Unit 6 The Age of Romanticism

(1798—1832)

I. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

Life of Byron

• Byron's poetry won great popularity both at home and abroad. Although today Shelley and Keats are given a higher place as poets, in their own time, they were largely unknown while Byron was read all over Europe and was hailed as a champion of liberty.

• Byron is hard to describe. He is famous as well as notorious. He came of a noble family, but often in debt. He belongs to the Romantic Movement but loves Alexander Pope more. A faithful truth teller, he is involved in incestuous affairs with his half sister. He wrote great poems, but at the same time a womankiller. He is lame yet attracts lots of women. He is strong willed, yet often diffident. He belongs to the Romantic Movement mainly because of Byronism or rather Byronic hero.

• Byron was descendent from two aristocratic families, both colorful, violent, and dissolute. His grandfather is nicknamed Foulweather Jack; his greatuncle (5th Baron Byron) Wicked Lord; Father a rake and fortune hunter who rapidly dissipated the patrimony of two wealthy wives. He died when Byron was three. His mother, a lawless Scottish Lairds descendent, an irascible woman brought him up. At ten, Byron was made the 6th Lord Byron.

• Byron was born lame, but he was a good sportsman. When only seven he fell in love with a little cousin, Mary Duft.

• He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. While a student of nineteen at Trinity College, Cambridge, he published his first collection of poems entitled Hours of Idleness.

• The book was severely criticized by the conservative Edinburgh Review (1807). He nursed his revenge and two years later, replied with a sharp satire called English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, in the couplet style of Pope, which caused great shock in the upper class, and was compared to the roar of a young lion.

• He travelled across Europe to Greece in 1810, invloving himself in selft-conciously romantic adventures (a tour through Portugal, Spain, the Mediterranean, Turkey, Albania, Asia Minor).

• The result was his Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (1812), which was a great success and made him instantly popular at twenty four, as he himself put it, “I awoke one morning to find myself famous." It was a self-dramatizing poem written in Spenserian stanzas.

• Then for a time he was active in the House of Lords, spoke courageously in defence of the Nottingham weavers.

• Byron married in 1815 Annabella Milbanke who persuaded herself that she could make Byron over in her own image. But she failed and the marriage broke up shortly after she had given birth to a daughter.

• The upper class and society, which had already begun to hate him, all believed his wife and turned against him.

• Byron left England on April 25, 1816, never to return again. For the rest of his short life, he struck back at that which had struck him and struck very effectively. He attacked all the conventions, all the hypocrisies, and all the moral commonplaces of English society.

• Byron not only attacked the social shams in his poetry, but set an example of reckless living, which appeared to more than justify all the bad things about him. ("You said I was immoral when I tried to live decently. Now I shall be immoral; you can do as you please about it.)

• The following travels provided him with part of the materials for the 3rd and 4th cantos of Childe Harold (including several months with Shelley and Mary, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, a girl of 17, who forced herself upon Byron and in 1817 bore him a daughter).

• In 1817 Byron established himself in Venice.

• In 1819 he settled into faithful relationship with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of Count Alessanlro Guiccioli. Meanwhile he had been working on a series of closet tragedies (including Cain, Sacradonapalus, Marino Faliero) and on his superb satire, The Vision of Judgement and Don Juan.

• Byron then gave up literature for action when he organized an expedition to assist the Greek war for independence from the Turks. Worn out, he succumbed to a series of feverish attacks and died just after he had reached his 36th birthday.

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Byronic Hero

• strange figures of rebels, pirates, and desperate adventurers who were passionate, haughty, cynical, even dissolute, but undoubtedly against all oppression.

• He was a moody, passionate, and remorse torn but unrepentant wanderer.

• He is an alien, mysterious and gloomy spirit, immensely superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity, who he regards with disdain.

• He harbours 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 cold against any opposition, human or supernatural.

• This figure, infusing the archrebel in a nonpolitical form with a strong erotic interest, embodied the implicit yearnings of Byrons’ time, was imitated in life as well as in art, and help shape the intellectual as well as the cultural history of the latter 19th century.

• The literary descendents of the Byronic hero include Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, and the hero of Pushkin’s great poem Eugene Onegin. It is the attitude of “Titanic cosmic selfassertion, established an outlook and a stance toward humanity and the world that entered 19th century, philosophy and eventually helped to form Nietzshe’s concept of the Superman, the hero who stands outside the jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil

II. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• As a lyric poet, Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses of English literature.

• He is certainly the most beloved of the Romantic poets. Like Spencer, he has been called "the poet's poet."

• No English poet has ever possessed a lyric genius as pure as his.

• His early death was perhaps the greatest catastrophe English literature ever suffered, for he was a man not only of the highest idealism, but also of enormous intellectual breadth.

• Yet in his own days, while Byron's name was on everyone's lips, Shelley's, if mentioned at all, was uttered only as a synonym for turpitude and moral degeneracy

Life of Shelly

• born into an aristocratic family

• educated at Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled in 1811 for circulating a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism.

