Da "Pre-Roman poetry" a "Samuel Taylor Coleridge"

Pre-Roman poetry

In the second half of the 18th century, literature saw a growing interest in everyday or humble subjects.
Poets also began to describe scenes of rural life in simple language, often permeated by pervasive sadness. The call to sentiment was equally strong, especially in romantic novels like Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which became famous for its combination of sentimentality, adventure and picaresque.
Goldsmith also exemplifies this period through his poem The Deserted Village.

Folk poetry

Interest in common characters, speeches and scenes found a favorite medium in the form of the ballad. Songs about friendship, love, drinking, animals and the like were also popular, such as those written by Robert Burns.
There was also an interest in melancholy and desolation, which led to the so-called funerary poetry by Thomas Gray.

Romantic poetry

Within the first romantic generation, William Blake was a self-taught poet. His Songs of Innocence describe the uncontaminated condition of man. To these, Blake added Songs of Experience, which deals with the presence of evil and injustice in the world.
The two states, innocence and experience, are complementary for Blake: the lamb of his poetry assumes the tiger, and vice versa.
He also wrote about social problems, such as the inhumane working conditions of children described in The Chimney Sweep.
It can be said that English Romanticism began with the publication of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written by four hands by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth contributed romantic poems in spirit, themes and language. Coleridge contributed poems on supernatural and magical themes, the so-called “demonic poetry”.
Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge embody the two souls of English Romanticism: the ordinary world and the supernatural and magical.

Second-generation Romantics

The most representative figure of the second generation was Lord Byron, who embodied the aspirations of the generation raised with the ideals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. He became famous for his long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan.
A close friend of Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley in Italy wrote lyrics and odes that link Nature to human ideals of freedom and happiness, such as Ode to the Wind of the West and longer works as Prometheus Unbound.
John Keats, on the other hand, in his odes exposed an acute awareness of the brevity of life to faith in the ethical value of beauty, which is eternal.
In a ballad like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Keats demonstrated his love for romantic subjects.

Gothic novel

The gothic novels are set in picturesque places, usually Italian, characterized by castles, dungeons and darkness, chosen as the scene of terrible crimes that contribute to the suspense and fear that pervade the entire novel.
They are characterized by a sinister and gloomy atmosphere and supernatural events, and their main characters are usually an evil and mysterious man who haunts a young innocent woman.
A good example of Gothic fiction is The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

Romantic novel

In 1830 the narrative was already highly descriptive; now two other characteristics began to develop:
the complete analysis of any situation;
the incorporation of rhythms and constructions of spoken language.

Novel of manners

Some authors looked back to the 18th century, like Fanny (Frances) Burney who, with Evelina, created a new genre: the "novel of manners".
The same anti-romantic quality is found to a greater extent in Jane Austen.

Novel of purpose

The "novel of purpose" was also very popular, written with the aim of spreading ideas, especially those social and political after the French Revolution.
The novel belongs partly to the Gothic tradition and partly to the philosophical tradition of the XVIII century, dating back to Rousseau, who turned themes such as isolation and social injustice into fantasy subjects, as in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Historical novel

Sir Walter Scott’s plots are based on strange and unusual events, linking them to the tradition of the romance novel.
Scott inaugurated the "historical novel", a story set in the past where the actions and lives of picturesque characters are contrasted with great historical events.

American short story

The short story responded to the readers' demand for a short and agile narrative prose, which emerged from magazines.
The best example of this new American tradition is Edgar Allan Poe. He considered brevity indispensable to produce a strong emotional effect on the reader.

Romantic themes

The themes of romantic poetry were:
instinct, feeling and intuition have become essential qualities of the romantic age. The "knowledge of the heart" was considered greater and deeper than the "knowledge of the head”. Therefore, feeling and emotion were essential steps towards a true knowledge of things;
for the romantics, imagination connected the individual mind and the universe, the human and the divine, mortality and eternity, emotions experienced and written poetry;
the love for nature, which endowed with life, passion and feeling;
simple scenes, objects and people began to acquire new value, along with everything that was supernatural;
romanticism was introspection. Romantics discovered that reality and truth are subjective. The individualism of the Romantics was also reflected in their isolation from society;
there is a whole area of romantic sensitivity that can be called "negative". Shows a marked interest, sometimes a fascination, for the strange, the unusual and the forbidden;
the "tendency to infinity" was the desire to exceed human limits.

