Poetry on the Porch

Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin

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.

Author(s):  
James Whitehead

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.


Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes

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?


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy

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.


Author(s):  
Christoph Bode

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.


Author(s):  
Miguel Dias

John Keats (1795-1821) is widely regarded as a main figure in the scope of English Romantic Literature. Although the poet lived a short life, the quality of his work has earned him a place in the literary cannon, alongside Lord Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), within the second generation of English romantic poets. The reception of Keats in Portugal, however, took place long after the poet achieved literary recognition in England. There were virtually no references to the poet, either in published volumes or in the Portuguese press of the 19th century, and the first translation of one of his poems was only published in 1915. The poet’s famous odes, generally considered his most influential works, were only translated in 1960. This was followed by an increase in the number of published translations, as well as essays on Keats and his work. The reception of John Keats in Portugal was evidently dissimilar to the ones of Lord Byron and Walter Scott (1771-1832), two Anglo-Saxon romantics tremendously appreciated in the country since the early 19th century. The aim of this case study is, to the extent that is possible, to point out and to clarify the reasons that led to the late reception of this English romantic in Portugal. It is therefore important to draw a comparison between the receptions of Keats, Byron and Scott in the country, as well as to discuss the importance of the French cultural system in the mediation of English authors and works to Portugal during that period.


Author(s):  
Michael Rossington

This chapter addresses the theory and practice of translation in works by Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Felicia Hemans, Sir William Jones, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite Shelley’s view of its impossibility, translation is shown in the work of Jones, Byron, and Shelley to be one of the most vital and sophisticated literary activities of the Romantic era, at once a means to enlightenment about poetic traditions outside Britain and an arena for bold technical experimentation. For Shelley, translation constitutes a creative habitus through which he escapes his native language and then translates back into English from an assumed ‘foreign’ persona. Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, demonstrates how originality is prompted through engagement with the translations of others. The chapter also situates theories about translation in Britain within the context of wider debates on the Continent.


Author(s):  
Arden Hegele

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.


Author(s):  
William H. Galperin

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.”


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rois Ainul Umah ◽  
Tian Fitriara Huda ◽  
(Prosiding Seminar Nasional FKIP Univeristas PGRI Banyuwangi

Banyuwangi is an area rich in various cultures and customs, this is because Banyuwangi district is inhabited by various ethnic groups. The majority of the sub-districts of Banyuwangi are osing tribe who live in the village of fern and urban village of rejo. Joglo building as one of the traditional Javanese buildings in it contained philosophy that suits the life of the people. The arrangement of the room in Joglo is generally divided into three parts, namely the meeting room called pendopo, the living room or the space used to hold the show called pringgitan, and the back room called dalem or omah jero as the family room. For the people of Banyuwangi especially those who still preserve the joglo house just like the osing tribe have begun to experience the shifting of its role and function where in this case joglo house serve as additional need for home decoration, private residence of the citizen, until used as permanent building of cafe and restaurant. From the description above, the researcher felt that the community did not understand the function of the role and shape of the architecture of the Javanese house which has become the culture of the inheritance slowly changed by causing a shift to the cultural values contained within it. The shift in value will sooner or later bring changes to traditional architectural forms, structures and functions.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Douglass

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.


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