PRACTICAL CLASS 5

The nineteenth-century literature. The Romantism.

To speak briefly on:

1. Poetry of Romanticism

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little
conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the
first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their
concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had
been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he
considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early
development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world
in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the
satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784-85); he then took the bolder step
of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His
desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution
as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-
93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the
impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in
contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were
not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his
contemporaries' view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not
in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom
he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of
Urizen's rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more
ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas),
written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804-08) and
Jerusalem (1804-20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he
portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility
of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also

exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in
France in 1791-92, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war
on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood
on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his
twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities
in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems
"The Ruined Cottage” and "The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion);
the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom
he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred
simultaneously by Dorothy's immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her
Journals (written 1798-1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge's imaginative and
speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The
volume began with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued
with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of
ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative "Lines Written a Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth's attempt to set out his mature faith in nature
and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued
in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The
Prelude (1798-99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised
continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a
poet of having been a child "fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing
in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English
expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature.
The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in
the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In
poems such as "Michael” and "The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second
volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and
potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge's poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth's.

Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in "The Eolian
Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political
and social prophecy, such as "Religious Musings” and "The Destiny of Nations.”
Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged
by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human
mind. Poems such as "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” "The Nightingale,” and
"Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the "conversation poems” but collected
by Coleridge himself as "Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive
descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. "Kubla Khan”
(1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in "a kind
of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in
the supernaturalism of "The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished "Christabel.”
After his visit to Germany in 1798-99, he renewed attention to the links between
the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in
letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his
poetic output became sporadic. "Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative
poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's
sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his "shaping spirit of
Imagination.”
The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by
the rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the
patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the
merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as
a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of
duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the
Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal...as Affected by the Convention of
Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge's periodical The Friend (1809-10) in deploring
the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814
(the time of Napoleon's first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central
section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, "a philosophical Poem, containing
views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The
Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious
consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French
revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the
Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge's lectures on
Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his
volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was
published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own
development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made
an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at
Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as "the most impressive talker of his
age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings
made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

2. The later Romantics: Shelley (in short), Keats and Byron (very briefly)

The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors' passion for liberty (now
set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn
from their experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in
politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin,
whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley's
revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay "A Defence of
Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that "the most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion
or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.” This fervour burns throughout the early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon
and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus
Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine "Ode
to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical politics,
however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his concern is
with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most
characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance
invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the
Rousseauistic belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human
nature itself than the behaviour evinced and approved by society. In that sense his
material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate.
Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and
power.

John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his
early work, such as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying
effect. As the program set out in his early poem "Sleep and Poetry” shows,
however, Keats was determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820,
when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to
live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity.
He experimented with many kinds of poems: "Isabella” (published 1820), an
adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in
its attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same time a poem
involved in contemporary politics. His epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818 and
abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published posthumously as The
Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery, but Keats soon found
the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called "other
sensations.” Some of these "other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819,
Keats's annus mirabilis: "The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes "To a
Nightingale,” "On a Grecian Urn,” and "To Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion
poems, represent the summit of Keats's achievement, showing what has been
called "the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the complex themes
being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb letters show the full
range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and
manner, was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward "Mediterranean”
topics. Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of
sensibility and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he
developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two
longest poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18) and Don Juan (1819-24), his
masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and
melancholy exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque
adventurer enjoying a series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic
vein was further mined in dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain
(1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now remembered
best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which
he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed
there became a formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire on Southey, The
Vision of Judgment (1822).
3. The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott

The death of Tobias Smollett in 1771 brought an end to the first great period of
novel writing in English. Not until the appearance of Jane Austen's Sense and
Sensibility in 1811 and Sir Walter Scott's Waverley in 1814 would there again be
works of prose fiction that ranked with the masterpieces of Richardson, Fielding,
Sterne, and Smollett.

It is possible to suggest practical reasons for this 40-year partial eclipse. The war
with France made paper expensive, causing publishers in the 1790s and early
1800s to prefer short, dense forms, such as poetry. It might also be argued, in more
broadly cultural terms, that the comic and realistic qualities of the novel were at
odds with the new sensibility of Romanticism. But the problem was always one of
quality rather than quantity. Flourishing as a form of entertainment, the novel
nevertheless underwent several important developments in this period. One was
the invention of the Gothic novel. Another was the appearance of a politically
engaged fiction in the years immediately before the French Revolution. A third
was the rise of women writers to the prominence that they have held ever since in
prose fiction.

The sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with
Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765-70), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of
Feeling (1771), and Charles Lamb's A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind
Margaret (1798). Novels of this kind were, however, increasingly mocked in the
later years of the 18th century.

The comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way.
John Moore gave a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his
predecessors in Zeluco (1786) and Mordaunt (1800). Fanny Burney carried the
comic realist manner into the field of female experience with the novels Evelina
(1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796). Her discovery of the comic and
didactic potential of a plot charting a woman's progress from the nursery to the
altar would be important for several generations of female novelists.

More striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace
Walpole's invention, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as
the Gothic novel. Walpole's intention was to "blend” the fantastic plot of "ancient
romance” with the realistic characterization of "modern” (or novel) romance.
Characters would respond with terror to extraordinary events, and readers would
vicariously participate. Walpole's innovation was not significantly imitated until
the 1790s, when - perhaps because the violence of the French Revolution created a
taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction - a torrent of such works
appeared.

The most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished
between "terror” and "horror.” Terror "expands the soul” by its use of "uncertainty
and obscurity.” Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Radcliffe's own
novels, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), were
examples of the fiction of terror. Vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined castles, are
terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be illusions.

Matthew Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the
hero commits both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman's
imprisonment in a vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of
Gothic fiction have more-sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction.
James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is
a subtle study of religious mania and split personality. Even in its more-vulgar
examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious political and
psychological issues.

By the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the ideas of
the French Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the process.
One practitioner of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered for
Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), in which a "natural” hero rejects the
conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas Holcroft published two
novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794),
influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best
example of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of
Caleb Williams (1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a
narrative of social oppression.

Women novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such

as Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798),
Elizabeth Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma
Courtney, 1796) celebrated the rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists such
as Jane West (A Gossip's Story, 1796; A Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia Opie
(Adeline Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-Control, 1811) stressed the
dangers of social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably Elizabeth
Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth, whose
long, varied, and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary Ladies
(1795) to Helen (1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent (1800), an
affectionately comic portrait of life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the
subsequent work of Scott.

Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in novels
that incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into love
stories that many readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels - Sense and
Sensibility (first published in 1811; originally titled "Elinor and Marianne”), Pride
and Prejudice (1813; originally "First Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey
(published posthumously in 1817) - were drafted in the late 1790s. Three more
novels - Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817, together
with Northanger Abbey) - were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen uses,
essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected
heroine is gradually acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously
looked down on her (such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in
Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-deceived heroine (such as Emma
Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) belatedly
recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she had
previously despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a
powerful case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense,
empiricism, and rationality to the new "Romantic” values of imagination, egotism,
and subjectivity. With Austen the comic brilliance and exquisite narrative
construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in conjunction with a
distinctive and deadly irony.

Thomas Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate

knowledge of Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in
comic debates rather than conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816),
Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare Abbey (1818) are sharp accounts of
contemporary intellectual and cultural fashions, as are the two much later fictions
in which Peacock reused this successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll
Grange (1860-61).

Sir Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a
Romantic novelist. After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose
fiction in 1814 with the first of the "Waverley novels.” In the first phase of his
work as a novelist, Scott wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries,
charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern world in a series
of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary
(1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with
Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with
Quentin Durward in 1823, he added European settings to his historical repertoire.
Scott combines a capacity for comic social observation with a Romantic sense of
landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the novel in ways that equip
it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.

4. Drama

This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip
Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not
a great period of playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the
"Royal” (or "legitimate”) theatres created a damaging split between high and low
art forms. The classic repertoire continued to be played but in buildings that had
grown too large for subtle staging, and, when commissioning new texts, legitimate
theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-verse manner of the great
tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular modes of
performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.

This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver
Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition
of "laughing comedy.” But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained
the dominant mode, persisting in the work of Richard Cumberland (The West
Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle's Stratagem, 1780), Elizabeth Inchbald
(I'll Tell You What, 1785), John O'Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic Reynolds
(The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and
Thomas Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh
impetus in the 1790s from the work of the German dramatist August von
Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as
Lovers' Vows in 1798.

By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become
the most important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas
Holcroft's Seduction (1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the
moral simplicity, tragicomic plot, and sensationalism of the "mélodrames” of
Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the latter's Coelina (1800) as A Tale of
Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the emotional effect, the
form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences of the
"illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis's The Castle
Spectre (first performance 1797) and J. R. Planché's The Vampire (1820), were
theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal
melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas
(Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic melodramas (John Howard
Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker, The Factory
Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the "legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the
films and television of a later period.

Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the work of

James Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both
tragic and comic (Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of
the era all attempted to write tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge's
Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse) at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron's
Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth's The Borderers (1797), Keats's Otho the
Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes
it from the general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and
produce "closet dramas” (for reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian
poet Robert Browning would spend much of his early career writing verse plays
for the legitimate theatre (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, produced in
1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished the
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play
rapidly disappeared.

1. The romantic period.

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of

literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western
civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism
can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance,
idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-
century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against
the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism
in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational,
the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and
the transcendental.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened

appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason
and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened
examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a
preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a
focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a
supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than
strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon
imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an
obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and
the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the
weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

Literature

Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-
18th century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a
new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement
derives its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose
emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear
contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of
literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in
poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional
literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.

Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of

the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which
he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became
the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the
third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of
the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content
and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and
the supernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the
early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, August
Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder,
and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary
France, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, and Madame de
Staël were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential
historical and theoretical writings.

