Romanticism an artistic and intellectual movem

ent originating in Europe in the late 1700s and charac

terized by a heightened interest innature, emphasis on
the individual's expression of emotion and imaginatio
n, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicis
m, and rebellionagainst established social rules and c
onventions.
Central features of Romanticism include:
-An emphasis on emotional and imaginative
spontaneity
-The importance of self-expression and
individual feeling. Romantic poetry is one of
the heart and the emotions, exploring the truth
of the imagination' rather than scientific truth.
The I' voice is central; it is the poet's
perceptions and feelings that matter.
-An almost religious response to
nature. They were concerned that Nature
should not just be seen scientifically but as a
living force, either made by a Creator, or as in
some waydivine, to be neglected at
humankind's peril. Some of them were no
longer Christian in their beliefs. Shelley was
an atheist, and for a while Wordsworth was
apantheist (the belief that god is in
everything). Much of their poetry celebrated
the beauty of nature, or protested the ugliness
of the growing industrialization of the century:
the machines, factories, slum conditions,
pollution and so on.
-A capacity for wonder and consequently a
reverence for the freshness and innocence of
the vision of childhood. See The world of the
Romantics: Attitudes to childhood
-Emphasis on the imagination as a positive
and creative faculty
-An interest in primitive' forms of art for
instance in the work of early poets (bards), in
ancient ballads and folksongs. Some of the
Romantics turned back to past times to find
inspiration, either to the medieval period, or to
Greek and Roman mythology. See Aspects of
the Gothic: Gothic and the medieval revival
-An interest in and concern for the outcasts of
society: tramps, beggars, obsessive characters
and the poor and disregarded are especially
evident in Romantic poetry
-An idea of the poet as a visionary figure,
with an important role to play as prophet (in
both political and religious terms).

of sublimity through a connection with nature.

Romantics rejected the rationalization of
nature by the previous thinkers of the
Enlightenment period.
Celebration of the individual-Romantics often
elevated the achievements of the
misunderstood, heroic individual outcast.
Importance of imagination-Romantics
legitimized the individual imagination as a
critical authority.

English romanticism-represents a complex

cultural and historical phenomenon and is
regarded as a reaction against the 18 th
century.

Representatives William Wordsworth, who

was known for his poems as poet of the nature,
he was one of the greatest poet of the ages.
William Blake was a poet, painter, visional.
He is known for his works as are:Songs of
innocence, Songs of Experience. Lord Byron,
Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, Mathew
Arnold, Shelly.

Blakes Songs of Innocence and

Experience (1 7 9 4 ) juxtapose the innocent,
pastoral world of childhood against an adult
world of corruption and repression; while such
poems as The Lambrepresent a meek virtue,
poems like The Tyger exhibit opposing,
darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole
explores the value and limitations of two
different perspectives on the world. Many of
the poems fall into pairs, so that the same
situation or problem is seen through the lens of
innocence first and then experience. Blake
does not identify himself wholly with either
view; most of the poems are dramaticthat is,
in the voice of a speaker other than the poet
himself. Blake stands outside innocence and
experience, in a distanced position from which
he hopes to be able to recognize and correct
the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits
himself against despotic authority, restrictive
morality, sexual repression, and
institutionalized religion; his great insight is
into the way these separate modes of control
work together to squelch what is most holy in
human beings.

Strong senses, emotions, and feelingsRomantics believed that knowledge is gained

through intuition rather than deduction. This is
best summed up by Wordsworth who stated
that all good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.

The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive

hopes and fears that inform the lives of
children and trace their transformation as the
child grows into adulthood. Some of the
poems are written from the perspective of
children, while others are about children as
seen from an adult perspective. Many of the
poems draw attention to the positive aspects of
natural human understanding prior to the
corruption and distortion of experience. Others
take a more critical stance toward innocent
purity: for example, while Blake draws
touching portraits of the emotional power of
rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes
over the heads, as it were, of the innocent
Christianitys capacity for promoting injustice
and cruelty.

