esame di Letteratura Inglese II, prof Reggiani, poesie commentate

Letteratura inglese

Enrico Reggiani - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Voto all’esame orale, 30. Appunti presi in classe, integrati dal commento tratto da ricerche personali sulle poesie, lettere e prose più significative (proposte nella bibliografia e presenti sulla Norton Anthology) dei seguenti autori:

William Wordsworth

• Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
• I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
• The Solitary Reaper
• London, 1802
• Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• The Eolian Harp
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Kubla Khan
• To William Wordsworth

George Gordon, Lord Byron

• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
• Manfred
• On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Six Year
• Letters

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• Ode to the West Wind
• To a Sky-Lark
• To —— [Music, when soft voices die]
• From A Defence of Poetry

John Keats

• La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• Ode to Psyche
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• To Autumn
• Letters: Nov. 22 1817, Dec. 21, 27 1817, Feb. 27 1818, Oct. 27 1818, Nov. 30 1820

The Victorian Age (1830-1901)

John Stuart Mill

• What is Poetry?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• The Lady of Shalott
• Ulysses
• Break, Break, Break
• Crossing the Bar

Robert Browning

• Porphyria’s Lover
• My Last Duchess
• A Toccata of Galuppi’s
• Caliban upon Setebos

John Ruskin

• Modern Painters
• The Stones of Venice

Matthew Arnold

• From The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
• From The Study of Poetry

The Pre-Raphaelites

William Michael Rossetti

• The Pre-Raphaelite Manifesto

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• The Blessed Damozel
• The House of Life: The Sonnet

Christina Rossetti

• Song ("She sat and sang alway")
• Goblin Market
• Cardinal Newman

William Morris

• The Defence of Guinevere

Walter Pater

• Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Gerard Manley Hopkins

• God’s Grandeur
• The Windhover
• Pied Beauty
• From Journal

Rudyard Kipling

• Recessional
• The White Man’s Burden
• If

E approfondimenti storici su: industrialismo e epoca vittoriana

Walter Pater

He had an extraordinary influence on a whole generation of young writers, including Oscar Wilde. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance – which celebrated energy and egoistic individuality in figures such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo – became something of a cult work for its insistence on the tragic brevity of human life, and the assertion that the only way to combat the meaninglessness of existence is to live hedonistically, devoting oneself to pleasure (Aestheticism). One of life’s pleasure was art. Pater argued that it should have no moral basis or purpose: it was good in its own right, an end in itself. (Art for art’s sake), implying that art has to be free of all moral and didactic restraint. Although Pater did not mean that pleasure had to be immoral, his doctrine was read as a reaction against Victorian standards of morality. As the century progressed this attitude was taken to extremes by some French writers who came to be called Decadents.

However, some Pre-Raphaelites had been developing a sensibility akin to, and partly modelled on, that of the Decadents, and it is easy to trace a line from Keats’ poetry of sensual beauty to Wilde through Tennyson and Dante Gabriele Rossetti.

Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Siccome la bellezza è un concetto relativo, è inutile cercare una sua definizione astratta e assoluta. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. Il critico estetico ha il compito non di valutare una poesia nell’assoluto, ma i suoi effetti su di lui, il grado di piacere che gli reca nel particolare.

The aesthetic critic regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book… are valuable for their virtues, affecting one with a special, a unique impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.

The function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this fair impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced.

Un critico di questo genere non deve possedere la definizione astratta di bellezza, basta un temperamento che si lascia muovere da un certo tipo di bellezza e che all’interno di una determinate era è in grado di determinare il “genio”. Il genio spesso non è presente in modo omogeneo in tutta l’opera: si possono trovare piccole gemme qua e là, mentre la maggior parte dell’opera stessa è destinata ad essere dimenticata. Viene quindi presentato il tema: il Rinascimento italiano, un tema complesso e difficile da trattare in modo esaustivo.

Dice che di solito le diverse branche della cultura rimangono separate (i filosofi lontani dai religiosi, lontani dai pittori…) invece il Rinascimento è un’epoca speciale di unità, soprattutto sotto Lorenzo de Medici in which artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation but breathe a common air.

La Gioconda ha una bellezza tale da poter incarnare qualsiasi bellezza di ogni epoca, a partire da quella greca in poi. È come se fosse un simbolo di eternità.

Conclusion

L’esperienza consiste non solo di tante impressioni: colore, odore, texture… ma l’esperienza è anche unica per ogni diversa persona e suscettibile ai cambiamenti di tempo. Noi abbiamo un tempo limitato e l’unico modo di espandere il nostro tempo è l’arte, il piacere che l’arte ci può offrire in maniera disinteressata. L’importanza dell’arte è quella di riuscire a farci provare sensazioni importanti nel nostro periodo di vita.

Pater's critical method was outlined in the 'Preface' to The Renaissance (1873) and refined in his later writings. In the 'Preface' he argues initially for a subjective, relativist response to life, ideas, art, as opposed to the drier, more objective, somewhat moralistic criticism practised by Matthew Arnold and others. "The first step towards seeing one's object as it really is," Pater wrote, "is to know one's own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality in life or in a book, to me?" When we have formed our impressions we proceed to find "the power or forces" which produced them, the work's "virtue". Pater moves, in other words, from effects to causes, which are his real interest.

"Theory, hypothesis, beliefs depend a great deal on temperament; they are, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament." Pater's critical method, then, sometimes seen as a quest for "impressions", is really more a quest for the sources of individual expression.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

In college, he became associated with the Oxford movement and its programme of religious reform. He was received into the Catholic Church, with Cardinal Newman’s support, and then entered the Jesuit Order. He was ordered a priest and worked in many parishes, including some in working class areas of Liverpool and Glasgow. After teaching at Stonyhurst, he became Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, a post he held until his death.