The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the

1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to
national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk
ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval
and Renaissance works. The revived historical appreciation was translated into
imaginative writing by Sir Walter Scott, who is often considered to have invented
the historical novel. At about this same time English Romantic poetry had reached
its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing

with the supernatural, the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by Charles Robert Maturin, the Marquis de
Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The second phase of Romanticism in Germany was
dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Görres,
and Joseph von Eichendorff.

By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all
of Europe. In this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in
approach and concentrated more on exploring each nation’s historical and cultural
inheritance and on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional
individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers would
have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne Brontë in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de
Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas,
and Théophile Gautier in France; Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in
Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; José de
Espronceda and Ángel de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and
almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.

2. Poets of “Lake school”

Definition and Explanation of Lake Poets

The primary members of the loosely defined group were William Wordsworth, and
later (to an extent) his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
Robert Southey. But there were several other poets, mentioned below, who were
also given the name. It was due to the works of poets like Wordsworth that the
Lake District became as well-known and defined as it is today. His vision of the
landscape, and how he wrote about it, created it. He was attracted to the region for
its isolation and for the undisturbed vision of nature he could find there. Other
poets, like Southey and Coleridge, were attracted to the region for different
reasons. 

Famous Lake Poets 

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was the best-known of the Lake Poets. He exemplified

the attitude that’s now associated with the region and with all those who were
inspired by the landscape. He, along with Coleridge, is remembered by history as
helping to launch the Romantic Age of English literature with their publication
of Lyrical Ballads. The greatest work of his career, The Prelude, was unknown
during his lifetime. He began it when he was twenty-eight years old and it was
published posthumously. His broader oeuvre is noted for his veneration o nature
and dislike for change that flew in the face of the natural world. He often used
common language and centered the everyday person at the heart of his poems. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, along with Wordsworth, is remembered as one of the

progenitors of the Romantic Movement in England. He worked as a poet, literary
critic, and philosopher. He is one of the most prominent members of the group
referred to as the Lake Poets. He collaborated on volumes with other writers on
this list, such as Robert Southey and Charles Lloyd. His work was often darker
than Wordsworth’s. He used elements of the supernatural, imagination,
and naturalism. 

Robert Southey 

Robert Southey is remembered today for his lyrical verse, sonnets, odes, and

ballads that dealt with topics like social injustice and the supernatural. He, like
Coleridge and Wordsworth, became more conservative throughout his lifetime,
acquiring deep respect for British social institutions. He is remembered for his
poem ‘After Blenheim.’ 

Mary Lamb 

Mary Lamb is best-remembered for her collaboration with Charles Lamb, her
brother, on Tales from Shakespeare. She and her brother were part of the same
literary circles as the other poets on this list and she is often included as part of the
group of Lake Poets. She spent most of her life, after briefly being confined to a
mental facility for murdering Elizabeth Lamb, her mother, working as a seamstress
in London under the care of her brother. 

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was brother to Mary Lamb and is best-remembered as a poet,

essayist, and children’s author. His collection of essays titled, Essays of Elia, is his
best-known work. He was at the center of the poet’s literary circle in London and
was a much-loved character there. His most famous poem was ‘The Old Familiar
Faces.’ 

Charles Lloyd 

Charles Lloyd was a close friend of the other poets on this list and is best known
for his poem, ‘Desultory Thoughts in London.’ He was a student of Coleridge’s
and collaborated with him on a few occasions. It was through Coleridge that he
met Charles Lamb with whom he also collaborated. 

3. Poetry of Percy Shelley

Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, the eldest son of Sir Timothy
Shelley, MP for the Duke of Norfolk’s pocket borough of Shoreham-by-sea.
Shelley was educated at Eton, where he was known as ‘Mad Shelley’, and
University College Oxford, from where he was expelled for co-authoring a
pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ and refusing to answer when asked
whether he had written it.

The expulsion from Oxford led to a violent quarrel with his father and was the first
step in the sense of exile which pursued Shelley throughout his life. Immediately,
he eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a
coffee-house proprietor. They married in Edinburgh in 1811.

During a restless and nomadic existence for the next three years, Shelley wrote
‘Queen Mab’ (1813) which reflects Shelley’s revolutionary instincts and his
republicanism, belief in free love, vegetarianism and atheism. It shows the
influence of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the
Rights of Women) and of William Godwin, both of whom he soon met, along with
their daughter, Mary.

In 1814, as Harriet expected a second child, the marriage collapsed and Shelley
eloped to France with the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin and (surprisingly) her
fifteen-year-old stepsister Claire. The three of them lived and travelled together,
with only occasional interruptions, for the rest of Shelley’s life. When, in 1816,
Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine, Shelley and Mary were married.
‘Ozymandias’ (1817) is the result of a sonnet-writing competition with a friend
with whom he visited the British Museum just after the acquisition of fragments
from the Empire of the Ramases. The sonnet expresses in harsh and dramatic
words Shelley’s hatred of tyranny and the human wilderness to which it leads.
Much of his work expresses his fury at the effrontery, the corruption and
complacency, the sneer of cold command, of those who pretend to govern.