• In 1811, eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, a girl of 16, and whom he left after 3 years.

• In 1814, he travelled abroad with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

• Two years later (1816) Harriet drowned herself. Thereafter She1ley’s name became synonymous with that of a scoundrel until the day of his death.

• He himself never recovered from a sense of responsibility for her death, and a sense of guilt shadowed the rest of his life, though the real cause of her suicide is unknown.

• Shelley's outspoken support for the people's struggle against the ruling class had long evoked hatred on the part of English reactionary circle. They grasped his misfortune in family life as pretence to launch a wholesale attack against him.

• This made his living in England unbearable, so he left England with Mary in 1818 and never returned.

• He settled in Italy in 1819 and there he spent the remaining few years of his life.

• In Italy he kept close ties with the Italian people who were fighting for their independence. He also watched the liberation movement in Spain and Greece, and he never forgot the people of his motherland.

• On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small boat along the coast of Italy, a terrific storm struck his boat and he was drowned.

• His remains were cremated by Byron and two other friends. His ashes and heart were buried in Rome near the grave of Keats. The inscription on his tombstone reads: "Percy Bysshe Shelley. Cor Cordium" (The Heart of Hearts).

Major Works of Shelley

• The Necessity of Atheism

• Queen Mab

• The Revolt of Islam (1817)

• The Cenci, a play (1819)

• Promethus Unbound (1820), his masterpiece

• Ode to the West Wind

• The Mask of Anarchy

• To a Skylark

• Adonais (1821), an elegy on John Keats

• Defence of Poetry

[Back]

III. John Keats (1795-1821)

1. Life

• John Keats was one of the brilliant trio of active Romantic poets in England

• the son of a stable keeper

• Before Keats was fifteen, both his parents died. His guardian bound him as an apprentice to a surgeon. But he abandoned this career in his determination to be a poet.

• Later he made friends with Leigh Hunt and other radical writers in London, and published some poems in Hunt’s magazine Examiner.

• With the help of Shelley, his first collection of poems, Poems by John Keats(1817), was published in 1817.

• When his second book Endymion appeared in 1818, he gave up medicine for poetry.

• Keats was a composer of poetry of wonderful genius. His poems reveal mastery of form and depth of feeling. But the book was severely criticized because of his democratic views and his close association with the "Cockney School”.

• The aristocratic bourgeois literary circles brutally leveled their criticism at Keats and dubbed him "young Cockney rhymester."They jeered at his extreme poverty, saying "It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary (药剂师) than a starved poet. "For a long time, Shelley, Byron, and Keats's other friends believed that the inhumanity of critics was responsible for the early death of the poet.

• In spite of the hostility showed upon him, Keats did not put down his pen; during the three years after 1818. These poems were written under the great stress of poverty, personal sorrow and failing health.

• His third and last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems appeared in 1820, containing an amazing series of masterpieces, which won Keats his place among the immortals.

• But his health was on the brink of collapse. He coughed up a drop of blood; and recognized it as his death Warrant. Shelley was kind enough to invite him to come to Italy in hope of recovery. He went to Rome, where he died on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty six.

2. Major Works of Keats

– During his life time Keats wrote five long poems, two of which Isabella and Hyperion (unfinished) have generally been considered his major works.

– It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of presentday readers. Among these exquisite shorter poems we mention only the four odes:

Life of Byron

• Byron's poetry won great popularity both at home and abroad. Although today Shelley and Keats are given a higher place as poets, in their own time, they were largely unknown while Byron was read all over Europe and was hailed as a champion of liberty.

• Byron was born lame, but he was a good sportsman. When only seven he fell in love with a little cousin, Mary Duft.

• He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. While a student of nineteen at Trinity College, Cambridge, he published his first collection of poems entitled Hours of Idleness.

• He travelled across Europe to Greece in 1810, invloving himself in selft-conciously romantic adventures (a tour through Portugal, Spain, the Mediterranean, Turkey, Albania, Asia Minor).

• The result was his Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (1812), which was a great success and made him instantly popular at twenty four, as he himself put it, “I awoke one morning to find myself famous." It was a self-dramatizing poem written in Spenserian stanzas.

• Then for a time he was active in the House of Lords, spoke courageously in defence of the Nottingham weavers.

• Byron married in 1815 Annabella Milbanke who persuaded herself that she could make Byron over in her own image. But she failed and the marriage broke up shortly after she had given birth to a daughter.

• The upper class and society, which had already begun to hate him, all believed his wife and turned against him.

• Byron left England on April 25, 1816, never to return again. For the rest of his short life, he struck back at that which had struck him and struck very effectively. He attacked all the conventions, all the hypocrisies, and all the moral commonplaces of English society.

• Byron not only attacked the social shams in his poetry, but set an example of reckless living, which appeared to more than justify all the bad things about him. ("You said I was immoral when I tried to live decently. Now I shall be immoral; you can do as you please about it.)

• The following travels provided him with part of the materials for the 3rd and 4th cantos of Childe Harold (including several months with Shelley and Mary, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, a girl of 17, who forced herself upon Byron and in 1817 bore him a daughter).

