Transcription
Foreign. [Music]
The early years of the 19th century mark a truly great period of creative achievement here in the Lake District. William Wordsworth created poems that remain amongst the most famous in the English language. This wonderful scenery also inspired the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The works of these three men alone would represent a golden age, but the early 1800s also produced enduringly popular verses of John Keats and Lord Byron. Together, these five great masters defined England's poetic contribution to one of the most stimulating periods of European cultural history. They were the English Poets of the Romantic Age.
The main thing about Romantic poetry is that it did introduce the personal enterprise. Before that, poetry was very rather formal, and there were a certain number of poetic subjects that you wrote about. Another substitute, didn't it? It opened the range of poetry very much, and of course, it opened the range of language. More normal language about ordinary people. In the case of Wordsworth, particularly, one of the themes of the Romantic age is the freedom of the individual. And obviously, this arises from the fact that it was an age of revolutions. Poets were very interested in imagination, the capacity of the human mind to create, which was conceived of as a god-like power. And a lot of people were writing about a spirit in nature, seeing nature almost as a new religion in the face of waning faith in traditional religions. Shelley would call himself an atheist, yet he's a very like religious kind of mind. Wordsworth was called by Coleridge a semi-atheist, and yet it's he above all who gives us intimations of immortality. So that's kind of probing of things, looking at them in a new way, giving the individual certain freedoms and responsibilities. That's all to do with Romanticism, and the idea that the unconscious is as important as the conscious. The little unremembered things of kindness and of love, all that comes together with a new kind of energy.
The French Revolution of 1789 was an event that changed the history of the world politically. It led on to the age of Napoleon Bonaparte and a European continent engulfed in conflict. Culturally, the ideas that underpin the French Revolution also came to spread throughout Europe. Many creative minds of the time were impressed with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a philosopher whose emphasis on the liberty of the individual profoundly influenced the views of the revolutionaries. Many artists also admired Rousseau, especially his emphasis on the value of individual feeling and emotion, summed up in the phrase "I felt before I thought." This admiration was reflected in many of the greatest paintings of the early 19th century. This was also the time of the Industrial Revolution. As a response, many visual artists sought to emphasize unspoiled nature in their paintings, with the English landscapist John Constable, the finest of them all.
These were the basic artistic principles of what we now know as the Romantic Age. The notion of the Romantic Age didn't really become established in those terms until the end of the 19th century. It was first used around the 1860s to describe that group of poets in England. The artistic spirit of Romanticism would make itself felt in the verses of some of her greatest ever poets.
With hindsight, we can identify the beginnings of English Romantic poetry in the work of two men: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth. Born in 1770 in the English Lake District, William Wordsworth was from his earliest years inspired by the dramatic landscape of this wild, mountainous region. And even after becoming one of his country's most famous sons, he continued to make his home here. But as a 17-year-old, William Wordsworth left the Lake District to attend the University of Cambridge. His parents hoped that he would eventually become a priest. Instead, their son decided that his destiny was as a poet. He would be proved triumphantly correct.
Wordsworth's early work was, like that of many other greats, unremarkable. Much of his earliest verse adopted the formal poetic style that had dominated throughout the 18th century. But the young Wordsworth was also an enthusiast for the new ideas of the day. In 1790, he visited France and became a great admirer of the Revolution then taking place. In 1797, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fellow young poet and Cambridge graduate with radical political views. The two men quickly became firm friends. Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy moved to the county of Somerset, where Coleridge lived in the village of Nether Stowey. There, in the heart of England's West Country, the three took long walks together, discussing poetry as well as the momentous political issues of the day.
Coleridge came to the Quantocks on the first day of the year 1797, and he was 25 years old. He came with his wife, Sarah, and his young child, Hartley, who was six months old. He came to this little cottage here mainly on account of his friend Tom Poole, the local tanner, a wealthy man, self-educated man, who was a friend and a patron of Coleridge for the whole of his life. During the period that Coleridge was living here, William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived three miles down the road at Holford, at Alfoxden. When Coleridge came here, they lived in Racedown in Dorset. He went to see them. He walked, of course, the 40 miles, stayed there for three weeks, and brought the Wordsworths back to Nether Stowey. And while they were here, they found this mansion, Alfoxden, and took a lease on it for the year. And during that time, they met practically every day, and used to walk on the Quantocks, visit each other's houses, and of course, most important of all, they collaborated on the on the book known as Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to produce a collection of poems together, and in September 1798, it was published under the title Lyrical Ballads. All but one of the poems included were written by William Wordsworth. And in the book's second edition of 1801, his contribution was greater still. For it, he wrote a preface which outlined his views on poetry as a whole. With hindsight, the whole Lyrical Ballads project can be seen as the birth of English Romantic verse.