Tormented by creditors, and by a sense of exile, Shelley and his household

decamped to Italy in 1818 where they remained until his death. His domestic
situation was dire: his little daughter Clara had already died and now his son
William died in Rome; Mary had a nervous breakdown. Yet the year from the
summer of 1819 saw an extraordinary burst of major poetry.

‘Ode to the West Wind’, written in October, followed news of the Massacre of
Peterloo when soldiers fired on a peaceful crowd of demonstrators, with several
fatalities. Shelley was also brooding on a vicious article attacking his work and his
style of life. He went for a long solitary walk by the Arno and watched the
gathering of a storm against the cold, clear blue sky. The wind was hard from the
West. In the poem, the wind becomes a series of shifting symbols: first a swirling
chaos sweeping before it the people of the world, then a carrier of the seed of
revolution to promise a brighter day. Finally the last two sections describe
Shelley’s own plight: the gap between what must be done and the inadequacy of
his mind and body to accomplish the task.

In the midst of domestic gloom, in the summer of 1820, Shelley wrote the lovely
lyric, ‘To a Skylark’. It reaches longingly for the idea of escape into a world of
effortless creativity.

Two years later, in August 1822, while living in an isolated house on the bay of
Lerici, Shelley took a sailing trip to visit Byron at Livorno. On his return, the boat
was overcome by a violent summer storm and sank without lowering its sails.
Shelley’s body was washed ashore a week later; he was drowned a month short of
his thirtieth birthday.

4. G. G. Byron. His life and works

Early Life

George Gordon Byron was born on the 22nd of January in 1788. He is well-known

as Lord Byron or the 6th Baron Byron. He was an intelligent child of John (Mad
Jack) Byron, a British army officer, while his mother, Catharine Gordon, was a
ruined Scots Heiress. Catherine was the second wife of John Byron. He led a
traumatic childhood partly because of the fierce temper and insensitivity of his
mother and partly because of his clubbed right foot. His father left him in 1791,
while his mother left the world in 1811.
Education 

Lord Byron’s mother took him to Aberdeenshire, England. There, he attended

Aberdeen Grammar School and the school of Dr. William Glennie in Dulwich. He
was treated with extra care at school because of his clubbed foot. However, due to
the mistreatment of his mother coupled with her uneven temper, he lacked manners
and discipline in his early years. Later, between 1801 and 1805, he attended
Harrow School in London, followed by Trinity College, Cambridge. It was during
that time he started documenting his literary ideas on papers. Also, he got engaged
in gambling, boxing, horse riding, and sensual escapades during that time.
Moreover, during his stay at Cambridge, he developed a lifelong friendship with
John Cam Hobhouse, a political figure and Francis Hodgson who later guided him
in literary and other matters of his life.

Married Life and Tragedy

Lord Byron is a prolific literary figure. Sadly, his life is marred by a series of love
affairs, including Lady Oxford and Lady Caroline Lamb. He had had a secret
relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, too, who turned him down by marrying
Colonel George Leigh. To distract himself, he developed an illegitimate
relationship with Lady Frances Webster. He recorded his unsuccessful love affairs
in his dark poems: “The Giaour”, “Lara”, “The Bride of Abydos” and “The
Corsair.” However, in January 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke and their
daughter, Ada Lovelace, was born in the same year. Unfortunately, after a year,
Isabella left him because of his suspected love affair with his half-sister. After this
tragic end of their marriage, in April 1816, he left England for good.

Death

Lord Byron, one of the great poets, died of illness on the 19th of April in 1824 in
Messolonghi, Greece, where he had traveled to support Grecians in their fight for
independence from Turks. His body was sent to England but the clergy refused to
give him space at Westminster Abbey. Therefore, his remains were buried near
Newstead in a family vault.

Some Important Facts of His Life 

1. At the age of seventeen, he secured a reputable seat in the House of Lords.

2. He led a troubled childhood because of his schizophrenic mother and
clubbed foot.
3. He had an illegitimate affair with his half-sister,
4. His famous pieces include: “She Walks in Beauty”, “The Curse of Minerva”
and “When We Two Parted.”
5. He played an active role in Greek’s war of independence.

His Career
Lord Byron is considered one of the most controversial, yet leading figures of the
Romantic Movement in Europe. He started writing at an early age but did not
publish his pieces. However, in 1806, he started gathering his poems and published
the first volume of his collection privately which got poor reception. Later, in 1807
he published “Hours of Idleness” followed by English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. These publications brought him into the limelight and he became
known among the literary circle of that time.

Moreover, his friendship with John Cam Hobhouse further accelerated his literary
career. Together they flew to Greece, Turkey, Malta, Albania, and Portugal. It was
during that time he started working on his epic poem, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’
which hit the shelves in 1811. Later in 1816, he traveled to Geneva and
Switzerland with Shelley and Mary Godwin. Also, he completed the third canto of
his poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” during this time. Besides poetry, he edited
the Carbonari newspaper, The Liberal.

