EQ: How Does Mystery Help Define Romanticism?

Moon’s Day, November 12: “Amazing & Unexplainable

EQ: How does mystery help define Romanticism?

Welcome! Gather the usual!

Opening Freewrite: “This is amazing and unexplainable” (Nakyle Watkins)

Project Evaluation: Songs of Blue Devils and Wolverines

ELACC12RL-RI2: Analyze two or more themes or central ideas of text

ELACC12RL3: Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding elements of a story

ELACC12RI3: Analyze and explain how individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop

ELACC12RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text

ELACC12RI8: Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal British texts

ELACC12RL-RI9: Analyze for theme, purpose rhetoric, and how texts treat similar themes or topics

ELACC12RL10: Read and comprehend complex literature independently and proficiently.

ELACC12W2: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas

ELACC12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience

ELACC12W5: Develop and strengthen writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting

ELACC12W10: Write routinely over extended and shorter time frames

ELACC12SL1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions

ELACC12SL3: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, evidence and rhetoric

ELACC12L1: Demonstrate standard English grammar and usage in speaking and writing.

ELACC12L2: Use standard English capitalization, punctuation, spelling in writing.

ELACC12L3: Demonstrate understanding of how language functions in different contexts

This is amazing and unexplainable.

~ Nakyle Watkins

After a major event – like a game or an election – people like to try to explain what happened.

Sometimes the explainer is involved in and knowledgeable about the event.Sometimes the explainer has no involvement, and no clue.

But everyone likes to explain. Except when they don’t.

Freewrite 100 words: What sorts of things are we reluctant or afraid to explain – and why is that?

You can discuss an example, or go more philosophical.

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

– Lafew in William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (1604), II iii 1-6

This is amazing and unexplainable.

~ Nakyle Watkins

Freewrite 50 words: BESIDES YOUR OWN – which of this class’ Blakean poster/poems did you like best – and why?

TURN IN TODAY:

Opening Freewrite: “This is amazing and unexplainable” (Nakyle Watkins)

Notes on Blakean Poster/Poems from hall (Contraries)

Closing Freewrite: The Best Blakean

The Romantic Era (1780s - 1830s)

Major Idea: The Individual Imagination is the only Truth

Following Milton, Blake: Individual Mind is the ONLY reliable pathway to God and Truth – BUT NOT in any linear, “rational,” systematic way; must acknowledge, accept the mysterious and unexplainable

Love of Spontaneity, Emotion, Mystery as “real”
Distrust of Organized, Merely “Rational” Systems

Following Descartes: Imaginationnot only perceives reality butactually creates reality

Celebration of the “common” – Nature, ordinary people and experiences, simple language, etc.

Poetic treatment of traditionally ignored or outcast: children, commoners, poor, rural, insane, deformed
Distrust of Elites and Collective Society
Love of “Nature Without Check With Original Energy” (Whitman); Distrust of Civilization

Great Romantic Authors

William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mary Shelley

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads(1798)

Revolutionary in many ways:

A true collaboration – Wordsworth and Coleridge cowrote some, alternated others; published anonymously

“Language Really Used By Men” – simple words, rhymes, rhythms

Mixed common and uncommon
WW – “common man” and everyday scenes treated as if brand new
STC – weird, fantastic phenomena happening to ordinary folk

An instant HUGE seller; changed English literature forever

William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”(1802)

Excerpted and adapted from

The principal object which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them the primary laws of our nature....

All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by one who had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are representatives of all our past feelings....

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity 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. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on ; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment.

William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven”(1798)

--A Simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
--Her beauty made me glad.
"Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?"
"How many? Seven in all," she said
And wondering looked at me.
"And where are they? I pray you tell."
She answered, "Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea.
"Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother."
"You say that two at Conway dwell,
And two are gone to sea,
Yet ye are seven!--I pray you tell,
Sweet Maid, how this may be."
Then did the little Maid reply,
"Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree."
"You run above, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five." / "Their graves are green, they may be seen,"
The little Maid replied,
"Twelve steps or more from my mother's door,
And they are side by side.
"My stockings there I often knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
"And often after sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
"The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
"So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
"And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side."
"How many are you, then," said I,
"If they two are in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! we are seven."
"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"