Wordsworth now began to find his muse, and his poem "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" became his first great achievement. In it, he describes the effect upon his being of a single English landscape seen by him some five years before: "That blessed mood, in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened; that serene and blessed mood, in which the affections gently lead us on, until the breath of this corporeal frame, and even the motion of our human blood, almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul."
The end of Lyrical Ballads, the last poem he puts in is "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the River Wye," and he gives the date July the 13th, 1798. People went to Tintern Abbey because of the picturesque rules. Wanted to find the picture in the landscape. When Wordsworth goes, he chucks out the picturesque and really makes you feel it isn't a picture you're going for, but it's an immense relationship which is you and the universe. It's mind that you have is married to this goodly universe, that the mind is as big as the universe, and that if you like, if that's big, then this is big. And it gives immense heroic power to every human being.
The Lyrical Ballads is a romantic compilation because it's about passion, feelings, and also about the feelings of ordinary people. Wordsworth says in his preface, famously, that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." And you can't really overemphasize Wordsworth's interest in feelings as being the core of his poetry. They're written in what Wordsworth called "the real language of men," by which he meant a language of passion and also a simple language, a language which approximated to ordinary speech. And this was, in itself, a radical or pro-revolutionary gesture at the time. This was poetry for the people.
Although the Lyrical Ballads were often strongly criticized, Wordsworth grew more confident about his new approach to verse. He began to write an account of his own creative development entitled The Prelude. In it, he memorably described what his feelings were when the French Revolution, he supported, degenerated into the barbarity of the Terror that broke out in 1793. "I scarcely knew one night of quiet sleep; such ghastly visions had I of despair and tyranny and implements of death. And long aberrations which in dreams I pleaded before unjust tribunals, with a voice laboring, a brain confounded, and a sense of treachery and desertion in the place the holiest that I know of, my own soul."
The Prelude, which is on his own life, is undoubtedly not only the greatest poem Wordsworth wrote, but perhaps the greatest of all the Romantic poems. In this blank verse, he really taught himself to write, say, 30 or 40 lines in which he would tell you an anecdote or a story. You just find that Santa Fe Bridge is aloud, how the echoes of phrases that he used earlier repeat themselves, how, in a way, the orchestration moves through it.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth not only traces his development back into childhood, but also reveals his fascination with the child in general. It was a popular subject at the time, inspired by Rousseau's phrase "Man is born free, but lives forever in chains." Many intellectuals came to believe that the child possessed an innocent beauty, a beauty which was corrupted by the process of socialization into adulthood. In his own "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," Wordsworth expressed his admiration for the untainted perspective of youth: "Behold the child among his newborn blisses, a six years' darling of a pygmy size; see where, mid work of his own hand, he lies, fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, with light upon him from his father's eyes."
But of all Wordsworth's verse, it is the poems inspired by nature that remain his most enduring achievement, in particular those that celebrate the rugged landscape of the Lake District, to where he returned with his sister Dorothy in 1799. Three years later, Dorothy Wordsworth was taking a lakeside walk with her brother when he was struck by the beauty of a small group of flowers. The experience inspired William Wordsworth to create one of the most famous poems ever written in the English language: "I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils; beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
On the 16th of April 1802, Dorothy gives a description of walking with William along the shores of Ullswater and seeing the daffodils. She said, "There was a long, wide country turnpike road, and they were tossing their heads and reeling in the wind." And one that she wonders whether the seeds have floated ashore. Two years later than the experience, when he writes the poem, he's by himself. He wants to make a particular point. It's often in the mind that the pleasure is in recollection, the memory that they flash upon the inward eye, that is the bliss of solitude. Memory is always granting you grace and favors and delight.