His Style

Lord Byron was a leading figure of the Romantic Movement. His specific ideas
about life and nature benefitted the world of literature. Marked by
Hudibrastic verse, blank verse, allusive imagery, heroic couplets, and complex
structures, his diverse literary pieces won global acclaim. However, his early
work, Fugitive Pieces, brought him to the center of criticism, but his later works
made inroads into the literary world. He successfully used blank verse and satire in
his pieces to explore the ideas of love and nature. Although he is known as a
romantic poet, his poems, “The Prisoner of Chillon” and “Darkness” where
attempts to discuss reality as it is without adding fictional elements. The
recurring themes in most of his pieces are nature, the folly of love, realism in
literature, liberty and the power of art.

Lord Byron’s Famous Works 

 Best Poems: Lord Byron is a great English poet, some his popular poems
include: “She Walks in Beauty”, “Darkness”, “There Be None of Beauty’s
Daughter”, “The Eve of Waterloo”, “When We Two Parted” and “And Thou
Art Dead, As Young and Fair.”
 Other Works: Besides poetry, he tried his hands on the tragedy in verse
form. Some of them include The Two Foscari: A Historical Tragedy,
Sardanapalus, Marino Faliero and The Prophecy of Dante.

Lord Byron’s Impact on Future Literature

Lord Byron’s unique literary ideas brought new perspectives for English literature.

His distinctive writing approach and experimentation with epics and lyrics made
him stand out even among the best poets. His narrative and lyrical works are
regarded as masterpieces and had had significant impacts on generations. He
successfully documented his ideas and feelings about historical tragedies
and romanticism in his writings that even today, writers try to imitate his
unique style, considering him a beacon for writing plays and poetry.

5. George Gordon Byron “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”, “Don Juan”

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. In many

ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord
Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English
romanticism’s conception of the relationship between nature and literature. The
question always to keep in mind about Childe Harold is why Byron would write a
combination travelogue, political tract, autobiography, lamentation, and paean to
nature as a poem, and why such a poem should be so spectacularly popular. These
are the basic questions of romanticism.
Byron famously woke up to find himself famous after the publication of cantos I
and II of Childe Harold when he was 24. Those cantos are more or less the poetic
journal of a trip Byron took with friends (in particular his close confidant John
Cam Hobhouse) through the regions of Europe not occupied by Napoleon
Bonaparte’s French forces; the areas held by Napoleon were enemy territory for an
Englishman. Accordingly, Byron traveled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania,
Greece, and Turkey, whose Ottoman Empire extended over Greece, and Byron
would die championing the cause of Greek independence, the loss of which he
laments in Childe Harold.
Indeed, the poem is about the meaning of freedom in all its forms—personal,
political, poetic. In canto I, Byron joins with William Wordsworth and with a host
of others to heap scorn on the Convention of Cintra, the terms by which the British
bureaucracy agreed to allow the French forces Admiral Arthur Wellesley had
soundly defeated in Portugal in 1808 (a major incident in the Peninsular War
against Napoleon) to leave Portugal and Spain with their loot intact. For Byron,
Britain was on the right side of the Peninsular War, since Napoleon had come to
represent conquest and tyranny. He accordingly celebrates Iberian resistance to
Napoleon’s superior forces, and throughout Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he takes
the side of the conquered over their conquerors.

In particular, this takes the form of commitment to Greek independence, a cause

for which Byron would later fight and die. In the poem, what he sees everywhere
he goes is emptiness and loss. In Greece the loss is that of the glorious past and the
great writers who belong to that past; in Albania it is the sublime emptiness of the
wilderness. Everywhere it is the indifference of time and fate and nature to human
ambition. Byron’s predilection for battlefields (which he explicitly mentions in a
footnote to canto III) is for them as a place in which the most intense passion and
pain display their ultimate pointlessness.
It is this sense of pointlessness—to be found in the ultimate insignificance of
poetry as well as of political power—that Byron finds everywhere. The work of the
poem is to transmute that feeling into one of freedom. Harold, who barely exists in
the poem (he was originally to be called Burun, the old spelling of the Byron
family name), is attempting to escape his own past by leaving England for the
wastes of ocean and of a fabulous elsewhereness. He is Byron reduced to his own
poetic perception, judgment, and feeling, “The wandering outlaw of his own dark
mind” (III, l. 20). Indeed, Byron sees him as a kind of avatar by whose creation he
can transform his nothingness into “A being more intense,” by an apprehension of
that very nothingness, “feeling still with thee”—his fictional avatar Harold—“in
my crush’d feelings’ dearth” (III, ll. 47–54).

All experience testifies to the nothingness that affords Byron the intensity of its
own apprehension: “There is a very life in our despair” (III, l. 298). The final
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the battlefield Byron visits in canto III (and
describes in a passage that will incite William Makepeace Thackeray’s great
Waterloo scene in Vanity Fair), the later autobiographical projection he undertakes
in his praise of “the selftorturing sophist, wild Rousseau” (III, l. 725; cantos III and
IV are significant influences on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of
Life, which also contains a memorable account of the French philosopher
JeanJacques Rousseau, perhaps the first romantic) all lead to the placement of
nature above any human significance. As Byron explains in one of his many
footnotes, which are essential to the poem’s integrity, when describing the scenery
of the Alps where Rousseau set his novel Julie: “If Rousseau had never written,
nor lived, the same associations would not less have belonged to such scenes. He
has added to the interest of his works by their adoption; he has shown his sense of
their beauty by the selection; but they have done that for him which no human
being could do for them” (note to III, l. 940).

This is a telling claim. When canto III of Childe Harold came out, Wordsworth
complained about Byron (who, like Shelley, is often talking about the still-living
Wordsworth when he refers to Rousseau) that his hymn to nature was derived
from Tintern Abbey. There is much justice in this claim. Byron had described
himself in canto II as the child of nature, as “Her neverwean’d, though not her
favour’d child” (II, l. 328). If we take Wordsworth to be her favorite child (as he
himself often claimed), then we can see that Byron’s relationship to nature is not
quite Wordsworthian. For Wordsworth, it is nature that instills within him his
vocation as a poet, even if in the end he can transcend nature and plumb the depths
of his own soul. Indeed, it is that exploration of selfhood that makes poetic
vocation greater and deeper than the experience of nature that catalyzes it. But for
Byron, nature is greater than the poet who celebrates her. Poetry is our trivial
human way of recording our experience of nature. However, nature is all in all.
(Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” written during the summer he and Byron both visited the
mountain and the surrounding regions, is a kind of rebuttal of this conclusion.)
The odd and paradoxical effect of Childe Harold is that it testifies to the most
important fact about Byron as a poet: Unlike any of the other romantics, he did not
imagine being a poet as a transcendent fact. His refusal of such a claim is part of
his greatness, but it is a refusal nonetheless. In comparing himself with Napoleon
and with Rousseau, he is acknowledging the ultimate triviality of what he is doing,
even while using the language of overweening pride. His poetry is more fully
about nature than that of any other romantic poet, because it is least about the
depths of selfhood. Of course, Byron’s overwhelming and intoxicating personality
can be felt in every page he writes. But he refuses to go deep, and this refusal
returns us to the nature and freedom from self that he found in nature. Poetry is for
Byron a means, and not an end: a means to finding freedom finally in the nature it
celebrates. It is this fact—most palpable in Childe Harold—that displays both
Byron’s greatness and his limitations. Those limitations are the very subject of his
poetry; they are what make it great, and they are also where he finds the freedom to
be overwhelming and intoxicating, a freedom he preferred to the implacable
demands of the uncompromising poetic vocation of the other romantics.

Don Juan

Don Juan begins with a dedication to Robert Southey and William Wordsworth—

both famous poets of the time, whom Byron lampoons here. The narrator distances
himself from these “great” men by insisting that his own muse is of a lesser nature,
and so his verse will be lesser as well.
The narrative then begins with the birth of Don Juan. The child of Donna Inez and
Don Jose of Seville, Don Juan is sexually precocious, having an affair with his
mother’s best friend, Donna Julia. Don Alfonso, Donna Julia’s husband, discovers
the affair and Don Juan is sent to Cadiz.
En route to Cadiz, Don Juan is shipwrecked, the only survivor of the vessel, and
left alone until he encounters Haidee, daughter of the pirate Lambro. Lambro’s
men find both Haidee and Don Juan, who is captured and sold into slavery.

The lovely Gulbayaz, member of the Sultan’s harem, arranges for Don Juan’s
purchase. She has him disguised as a girl and smuggled into her chambers. Don
Juan almost immediately insults Gulbayaz by bedding one of her courtesans;
Gulbayaz threatens to have both offenders killed, but Don Juan manages to escape.

Don Juan then joins the Russian army in its assault on Ismail; there he proves
himself an able warrior and rescues the Muslim girl Leila. Victorious, the Russian
army goes to St. Petersburg, where Don Juan and his captive are presented to
Catherine the Great. Don Juan so impresses the Czarina that she invites him to join
her court.

Don Juan then becomes ill and is sent to England as an ambassador from Russia.
There he finds a governess for the girl Leila. Thus begin a series of shorter
adventures among the British aristocracy.
Analysis
Don Juan is written in groups of eight lines of iambic pentameter that follow an
ABABABCC rhyme scheme, which is known as ottava rima. The dedication,
sixteen cantos, and fragmentary seventeenth canto make up the poem, which Byron
insisted was unfinished. Unfortunately, Byron died shortly after the publication of
the last cantos and was therefore unable to complete the entire mock epic.
As with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the protagonist, Don Juan, is often more a
plot device than a character, as the narrator is subsumed into Byron himself. Byron
becomes more central to the poem than the young hero. Don Juan is actually a
rather flat character—he is young, of a sweet disposition, and simultaneously
innocent and promiscuous. Don Juan falls (often literally) into his amorous
adventures, the passive recipient of the erotic attentions of a succession of
aggressive women of power.
Don Juan is a mock epic in that its protagonist—while often heroic (as in the battle
of Ismail in Canto VIII)—is in fact naïve and his adventures almost entirely the
result of accident. The tone of the poem is comic, which Byron accentuates with
playful rhymes and—in particular—incisive homonyms. Byron makes his satire of
the classical epics clear in Canto I, where he notes that “Most epic poets plunge ‘in
medias res’” (1.6.41), but then states, “This is the usual method, but not mine”
(1.7.49) and then proceeds to tell the tale of Don Juan from the very beginning: his
birth.
Always self-conscious of his literary standing, Byron did not neglect to include
literary and cultural criticism in his comedic epic, as he did in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage. His dedication to Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth seems to be a
humble distancing of his own low efforts from these poets’ grand
accomplishments, but even a cursory reading demonstrates his incisive critique of
their discursive and verbose styles of writing.
The adventures of Don Juan themselves are poetic re-imaginings of Byron’s own
escapades and dysfunctional relationships with the women in his life. These make
them of interest not just as poetry but also as windows into Byron’s biography
from his own point of view. Byron retells the story of Don Juan with himself as the
womanizer. Whether this long poem is a late masterpiece or self-indulgence or
both remains a matter of debate.

