Revolutionary Ideas

HUM 2212: British and American Literature IFall 2012

Dr. PerdigaoAugust 24-September 5, 2012

Period of Revolution• Percy Shelley’s letter to Byron in 1816 describing the French

Revolution as “the master theme of the epoch in which we live” (183)

• English literature “has arisen as it were from a new birth” (from “Defence of Poetry”) as a result of the Revolution (183)

• Political transformation as religious awakening—fulfilling promise that a period of violence would usher forth an era of universal peace, a new beginning (183)

• Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789

• New National Assembly passing the Declaration of the Rights of Man

• October, 1789: citizens marching into Versailles and arresting King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette (183)

• British responses—loyalists, the conservatives, reinforcing tradition vs. radicals looking for political change in Britain as well

Scandal• New print culture

• Dissemination of ideas as a result of the invention of the printing press centuries earlier

• “Pamphlet war” in Britain over the meaning of the French Revolution; the “republic of letters” that constitutes the Romantic period (alongside the poetry)

• Richard Price’s sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, delivered a month after the imprisonment of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, followed a year later by Edmund Burke’s rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France

• Responses to Burke: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791)

• Use of the audience, mobilizing support through the new print culture, rise in literacy among “commoners”

• (Contemporary corollary—media blackout in England)

• From the 1780s, working classes learning to read due to lessons in Sunday schools; reading materials becomes less expensive, technology grows (21)

“The times they are a-changin’”• Romantic period defined as an epoch of “free enterprise, imperial

expansion, and boundless revolutionary hope,” an epoch of “individualism in which philosophers and poets alike put an extraordinarily high estimate on human potentialities” (19)

• Prose versus poetry

• Edmund Burke’s response to the Revolution

• Sensationalism of violence, dramatic prose (according to Wollstonecraft, overblown, those “flowers of rhetoric” [195])

• Reflections as the “most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, heredity succession, and the wisdom of the ages” (187).

• Ideas about the modern monarchy

• Tradition versus modernization

• Hereditary claims, “natural rights of men,” questions about the roles of women

“The times they are a-changin’”• Burke’s support of two principles, the “spirit of a gentleman” and

the “spirit of religion” (193)

• Wollstonecraft’s response—appeal to reason

• Thomas Paine’s writing dedicated to George Washington, yoking the traditions and their influences

• Statement against hereditary monarchy

• Comparison to Don Quixote, jousting windmills (202)

A Modern Prometheus (or Pandora)• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

• Father as gentleman farmer, succumbed to drinking, abuse in family

• Mary’s younger life spent taking care of others, as nurse, governess

• Established a girls’ school in Newington Green, near London, but it eventually closed due to financial problems

• Writing against the revolution (and one-time friend Reverend Richard Price), on human rights (209)

• Women as an oppressed class, denied rights as human beings

• Gender constructions limit individuals and society as a whole

• Lived in Paris between 1793-1794, witnessed the Revolution (209)

• Met and fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, American officer in American Revolutionary Army and author (actually left America for Paris to avoid prosecution for debt) (210)

A Modern Prometheus (or Pandora)• Gave birth to daughter Fanny Imlay

• Later left by Imlay, followed him to London and tried to commit suicide, sent as envoy to Scandinavian countries (inspiring later writing Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796])

• Returned to London, found Imlay living with an actress, tried to commit suicide again by jumping from bridge into the Thames, rescued (210)

• Met up with William Godwin again, started relationship

• Pregnancy, marriage

• Couple’s ideas about the institution of marriage (210)

• Gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, died of blood poisoning ten days later

• Wollstonecraft’s legacy established in the twentieth century after rejection of her ideas (and lifestyle) in the Victorian era (211)

A Modern Prometheus (or Pandora)• Significance of voting rights and right to education for women

• Image of Pandora's box and the preservation of private virtue, public freedom, and universal happiness (212)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)• Mother died when Wordsworth was 8; his father died when he was 13

• Inheritance finally acquired in 1802

• Attended St. John’s College, Cambridge University (270)

• Summer vacation in France and the Alps; after graduation, Wales, France

• Lived in France from 1791-1792; became fervent supporter of French Revolution, “glorious renovation” of society

• Fell in love with Annette Vallon, daughter of French surgeon

• Wordsworth went back to England because of financial problems; with outbreak of war, unable to return to Annette and their daughter Caroline