For Wordsworth, nature was almost a religion. It was a sustaining power in his life. He describes in his long poem, The Prelude, how as a boy, he running about the Lake District developed this very intense bond with nature, so that nature became a surrogate parent for him. In "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," these ideas which are explored at great lengths in The Prelude are boiled down, are made very succinct and very powerfully expressed through this very simple image of coming across a field of daffodils. I think that one of the reasons for this poem's great popularity is the simplicity with which he puts forward this very important idea that nature can give a spiritual, sustaining power to the individual.
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" was included in Wordsworth's 1807 anthology, Poems in Two Volumes. This collection represents the peak of his poetic achievement. Although he continued to compose for decades afterwards, he was never able to surpass the wonderful poems of his early adult years. Politically, in later life, he threw off his enthusiasm for revolution and became a conservative, much to the dislike of many of his contemporaries. But his earlier achievements were now fully recognized. In 1843, seven years before his death, William Wordsworth was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate.
A shift away from radicalism also took place during the later years of Wordsworth's old friend, Coleridge, a poet whose greatest work was also a product of his younger years. In his time at university, Coleridge began to use the drug opium to ease the pain of rheumatism, and much of his life would be spent struggling with opium addiction. This contributed to a falling out between Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1810. But of course, by then, the two men had already changed the poetic landscape with the publication of Lyrical Ballads, some 12 years before.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge, before they wrote the book of ballads, both tried to write plays. Both plays failed, and they never got really big performances. But they taught themselves to use the language of actual speech. And in a way, if you assume a character who actually takes a particular position and explains what it seems like to be that person suffering in that way that an individual does suffer, they could really bring new areas of feeling to life by doing this.
Coleridge's single contribution to Lyrical Ballads is one of the defining poetic works of the Romantic Age. Later, he recalled how he had made an agreement with Wordsworth: his fellow poet would write about everyday life. Coleridge, to use his own words, would concern himself with "persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic." With "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," he achieved his aim. It is a poem that tells the story of a mysterious seafarer on a great ocean voyage.
As far as Coleridge was concerned, his major contribution, of course, to Lyrical Ballads was "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and that is also a romantic poem in the sense of being a ballad and also being very much about imagination. You can read the poem partly as a journey of the poet's imagination into unknown realms. It's also experimental in terms of the language it uses. Coleridge tried to imitate archaic English, especially in the earlier version of the poem. And the story is of a voyage to the South Pole. In fact, the voyage starts well, all is going well, the weather is good. Suddenly, a bird appears, the albatross. It follows the ship, and the sailors hail it in God's name and feed it.
"The Ancient Mariner" begins quite abruptly, the insistence of the Mariner that he tell his story to a wedding guest. What is astonishing about the structure of the whole poem is that those two things are side by side: the insistent, dark story of the Mariner, telling of a journey into the dark side of things, and the wedding going on, which sort of represents normal life.
The Mariner's decision to kill the albatross has terrible consequences. In one memorable passage of the poem, Coleridge describes the fate of the ship's crew: "The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I. I looked to heaven and tried to pray, but, however, a prayer had gushed, a wicked whisper came, and made my heart as dry as dust."
There was a source for the appointment which is called Shelvocke's Voyages, a book which Wordsworth had read, and he told Coleridge the tale. And you're told it was a mate of a ship called Mr. Hackley who saw this albatross hovering near the ship, and in the fit of his melancholy, were told in the story, he shot the albatross. There's no motive for the Mariner killing the albatross. He just does it arbitrarily. Just at the moment when it takes place, the crew sort of say he'd done a good thing, and then they say he's done a hellish thing. In other words, they don't really feel certain about their relationship to such a wonderful specimen of the natural world.
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" remains one of the finest and most mysterious achievements of the Romantic imagination. But by the time it was published, Coleridge had already composed his second great imaginative work, "Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream." The title is entirely appropriate. Coleridge wrote the poem in a dream, an opium dream. Although Coleridge was woken from his drug state before he could finish the poem, the 54 lines he did complete are a triumph of his poetic imagination.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alf the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground, with walls and towers were girdled round. And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree. And there were forests ancient as the hills, enfolding sunny spots of greenery."