Don Juan

Summary

      Don Juan is an epic satire in sixteen cantos by Lord Byron. Don Juan, a young
man of sixteen is sent abroad in a ship by his mother for his amorous intrigues with
Donna Julia. There is the shipwreck and Don Juan is cast upon a Greek island. He
is restored to life by Haidee, the beautiful daughter of a pirate and the two love
each other. The pirate father, who was supposed to be dead returns and punishes
Juan by sending him, bound in chains, to a sailing ship. Haidee dies of broken
heart. Juan is sold as a slave to a Sultana in Constantinople who falls madly in love
with him. But stung by jealousy she threatens to kill him. Juan escapes to the
Russian army which is besieging the land. Juan plays a gallant part in the siege. He
goes to Russia, where he finds favour with the Empress Catherina. By her Juan is
sent on a political mission to England, where a fresh intrigue is just beginning. But
the poem suddenly breaks off at this point.

Critical Analysis

      The poem is a medley of the grave and the gay, narrative and descriptive,
philosophy and satire. Some of the most beautiful poetry of Byron occurs in the
poem. The famous lyric The Isles of Greece occurs in Canto III of the poem. The
Haidee - Juan episode is a charming love-idyll. With the main story are mingled
several digressions, in which Byron, the fierce satirist lashes at the society and the
enemies that so ill-treated him. Byron with his sharp humour and wit, heady
passion and thirst after beauty reveals himself unmistakably in the poem. The
whole poem flows with the ease and naturalness of Byron's conversation, a stream
sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid, sometimes rushing down in cataracts - a
mixture of philosophy and slang - or everything.

6. Novels of Walter Scott. “Ivanhoe”

Ivanhoe: analysis

Although it would be too glib to describe Ivanhoe as ‘the Game of Thrones of the

Regency era’, its appeal to nineteenth-century readers certainly stemmed in part
from Scott’s evocation of medieval pomp and pageantry, and the focus on warring
kings, princes, knights, and bandits in twelfth-century England has helped to
ensure its enduring appeal. The novel is a colourful depiction of medieval England,
featuring jousting tournaments, banquets, knights, kings, princes, jesters, and even
Robin Hood (it was Scott who popularised the idea of the Sherwood outlaw as a
Saxon yeoman named Locksley).

What more could one want from a historical novel? Mark Twain went so far as to
blame the popularity of Ivanhoe in the Southern states for the American Civil
War: Ivanhoe, rather than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the little book that made that
great war. (Twain thought that the novel’s romantic view of the feudalistic Middle
Ages inspired Southern Americans to cling to the idea of indentured servitude.)

Ivanhoe, as with several of Scott’s other historical novels –

notably Waverley (which gave its way to Edinburgh’s railway station) and The
Heart of Midlothian (which gave its name to a football team) – set a new standard
for historical fiction. Although many of the principal characters speak in an overly
ornate, formal style, characters like Wamba the clown, and Gurth the swineherd,
broaden the sweep of the novel.
Although both Richard the Lionheart (as the Black Knight, until he reveals his true
identity) and his brother, Prince John (later King John of England) feature, the
focus is as much on Rebecca, Rowena, Ivanhoe, Robin of Locksley, and his
various Saxon associates as it is on kings and princes and Norman knights.

And this is without doubt the main ‘thrust’ of Ivanhoe: Scott repeatedly highlights
the Saxons’ status as a dispossessed people, whose defeat at the Battle of Hastings
over a century earlier has led to a rift in some parts of the kingdom between
Normans and Saxons. In making his titular hero the son of a Saxon lord, Scott
casts the Normans into the role of villains, with Ivanhoe – his name probably
suggested by the song ‘Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe’, about places in
Buckinghamshire, England – representing the authentic English hero.

Given Scott’s interest in creating a historical narrative for his own country of
Scotland, and his need to reach a wider audience with his work (the majority of his
other novels are set in Scotland, rather than the English midlands), we might
analyse this friction between Norman invaders and Saxon natives as an Anglicised
version of a similar conflict between English invaders and native Scots, seen in
many of Sir Walter Scott’s Scottish-set novels.