• Inheritance after friend’s death, took residence with his sister Dorothy

• Began friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wordworth’s Legacy• Coleridge called Wordsworth the “best poet of the age” (271)

• Collaborated on poems

• Wordsworths lost the lease on house because the government feared the poets’ radical politics (connection and housing of another radical writer John Thelwall) (271)

• Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson

• Tragedies in his life: eventually lost his brother, two of their five children; growing rift with Coleridge; sister’s illness

• Wordsworth’s fame and success increased

• Turn to political and religious conservatism (271)

• From beginnings as what critics identified as a “levelling Muse” that promoted democratic change to conservative

• Poet laureate of Great Britain in 1842 (272)

Wordworth’s Spontaneous Overflow of Feelings• The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind published after his death

—written in two parts in 1799, expanded to full length in 1805 and revised until his death (272)

• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), considered to be Wordsworth’s greatest poetry but sense that his work decreased in quality over the years

• Considered to be the poet of the “remembrance—also the reinterpretation—of things past” (272)

• Revisitation of experiences, travelling the same ground

• Lyrical Ballads (1802) as experiments to determine “how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure” (292)

• Premise that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (293)

• Sincerity over artifice, changing diction

Wordworth’s Spontaneous Overflow of Feelings• Fear that a new urban, industrial society’s mass media and mass

culture (example of the Gothic novels and German melodramas) as threat; decline in literature (293)

• “We Are Seven” (1798) (278-279)

• Mortality versus immortality

• Fixed state of being, consciousness

• Innocence versus experience

Wordworth’s Spontaneous Overflow of Feelings• “The Solitary Reaper” (1807) (342)

• Song she sang, untranslated

• Creative experience

• Musicality, feeling

• Pastoral tradition

• Gender constructions

• “London, 1802” (1807)

• To Milton

• One of a series written after return from France to London, revolution in France versus the tradition in England (346)

• Sonnet (14 lines, iambic pentameter)

Wordworth’s Spontaneous Overflow of Feelings• “The world is too much with us” (1807) (347)

• Idea of change

• Modernization

• Measuring time

• Elegy

• Sonnet (14 lines, iambic pentameter)

• “Mutability” (1822) (248)

• “Material revolution” produced by science

• Revolution in the natural world

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)• 1791—attended Jesus College, Cambridge

• Enlisted in the Light Dragoons under alias

• Sent back to Cambridge but left in 1794 without a degree

• 1794—met Robert Southey, Oxford student, sympathized with French revolutionaries

• Coleridge and Southey planned to create ideal democratic community in America (“Pantisocracy,” equal rule by all) (437)

• Susquehanna in Pennsylvania as site

• Coleridge became engaged to sister of Southey’s fiancée Sara Fricker

• Coleridge married though plan failed

• Coleridge became more conservative and staunch Anglican over time

• 1795—met Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)• Coleridge was to become a Unitarian minister but given allowance

by the Wedgwoods and worked on writing

• After Lyrical Ballads (1798), attended University of Göttingen in Germany (438)

• Studied German philosophy

• Fell in love with Sara Hutchinson (her sister married Wordsworth in 1802)

• Had been taking laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) to ease physical ailments

• Dependent on drug

• “Dejection: An Ode” (1802) about his despair

• Attempt to restore health in Malta led to decline

• Critical and professional success during the time

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)• Speaker at lecturing institutions in British cities, lecturing on

poetry and Shakespeare, part of literary society at the time

• Women as central audience (not allowed to enroll in universities)

• Gained control over opium habit

• Considered to be heir to the conservatism of Edmund Burke (438)

• Better relationship with wife, reconciled with Wordsworth

• Mary Shelley’s memory of hearing Coleridge recite “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

• Idea celebrated in Coleridge's writing that “culture, the nation’s artistic and spiritual heritage, represents a force with the power to combat the fragmentation of a modern, market-driven society and to restore a common, collective life” (439).