The role of the imagination was very important to Coleridge and to all the Romantic poets. Coleridge, of course, defined the imagination very influentially in his work, the Biographia Literaria. But for him, and for all the Romantics, the imagination was a divine faculty. It made the poet into a god-like figure. More than this, it was not only creative, it was also an act of love. Imagination allows us to see into the minds of fellow human beings, to understand fellow human beings.
Although the drug-induced "Kubla Khan" was one of Coleridge's finest works, the opium that inspired it often affected him badly. Coleridge was also prone to heavy drinking, and at times, the combination of the two reduced him to the verge of insanity. He did become quite seriously addicted to opium because opium in the form of laudanum was commonly taken in the 18th century and 19th century. It was prescribed to children. It was a very effective painkiller, well, like aspirin is today. In fact, the only painkiller. Coleridge had quite a few pains in his life, both physical and psychological, and so he took quite a lot of laudanum, and he did, in fact, become addicted, and it did disable him during the middle period of his life quite a lot.
His addiction was not the only aspect of his life to cause him grief. In the Lake District with Wordsworth in the early 1800s, he conceived a passion for a local woman, Sarah Hutchinson. Sarah's sister, Mary, was to become Wordsworth's wife, but Coleridge was already married. The affair with Sarah was an often tormenting experience for the poet and ultimately unfulfilling. Unsurprisingly, it wrecked his marriage, and it also affected his work. Much of his verse of the time reflects his growing despair, although the best of this work provides a dramatic insight into his state of mind at the time.
"Oh, dearest Sarah! In this heartless mood, all this long eve, so balmy and serene, have I been gazing on the Western sky, and its peculiar tint of yellow green. And still I gaze, and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, that give their motion to the stars; those stars that glide behind them or between, now sparkling, now be-dimmed, but always seen. Yon crescent moon is fixed, as if it grew, in its own cloudless, starless lake of blue. A boat, the calm, dear William's sky canoe! I see them all so excellently fair; see not, feel how beautiful they are."
Happily, Coleridge was able to cling onto his sanity, and in the years prior to his death in 1834, he had attained the status of a London literary celebrity, not only for his poetry but for his criticism and his lecturing. That said, his life was often tormented, and this makes Coleridge an ideal figure for his age. It was a time when the notion of the troubled, isolated artist became popular, and this concept of the suffering artistic hero is most closely associated with the life and the work of the third great figure of the English Romantic Age: George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron. [Music]
Born in London in 1788, George Gordon's earliest years were lived in humble surroundings, but his life was transformed at the age of 10 with the death of his great-uncle, William, the fifth Lord Byron. This meant that the boy George Gordon inherited the titles and lands of this distant relative. Overnight, he became a member of the upper classes. He attended the great school at Harrow before moving up to the University of Cambridge. He was handsome and intelligent, but he was also moody and self-conscious. These character traits would feature in the literary figure later known as the Byronic hero, a literary phenomenon of the Romantic Age.
Byron's literary career began during his stays at Cambridge. In 1807, he published an anthology of poems entitled Hours of Idleness. It was an unremarkable collection which was criticized heavily in a Scottish newspaper. Byron's response to this criticism was more significant than the work which provoked it. In verse, he launched a furious attack on his critics and on the literary world in general: "A man must serve his time to every trade, save censure; critics all are ready made. Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, learned by rote, with just enough of learning to misquote. Care not for feeling, pass your proper jest, and stand a critic, hated yet caressed."
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was hardly a masterpiece, although it did get him noticed. It was composed in the rhyming couplets that so influenced the poetry of the previous century, and Byron himself later condemned it. In 1809, the young Lord set off for two years of travel around Europe. Significantly, he developed a passion for Greece that would contribute strongly to the Byron legend. His European journey also inspired his first true masterpiece, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This is a poem that introduces the concept of the Byronic hero, the moody, reflective young man of the title.
In the third canto, written in 1817, the young man becomes desperately conscious of the difficulties of self-expression. It is a strikingly romantic theme: "Could I embody and unbosom now, that which is most within me? Could I wreak my thoughts upon expression, and thus throw soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, all that I would have sought, and all I seek, bear no feel, and yet breathe into one word, and that word were lightning! I would speak. But as it is, I live and die unheard, with our most voiceless thought deceiving it as a sword."
