The Romantic Poets

The Romantic Poets

I. William Blake (died in 1827)

a. like Wordsworth, he sought to emulate and surpass Paradise Lost

b. Blake wishes to strip the idea of the divine from God….remove everything that makes

God holy

i. “Thou art a Man. God is no more;

Thine own Humanity learn to adore”

c. writes in the tradition of Milton/Spenser (Christians

i. Blake argued he was a Christian, but he does not appear to share any orthodox

concepts.

d. Blake’s God possesses no powers that differ in kind from highest human gifts.

God is “the real man, the imagination which liveth forever.”

i. the basis for Blakes’s apocalyptic humanism (anthropocentric view)

II. Life

a. Painter and poet

i. inventor of new art form in which a sequence of engraved plates mixes design and text in varied combination, so that the design and text illuminate one another

b. Blake preceded other Romantics/ never identified himself with them

c. A dissenter from the Anglican Church—argues the church’s doctrines were oppressive

i. Songs of Experience show how this is wrong

ii. dissenters insisted on intellectual and spiritual independence, on the right of private judgment

in matters of morality, on the inner light within each man by which scripture was to be read.

a. Milton was the fountain head of this source, though he would not have claimed it because of the satanic idolatry to which it led.

Blake hoped, as did Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, that by expressing the whole man, poetry would either liberate man OR make him see that condition as unnecessary, or as an unimaginative fiction that an awakened spirit could throw off.

Central desire of Romanticism: a final good in the human condition/existence

Matthew Arnold argues the Romantics failed because they didn’t know enough, they relied too much on imagination. However, what separates us from the Romantics is the loss of their faithless faith. (Harold Bloom)

Hope of Romanticism: Mankind can live outside of existing concepts—we can forge a new path.

III. Songs of Innocence and Experience: The Contraries

a. Blake’s canon of engraved poetry

b. they are an integrated work and need to be read together to truly grasp his purpose

c. without the presence of both states, human existence would cease to exist

d. because they are contraries, they cannot be reconciled within the limitations of human

existence/but their existence does not merely negate the other, rather than expose an

interplay as various as existence itself.

e. Blake does not prefer either Innocence or Experience!

i. in earlier works he set up the idea of “Beulah” (innocence) “Generation” (hell)

ii. Blake argues we should be seeking an Eden, we do so through imagination

iii. Both Innocence and Experience are inadequate, but neither of them are a total

loss

iv. Songs of Innocence are ambiguous; Songs of Experience possess a bitter tone

--bitterness does not result from disillusion, innocence is more indicative of that condition

IV. The Lamb/The Tyger

a. “The Lamb” shows a picture of a naked child holding out his hands to the lamb.

b. “The Tyger” shows a sort of stuffed tiger, more an overgrown house cat, with a confused and rather worried smile (despite its “fearful symmetry”)

c. the lamb is emblematic of both reality and deception in the ambiguities of natural innocence/ the tiger seems to inspire more pity

i. Read properly, the poems reveal a state of being where the lamb can lie down with the tiger (Eden).

“The Tyger”

--a series of rhetorical questions—speaker becomes more sure of the answer as the poem progresses (speaker is NOT Blake)

i. Speaker is the Bard of Experience, trapped by the limitations of Experience

ii. Blake is not trapped; he is attempting to liberate us from such limitations

--the man who sees the fearful symmetry may see also God’s Love as light, and His wrath as fire, may identify “The Tyger” with the latter

--Thus, God made both the tiger and the lamb—a possible conclusion

i. or one may choose the darkness and be a kind of Gnostic, and believe that two gods are in question, and assign one beast to each

Blake wants neither answer. God is human in the clear light, and the fierce Tyger only the poor creature of design. Blake wants us to question the questioner, rather than attempt an answer to question that already seeks merely to answer itself.

Who dares? Must be an immortal. Who would “dare seize the fire” (Prometheus)…..a mere man would suffer a horrible fate if he dared frame the Tyger.

“The Lamb”

--the child’s responses are simplistic, provide a one-sided truth

--The Lamb of Innocence is Christ, and the child

--From experience, the lamb is meat and wool—its tender bleat conveys the pathos of sacrifice

--a reply of “God” to the lamb means triumphant reassurance (does this exist in “The Tyger”?)

--“The Tyger” offers an enslaving resignation

--The Man of Innocence is the Natural Man, prone to the brutalities of Experience. The Man of Experience is the Imaginative Man, creating a nature beyond brutality. Each Man, and each God, satirizes the other.

--In reading these two poems, the speaker has worked himself into a controversy regarding God’s mercy and His wrath.

V. John Keats (October 1795- February 1821)

a. one of the most influential members of the movement despite the fact this his work had been in publication only 4 years prior to his death.

b. initially, Keats did not receive favorable recognition, but by the end of the 19th century he became one of the most beloved of all the British poets

VI. Life

a. born to a sort of middle class family

b. he was not able to attend the more prestigious schools (like Eton, etc)

c. he did not attend a small liberal arts school where his love for history and the classics flourished

d. often described as a volatile character, one given to extremes

e. his father died when he was 8, his mother when he was 14.

i. he and his siblings became the ward of a grandparent; his parents small fortune was left in

trust

d. Keats struggled financially throughout his short life, often relying on aide and support from friends

i. it seems he never knew of the money, and it would have made a world of difference for him

e. Keats became a medical student, probably to ensure financial security for himself and his younger

siblings

f. he secured his license in 1816, but by the end of that year he announced he wanted to be a poet (though writing never did come easy to him)

g. he eventually left his training at the hospital due to a serious of colds, and general poor health. It also didn’t help that a younger brother was dying of tuberculosis.

i. many scholars believe this is where Keats contracted the “family” disease

h. by 1819, Keats is well aware that he is dying….his poetry gives voice to that truth as it is riddled with darkness, depression, and death

i. Fanny Brawne was his muse and great love (notice how his poetry could almost be read as letters to her)

i. Fanny apparently wrote him many letters, but they no longer exist as Keats had them destroyed upon his death

ii. their engagement was never official because he had nothing to offer her; their love was never consummated.

iii. his work may also demonstrate a jealousy towards his “star” who is not facing her own mortality.

j. in September of 1820, Keats left England for Rome (better climate); he knew full well he would not see Fanny again….he died a few months later

i. Fanny openly mourned for 6 years…..she finally married 12 years after Keats’ death.

ii. The film Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, is based on their brief time together

k. Keats finalizes “Bright Star” (the poem) in his final months in Rome

l. 7 weeks after his death, Shelley memorialized Keats in his poem “Adonais”

“The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.”

Keats’ work

--characterized by sensual imagery

--in 1819 he wrote a series of Odes that exist as some of his most famous work

--sonnets were also a mode of choice

--passionate, revealing

In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October 1819, declaring, "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you– I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again– my Life seems to stop there– I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving– I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion– I have shudder'd at it– I shudder no more– I could be martyr'd for my Religion– Love is my religion– I could die for that– I could die for you." (taken from wikipedia)

Keats: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and True Imagination”

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”

“My imagination is a monastery and I am its Monk”

Primary Source: The Visionary Company, Harold Bloom.