Hopkins’ position in the history of English literature is rather unusual. His poetry was completely unknown in his lifetime because he refused to publish it, or even publicly admit that he wrote verse. He thought that his interest in poetry conflicted with his vocation as a priest, and would distract him from his duties. The first edition to his poems appeared 30 years after his death. This coincided with the appearance in England and America of Literary Modernism, one of whose aims was to abolish the mellifluous dictation of late Victorian and Georgian poetry and return to a more vigorous type of composition. Upon his publication, Hopkins was immediately perceived as a man born before his time, a poet born in an age that could not have appreciated the modernity of his talent.

Hopkins’ poetry, however, is firmly rooted in the 19^th century as well as in the tradition of English devotional writing. He absorbed the ideas of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. In his highly personal religious way he was still a late romantic and his mystical and sensual vein stems directly from Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites. He was also influenced by the medieval Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus, whose discussion of theology is based on the individual forms that people and things take in the physical world. Such a view was naturally congenial to Hopkins’ desire to render his experience of God’s presence in the world. He uses Keatsian poetry in a devotional or religious mode of literature. His poetry comes close to that of the Metaphysical Poets, in finding unusual connections between apparently unrelated things in the world, which indicate the presence of God in all things.

Hopkins loves the appearance of God in the world, and finds the meaning of his life in submission. His own pessimism, and the terrible fits of depression he went through, found relief in the Catholic faith in God’s boundless mercy. Most of Hopkins’ poetry is religious, either because it directly praises or talks to God or because in nature he constantly sees and celebrates God.

Hopkins’ real innovations, however, are above all technical. He made lengthy studies of Old English and Welsh verse, and came to the conclusion that it embodied the true, natural tradition of expression in English. Hopkins’ poetry is rich in the alliteration and assonance. He was also contrary to the smooth and fluent rhythm prevailing in 19^th century poetry and tried to model his metres on what he believed was the common rhythm of spoken English. To pursue this he invented a metrical system that he called ‘sprung rhythm’. By this he meant a stress-based metre where each line of verse is based on a regular number of stresses, or primary accents, and not of syllables, which can vary in number. This reflected the stressed metre of Anglo-Saxon verse.

God’s Grandeur

The first four lines of the octave describe a natural world through which God’s presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted lightnings of light produced by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God’s presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up “to a greatness” when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of God’s presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed (“reck”) His divine authority (“his rod”).

The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of “toil” and “trade.” The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.

The sestet (enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins’s contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep “freshness” that testifies to the continual renewing power of God’s creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who “broods” over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation (“ah! bright wings”) Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God’s grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God’s loving incubation.

This poem is an Italian sonnet. The meter here is not the “sprung rhythm” for which Hopkins is so famous, but it does vary somewhat from the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet. The poem begins with the surprising metaphor of God’s grandeur as an electric force. The figure suggests an undercurrent that is not always seen, but which builds up a tension or pressure that occasionally flashes out in ways that can be both brilliant and dangerous. The optical effect of “shook foil” is one example of this brilliancy. The image of the oil being pressed out of an olive represents another kind of richness, where saturation and built-up pressure eventually culminate in a salubrious overflow.

The image of electricity makes a subtle return in the fourth line, where the “rod” of God’s punishing power calls to mind the lightning rod in which excess electricity in the atmosphere will occasionally “flame out.” Hopkins carefully chooses this complex of images to link the secular and scientific to mystery, divinity, and religious tradition. Electricity was an area of much scientific interest during Hopkins’s day, and is an example of a phenomenon that had long been taken as an indication of divine power but which was now explained in naturalistic, rational terms. Hopkins is defiantly affirmative in his assertion that God’s work is still to be seen in nature, if men will only concern themselves to look. Refusing to ignore the discoveries of modern science, he takes them as further evidence of God’s grandeur rather than a challenge to it. The olive oil, on the other hand, is an ancient sacramental substance, used for centuries for food, medicine, lamplight, and religious purposes. This oil thus traditionally appears in all aspects of life, much as God suffuses all branches of the created universe. Moreover, the slowness of its oozing contrasts with the quick electric flash; the method of its extraction implies such spiritual qualities as patience and faith.

Hopkins’s question in the fourth line focuses his readers on the present historical moment; in considering why men are no longer God-fearing, the emphasis is on “now.” The second quatrain contains an indictment of the way a culture’s neglect of God translates into a neglect of the environment. But it also suggests that the abuses of previous generations are partly to blame. Yet the sestet affirms that, in spite of the interdependent deterioration of human beings and the earth, God has not withdrawn from either. He possesses an infinite power of renewal, to which the regenerative natural cycles testify. The poem reflects Hopkins’s conviction that the physical world is like a book written by God, in which the attentive person can always detect signs of a benevolent authorship, and which can help mediate human beings’ contemplation of this Author.

The Windhover

The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw one of these birds in the midst of its hovering. The bird strikes the poet as the darling of the morning, the crown prince (dauphin) of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled colors of dawn. It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with steady control like a rider whose hold on the rein is sure and firm. In the poet’s imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly reined in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and suspended in an ecstatic moment of concentrated energy. Then, in the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater balancing forces as he makes a turn. The bird, first matching the wind’s force in order to stay still, now “rebuff[s] the big wind” with its forward propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his own heart stir, or lurch forward out of “hiding,” as it were—moved by “the achieve of, the mastery of” the bird’s performance.

The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird’s movement and an injunction to the poet’s own heart. The “beauty,” “valour,” and “act” (like “air,” “pride,” and “plume”) “here buckle.” “Buckle” is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature’s being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the “buckling” of the knees), in which all parts subordinate themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a unification takes place. At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order as the glory of Christ’s life and...