By the time Byron wrote these lines, however, his life was faced with more than literary problems. In 1815, he married Anna Isabella Milbanke, who presented him with a daughter, but the relationship was short-lived. In the salons of London society, it was strongly rumored that Byron was engaged in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. Doubts about his sanity also prevailed. His response was typical: in 1816, he stormed out of his home country and headed for Europe. He never returned to England. Most of the remainder of his life would be spent in Italy, and it was in Venice that he began what is considered by many to be his finest work, Don Juan.
It's a long verse narrative, and unsurprisingly for a man of Byron's temperament, it includes stinging satirical references to the country he had left behind: "Happy the nations of the moral North! But all is virtue in the winter season; sends sin without a rag on shivering forth. It was snow that brought Saint Anthony to reason; where jury is cast up what a wife is worth, by laying whatever sum in a malt they please on the lover who must pay a handsome price, because it is a marketable vice."
It is significant that Don Juan also includes satirical references to Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose increasing conservatism was not to Byron's taste. But Don Juan is more than just a withering attack on the English. In its entirety, it is a triumph of the Romantic poetic tradition. Don Juan is a very important romantic poem because it is both deeply romantic and deeply anti-romantic. Byron took himself very seriously at times, but he was also able to mock himself, and in this poem, you have a hero who is a Byronic hero in some ways: brooding, melancholy, sometimes handsome, a great lover, a seeker on a quest for knowledge and experience. But on the other hand, he is also an anti-romantic hero. He mocks all those things. He gets himself into trouble. He's perpetually involved in disastrous love affairs, in and out of wardrobes, in his mistress's bedrooms. His quest is really futile. It has no conclusion. It's haphazard. It has no particular purpose. It's full of accidents. By taking up a very old legend, which is about the young man who everyone wants to fall in love with, he transforms it. The old legend was always that, in a way, Don Juan defies hell in this way. He's just helpless, being so attractive, but beyond the predatory advances of all the women of the world, so that you have a wonderful concept of a passive person who, as it were, reveals all the errors that exist. So, in a way, it reveals the corruptions of the whole world on a kind of Shakespearean scale.
But by the time Don Juan was completed in 1823, Byron was famous across Europe, and even in the Europe of today, his fame ranks second only to Shakespeare. In part, this fame is due to the sheer Romanticism not only of his life but also of his death. In 1823, the people of Greece were in revolt against their Turkish rulers. It was a time when the notion of liberty exerted a strong influence in the artistic world, with Delacroix's 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People perhaps the greatest visual reminder of this concern for freedom. Byron too shared this love of liberty, and when the liberty at stake was that of the Greeks, the fathers of Western Civilization, Byron felt compelled to act. Despite sickness, he traveled to Greece in July 1823 to join the rebel forces. Six months later, he was dead. Though the cause of death was not a bullet, but a fever, Byron's fame as the Romantic hero, sacrificing himself in the cause of liberty, was secured forever.
The concept of a great artist dying young is now etched into the consciousness of all branches of the arts. In the history of English poetry, the suicide of the 17-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton in 1770 is the most striking example of this. Sadly, an early death would also be the fate for the final two great English poets of the Romantic Age: Percy Shelley and John Keats. Neither lived to see their 30th birthday. [Music]
Keats was born in London in 1795. In his youth, he studied medicine with an aim to becoming a druggist. In 1816, he qualified, and a prosperous career beckoned. But by then, his commitment to poetry had become established. Like Byron, he was passionate about the great ancient civilization of Greece, and in his first published volume of poetry, simply entitled Poems by John Keats, he describes the sensation he felt when he first encountered the works of Homer as translated by the Englishman George Chapman: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise— silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Keats's first collection of verse also revealed his passion for nature. Keats's genius was to take the most ordinary and everyday plants and animals and describe them with an easy delight. His choice of words to describe a humble pea plant are especially worthy of note: "Here are sweet peas on tiptoe for a flight, with wings of gentle flush or delicate white, and taper fingers catching at all things, to bind them all about with tiny rings."
