‘Master[s] of the prospect’?

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-128
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Simple Equation ◽  
Mountain Climbing ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter explores how William Wordsworth and John Keats invested their climbing exploits and the mountain-top position with symbolic significance. Placing the poets’ work within the context of the period’s wider mountaineering literature, it examines how the new ways of seeing gained through mountain-climbing became linked to new ways of being. It investigates how elevation was seen to offer self-transformation and place the climber in a position of power, an idea both Wordsworth and Keats called upon in their definitions of poetic identity. The omniscient position of the summit view, with what Wordsworth termed its ‘visual sovereignty’, raised significant questions about the politics of ascent. The chapter argues that even as both poets made mountain ascent crucial to their poetic identities and missions, they came to adopt a more nuanced response to climbing that challenged the simple equation of the summit with a position of unqualified authority.

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.

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.

Wordsworth, Keats and Cognitive Spaces of Empathy in Endymion

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Renee Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
John Keats ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Anatomical Basis ◽  
Romantic Era

Eighteenth-century medicine provided an anatomical basis for the belief that our skin is not a barrier against but a channel to the feelings of others. Mutual adoption of the term ‘sympathy’ in medicine and moral philosophy exceeds metaphor to speak to the way Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture understood the body’s openness to external influence. While Romantic writers conceived of reading as an embodied social interaction between writer and reader, contrasting sentiments surfaced between those who celebrated the possibility for radical interconnectedness and those who feared the vulnerability of a penetrable self. William Wordsworth and John Keats experimented with poetic form to find how best to manage a reader’s engagement with the text and thereby shape their sympathetic faculties. Examining acts of reading in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Keats’s Endymion, I apply Giovanna Colombetti’s work on enacted spaces of empathy to show how Keats’s theory of feeling challenges Wordsworth’s and goes beyond Enlightenment models available to them to envision a more revolutionary model of social cognition. For Keats, poetry enacts a co-emergence of aesthetic experience where cognition and composition seem to occur between acts of writing and reading at the site of text.

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.

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.

Reading the Red Bull Sublime

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE C. McCARTHY
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Energy Drink ◽  
Mountain Climbing ◽  
High Point ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Red Bull

The aesthetic of the sublime has long been associated with the language of elevation and height. Activities such as mountain climbing offer a physical correlative to this discourse. In these cases, the sublime is associated with a high point or summit, and the process of descent is minimized or erased. By contrast, what I call the Red Bull sublime—named for the energy drink company that claims to “give you wings”—uses technological innovation to draw attention to the aesthetic pleasures of falling. Taking Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump as its paradigmatic example, this essay elaborates the central features of the Red Bull sublime, connecting it with a Romantic tradition, represented here by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, of peering over the edge of the abyss.

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?

Mountaineering and British Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognized, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity’s evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture, and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with twenty-five images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering’s power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms ‘visual sovereignty’), the relationships between different types of ‘mountaineers’, and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.

Slow Time

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sachs
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Slow Time ◽  
Apparent Lack ◽  
Rates Of Change ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Fine Detail

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

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