Awe of nature-Romantics stressed the awe of

nature in art and language and the experience

The Songs of Experience work via parallels

and contrasts to lament the ways in which the

Characteristics of Romanticism
Romantic Characteristic Description of
Characteristic Interest in the common man and
childhood-Romantics believed in the natural
goodness of humans which is hindered by the
urban life of civilization. They believed that
the savage is noble, childhood is good and the
emotions inspired by both beliefs causes the
heart to soar.

harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is

good in innocence, while also articulating the
weaknesses of the innocent perspective (The
Tyger, for example, attempts to account for
real, negative forces in the universe, which
innocence fails to confront). These latter
poems treat sexual morality in terms of the
repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and
secrecy, all of which corrupt the
ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to
religion, they are less concerned with the
character of individual faith than with the
institution of the Church, its role in politics,
and its effects on society and the individual
mind. Experience thus adds a layer to
innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while
compensating for some of its blindness.
The style of the Songs of Innocence and
Experience is simple and direct, but the
language and the rhythms are painstakingly
crafted, and the ideas they explore are often
deceptively complex. Many of the poems are
narrative in style; others, like The Sick
Rose and The Divine Image, make their
arguments through symbolism or by means of
abstract concepts. Some of Blakes favorite
rhetorical techniques are personification and
the reworking of Biblical symbolism and
language. Blake frequently employs the
familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes,
and hymns, applying them to his own, often
unorthodox conceptions. This combination of
the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant
with Blakes perpetual interest in
reconsidering and reframing the assumptions
of human thought and social behavior.

William Wordsworth as a Romantic

Poet William Wordsworth was at once the
oldest, the greatest, and the most long-lived
among the romantic poets. He made himself
the leader of the Romantic movement, first,
because he issued in his Pre-face to the Lyrical
Ballads what may be called the manifesto of
the movement, in which he demanded a
change both in the subject and the form of
poetry that was truly revolutionary ; and
secondly because the theme of his great poem
The Prelude is the apotheosis of the Self which
lies at the root of Romanticism. The basic
traits of romanticism such as the love of
nature, the belief in humanity, mysticism,
revolutionary spirit etc were early developed
in his poetry. As a young man he had high
hopes for humanity and he had been nurtured
in the Lake District which helped him to think
well on man. He also read Rousseaus view on
the innocence of man. Thus, the teaching of
Rousseau and his own experience convinced
him that man was naturally good. He greatly
supported the dawn of a new era for the
humanity. But later he changed his mind when
the French Revolutionists started to commit all
kinds of atrocities.
The whole of his early life had been a
dedication to poetry, and from his childhood
he had stored his mind with the experience in
nature which later he was recall in is verse.
His best-known works are The Prelude, The
Lyrical Ballads, Tintern Abbey and a number
of sonnets.
The work which made him popular was
the Lyrical Ballads. He wrote it in
collaboration with his intimate friend S.T.
Coleridge. In Lyrical Ballads he attempted to

make verse out of the incidents of simple

rustic life. He took incidents and situations
from common life and threw over them a
coloring of the imagination by which ordinary
things would be made to assume an unusual
aspect. In it, he used a language that was a
selection from the ordinary speech. Thus, the
poems of the Lyrical Ballads showed
originality both in subject matter and in
language and were a departure from all
previous practice. S.T. Coleridge contributed
inLyrical Ballads only The Ancient Mariner
and four other poems in blank [Link] his
poems, Coleridge endeavoured to employ to
give credibility to the miraculous
The Prelude, an autobiographical poem is the
spiritual record of his mind, honestly
recording its own intimate experiences, and
endowed with a rare capacity for making the
record intelligible. It is an idealized version of
his spiritual growth in which he escapes into
the higher reality of his imagination. It
emphasized particularly his surrender of the
charm of logic to the claims of the emotion
which became a cardinal principle of all the
later Romantic poets. No poems in English
offers a parallel. It was composed in bland
verse and had an epical scale.
Wordsworth also wrote some of the finest
sonnets in which he wanted to awaken
England from lathargy, to condemn Napoleon
and to record many of his own moods
Wordsworth also wrote some famous sonnets.
He wrote the sonnets to arouse England to a
sense of her responsibility in international
affairs, and to express memorable moment in
his own experience. His other works included
Immortality ode, Ode to Duty and Laodamia.
In the Immortality Ode, he recorded a mystical
intuition of a life before birth which can be
recovered in a few fortunate moments in the
presence of nature.

Coleridge is one of the most important

figures in English poetry. His poems directly
and deeply influenced all the major poets of
the age. He was known by his contemporaries
as a meticulous craftsman who was more
rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems
than any other poet, and Southey and
Wordsworth were dependent on his
professional advice. His influence on
Wordsworth is particularly important because
many critics have credited Coleridge with the
very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea
of utilising common, everyday language to
express profound poetic images and ideas for
which Wordsworth became so famous may
have originated almost entirely in Coleridges
mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworths
great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude,
ever having been written without the direct
influence of Coleridges originality.
As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a
poet, he was equally important to poetry as a
critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he
developed over many years, has been deeply
influential in the field of literary criticism.

The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan
Coleridge is probably best known for his long
poems, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have
never read the Rimehave come under its
influence: its words have given the English
language the metaphor of an albatross around

one's neck, the quotation of "water, water

everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost
always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"),
and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man"
(again, usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser
man"). The phrase "All creatures great and
small" may have been inspired by The Rime:
"He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things
both great and small;/ For the dear God who
loveth us;/ He made and loveth
all." Christabel is known for its musical
rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A
Fragment, although shorter, is also widely
known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have
an additional "Romantic" aura because they
were never finished. Stopford
Brooke characterised both poems as having no
rival due to their "exquisite metrical
movement" and "imaginative phrasing." Kubla
Khan was the inspiration for the song Xanadu,
written by Neil Peart of Rush for their 1977
album A Farewell to Kings. Peart also refers to
the suspension of disbelief in the 1985
song Mystic Rhythms from Power Windows.

Biographia Literaria In addition to

his poetry, Coleridge also wrote
influential pieces of literary criticism
including Biographia Literaria, a
collection of his thoughts and
opinions on literature which he
published in 1817. The work
delivered both biographical
explanations of the author's life as
well as his impressions on literature.
The collection also contained an
analysis of a broad range of
philosophical principles of literature
ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel
Kant and Schelling and applied them
to the poetry of peers such
as William Wordsworth.[41]
[42]
Coleridge's explanation
ofmetaphysical principles were
popular topics of discourse in
academic communities throughout
the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S.
Eliot stated that he believed that
Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest
of English critics, and in a sense the
last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge
displayed "natural abilities" far
greater than his contemporaries,
dissecting literature and applying
philosophical principles of
metaphysics in a way that brought
the subject of his criticisms away
from the text and into a world of
logical analysis that mixed logical
analysis and emotion. However, Eliot
also criticises Coleridge for allowing
his emotion to play a role in the
metaphysical process, believing that
critics should not have emotions that
are not provoked by the work being
studied.[43] Hugh Kenner in Historical
Fictions, discusses Norman
Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged
Archangel and suggests that the
term "criticism" is too often applied
to Biographia Literaria, which both
he and Fruman describe as having
failed to explain or help the reader

understand works of art. To Kenner,

Coleridge's attempt to discuss
complex philosophical concepts
without describing the rational
process behind them displays a lack
of critical thinking that makes the
volume more of a biography than a
work of criticism.[44]
In Biographia Literaria and his poetry,
symbols are not merely "objective
correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for
making the universe and personal experience
intelligible and spiritually covalent. To
Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making
its way upstream "by fits and starts,"
[Biographia Literaria] is not merely a
comment on the intermittent nature of
creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress,
but the journey and destination of his life. The
spider's five legs represent the central problem
that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict
between Aristotelian logic and Christian
philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent
the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the
idea that a thing cannot be itself and its
opposite simultaneously, the basis of the
clockwork Newtonian world view that
Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs
exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the
Holy trinityrepresent the idea that things can
diverge without being contradictory. Taken
together, the five legswith synthesis in the
center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic.
The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's
emblem of holism, the quest and substance of
Coleridge's thought and spiritual life.