Keats's concern with beauty was also expressed in his second published work, a collection inspired by the myth of the Moon Goddess Endymion: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we reading a flowery band to bind us to the earth. Spite of despondence of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and all darkened ways made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirit."
It was hardly surprising that Keats was aware of the darker aspects of life. Professionally, his work often attracted harsh criticism. This bad press contributed to his financial difficulties. In addition, his health was suspect. One of his brothers died of tuberculosis in 1818, and by 1820, John Keats had contracted the same cruel disease. His difficulties prevented him marrying the love of his life, a young woman named Fanny Brawne. But like Coleridge before him, Keats responded to his troubled life by throwing himself into his work.
In 1820, he published his third volume of poetry. It included three of the finest odes ever written: "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on Melancholy." Given his circumstances, the concept of melancholy was entirely appropriate subject matter. In the final stanza of this timeless poem, he describes precisely where the state of melancholy is to be found: "She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, turning to poison while the bee mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight, veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, a restless pool, where Beauty’s shadow lies, and where her tears, like pearls, do lie."
The notion of melancholy is important to the Romantics because it ties in with the great focus on introspection. If you think about it, introspection isn't really going to get very far if you're a happy person. There isn't going to be much to explore, much to say, if you're just simply happy. Melancholy is a much more interesting mood if you want to explore the inner reaches of human psychology. This is something that, of course, wasn't discovered by the Romantics. Shakespeare knew it as well. And Hamlet, the great introspective, melancholy hero, is very much the model of many Romantic heroes. Melancholy was an appropriate Romantic mood to fit in with the gothic atmosphere of many Romantic texts: gloomy, dark, mysterious, not accessible to reason.
Like Byron, John Keats died at one of the great centers of ancient civilization. Late in 1820, he was sent to Rome by his doctor in the hope that the climate would ease his tuberculosis. It was a forlorn hope. On February the 23rd, 1821, at the age of just 25, he died in the Eternal City. There is no doubt that Keats himself suspected that his life would be short. One of his finest sonnets was concerned entirely with the thought of his own death. Published in 1818, it is a poem that provides a moving insight into the fears of a man whose short life produced some of the finest ever English verse:
"When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love; then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink."
Keats's achievement was ready to produce a poetry of unprecedented vividness of sensation. His poetry encapsulates what it is to be alive very, very intensely, and also, of course, what it is to feel that one hasn't got long to live. Keats, of course, was very interested in sensation. In his letters, you can see he experimented with violent and intense sensations in order to discover what they were like so that he could write about them. For instance, putting pepper on his tongue and then taking cold claret, just to feel the contrast in those intense sensations. Or he describes in one of his letters imagining what it would be like to be a billiard ball rolling around a table. So his great interest in just things comes out in his poetry, this wonderful, concrete sense of the universe.
Looking back on the early 1820s, we can identify the end of the great age of English Romantic poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge were already past their peak. Keats died in 1821. Byron's death came three years later, and in the intervening time, the career of the final great English poet of his age was tragically cut short. His name was Percy Shelley.
Born in 1792, Shelley was perhaps the most radical thinker of all the Romantic poets. As a student at Oxford University, he was expelled for publishing a pamphlet on atheism. He became a friend of the philosopher William Godwin, an early socialist with a profound dislike for any form of authority. The influence of Godwin permeated his first important work, Queen Mab, a poem completed in the Lake District that had so inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is a long philosophical poem, a radical work that also revealed the young Shelley's respect for the ancient world. In it, he laments the passing of the classical age: "Where Athens, Rome, and Sparta stood, there is a moral desert now. Where Cicero and Antoninus lived, a cowled and hypocritical monk prays, curses, and deceives."
Queen Mab is really a kind of pamphlet poem. It's not Shelley at his great imaginative, which really is until two or three years later. It's 1816. What makes it just a revolutionary character? He said he thinks that everything should be knocked down and start again. He loved the idea of change, even the violence of change, but for perfectability is safe, and it was a kind of anarchy, really. Reason should govern all human affairs. He didn't need any government because you just had to be reasonable with each other. You could see that my need was greater than yours, so you give me everything you had. This kind of reasonableness. He read Tom Paine's Rights of Man and read Rousseau, for instance, and all those radical or pro-revolutionary texts feed into Queen Mab, which is a wonderfully revolutionary poem against, for instance, the monarchy, pro-republicanism, against marriage, against the church, pro-free love, pro-vegetarianism, very much against meat-eaters. It became a popular poem amongst working-class radicals in the 19th century and was, in fact, the only poem of Shelley really to be read widely by such people, the very people, if you like, whom Shelley was trying to reach through his radical philosophies and his radical feelings.
