Study of major Romantic Poet.

Name:-  Kubavat  Kishan B.

Semester :- 2

Roll no :- 11

 Enrolment No :- Pg14101021

Year :- 2014-15

Paper No :- 5

Paper Name :- The Romantic Literature

Topic :- Study of major Romantic poet

Email ID :- kishan.kubavat@gmail.com

Submitted to :-  Department of English

                Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction

While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were successively the of English letters and while under their leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion for poetry and literature in general became satiric or critical in spirit and formal in expression, a New Romantic movement quietly made it’s appearance. Thomson’s  ‘The Seasons’ (1730) was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival and the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till in the age of Wordsworth and Scott. The spirit of romanticism dominated our literature more completely than classicism had ever done. This Romantic movement which Victor Hugo calls “ Liferalism in Literature ”  is simply the Expression of life as seen by imagination rather by prosail ‘common sense’ in the 18^th century.

The Age of Romanticism is known as the second creative period of English Literature. This Age produced many great poets like William Wordsworth, S.T.Colerdige, Lord Byron, P.B.Shelley, John Keats, and many more.

The poets of Romanticism 

 

1)     William Wordsworth ( 1770-1850)

2)    Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1772 – 1834 )

3)    Robert Southey  ( 1774 – 1843 )

4)    Walter Scott ( 1771-1832 )

5)    George Gordon, Lord Byron ( 1788 – 1824 )

6)    Percy Bysshe Shelley ( 1792 – 1822 )

7)    John Keats ( 1795  - 1821 )

William Wordsworth ( 1770 – 1850 )

Life of Wordsworth
               

 

Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cokermouth, Cumberland. His mother died when he was eight years old and his father died some six year later and the orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who sent him to school at Huskshed in the beautiful lake region.

Here, apparently the unroofed school of nature attracted him more than the discipline of the Classics and he learned more eagerly from flowers and hills and stars than from his books.

Three thing in this poem must impress even the casual reader   

 

Ø First, Wordsworth loves to be alone and is never lonely with nature.

Ø Second, like every other child who spends much time alone in the woods & fields he feels the presence of some living spirit.

Ø Third, his impression are exactly like our own and delightfully familiar.

When he tells of the long summer day spent in swimming, basking in the sun and questing over the hills or the winter night when on his skates, he chased the reflection of a star in the black lie, or his exploring the lack in a boat and getting suddenly frightened when the world grew big and strange in all this he is simply recalling a multitude of our own vague, happy memories of childhood no man can read such readers without finding his boyhood again.

          The second period of Wordsworth’s life begins with his university course at Cambridge in 1787. All his life he was poor, and lived in an atmosphere of “plain living and high thinking”. Wordsworth was hailed by critics as the first living poet ,and one of the greatest that England had over produce. He died Tranquilly in 1850, at Grasmere. Poetry was his life, his soul was in all his works and only by reading what he was written can we understand the man.

          Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides naturally into four periods;

1)    His childhood and youth in the Cumberland Hills from 1770-1787.

2)    A period of uncertainty of storm and streets, including his university life at Cambridge his travels abroad and his revolutionary experience from 1787-1797.

3)    A short but significant periods of finding himself and his work, from 1797 to 1799.

4)    A long period or retirement in the northern lake region where he was born and where for a full half century he lived so close to nature that her influence is reflected in all his poetry.

The poetry of Wordsworth

             William Wordsworth is the greatest poet of nature that our literature has produced. We find four characteristics of Wordsworth’s poetry. In his Exquisite ode, which he calls “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood (1807)”. Wordsworth sums up his philosophy of childhood.

          “ Tintern Abbey ”,  “ The Rainbow ”, “ Ode to Duty ”, “ Intimations of Immortality” is very well known poem by Wordsworth the early poets o the revival began the good work of showing the “ romantic interest of common life” Wordsworth continued it in “Michael”, “The Excursion”. To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mastic element, the result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection of the living god.

Yet he excels especially in the face of nature in the expression of reflective and analytic mood which is both personal and general. The following lyric illustrates this mood to perfection :

                   “ My heart leaps up when I behold

                             A rainbow in the sky :

                       So was it when my life began;

                       So is it now I am a man ;

                       So be it when I shall grow old,

                             Or let me die

                       The Child is father of the man;

                       And I could wish my days to be

                       Bound each to each by natural piety.”

         

 Nature is everywhere transfused and illumined by spirit, man also is a reflection of the devine spirit. The Home at Grasmere which is the first book of “ The Reause” was not published till 1888 long after poet’s death. “ The Excursion” is the second book of The Reause and the third was never completed.

       

   He tries to see more deeply and to find the secret springs of this joy and thanksgivings. He Says ;

                   “ To me the meanest flower that blows can give

                      Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

          

The best Known of his work appeared in the “ Lyrical Ballad (1798)” and in the sonnets, Odes and Lyrical of the next ten years ; though “ The Duddon Sonnet (1820)”, “ To a Syklark (1825)”, and “ yarrow Revisited (1831)” shows that he retained till past sixty much of his youth enthusiasm.