Byrons contribution to romanticism

He created a new kind of hero figure.
He used symbolism to convey innocence and
experience.
He identified with the struggles of the poor,
uneducated members of society.
He demonstrated the personal sacrifice that
romantic poets came to be known for.
George Gordon Byron, who is usually referred
to as Lord Byron, was a prominent British
writer, most famous for the influence of his
poetry on the romantic movement that
originated in the eighteenth century. Byron
was also the 6th Baron of the Byron family,
hence his being known as Lord Byron. The
title of Lord is typically given formally to a
baron in England. He was born on January
22nd 1788 in London. Byron was to be one of
the most illustrious poets of British literary
history. Even though his writing style was
quite classical, he would become one of the
great figures of British Romanticism together
with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Lord Byrons
best known works are not only the short
poems She walks in beauty ; When We Two
Parted ; and, So, well go no more a roving,
but also his two narrative poems Childe
Harolds Pilgrimage, and, of course the more
than famous Don Juan. (Childe Harold,
Manfred, Cain ) Byron's first
drama, Manfred, details the author's

characterization of the Romantic hero, a figure

of superior abilities and intense passions who
rejects human contact as well as the aid and
comfort offered by various religious
representatives. Consumed by his own sense
of guilt for an unspecified transgression
involving Astarte, the only human he ever
loved, Manfred finally seeks peace through his
own death.
As a "metaphysical" poem, in Byrons
term, Manfred has as its theme defiant
humanism, represented by the heros refusal to
bow to supernatural authority, and by his
insistence on the independence and selfsufficiency of the human mind. Unable to find
consolation for his guilt in this world or in the
supernatural, Manfred does not know what to
do at first. With its Miltonic echoes, his great
speech to the fiends near the end of the play
contains the answer he has discovered.
The Byronic Hero is a character archetype
that existed in literature long before Lord
Byron began writing. However, Byron
perfected the character so completely both in
his writing and in the way he lived his own
life, that it ended up being named after
[Link] Byronic Hero is a very complex
character - so complex, that entire books have
been written just to describe him.

Childe Harolds
Pilgrimage, autobiographical poem in four
cantos by George Gordon, Lord Byron. Cantos
I and II were published in 1812, Canto III in
1816, and Canto IV in 1818. Byron gained his
first poetic fame with the publication of the
first two cantos.
Childe is a title from medieval times,
designating a young noble who is not yet
knighted. Disillusioned with his aimless life
devoted to pursuing pleasure, Childe Harold
seeks distraction by going on a solitary
pilgrimage to foreign lands. The first two
cantos describe his travels through Portugal,
Spain, the Ionian Islands, and Albania, ending
with a lament on the occupation of Greece by
the Ottoman Turks. In the third canto the
pilgrim travels to Belgium, the Rhine Valley,
the Alps, and the Jura. On each segment of the
journey, Byron evokes associated historical
events and people, such as the
philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Napoleon before the Battle of
Waterloo. In the fourth canto the imaginary
pilgrim is replaced by the poet himself,
speaking in the first person
about Venice,Ferrara, Florence, and Rome and
the artists and heroes associated with those
cities.
To Byrons literary public, the work offered a
poetic travelogue of picturesque lands and
gave vent to the prevailing moods of
melancholy and disillusionment. The worldweary Childe Harold came to personify the socalled Byronic hero, thus becoming one of the
best-known types of the age. The work also

voiced with a frankness unprecedented in the

literature of that time the disparity between
romantic ideals and the realities of the world.