William Godwin also influenced Shelley's personal life. He began a relationship with Godwin's daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Frankenstein. This was despite the fact that he already had a wife, Harriet. The situation would resolve itself in tragic circumstances. In late 1816, the body of Harriet was found drowned in a lake in London. It was apparently a suicide. Three weeks later, Percy and Mary were married. The whole situation was suspicious, and Shelley, like Byron before him, became the target for London's rumor mill. His reaction was the same as that of the older poet. In 1818, with Mary, Percy Shelley left England for good and headed for Italy.
Shelley also found his Italian exile productive. Unsurprisingly, he met regularly with Byron and worked on literary projects with his fellow English poet Leigh Hunt. He composed two memorable verse dramas, The Cenci, and most significantly, Prometheus Unbound. But of all the works produced during this exile, it is the shorter poetic forms that perhaps give the best indication of his genius. His 1821 elegy, Adonais, represents his tribute to the recently departed John Keats, while his sonnet, Ozymandias, remains amongst his best known works.
Ozymandias is the Greek name for the great Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, a king who covered his land with monuments dedicated to himself.
"I met a traveller from an ancient land,
Who said—'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'"
Shelley was a master of the elegy, and like Keats, he was also a master of the ode. In 1819, he composed "To the West Wind." It remains one of the most famous poems of his life and one of the finest poems of his age.
"A wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
Driving sweet buds, like flocks to feed in air
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh, hear!"
The poem is very successful partly because of its form. It's in the form of five connected sonnets, and Shelley manages to give the poem a great driving forward energy through suspending the main verbs of his sentences so that you have to wait to find out what he's saying through several lines at a time, and that forces you forwards as a reader so that you're actually experiencing the energy of the wind as it rushes forwards towards liberty. And of course, the great final question: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" This vision of the future, of a reawakening, it's a wonderfully optimistic work. It has this huge faith, really, in what the future can bring.
Like Keats before him, Shelley would meet his death in Italy. In July 1822, he drowned in a storm while sailing on the Ligurian Sea. He was just 29. 18 months later, Byron was dead, and the great age of English Romantic poetry was over.
Perhaps more than any other creative discipline, poetry is an art whose appreciation is intimately concerned with personal taste. For this reason, it would be a futile exercise to suggest that any one of the five great English poets of the Romantic Age was the greatest of them all. But it is reasonable to consider Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley to be all true masters of the poetic art, and the age would have been the poorer without the contribution of them all.
Wordsworth is, as is often said, the father of Romanticism. His is the truly monumental lived vision, particularly his relationship with nature, expressed as this new religion of nature. Coleridge is the subtle theorist of Romanticism. He is, in a way, the failed romantic voice, but brilliant in his failure. Coleridge is the voice of guilt, of the inconclusive work, of fragmentation. Byron's contribution is that tears both a deeply serious romantic and esoteric anti-romantic spirit, and his contribution of the Byronic hero, of course, is extremely important. Keats is the poet of intense sensation and of a jewel-like intensity of language. Shelley is the true radical amongst them and the true voice of liberty, of freedom. Our idea of what a poet is is very much taken from the idea of the Romantic poet as defined by Shelley, Coleridge, and others. We still think of the poet, really, as the Romantic poet, and even poets in this century who have professed to be rejecting the Romantics, for instance, the modernist poets in the earlier years of the century, have been deeply, deeply indebted to them.
Coleridge once said that "there is great danger in thinking without images. We must think through images." And that's what the Romantic poets allow us to do. Not since the Chinese, not since the age of Sappho, not since Elizabethans had there been any other outburst of poetry to equal it in the world. And it is really to give human beings a finer concept of themselves, a truer psychological understanding, and a belief that there is this power within each mind of each one of us to be creative and add to the benefit of the world.
Foreign. [Music] [Music]