john keats

English 61: Some Concepts to Consider
I Romantic Personae
A. Wordsworth: close to Nature , family and friends. 1. Believes we can only hope to retain in middle age some of the energy and enthusiasm for Nature we enjoyed in youth. Nature takes the place of Truth and Beauty in Plato's philosophy of metempsychosis and anamnesis. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But railing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. (Intimations of Immortality, 58-65)

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind. (Intimations of Immortality 177-80) 2. Celebrates the simple man in simple language. Once again, I see These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. (Tintern Abbey 14-22)

B. Coleridge 1. Tends to seek more exotic themes and settings, writing an incantatory verse suggesting a "nature" beyond Nature, a mystical world which helps explain the ordinary. At Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to me Down to the sunless sea. (Kubla Khan 1-5) 2. Wrote critical essays on other poets, including Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Spenser. He sees the poet as transcending the ordinary man and revealing the truths of Nature. "Shakespeare possessed the chief of if not all the requisites of a poet - namely deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody . . . that these feelings were under the command of his own will - that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt and made others feel on subjects in no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty, by which a great mind becomes that which it meditates on. To this we are to add the affectionate love of nature and natural objects." ("Lectures on Shakespeare," D500)
C. Shelley: shares the same core principles as Wordsworth and Coleridge but he puts himself at the center of every poem. In this he will be followed by Byron. Together they create the Romantic Hero, who wanders the world seeking the proper setting for his own excellence. Of course, he is always disappointed but the rapturous verses keep rolling on. I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings Holing an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around. (Mont Blanc 35-40) Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My Spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! (West Wind 57-62) Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heedeth not. (Skylark 36-40)

II. Great thinkers tend to be consistent in their thinking across the spectrum of issues - social, political, economic. Mary Wollstonecraft had the brilliant insight that women suffer the same social, political and economic oppression as lower class men: A Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are strikingly parallel in argument and example. A contemporary and analogous text is Beaumarchais' Figaro. Figaro speaks out against the aristocracy -"The only trouble you ever took was to be born!" - and Marceline, later discovered to be his mother, complains that society gives women no place but subservience. In both cases the attack on the class system had a more immediate effect than the attack on the subordination of women: Marceline's speech was cut before the first performance. The Necessity of Atheism (D749). In Queen Mab he denounces institutional religion, aristocracy and monarchy. He eloped with Harriet Westbrook when he was eighteen and she only sixteen, then abandoned her to marry the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. They fled first to Switzerland and then Italy, where other artists and intellectuals gathered around them. He turned on Wordsworth when Wordsworth became more conservative in middle age ("To Wordsworth" D752). Byron inherited an aristocratic title and wealth. He traveled widely and experimented in all sorts of sexual relations - including but not confined to - pederasty and incest.

III. Periods of great social and political turmoil are often marked by great bursts of artistic, poetic and dramatic creativity.
A. Periclean Athens, late fifth century B.C. After the Greeks drove back Persian invasions in 490 and 480 B.C., Athens rebuilt itself with magnificent temples, like the Parthenon on the Acropolis. The historian Thucydides quotes Pericles in his Funeral Oration of 431 B.C.: "Athens is the school of Hellas." Part of that education the Athenians gave the rest of Greece was tragedy, which was only written and produced in Athens in the fifth century. It is a democratic medium: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides instruct all citizens on the glories of Greek heroism, the complexities of Greek humanism and the power of poetry to lift and define the nature of man.
B. Early sixteenth century Florence. This northern Italian city had long been the home of great aristocratic families and powerful professional guilds. At the end of the fifteenth century, however, it was stricken by religious fanaticism. The monk Savonarola gripped the people with fiery sermons, often ending with the burning of books. Then in 1498 the mob turned on him and burned him as a heretic. There followed the most brilliant period of Florentine art and culture: Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli.
C. Elizabethan England. Elizabeth I ruled from 1558 until 1603. She consolidated the political gains of her father Henry VIII, making England the first modern nation state. At the same time she sent Francis Drake and Walther Raleigh off to discover the New World. She herself read, wrote and spoke five languages. Her own poetry is brilliant. Her court became the most brilliant in Europe: Shakespeare wrote and performed many of his plays for her. Spenser immortalized her as The Fairie Queene. Nicholas Hilliard painted remarkable portraits of her courtiers.
D. The Romantic Age (1789-1832). Framed by the beginning of the French Revolution and the English Reform Act, this period was the first of a series of social and political cataclysms which would lead finally - after the First World War - to the collapse of aristocracies and monarchies across Europe. There are early stirrings in France and Germany - Rousseau, Voltaire, Goethe - but the greatest creative brilliance comes in English lyric poetry. Never, anywhere else at any other time, has so much brilliant poetry been written by men and women who shared the same beliefs and encouraged each other in their work.

Anodontoides ferussacianus

Anodontoides ferussacianus

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