• In 1817 Byron established himself in Venice.

• In 1819 he settled into faithful relationship with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of Count Alessanlro Guiccioli. Meanwhile he had been working on a series of closet tragedies (including Cain, Sacradonapalus, Marino Faliero) and on his superb satire, The Vision of Judgement and Don Juan.

• Byron then gave up literature for action when he organized an expedition to assist the Greek war for independence from the Turks. Worn out, he succumbed to a series of feverish attacks and died just after he had reached his 36th birthday.

Byronic Hero

• strange figures of rebels, pirates, and desperate adventurers who were passionate, haughty, cynical, even dissolute, but undoubtedly against all oppression.

• He was a moody, passionate, and remorse torn but unrepentant wanderer.

• He is an alien, mysterious and gloomy spirit, immensely superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity, who he regards with disdain.

• He harbours 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 cold against any opposition, human or supernatural.

• This figure, infusing the archrebel in a nonpolitical form with a strong erotic interest, embodied the implicit yearnings of Byrons’ time, was imitated in life as well as in art, and help shape the intellectual as well as the cultural history of the latter 19th century.

• As a lyric poet, Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses of English literature.

• He is certainly the most beloved of the Romantic poets. Like Spencer, he has been called "the poet's poet."

• No English poet has ever possessed a lyric genius as pure as his.

• His early death was perhaps the greatest catastrophe English literature ever suffered, for he was a man not only of the highest idealism, but also of enormous intellectual breadth.

• Yet in his own days, while Byron's name was on everyone's lips, Shelley's, if mentioned at all, was uttered only as a synonym for turpitude and moral degeneracy

Life of Shelly

• born into an aristocratic family

• educated at Eton and Oxford, from which he was expelled in 1811 for circulating a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism.

• In 1811, eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, a girl of 16, and whom he left after 3 years.

• In 1814, he travelled abroad with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

• Two years later (1816) Harriet drowned herself. Thereafter She1ley’s name became synonymous with that of a scoundrel until the day of his death.

• He himself never recovered from a sense of responsibility for her death, and a sense of guilt shadowed the rest of his life, though the real cause of her suicide is unknown.

• Shelley's outspoken support for the people's struggle against the ruling class had long evoked hatred on the part of English reactionary circle. They grasped his misfortune in family life as pretence to launch a wholesale attack against him.

• This made his living in England unbearable, so he left England with Mary in 1818 and never returned.

• He settled in Italy in 1819 and there he spent the remaining few years of his life.

• In Italy he kept close ties with the Italian people who were fighting for their independence. He also watched the liberation movement in Spain and Greece, and he never forgot the people of his motherland.

• On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small boat along the coast of Italy, a terrific storm struck his boat and he was drowned.

• His remains were cremated by Byron and two other friends. His ashes and heart were buried in Rome near the grave of Keats. The inscription on his tombstone reads: "Percy Bysshe Shelley. Cor Cordium" (The Heart of Hearts).

Major Works of Shelley

• The Necessity of Atheism

• Queen Mab

• The Revolt of Islam (1817)

• The Cenci, a play (1819)

• Promethus Unbound (1820), his masterpiece

• Ode to the West Wind

• The Mask of Anarchy

• To a Skylark

• Adonais (1821), an elegy on John Keats

• Defence of Poetry

1. Life

• John Keats was one of the brilliant trio of active Romantic poets in England

• the son of a stable keeper

• Before Keats was fifteen, both his parents died. His guardian bound him as an apprentice to a surgeon. But he abandoned this career in his determination to be a poet.

• Later he made friends with Leigh Hunt and other radical writers in London, and published some poems in Hunt’s magazine Examiner.

• With the help of Shelley, his first collection of poems, Poems by John Keats(1817), was published in 1817.

• When his second book Endymion appeared in 1818, he gave up medicine for poetry.

• Keats was a composer of poetry of wonderful genius. His poems reveal mastery of form and depth of feeling. But the book was severely criticized because of his democratic views and his close association with the "Cockney School”.

• In spite of the hostility showed upon him, Keats did not put down his pen; during the three years after 1818. These poems were written under the great stress of poverty, personal sorrow and failing health.

• His third and last volume of poetry Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems appeared in 1820, containing an amazing series of masterpieces, which won Keats his place among the immortals.

• But his health was on the brink of collapse. He coughed up a drop of blood; and recognized it as his death Warrant. Shelley was kind enough to invite him to come to Italy in hope of recovery. He went to Rome, where he died on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty six.

2. Major Works of Keats

– During his life time Keats wrote five long poems, two of which Isabella and Hyperion (unfinished) have generally been considered his major works.

– It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of presentday readers. Among these exquisite shorter poems we mention only the four odes:

–"On a Grecian Urn"

–"To a Nightingale"

–"Ode to Autumn”

–"To Psyche,"

and two sonnets:

– "On First Looking in Chapman's Homer"

– "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket."