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Romantic Age (1800-1851)
Romanticism was an European movement started in the end of the 18th century. Many poets and artists had started reacting against the dehumanization of new urban industrial society, these artists were called Romantics. The term “romantic” assumed the meaning connected with feelings, imagination and it was used to describe the expression of personal emotion. In the world of industrial the romantics took refuge and consolation and inspiration in Nature. The romantic writers looked inward to their soul and their imagination to find private truth, they are a creator who used imagination to explore the unfamiliar and the unseen. For them was important childhood, because they saw the child pure and uncorrupted. Romantic poets are usually divided in 2 groups: 1st generation and 2nd generation. Wordsworth and Coleridge belong to the 1st generation, while Byron, Shelley and Keats belong to the 2nd generation of romantic poets.
Poetry
The English romantic period was dominated by poetry. The language was affected by new ideas. Artificial poetic diction was replaced by a selection of language really spoken by men. The heroic couplet, which had been the favourite poetic form of the 18th century, gave way to a return to earlier versus forms, such as blank verse(Wordsworth, Shelley); the sonnet (Wordsworth, Keats, etc); the Italian terza rima, the Italian ottava rima; the folk ballad stanza( Keats, Coleridge)
Task of the poet
The artists, and the poet in particular came to be seen as someone unique in his creative faculties, a prophet divinely inspired, enjoying the same freedom as God himself, in the sense that, in the act of creation, he was free from external rules. The poet considered poetry as an expression and a vehicle of the most profound truth of experience.
IMAGINATION:
Imagination, together with fancy and fantasy came to mean the highest and
noblest gift of the poet who was able to modify or even re-create the world
around him.
NATURE:
In the world of industrial the romantics took refuge and consolation and
inspiration in Nature. Romantic poetry is Nature poetry and it conveyed a new
sense of intimate communion between nature and men, two different and
inseparable parts of the same universe.
PHILOSOPHICAL THEORIES ON THE ROMANTIC CONCEPTION
OF NATURE
-PLATONISM or Neoplatonis, which saw this world as the image of an ideal
metaphysical world
PANTHEISM: according to which nature was moved by a might power, an
immanent God, whose presences is manifest in every stone and tree
GERMAN IDEALISM with 3 great philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
WORDSWORTH(1770-1850)
According to Wordsworth poetry was to deal situations and incidents from
common life. The best subjects to write about were humble rustic life and
simple people living in the countryside. The poems were to be written by a
selection of language really used by men. Imagination was to play a very
important role when Wordsworth identified with his capacity of modifying the
object observed so as to present them in an unusual aspect. As for W. poetry
originates from emotions recollected in tranquility and that’s why the memory
of feelings is important. The task of the poet is to communicate the essence of
things in a simple language and that is due to the fact that the poem has a high
degrees of sensibility and imaginative capacity. He wrote the lyrical ballads, a
collection planned and written with Coleridge. It was first published in 1798
then in 1800. In the second edition it had a long preface by W., this preface is
generally considered as the Manifesto(topics, theme, features) of the Romantic
Movement.
POETICA DI COLERIDGE
Coleridge is the most important English romantics poet . In his best poems he
sums up all those elements when constitute the spirit of romanticism. Coleridge
adopted the rhyme patterns and the dramatic atmosphere of medieval ballads.
He introduced mystery and supernatural elements in his poetry. Nature plays an
important role, but unlike Wordsworth Coleridge doesn’t find happiness and
consolation in it .Some of his poems are set in distant places and times .He
made use special sounds, words and devices such as alliteration, assonance etc.
In order to create unreal atmosphere. The function of his poetry is described in
his Biographia Literaria .He wanted to deal with supernatural characters and
elements as if they were real. He aimed at revealing the inward nature of man
through the use of supernatural element.
BLAKE
Blake was a visionary. He didn’t like the materialistic world around him, but he
dreamed a world where imagination and feeling would be central to people’s
lives. He believed that God made the world.His visionary spirituality can be
seen in the two poems “the lamb” and “the tyger”. In the lamb, from songs of
innocence, god is gentle, benevolent and loving. The innocence and joy of the
lamb and childhood reflected the true nature of god. In “the tyger” from songs
of experiences, god is vindictive and terrifying.
Songs of innocence and songs of experience are in contrast and complementary
and full of symbols. Songs of innocence are about infancy/childhood and are
written in a child-like language. Childhood represent a state of the soul and
innocent view of life.
Songs of experience are about adulthood and the language is more difficult to
interpret . The child can’t stay young forever and he must go through the stage
of experience.
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
1819 was the great year where he produced some of his finest works including
his five odes.
In the odes he reached the pinnacle of his creative powers. all these odes are
lyrical meditation on art and beauty, experience and aspirations, morality and
dreams.
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
Various pastoral scenes that are painted on the urn are described, as the poet
reflects on the transient nature of human life. He concludes that while
everything else is described to decay and die, the beauty of art alone lives on
forever. The poem is made up of 5 stanzas that is ideally divided in 3 parts, 2
describing 2 separate scenes on the two sides of the urn and a conclusion. The
first part includes stanzas 1,2,3, the second part includes stanza 4 and the third
part or conclusion stanza 5.
VICTORIAN AGE (1837-1901)
The Victorian age Is identified with the novel. The most significant reason for
the triumph of novels is the rise of the middle class who had been avid
costumers of this form of literature. Circulating libraries become very
popular.Early Victorians are: Dickens, Elliot and Stevenson. The later
Victorians is Thomas Hardy.
Victorianism contained a lot of contradiction caused, among other things, by
new philosophical currents like materialism, positivism and by the works of
British and foreign philosophers such as :
-Charles Darwin: he carried out the theory of evolution, according to which
men descends from apes and the world is ruled by the law o natural selection.
-Karl Marx: who advocated a new social organization and a new distribution of
wealth
-Arthur Shopenhauer: he maintained that God, free will and immortality of the
soul are human illusions
- Auguste Comte: He was the founder of positivism which excluded revealed
religion and metaphysics and replaced them with sociological ethics
-Hyppolite Tane: who maintained that man is the product of 3 factors : the race,
the environment and the pressure of the past on the present.
MODERNISMO: T. S. ELIOT
The word modernism is a label used to define the main tendency of the 20th
century in all fields of art. It is marked by complexity and experimentation. It
started in 1920 and it was rich in innovations. it included poets such as : Pound,
Yeats and T.S. Eliot. The modernists were all against Victorianism.. They
seemed be more interested in the unconscious mind and symbolism than in
politics. Among these writers T.S. Eliot(1888-1965) in particular showed the
influence of many fold movements including symbolism, imagism as well as
the metaphysical tradition stemming from J. Donne .All these elements
combined with quotations from foreign languages make his poetry complex and
often obscure.
T. HARDY
His literary career can be divided in 2 phases. in the first period he was
influenced by the romantic conception of nature. The presence of nature is an
essential element in his works and it’s an important part of his novels. In the
second period his conception of nature chanced. It became a hostile power.
Love us the base of his novels quite often ends in disillusion and failure,
destroyed by institutions like marriage or by society or more often by fate. He
had a pessimistic view of life and he refuse Christian doctrin and he worked out
a pessimistic theory of his own according to which man is an insignificant
insect in the universe, man is only a puppet in the hands of a malicious force
called by him “immanent will”. T. Hardy work out the idea of a kind of
predestination to failure, that’s why he is considered a naturist novelist.
AUDEN
Auden’s work is notable for his immense technical virtuosity and his wide
range of intellectual interests: he used Marxism, Freudianism and religious
ideas to interpret his age, which he named the age of anxiety. Auden’s poem are
inspired by a passionate moral sense, political engagement and a rigorous social
conscience. The sociopolitical themes of much of his work reflect his strong
beliefs, while his exploration of the psyche mirrors.