         

 No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world “He had not only sight, but insight”.       

          Thus, he was one of the great poet of romanticism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge           (1772-1834)

Life of Coleridge

        

  

S.T.Coleridge was born in 1772, the son of John Coleridge, vicar of parish church and master of local grammar school. S.T.Colerdige was the youngest of thirteen children. He was an extraordinary precocious child who could read at three years of age and who before he was five had read the Bible and the Arabian Nights. And could remember an astonishing amount from both books from three to six be attended a “dame” selual and from six till nine he was in his father’s school learning the classics.

        

  At ten he was sent to the charity school of Christ’s Hospital, London , where he met Charles Lamb. At nineteen this hopeless dreamer who had read more books than an old profess. He left university in 1794without his degree.

          

He studied in Germany, worked as private Spcretary later he started the friend a paper devoted to truth and Liberty. A terrible shadow in Coleridge’s life was the apparent cause of most of his desection. In early life he suffered from neurigia another ease the pain began to use opiate.

          He became a slave of drug habit. The shadow is dark indeed but there is a gleans of sunshine that occasionally break through the cloud one of these is hid association with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The last bright ray of sunlight comes from Coleridge’s own soul. In his poetry we find a note of human sympathy more tender and profound than can be found in Wordsworth or in any other of the great English poets.

          He died in 1834, and was buried in Highgate Church.

Works of Coleridge

          The works of Coleridge naturally divide themselves into three classes ;

·        The poetic

·        The critical and

·        The philosophical

Corresponding to the early, the middle and the later period of his career.

          His early poem’s shoe the influence of Gray and Blake especially of the latter. Coleridge is rare combination of dreamer and profound scholar. His early poems are ‘ A Day Dream’, ‘ The Devil’s Thought’, ‘The suicide’s Argument’, and ‘The Wanderings of Cain.’ His later poems are “Kubla Khan”, “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.”

          “Kubla Khan” is a fragment painting a gorgeous oriental dream picture, such as one might see in an October sunset. The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen asleep over Purchas and upon awakening he began to write hastily.

“ In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A Stately Pleasure dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measurelss to man

Down to a sunless sea.

          He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written and he never finished the poem.

“  A grief without a pung, void dark and drear

A Stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief

In word, or sigh, or tear.”

In the wonderful “Ode to Dejection” from which the above fragment is taken, we have a single strong impession of Coleridge’s whole life- a sad, broken, tragic life, in marked contrast with the peaceful existence of his friend Wordswroth. 

          “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ” is Coleridge’s chief contribution to ‘ The Lyrical Ballads’ of 1798, and is one of the world’s masterpieces. Through it introduces the reader to a supernatural realm, with Phantomship, a crew of dead men the overhanging curse of albatross, the polar spirit and the magic breeze it nevertheless manages to create a sense of absolute absurdities.

          Among Coleridge’s shorter poem there is a wide variety. This poem are ‘Ode to France’, ‘Youth and Age’, ‘Love Poems’, ‘Fears on Solitude’, ‘Religious Musings’, ‘Work without Hope’, and the glorious ‘Hymn Before Sunsire in the vale of Chamouni.’ One exquisite little poem from the Latin “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn’ and his version of ‘Schiller’s Wallenstain’, show the Coleridge’s remarkable power as a translator. The latter is one of the best poetical translations in our literature.

          Of Coleridge’s prose works, ‘ The Biographia Literaria ’, or  ‘Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (1817) his collected ‘Lectures on Shakespeare (1849) and ‘ Aides to Reflection (1825), are the most interesting from a literary view point. In his Philosophical work Coleridge introduced the idealistic philosophy of Germany into England.

          Thus, he is great poet of romanticism. 

Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)  

Life 

 

          Closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge is Robert Southey. He was born at Bristol in 1774 ; Studied at Westminister school, and at oxford, where he found himself in perpetual conflict with the authorities on account of his independent views. He consider himself seriously as one of the greatest writer of the day.

Works of Southey

His most ambitious poem are ‘Thalaba’, a tale of Arabian enchantment, ‘The Curse of Kehama, a medley of Hindu Mythology; madoc.’ A legend of a welsh prince who discovered the western world’s and ‘Roadrick’ a tale of the last of the Goths. Southey better prose work’s are ‘Life of Nelson and Lives of British Admiralls.’

A few of his best known poems are ‘The Scholar’, ‘Auld Cloot’, ‘The well of  St.Keyne’, ‘The inchcape Rock’, and ‘Lodone’.   

Walter Scott ( 1771 – 1832 )

Life

          

Scott was born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771. His father was a barrister and his mother a woman of character and education, strongly imaginative, a teller of tales which stirred young Walter’s enthusiasm by revealing the past as a worid of Living heroes from her wonderful tales Scott developed the intense love of Scottish history and tradition which characterizes all his work. He remain at school only six or seven years, and then entered his father’s office to study law.

Works of Scott 

          Scott’s literary work began with the translation from ‘The German of Burger’s romantic ballad of Lenore (1796) and of ‘Goethe’s Gutz won Berlichingen (1799). In 1805 when Scott was 34 years old appeared his first original work, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’. It’s success was immediate and marmion ( 1808) and ‘The Lady of the Lake (1810)’.   

George Gordon, Lord Byron

(1788- 1824)

Life

          Byron was born in London in 1788, the year preceding the French Revolution. His father was dissipated spendthrift of unspeakable morals; his mother was a scotch heiress, passionate and unbalanced. At school at Harrow and in the university at Cambridge; Byron led an unbalanced life. His school life is sadly marked by vanity, violence and rebellion against every from of authority. 

          While at Cambridge, Byron published his first volume of poems, “ Hours of Idleness” in 1807. A severe criticism of the volume in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ wounded. Byron’s vanity and threw him into a violent passion the result of which was the now famous satire called “ English Bards and Scoth Reviwers” in which not only his enemies, but also Scott, Wordsworth and nearly all the literary men of his day were satirized in heroic couplet. He died of fever in Missolonghi in 1824.

Work’s of Byron

 

          In reading Byron, it is well to remember that he was a disappointed and embittered man, not only in his personal life, but also in his expectation of a general transformation of human society and he is the most expressive writer oh his age.

          His first work, ‘Hours of Idleness’ written when he was a young man at university. There is very little poetry in volume. Byron’s later volumes, ‘Manfred and Cain’, are his two best known dramatic work. The best known of and the most readable of Byron’s work are ‘Maseppl’, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, and “Child’s Harold’s pilgrimage”. All his characters in Calin, Manfred, The giaowr, Child Harold, Don Javn are tiresome repetitions of himself avain disappointed cynicalman, who finds no good in life or love or anything. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Life

          Shelley was born in field place, near Horsham, Sussex in 1792. On both hid father’s and mother’s side he was descended from noble old familiar famous in the political and literary history of England. From childhood he lived in world of fancy. Shelley’s first public school, Kept by a hard- headed scotch master. At 12 years of age, he entered the famous preparatory school at Eton.

          Shelley’s marriage was even more unfortunate while living in London a certain young school girl, Harribt Westbrook was attracted by Shelley’s crude revolution and doctrines. For two years they wandered about England. Ireland and wales, living on a small allowance from Shelley’s father who had disinherited his son because of his ill considered marriage Byron wrote for him. The most amiable and the least wordly minded person I ever mex. In 1822, when only thirty years of age, Shelley was drowned while salling in a small boat off the Italian coust.  

Work’s of Shelley  

          AS a lurie poet Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses of our literature. His very best poems are ‘The Cloud’, ‘To a Skylark’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘To Night’. In reading Shelley’s longer poems one must remember that there are inthis poet two distinct men; one the wanderer seeking ideal beauty and forever unsatisfied. The other ; ‘the unbalanced reformer’, seeking the overthrow of present institutions and the Establishment of universal happiness. ‘Alastor or the spirit of solitude’.

          Shelley revolutionary works, ‘Queen Mab’, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, ‘Halls’ and ‘ The lviteh of Atlas’, and ‘Prometheus unbound’. Shelley finds a spiritual love, which exists chiefly for it’s own delight. In his “ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”. Shelley is most like Wordsworth but ‘sensitive plant’ with it’s fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world but himself Shelley’s exquisite ‘Lament’, beginning ‘o world, o life, o time’ compare with Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, both poems recall ‘happy memories of youth’ both express a very mood of a moment. 

   

John Keats (1795-1821)  

   

Life

  He was the son of a hostler and stable keeper and was born in stable of the swan and Hoop Inn, London in 1795. Before Keats was fifteen years old both parents died for five years he served his apprenticeship and for two years more. He was surgeon’s helper in the hospitals but he disliked his work and his thoughts were on other thing the other day during a lecture he said to a friend ‘There came a sunbelm in to the room and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray ; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland.

          

He abandoned his profession in 1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of poem. Keats was man of strong character and instead of quarreling with his reviewrs, he went quietly to work with the idea of producing poetry that should live forever. He settled in Rome with his seven the artist but died soon after his arrival in February 1821.

The Work’s of Keats

He published his first little volume of poems in 1817. He known no Greek ; yet Greek literature absorbed and fascinated him as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection in an English translation.

The imperfect result of this attempt are seen in his next volume ‘Endymion’ which is the story of a young shepherd beloved by among goddess. The poem beings with striking lines; “ A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Keats third and last volume ‘Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems (1820) are very famous “ Hyperion” is a magnificent work by him, that was never finished.

It is by short poems that Keats is known to the majority of present day reader among these exauisite shorter poem are (mention only the four odes); ‘On a Grecian urn’, ‘To a Nightingale’, ‘To  Autumn’, and ‘ To Psyche’. we remember that all Keats work was done in there or four years with small preparation and he died twenty-five of age.

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To sum up,

Thus, In Romantic age Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are very dominated figure and their contribution are unique and very important in our literature.