William Blake

It was not until the end of his thirties that William Blake began to write poetry.
When he wrote his first collection of poems, Songs of Innocence, in 1789, the poems were engraved.
He illustrated each of them with an image that was their visual counterpart, such as his famous The Tyger and The Lamb. In 1794 he published his Songs of Innocence and of Experience in one book.
Blake’s personality and poetry mark the beginning of the romantic age. He reacted violently against any form of control over the individual.
He openly attacked national institutions that were used as a tool for the oppression of men born without power, under a kind of intellectual and social tyranny.
Blake’s poetry is difficult because of its use of complex symbols.
The use of symbols was natural to Blake, who believed that the physical world could be read as the book of God.
On the other hand, its language and syntax are quite simple.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

The two Blake Songs were intended for children, but together they meant to show "the two opposite states of the human soul", that is Innocence and Experience.
The world of innocence is seemingly harmless and fearless, full of joy and happiness. But this is apparent because it is a world in which morality has not yet been tested by experience.
The world of experience is contaminated by selfishness, cruelty and social injustice.
For Blake, imagination allowed man to see beyond physical reality.
Blake is the first to write the "child’s poem", which constitutes much of romantic poetry, which does not just describe children in his poems, but is also interested in children's world.
Blake is also the first to denounce the exploitation of children by cruel and oppressive families and societies, and to express his moral indignation about it, like in Chimney Sweeper.

The Chimney Sweeper

The fate of the poor chimney sweep is narrated in the first quarter of this ballad from Songs of innocence: his mother died when he was very young, his father sold him when he was a child (for more money or for extreme poverty).
Despite little Tom Dacre’s dream, full of light and joy, the chimney sweeps must go out to work in the cold and dark of the morning.
In all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, joy and pain, laughter and tears go hand in hand.
In The Chimney Sweep contrast is visually represented in the alternation of dazzling flashes of white (the boy’s hair, the luminous key of the angel, the sunlight) and the darkness of soot and night.
In Tom Dacre’s dream, the chimney sweeps are freed from their sooty prisons and transformed into clean white children playing naked in the sun. This contrasts with the sad reality of their going out together in the cold and dark morning.

The Lamb

This poem from Songs of Innocence is an invocation to the lamb in the title, spoken by the little child in line 17.
In stanza 1 the lamb is shown as free and happy, in an unspoiled environment where it receives and gives pleasure.
The lamb's innocence and the perfect harmony of its existence make the poet ask, 'who made thee?'. The answer comes in stanza 2, where the traditional identification of the lamb with Christ is confirmed by the voice of the child.
Both the child and the lamb are united in God's name, in a world made up of light, running water, grass, and tender voices.

The Tyger

The subject of this poem from Songs of Experience is not a tiger which is realistically described but rather the archetypal 'Tyger', whose origins are buried in mystery and darkness.
The animal evoked in The Tyger is frightening yet fascinating, bursting with energy.
The contrast here is between the darkness of night and deep forests on the one hand, and flames and fire on the other.
Fire is the link between the tiger's strength and the metaphor of the last part of the song, where the tiger is seen as God's creation, the product of a mighty hammer and anvil.
As often in Blake, the poem ends with a question, which casts doubt on the possibility of understanding the universe through the senses and reason.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth is the father of English Romanticism.
In fact, most of the works for which he is remembered were the result of his friendship and collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth made what is called a literary manifesto of Romanticism.

Natural environment

William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District, an area of supreme natural beauty in north-west England. As a child, he and his three brothers were allowed to roam freely in the countryside by day.
In fact, both the people and the natural landscape would have provided inspiration for his later poems.

Travel

Already during his third year summer vacation in Cambridge he took a walking tour of France and the Alps with Robert Jones, his dearest college friend and after another walking tour through Wales.
He then returned alone to France to improve his knowledge of the language. Both his travels abroad and those in England are often reflected in his poetry, like in The Prelude.