Cain: A Mystery is Lord Byron's retelling of

the classical Biblical story from the point of
view of its antagonist. Undoubtedly influenced
by Milton's Paradise Lost, Byron's Cain is
defiant and questioning. In trying to come to
terms with the mortality humanity has been
punished with, he comes face to face with
Lucifer, who takes him to the "Abyss of
Space," shows him a vision of Earth's violent
natural history, and gives him a true
understanding of death. Upon his return, a
devastated Cain carries out the familiar end of
his tragedy. Cain: A Mystery is a closet drama,
a popular form for Romantic writers, where
the script is not intended to be performed
onstage, but rather read aloud with a small
group.

The Byronic Hero is a type of character

popularized by the works of Lord Byron,
whose protagonists often embodied this
archetype, though they existed before him, it
became prominent during Romanticism.
Sometimes an Anti-Hero, others an AntiVillain, or even Just a Villain, Byronic heroes
are charismatic characters with strong passions
and ideals, but who are nonetheless deeply
flawed individuals who may act in ways which
are socially reprehensible because
he's definitely contrary to his mainstream
society. A byronic hero is on his own side and
has his own set of beliefs which he will not
bow nor change for anyone. A Byronic hero is
a character whose internal conflicts are heavily
romanticized and who himself ponders and
wrestles with his struggles and beliefs. Some
are portrayed with a suggestion of dark crimes
or tragedies in their past.

The following traits are very

characteristic of Byronic heroes and
may be helpful in identifying them:
-Is usually male and is always considered very
attractive physically and in terms of
personality, possessing a great deal of
magnetism and charisma, using these abilities
to achieve social and romantic dominance.
One mark against him personality wise,
however, is a struggle with his own personal
integrity.
-Is very intelligent, perceptive, sophisticated,
educated, cunning and adaptable, but also selfcentered.
-Is emotionally sensitive, which may translate
into being emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or
moody.
-Is intensely self-critical and introspective and
may be described as dark and brooding. He
dwells on the pains or perceived injustices of
his life, often to the point of over-indulgence.
May muse philosophically on the
circumstances that brought him to this point,
including personal failings.

-Is cynical, world-weary, and jaded, often due

to a mysterious Dark and Troubled Past,
which, if uncovered, may reveal a significant
loss, or a crime or mistake committed which
still haunts him, or, conversely, that he may be
suffering from some unnamed crime against
him.
-He is extremely passionate, with strong
personal beliefs which are usually in conflict
with the values of the status quo. He sees his
own values and passions as above or better
than those of others, manifesting as arrogance
or a martyr-like attitude. Sometimes, however,
he just sees himself as one who must take the
long, hard road to do what must be done.
-His intense drive and determination to live
out his philosophy without regard to others'
philosophies produces conflict, and may result
in a tragic end, should he fail, or revolution,
should he succeed. Because of this, he is very
rebellious, having a distaste for social
institutions and norms and is disrespectful of
rank and privilege, though he often has said
rank and privilege himself. This rebellion
often leads to social isolation, rejection, or
exile, or to being treated as an outlaw, but he
will not compromise, being unavoidably selfdestructive.

Byronic heroa romanticized

antihero who possesses a wicked character. He
is an idealized but flawed character
exemplified in the life and writings of Lord
Byron, who was characterized by his ex-lover
Lady Caroline Lamb as being mad, bad and
dangerous to know. The Byronic hero first
appears in Byrons semi-autobiographical epic
narrative poem Childe Harolds Pilgrimage
(1812-18). The literary predecessors of the
Byronic hero in English can be traced back to
Miltons Lucifer and to the villains and tyrants
of Gothic fiction. After Childe Harolds
Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero made an
appearance in many of Byrons other works,
including his closet play Manfred (1817).
Byrons influence was manifested by many
authors and artists of the Romantic movement
and by writers of Gothic fiction during the
19th century, as in Polidoris The Vampyre
(1819). The Byronic hero is also featured in
many different contemporary novels, and it is
clear that Lord Byrons work continues to
influence modern literature as the precursor of
a commonly encountered type of anti-hero.
Conventionally, the figure: is a young and
attractive male with a bad reputation defies
authority and conventional morality becomes
paradoxically ennobled by his rejection of
virtue .
Byronic heroes are associated with:
destructive passions, conflicting emotions,
bipolar tendencies selfish brooding,
unpredictable moodiness indulgence in
personal pains alienation/rejection from their
communities, a distaste for social institutions
and social norms a lack of respect for rank
and privilege persistent loneliness; often an
exile, outcast, or outlaw intense
introspection, highly self-critical and/or selfdestructive fiery rebellion struggles with

integrity a troubled past being cynical,

demanding, and/or arrogant

hoped would affect his readers sensuously,

spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.

