Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The Public ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

scholarly journals Discursive Constructions of the Self in British Romanticism

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Christoph Bode
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Discursive Constructions

Abstract This essay examines how subjective identities are discursively constructed in William Blake and P.B. Shelley, making brief references to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith. It is argued that, although the poets come up with strikingly divergent solutions to the challenge of self-modelling, they face the same fundamental problems of self-grounding, working as they do within the paradox-prone paradigm of a Romantic self that tries to constitute itself out of itself. Comparing these Romantic poets with twentieth-century poetic models of selfhood and identity in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, this essay provides a tentative answer to the question of whether we continue to operate within the Romantic framework of discursive self-construction or whether in fact we have moved beyond this mode of self-construction.

Nature and the Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

scholarly journals Transcending Self-Consciousness: Imagination, Unity and Self-Dissolution in the English Romantic and Sufis Epistemology

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 08-18
Author(s):  
Maryam Soltan Beyad ◽  
Mahsa Vafa
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Life Journey

English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this reconciliatory state cannot be achieved through rational investigation but via the power of imagination. In this regard, there is striking resemblance between the mystical and philosophical thought of Sufism and the idealistic thought of the English Romantic poets as they both strive for a sense of unification with the Divine or the Ultimate reality, and they both rely on imagination and intuitive perception to apprehend reality. Applying an analytical-comparative approach with specific reference to Northrop Frye’s anagogic theory (1957) which emphasizes literary commonalities regardless of direct influence or cultural or theological distinctions, this study endeavors to depict that certain Romantic poets’ longing for the reconciliation of subject and object dualism via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, echoes the mystic’s pursuit of transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divinely infinite. Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution (fana) in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, particularly the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana.

Poetry on the Porch

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Sand Dunes ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Garden City ◽  
The Family

In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.

Romantic Prayer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

The Connected Condition

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yohei Igarashi
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Medium ◽  
Great Attraction

How can Romantic poetry, motivated by the poet’s intense yearning to impart his thoughts and feelings, be so often difficult and the cause of readerly misunderstanding? How did it come to be that a poet can compose a verbal artwork, carefully and lovingly put together, and send it out into the world at the same time that he is adopting a stance against communication? This book addresses these questions by showing that the period’s writers were responding to the beginnings of our networked world of rampant mediated communication. The Connected Condition reveals that major Romantic poets shared a great attraction and skepticism toward the dream of perfectible, efficient connectivity that has driven the modern culture of communication. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats all experimented with their artistic medium of poetry to pursue such ideals of speedy, transparent communication at the same time that they tried out contrarian literary strategies: writing excessively ornate verse, prolonging literary reading with tedious writing, being obscure, and questioning the allure of quickly delivered information. This book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living in—and living with—the connected condition, as well as the fortunes of literature in it.

Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-383
Author(s):  
David Kerler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Archival Practices

AbstractThe article explores the interrelation of archives, melancholia, and their (de)constructive features in British Romantic poetry. It will argue that the proliferation of archives and archival practices from the late eighteenth century on had a strong influence on the literary‑cultural output of the British Romantics. This shall be scrutinised by drawing on an extended reading of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever” (1995) and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, focusing on two basal, closely related aspects: (1) the subject’s feverish desire to archive, and (2) the archive’s (self‑)destructive tendencies. A close reading of paradigmatic writers and their poems (William Blake, Lord Byron, and John Keats) shall illustrate that the notion of “archive fever” turns out to be especially determinant for Romantic subjectivity, aesthetics, and its sujets.

Intertextual Dialogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Lau
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
John Clare ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
First Time ◽  
Intertextual Dialogue

Intertextual dialogue in the Romantic period is shaped by conflicting imperatives. Romantic writers lived in an age when the pressure to be original and natural coincided for the first time to a significant degree with the worship and canonization of previous British authors, especially such ‘geniuses’ as Shakespeare and Milton. Major figures from every genre of the period can be seen to negotiate the competing demands to acquire legitimacy by invoking other, recognized writers, and to express their own unique vision and style—both to fit into existing literary tradition and to stand out as unique. This chapter explores the complications of intertextual dialogue in five representative authors across a variety of genres: the essayist and critic William Hazlitt, the poet and writer of marginalia Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novelist Jane Austen, and poets John Clare and John Keats.

Romanticism: Characteristics, Themes and Poets

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 66-74
Author(s):  
Mr Amit
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Ludwig Tieck ◽  
Creative Mind ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Lyrical Ballads

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence. The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe. Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase. The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded  appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

scholarly journals "Poets had moved in this country once": John Mulgan and Romantic Poetry

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Main Character ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

In Part Two of Man Alone John Mulgan describes a farm in the fen country of Northamptonshire: “Poets had moved in this country once, Cowper and John Clare, but few poets moved there now.” The significance of the reference to these two poets, both of whom had been institutionalized for insanity and both of whom found solace in working the land, cannot be underestimated for Mulgan’s emotional characterization of the main character, Johnson. This essay focuses on some of Mulgan’s references to English Romantic poetry (William Cowper, John Clare, and Lord Byron in particular) and how these references evoke his melancholy frame of mind.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document