, philosophical thought.
The same Oxford University . that expelled him for preaching atheism later erected a statue of the deceased poet as a fallen angel. He had a very interesting life that we will learn more about.
John Keats
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John Keats has also been cast as something of a fragile beauty, too tender for this world. His life and work contradict this characterization. These lectures introduce you to the genial but fierce young man of flaming ambition and terrier courage, the man whose indomitable will kept him going in his final months, long after the resources of his body had abandoned him.
This spirit and drive transformed what was, by all accounts, a pedestrian poet in 1816 into a poet for the ages only four years later. Keats's poetry was alive to the last, whether examining intellectual adventure and wonder in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" or reflecting on mortality as a form of "ripeness" in "To Autumn."
Citation Page 1. Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets Professor Willard
Spiegelman
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