His persistent character is that of a passionate

and remorse-tornbut unrepentant
wanderer He is an alien, mysterious, and
gloomy spirit, immensely superior in his
passions and powers to the common run of
humanity, whom he regards with disdain He
harbors the torturing memory of an enormous,
nameless guilt that drives him toward an
inevitable doom He is in his isolation
absolutely self-reliant, inflexibly pursuing his
own ends according to his self-generated
moral code against any oppositionhuman or
supernatural He exerts an attraction on other
characters that is the more compelling because
it involves their terror at his obliviousness to
ordinary human concerns and values

English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was

dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by
vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy
through classical legend. In the summer of
1818, Keats took a walking tour in Northern
England and Scotland. He returned home later
that year to care for his brother, Tom, who'd
fallen deeply ill with tuberculosis. Keats, who
around this time fell in love with a woman
named Fanny Brawne, continued to write.
He'd proven prolific for much of the past year.
His work included his first Shakespearean
sonnet, "When I have fears that I may cease to
be," which was published in January 1818.

The central thematic concerns of Shelleys

poetry are largely the same themes that
defined Romanticism, especially among the
younger English poets of Shelleys era: beauty,
the passions, nature, political liberty,
creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination.
What makes Shelleys treatment of these
themes unique is his philosophical relationship
to his subject matterwhich was better
developed and articulated than that of any
other Romantic poet with the possible
exception of Wordsworthand his
temperament, which was extraordinarily
sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic
poet, and which possessed an extraordinary
capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley
fervently believed in the possibility of
realizing an ideal of human happiness as based
on beauty, and his moments of darkness and
despair (he had many, particularly in booklength poems such as the monumental Queen
Mab) almost always stem from his
disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed
to human weakness.

Shelleys intense feelings about beauty and

expression are documented in poems such as
Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark,
in which he invokes metaphors from nature to
characterize his relationship to his art. The
center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found
in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in
which he argues that poetry brings about moral
good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and
expands the imagination, and the imagination
is the source of sympathy, compassion, and
love, which rest on the ability to project
oneself into the position of another person.
No other English poet of the early nineteenth
century so emphasized the connection between
beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in
the power of arts sensual pleasures to improve
society. Byrons pose was one of amoral
sensuousness, or of controversial
rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and
aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was
able to believe that poetry makes people and
society better; his poetry is suffused with this
kind of inspired moral optimism, which he

Two months later, Keats published "Isabella,"

a poem that tells the story of a woman who
falls in love with a man beneath her social
standing, instead of the man her family has
chosen her to marry. The work was based on a
story from Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio,
and it's one Keats himself would grow to
[Link] work also included the beautiful
"To Autumn," a sensuous work published in
1820 that describes ripening fruit, sleepy
workers, and a maturing sun. The poem, and
others, demonstrated a style Keats himself had
crafted all his own, one that was filled with
more sensualities than any contemporary
Romantic poetry.
Keats' writing also revolved around a poem he
called "Hyperion," an ambitious Romantic
piece inspired by Greek myth that told the
story of the Titans' despondency after their
losses to the [Link] the death of
Keats' brother halted his writing. He finally
returned to the work in late 1819, rewriting his
unfinished poem with a new title, "The Fall of
Hyperion," which would go unpublished until
more than three decades after Keats' death.
This, of course, speaks to the small audience
for Keats' poetry during his lifetime. In all, the
poet published three volumes of poetry during
his life but managed to sell just a combined
200 copies of his work by the time of his death
in 1821. His third and final volume of
poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and Other Poems, was published in July
[Link] with the help of his friends, who
pushed hard to secure Keats' legacy, and the
work and style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during
the latter half of the 19th century, did Keats'
stock rise considerably.
Keatss speaker opens the poem with an
address to the goddess Psyche, urging her to
hear his words, and asking that she forgive
him for singing to her her own secrets. He says
that while wandering through the forest that
very day, he stumbled upon two fair
creatures lying side by side in the grass,
beneath a whispring roof of leaves,
surrounded by flowers. They embraced one
another with both their arms and wings, and
though their lips did not touch, they were close