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)• Sussex aristocracy

• Grandfather’s wealth and father’s role in Parliament

• Percy Shelley—in line for baronetcy, educated at Eton and Oxford

• Shelley’s collaboration with Thomas Jefferson Hogg on pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, expulsion from Oxford

• Shelley went to London, eloped with Harriet Westbrook (although opposed to marriage) at age 18; she was 16

• Involvement in Dublin with Catholic emancipation and as advocate for oppressed and poverty-stricken (749)

• Back in London, Percy pursued correspondence with William Godwin (father of Mary Godwin [later Shelley])

• Percy Shelley’s 1813 Queen Mab, A Philosophical Poem, based on Godwin’s theories: denunciations of institutional religion, aristocracy, and monarchy (749)

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)• Left London for France with Mary (and her stepsister Claire Clairmont)

• Harriet drowned herself

• Percy and Mary married in December 1816 and moved to Italy in the spring of 1818

• Inheritance from grandfather’s death in 1815 but finances in trouble (support to Godwin and others)

• Deaths of children with Mary; Percy only child to survive into adulthood

• Perceived exile from England, identification as alien and outcast (750)

• Themes of rejection, individualism (Prometheus Unbound)

• Friendships with Lord Byron and John Keats

• Readings of Dante, Milton, the Bible

• Studies of Plato

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)• Idealized world of perfect and eternal forms versus the ordinary

world of change in Plato, Neoplatonists

• “Skeptical idealism” (750)

• July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams sailing open boat Don Juan on the Gulf of Spezia, squall hit the boat

• Shelley’s ashes buried in Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near graves of John Heats and son William Shelley

• Egotism vs. idealism debated by critics

• Uses of Shelley’s poetry to later politics—Chartist movement in the 19th century, Marx and Engels in the late 19th and early 20th century Gandhi, British Labour Party (751)

Adonais• Adonais, pastoral elegy for John Keats

• Shelley’s son William buried in same cemetery in Rome

• “an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies” (839), love with death, such a sweet space

• Began writing elegy in April 1821

• Mourns and honors Keats, and attacks Keats’ critics (840)

• Adonais as “highly wrought piece of art” (as described by Shelley) (840)

• Pastoral elegy dating back to Greek poets two centuries before

Stages of Grief and Poetry• Conventions of the pastoral elegy:

Invocation to a muse

Descriptions of nature’s sympathetic participation in the grieving

Description of the procession of the mourners

Final turn from despair to consolation in the discovery that the grave is the gate to a higher existence (840)

• Stanzas 37, 39, 41, 49-51, 52-55

• Stanza 15, Echo without voice; Stanza 17, nightingale in mourning (844)

• Adonais as Adonis

• Urania=Venus (841)

• Renewal, immortality

• Published in 1821 in Pisa but not published in England until 1829 (840)

Stages of Grief and Poetry• Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”: Homer, Dante, Milton as three

great epic poets; Adonais echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost and its muse Urania (841)

“O Captain! My Captain!”• Dead Poets Society (1989)

• Directed by Peter Weir (The Truman Show)

• John Keating

• Carpe diem

• Romantics and post-Civil War writing

• Skipping the realists

• Rebellion versus conformity

• Questioning/challenging institutions

John Keats (1795-1821)• Father a head stableman at a London livery stable, married

employer’s daughter, inherited business (901)

• Father’s death the result of a fall from a horse when Keats was 8

• Mother quickly remarried, left, rejoined family for years later

• No access to the trust

• Keats taken out of school at 15 and apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, surgeon and apothecary at Edmonton

• Medical studies at Guy’s Hospital in London in 1815; soon quit medicine to write poetry

• Keats’ friendship with editor, radical, poet, critic Leigh Hunt as influence on writing

• First sonnet in 1816 with “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

• Fear of influence, imitating Milton’s style in Hyperion and abandonment of the project (902)

John Keats (1795-1821)• In 1818, subject o harsh critical reviews, especially Tory critics, part

of attack on Leigh Hunt’s radical politics (902)

• Attacks on Keats’ “common” and “vulgar” language, style

• Keats turned to journalism and play-writing to help support family (brother George and his wife emigrated to Kentucky and lost money on an investment) (902)

• Death of brother Tom to tuberculosis

• Keats’ own health suffered after walking tour in English Lake District, Scotland, and Ireland

• Fell in love with Fanny Brawne, engaged

• 1819, critical success: “The Eve of St. Agnes, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” odes

• Sensory experience within the poems celebrated (902)

• Melancholy in delight, pleasure in pain, love and death (903)

John Keats (1795-1821)• Before his death, returned to Hyperion into a dream vision

• Health worsened, travel to Italy for his health

• Died in Rome on February 23, 1821, buried in the Protestant Cemetery (903)