But it’s worth noting that King Richard the Lionheart, himself a Norman
descended from that first conqueror, William I, fights alongside the Saxons and is
presented as a good king. Scott also problematises the idea of the Saxons as
persecuted victims by including the two Jewish characters, Isaac and his daughter
Rebecca, the latter of whom is accused of witchcraft and condemned to die until
the trial by combat – the finale of Ivanhoe – saves her from the stake.

What’s more, Ivanhoe is a decidedly Shakespearean novel, in many ways – a fact

that many Shakespeare scholars, such as Jonathan Bate in The Genius of
Shakespeare, have remarked about Scott’s fiction more generally. Sir Walter Scott
clearly learned a great deal about writing historical fiction from reading, not earlier
historical novels, but from reading Shakespeare’s plays.

Like Shakespeare in his history plays about the Wars of the Roses (although it’s
worth noting that Shakespeare also wrote a play, King John, set just after the
historical setting of Ivanhoe), Scott is trying to create a historical identity for
England through writing about one of its most celebrated warrior-kings, Richard
the Lionheart (who famously spent less than six months of his ten-year reign in
England, and almost certainly never disguised himself as a knight to fight
alongside Saxons in England), and one of its most enduring characters from
legend, Robin Hood.

Ivanhoe is also remarkably Shakespearean in Scott’s use of supporting characters:

opening the novel with Gurth the swineherd, rather than a king at court, would
have been a novel (pun intended) move for a historical novelist in 1819, and is in
keeping with Shakespeare’s focus on the common soldier in such plays as Henry
V.

Meanwhile, we might regard the kindly Isaac and his generous daughter Rebecca
as subtle revisions of the mercenary Shylock and his headstrong daughter Jessica
in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Wamba the clown is clearly a
tribute to Shakespeare’s Clowns and Fools, whose purpose is to use wit and
absurdity to expose the truth of the situation.

7. The Poetry of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770—the same

year as gave us Beethoven, Hegel, and Hölderlin—and died at the age of eighty,
rich in the knowledge of his huge accomplishments, in Rydal Mount,
Westmorland, in 1850. In those eighty years, Wordsworth brought a unique poetry
to English letters and to the world; it had never before been seen, nor has it since.
He spent his last couple of decades, after many years of less genial reception (see,
for example, Byron’s, Shelley’s, and Keats’ responses to Wordsworth), enjoying
his well-earned popularity amongst the early Victorians. He had many friends in
high places, including Queen Victoria herself, and he was awarded honorary
degrees by both Durham and Oxford—honours which Wordsworth responded to
with dry wit in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (28 July 1838): ‘I forgot to
mention that the University of Durham the other day by especial convocation
conferred upon me the honorary degree of L.L.D. Therefore, you will not scruple
when a difficult point of Law occurs, to consult me.’

Wordsworth possesses one of the most intriguing biographies of all the poets,
which is itself indispensable for understanding his poetry. In his youth, for
example, he was fired with the revolutionary zeal which in the 1790s—while he
was in his twenties—infected so many Europeans whilst the ideals and the
resentments of The French Revolution matured and, ultimately, plummeted into La
Terreur. The Revolution’s bloody turn, which appalled Wordsworth, affected him
for the rest of his life. Yet, like many, he remained a lover of the Rousseauan ideals
which animated the early revolution. Thus, in what is perhaps his most ambitious
work, The Prelude, his poetic autobiography, he could say of the Revolutionary
era, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ and also could denounce the violence
and ‘atheism’ of Robespierre and the other architects of the terror. One begins to
get a sense, just from the music and the longing of this single line of iambic
pentameter, of how sorrow and joy beautifully intermingle in Wordsworth; they do
so in a truly personal voice which ought to be the sincere envy of all us poets who
cannot match that sincerity. The results often move his readers to tears.

Virgil sang “of arms and of the man”. Wordsworth sings of walks and of the man
—and the man is himself. His chief works are—like Proust’s À la recherche du
temps perdu, or even Dante’s Commedia—explorations of the entire world by way
of the self. Indeed, for these poets, the distinction between world and self is hardly
relevant, since the former is to be experienced only by way of the latter, and the
latter experiences nothing other than the former. In Wordsworth’s poetry, a
personal voice—indeed a whole personality—comes out with incredible vividness
and force. In this he is virtually the opposite of (say) Shakespeare, who banishes
his own personal voice about as much as is possible in the hugely personal practice
of literary creation.

Those of us who love Wordsworth’s poetry, then (and he does have his detractors,
though these people I do not understand), love the man himself. So great and
impressive is his soul, one almost feels he lives today with us; he is imprinted upon
his surroundings; in recording them, he (in a sense) makes them for us. And he is
not so much a distant, admired figure as he is a dear friend to those who love to
read him and hear the music of his lines.

Wordsworth is the best kind of moralist: although obsessed with goodness, and
though striving to be good, he had his faults. As well as the intellectual foolery of
his early revolutionary years, he also fathered an illegitimate child whilst living in
France. Thus Wordsworth might say with St. Paul, ‘I am the chief of sinners!’ But
this story gives a little bit more flesh and blood to the man. Although practicality
kept him from this early lover and daughter, he helped to support them financially
for the rest of their lives