Romantic Age (9)

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.