French Revolution

On a personal level, the French Revolution had an enormous impact on William, who became a fervent supporter of revolutionary ideas.
He also fell in love with a French girl, Annette Vallon, who gave him a daughter, Caroline. The two wanted to get married but lack of money or hostility from her family forced Wordsworth to abandon Annette and return to England.
The outbreak of war prevented him from returning to France, and this combination of personal feelings of guilt and political loyalties divided between England and France brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown, described precisely in The Prelude.

Friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

The friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge was crucial to the development of romantic poetry, they met almost every day and spent a lot of time together.
The result of this extraordinary friendship was a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads.

Lake District

William returned to the Lake District and Coleridge followed him soon.
Returning to his native lakes meant for Wordsworth a reunion with the physical landscape in which he had grown up as a child and whose spirit and beneficial influence he desired to recover as a man.
Wrote a guide to the area, A Guide through the District of the Lakes, considered one of the first modern tourist guides.

The last year of his life

The personal decline of his life was accompanied by growing fame and prosperity.
The Prelude, published after his death, is a long poem in loose verse in which Wordsworth describes his youthful experiences along with the development of his mind.

Lyrical Ballads

The Lyrical Ballads are one of the most important collections of poetry in English literature and the central work of English Romanticism.
It was written jointly by Wordsworth who contributed poems on everyday events written in ordinary language, and Coleridge who wrote poems of an exotic or fantastic nature.
The book opens with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge and ends with Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.
It was such a revolutionary and avant-garde idea for its time that many critics condemned the poems for their "vulgarity" and lack of importance.
Ordinary subjects and language were chosen as a way to create a kind of "democratic" poetry accessible to all men.
The preface also contains Wordsworth and Coleridge’s concern that the new urban and industrial society created by the Industrial Revolution threatened the ability of man to live in harmony with nature.

Importante topics

So the main topics are:
- nature = nature as a country, with mountains, rivers, lakes, forests and so on, often contrasted to the noise and confusion of the city.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud reflects these ideas.
Nature as a source of inspiration, which was based on the relationship that unites man to nature.
Nature as a life force, in fact man seems to communicate with nature. The view that God is present in nature.
- the child = Wordsworth was, together with Blake, the first English poet to make the child the subject of his poems.
The idea was that the child, in his simplicity and goodness, was closer than the adult to the original state of harmony with nature.
Growing up, the child gradually loses the memory of a perfect union with the universe.
- memory = Much of Wordsworth’s poetry is about memory, the way in which memory allows us to find continuity within ourselves and with the outside world.
For Wordsworth, the mind moves in two directions: into its past and outward, into nature, where it finds memories of itself or reflections of itself.
- the self = The Prelude is the work of a lifetime and is an autobiography in loose verses that tells the growth of the poet, as a country boy who roamed free among the uncontaminated nature of English lakes, from his days at school and university, to trips and experiences in France.
The novelty of The Prelude is that it puts the ego and its biographical details at the center of a poem.
- the ordinary person = by drawing our attention to the ordinary things of life, Wordsworth shows us how really great and inspiring they are, in fact the country person can teach lessons that the wisest of philosophers cannot give.

Nature: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

In this poem, often known as Daffodils, the poet is wandering alone through the countryside.
The first part is, as usual in Wordsworth, the description of a beautiful natural scene and the flowers are described metaphorically as people.
He sees himself in them.
The last stanza contains the recollection or memory of a precise event (seeing the daffodils), in which he finds his own emotions confirmed in nature.
The 'present moment' of the poem is, in fact, Wordsworth remembering the daffodils, not the moment when he actually saw them.

The ordinary person: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

The poem given below is part of the so-called Lucy Poems, which describe the poet's love for a country girl, a natural creature.
Lucy seems completely natural, completely 'other' than himself and other people. The gulf separating the poet from Lucy becomes a metaphor for the gulf separating man from nature, the self from external reality.
In three short ballad stanzas the poet sings an epitaph to Lucy - her death is as important to the poet as a princess's death.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 and in 1797 he settled in Nether Stowey, Somerset, where William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy also lived.
This was the beginning of the intellectual collaboration that gave birth to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a collection which included Coleridge’s most famous poem: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Later settled in the Lake District.
He then became addicted to opium and in 1810 quarreled with Wordsworth.

Demoniac poems

Coleridge’s best poetry seems to come from a dream world of eastern or medieval charm.
His best-known poems, often referred to as "demonic poems", share the presence of the supernatural in various forms.