to one another and ready past kisses to

outnumber. The speaker says he knew the
winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He
answers his own question: She was Psyche.
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses
Psyche again, describing her as the youngest
and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods
and goddesses. He believes this, he says,
despite the fact that, unlike other divinities,
Psyche has none of the trappings of worship:
She has no temples, no altars, no choir to sing
for her, and so on. In the third stanza, the
speaker attributes this lack to Psyches youth;
she has come into the world too late for
antique vows and the fond believing lyre.
But the speaker says that even in the fallen
days of his own time, he would like to pay
homage to Psyche and become her choir, her
music, and her oracle. In the fourth stanza, he
continues with these declarations, saying he
will become Psyches priest and build her a
temple in an untrodden region of his own
mind, a region surrounded by thought that
resemble the beauty of nature and tended by
the gardener Fancy, or imagination. He
promises Psyche all soft delight and says
that the window of her new abode will be left
open at night, so that her winged boythe
warm Lovecan come in.

Ode to a Nightingale The speaker opens

with a declaration of his own heartache. He
feels numb, as though he had taken a drug
only a moment ago. He is addressing a
nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the
forest and says that his drowsy numbness is
not from envy of the nightingales happiness,
but rather from sharing it too completely; he is
too happy that the nightingale sings the
music of summer from amid some unseen plot
of green trees and shadows.
In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the
oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for
wine, a draught of vintage, that would taste
like the country and like peasant dances, and
let him leave the world unseen and
disappear into the dim forest with the
nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his
desire to fade away, saying he would like to
forget the troubles the nightingale has never
known: the weariness, the fever, and the fret
of human life, with its consciousness that
everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth
grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies, and
beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the
nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not
through alcohol (Not charioted by Bacchus
and his pards), but through poetry, which will
give him viewless wings. He says he is
already with the nightingale and describes the
forest glade, where even the moonlight is
hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks
through when the breezes blow the branches.
In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he
cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can
guess them in embalmed darkness: white
hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-

rose, the murmurous haunt of flies on

summer eves. In the sixth stanza, the speaker
listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying
that he has often been half in love with the
idea of dying and called Death soft names in
many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingales
song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death
seems richer than ever, and he longs to cease
upon the midnight with no pain while the
nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If
he were to die, the nightingale would continue
to sing, he says, but he would have ears in
vain and be no longer able to hear.
In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the
nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not
born for death. He says that the voice he
hears singing has always been heard, by
ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick
Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed
open magic windows looking out over the
foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn. In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn
tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his
preoccupation with the nightingale and back
into himself. As the nightingale flies farther
away from him, he laments that his
imagination has failed him and says that he
can no longer recall whether the nightingales
music was a vision, or a waking dream.
Now that the music is gone, the speaker
cannot recall whether he himself is awake or
asleep.

Sir Walter Scott born in College

Wynd, Edinburgh, was the son of a lawyer.
Educated first at Edinburgh High School and
then University he was apprenticed to his
father and called to the bar in 1792. An avid
reader of poetry, history, drama and romances,
the young Scott read widely in Italian,
Spanish, Latin and German. In his twenties he
was influenced particularly by the German
Romantics and his first published works were
translations of G.A. Brger and Goethe. These
were followed by the collections of border
ballads and the narrative poems, written
between 1805 and 1815, that first made him
famous. By by this time he had also married
Margaret Charlotte Charpenter, of a French
Royalist family, and became sheriff-deputy of
Selkirkshire, in 1797 and 1799 respectively.
In 1809 Scott became partners with John
Ballanytne in a book-selling business and also,
as an ardent political conservative, helped to
found the Tory 'Quarterly Review'. In 1811 he
built a residence at Abbotsford on the Tweed.

