Creative Shipwrecks: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s Don Juan

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Michelle Baker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
As If

Abstract Contemporary discussions of English Romantic philosophers and their theories often include such names as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Lamb, but rarely do they treat of George Gordon, Lord Byron. While Byron’s reputation was not built upon complex philosophical explications of literary theory, the passion of his life did not preclude that of his mind. He has left us with no overtly philosophical work, and yet, many of the digressions in Don Juan are directed at the poets and philosophers of his time and some others seem to point us to a coherent system of thought about literature and how it works. Specifically, Juan’s voyage at sea contains several passages which parody Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Some of these similarities have been explored, but are frequently treated as if Byron were simply creating a pastiche of contemporary literature. However, Coleridge had used the Rime to elucidate a portion of his understanding of how literature works. It seems possible that Byron is purposely answering Coleridge in the second canto of Don Juan. Thus, we may be able to use Byron’s natural imagery and poetic technique to piece together a philosophical statement from that most unphilosophical of Romantics, Lord Byron.

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.

scholarly journals The Napoleon mystique and British poets

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (26) ◽  
pp. 359-377
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Mc Danel de García
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
At Home

This reflection on the influence of Napoleon and the consequences of the wars on the major British poets of the Romantic era is meant to illustrate how the reactions of both nobility and commoners are recorded in literature and media. The dual perception of Napoleon as both hero and tyrant and the atrocious suffering of those at home and bloody battles are manifest in the works of the major poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and especially George Gordon, Lord Byron. Even today, Napoleon transcends precise definition and he has inspired some of the greatest poets in British literature

Literature and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Romantic Era

This chapter proposes that our very notions of ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’ are, to a great extent, forged in the Romantic era. The chapter surveys the eighteenth-century background to this issue in the sceptical empiricism of David Hume and the German transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, F. W. von Schelling, and J. G. Fichte. In examining the writings of William Blake, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt, it also charts the ways in which the revolutionary debates of the 1790s politicized the disciplines of philosophy and ‘theory’, leading to an anti-philosophical rhetoric in the work of writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Lamb, and Lord Byron. Finally, the chapter scrutinizes the boundaries between Romantic philosophy and the Scottish common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, before examining the philosophical significance of the idea of ‘Literature’ in the work of Romantic writers, particularly Percy Shelley and John Keats.

scholarly journals How Sublime (and Prolific) was Byron?

2006 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Charles E. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Grand Nombre ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
John Wilson

Résumé Cet article propose un survol des livres, des articles et des critiques (et lettres) écrits sur Lord Byron et son oeuvre de son vivant et peu de temps après sa mort, soit de 1807 à 1830 environ, de sorte à déterminer à quel point les contemporains de Byron le trouvaient « sublime ». Walter Scott, en faisant le compte rendu de Childe Harold 4, affirmait avec enthousiasme qu’il s’agissait de « la poésie la plus sublime », mais d’autres, comme William Hazlitt, étaient d’avis que « l’auteur de Childe Harold et de Don Juan est… un poseur, encore qu’il soit provoquant et sublime ». En parlant de Don Juan, John Wilson Croker s’exclamait quant à lui : « Quelle sublimité! quelle légèreté! quelle audace! quelle tendresse! quelle majesté! quelle insignifiance! quelle variété! quel ennui!1 ». Ma discussion sur un grand nombre de ces jugements sur l’oeuvre de Byron par ses contemporains nous permettra de determiner si le terme « sublime » définit adéquatement l’esprit de la poésie de Byron, surtout ce « sublime » tel qu’il a été compris par Longin, Burke et d’autres.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

scholarly journals Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Douglass
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Madame De Stael ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Hannah Cowley

Abstract Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.

Contexts (II)

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-132
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

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