Coleridge’s importance

Coleridge is the perfect example of a complex romantic, an unfinished genius who has never fully realized his potential.
He is the poet of wonderful fragments; in fact some of his best poems are apparently unfinished.
In contrast to the prevailing British empiricist tradition, it held the view of the creative mind as capable of recreating the world of the senses.
Biographia Literaria is one of the most well-known works in language, it represents Coleridge’s most significant contribution to Lyrical ballads. It is divided into seven parts.

A case of joint poetic work

The Rime is a ballad. The story originates from a dream made by Coleridge’s friend, George Cruikshank, and was originally conceived as a collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, which, in effect, suggested some central episodes such as the killing of the albatross and the dead who were sailing on the ship.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be defined as a mixture of
Gothic novel, travel literature (providing the exotic) and traditional.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

- Part 1 = An old mariner meets three guests who go to a wedding and stops one to tell his story.
The mariner tells him how the ship on which he was travelling, after crossing the Equator, was pushed by storms towards the ice of the South Pole.
Suddenly, through the fog, an albatross appears and the mariner kills him
without apparent reason.
- Part 2 = From now on an evil spell is cast on the ship.
- Part 3 = The mariners on board are dying of thirst when another ship appears: it is a ghost ship led by Death and Life-in-Death.
- Part 4 = The mariner survives, but is tormented by the eyes of the dead. He gradually begins to feel compassion.
- Part 5 = The spell begins to break, the mariner hears strange noises and sees strange beings.
- Part 6 = Meanwhile the mariner has fallen into trance and hears two spirits, companions of the Polar Spirit who avenged the death of the albatross, talk about his sin and his atonement.
- Part 7 = The ship finally reaches the native land of the mariner, where a small boat with a holy hermit on board comes to rescue him. Once his story is told, his soul finds peace.
But still tormented by guilt, he must wander and tell his story to others, so that they learn through his example to love and respect all creatures of God.

Supernatural and magic

Coleridge’s procedure consisted in mixing the supernatural with the real.
The presence of the supernatural and magic can be summed up:
the figure of the old mariner = comes from nowhere and has a sparkling eye that has a hypnotic power, which makes people listen to his story;
is forced by a mysterious force to tell his story over and over again;
the albatross = sacred bird in many religious and mythical traditions, seems to be endowed with supernatural powers;
the poem is full of otherworldly creatures: spirits, angels, sea monsters;
the ship led by mysterious forces and populated by corpses, comes from two well-known medieval themes = the Ship of Fools, the ghost ship that does not take men anywhere, and the Dance of Death, where men are taken away to their skeletal tombs.
It is worth noting that in the end no rational explanation of supernatural events is offered, unlike some Gothic tales.

Interpretations of The Rime

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner it’s a creepy book.
Killing the albatross is a kind of sin against nature and therefore against God: for this sin the mariner must pass through the fire of purgatory and only then can he obtain salvation, represented by the return to his old homeland.
The turning point is found in Part 4, where in the shadow of the ship the water burns a "terrible red" and the water snakes continue to crawl around the ship. A change occurs when the mariner blesses them from the bottom of his heart. At that precise moment the spell begins to break: the albatross falls from his neck and ends up in the sea.
According to the artistic interpretation of the poem, the mariner is an artist who abandons his habitual world in search of truth and knowledge, passes through painful experiences and out of the ordinary and is finally saved by the power of imagination.

It Is an Ancient Mariner

This is the first part of the ballad. It serves as an introduction to the main story. The 'Argument' at the head of the poem and the prose commentary in the left margin of the text (both written in archaic language) provide a brief summary of the ballad's story.
The ballad is full of suspense, from the very first line.
The Mariner appears out of nowhere; his fixed stance contrasts with the movements of the guests hurrying to the wedding. The only mobile thing about him is his glittering eye, which casts the spell that binds the Guest and makes him listen.
The Mariner's tale has this same quality of surprise: the ship suddenly materializes, we know nothing about it or its crew, nor about its destination. The final touch of suspense comes in the final stanza: the Mariner's fear-stricken face surprises the Wedding-Guest; but the cause is only given in the last line. However we still do not know why killing the bird was such a terrible action.