By 1815, beginning to feel eclipsed as a poet

by Byron, he turned to the novel form for
which he is now chiefly famous.
A vast number of these were published,
anonymously, over approximately the next
fifteen years. In 1820 Scott was made a
baronet and seven years later, in 1827, he first
gave his name to his works. However, in 1826
the book-selling business became involved in
the bankruptcy of another company, leaving
Scott with debts of approximately 114,000. It
is generally believed that some part at least of
the profligacy of his writing is attributed to his
desire to pay off these debts personally. His
work, and along stay at Naples in 1831,
undertaken in an attempt to regain his health,
took up the rest of his life.
He is now generally hailed as the inventor of
the historical novel. His work was widely read
and imitated across the whole of Europe
throughout the Nineteenth-Century in
particular and his influence is marked even in
such writers as Elizabeth Gaskell, George
Eliot and the Brontes.

Ivanhoe is first and foremost an adventure

novel. Its popularity and longevity have
secured it a place as one of the great historical
romances of all time. The main goal of the
novel is to entertain and excite its readers with
a tale of heroism set in the high Middle Ages,
and any symbolic or thematic purpose Walter
Scott might have is decidedly secondary to
that goal. Still, Scott was too intelligent an
author to have written a mindless book.
The novel's main historical emphasis focuses
on the tension between the Saxons and the
Normans, the two peoples who inhabited
England. As a matter of course, the novel
proposes Ivanhoe, the hero, as a possible
resolution to those tensions--not because of
anything Ivanhoe does, for he is weirdly
inactive for an action hero .
Structurally, Ivanhoe is divided into three
parts, each of them centering around a
particular adventure or quest. The first part
involves Ivanhoe's return to England in
disguise (disguise is a major motif throughout
the novel: Ivanhoe, Richard, Cedric, Locksley,
and Wamba each mask their identities at some
point) and centers around the great jousting
tournament held at Ashby-de-la-Zouche. The
second part involves Sir Maurice de Bracy's
kidnapping of Cedric's Saxon party out of lust

for Rowena and centers around the efforts of

King Richard (in disguise, of course) and
Robin Hood's (Lockley's) merry men to free
the prisoners. The third part involves
Rebecca's captivity at the hands of the
Templars and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and
centers around the trial-by-combat which is
arranged to determine whether she will live or
die.
Scotts technique is to use a historical
character, such as King Richard I, and
surround him with fictional characters. He
makes the fictional side believable by making
all the plots, both historical and fictitious,
parallel in appeal. He also creates a huge cast
of characters, who weave in and out of the
novel. He carries each character or group of
characters to a certain crisis, and then he
leaves them for awhile and begins to follow
another set of characters. In order to bring all
his characters to the same point in time, he
uses flashbacks to fill in the necessary missing
details. In spite of going backward and
forward in time and of constantly changing the
characters who are in the forefront, Scotts
narrative is never disjointed. The reader can
clearly follow the action of the plot.
A good example of Scotts constantly
changing focus occurs in the castle, where the
Saxons are held prisoners. Chapter 21 centers
on Cedric and ends with his total despair;
Chapter 22 shows Isaac about to be tortured;
Chapter 23 shows Rowena being wooed by De
Bracy; and Chapter 24 shows Rebecca fighting
off the advance of Bois-Guilbert. All four
chapters, however, end with the same event;
the exact same bugle call is heard by all,
saving some and causing some to perish.
Through his varied narrative techniques, Scott
shows that he is a masterful storyteller who
can hold the reader spellbound with an
exciting and unified plot and an interesting
cast of characters who intertwine with one
another.