The Second Romantics and Romantic Prose

Unit twelve ended on three marks of the first Romantics: Blake's contraries, Wordsworth's recollection and Coleridge's supernatural. This unit follows the second generation, who pressed those terms further and died before Wordsworth did. Its governing idea is that the period made imagination, feeling and the individual the centre of literature, and that it also held Austen's ironic realism. This first part moves in three steps: Byron, the legend and the two voices; then Shelley, the radical idealist, and Keats, from his letters to the great odes; and then the prose, Hemans, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Austen's novels and irony, and Scott's historical novel.

We begin with Byron, the celebrity lord whose readers mistook him for his heroes.

First, the three younger poets.

ENL 1201 The Second Generation

The second generation of Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley and Keats, were younger than Wordsworth and Coleridge, more radical or more sensuous, and all died young and abroad in the eighteen twenties. Their deaths, the anchor notes, mark the end of the Romantic period. Byron, Shelley, Keats. All three died before Wordsworth.

Next, Byron himself.

ENL 1202 Lord Byron: Life and Legend

George Gordon, Lord Byron, an aristocrat with a clubbed foot, sat with the liberals in the House of Lords. Lady Caroline Lamb called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." After his separation he left England in eighteen sixteen, never to return, and died in Greece supporting its independence. Lord, celebrity, exile, Greece. Readers confused Byron with his heroes.

Byron gave a type its name.

ENL 1203 The Byronic Hero

The Byronic hero is proud, moody, cynical and solitary, a defiant exile who carries a secret guilt. Macaulay described him as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart." The anchor compares him to Milton's Satan. Proud, moody, guilty, alone. The type descends partly from Milton's Satan.

The type began with a wanderer.

ENL 1204 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published between eighteen twelve and eighteen eighteen in Spenserian stanzas, follows a world-weary young man travelling through Europe. Its first two cantos made Byron a celebrity overnight; he wrote, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." A weary wanderer; overnight fame. Harold is the first Byronic hero.

Byron's other voice is comic.

ENL 1205 Don Juan and Ottava Rima

Don Juan, written from eighteen nineteen until Byron's death and left unfinished, is a satirical epic in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza rhyming ABABABCC. Byron's Juan is not a seducer but a young man easily seduced, and the narrator's digressions mock the society and public figures of his day. Ottava rima; a comic, digressive narrator. The final couplet often punctures the stanza.

Byron also wrote quiet lyrics.

ENL 1206 "She Walks in Beauty"

"She Walks in Beauty," written in eighteen fourteen in iambic tetrameter and published the next year in Hebrew Melodies, is one of Byron's most popular lyrics. It is believed to have been written the morning after a London party, where he was struck by the beauty of his cousin's wife. A lyric of a woman's beauty. Byron also wrote quiet lyrics.

Now Shelley, the radical idealist, and Keats, the poet who tested beauty against mortality.

First, Shelley's radical life.

ENL 1207 Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley, an aristocrat expelled from Oxford over The Necessity of Atheism, was a radical, a Platonist and the anchor's "most intellectual" Romantic. He eloped with Mary Godwin, wrote most of his major work in Italy, and drowned sailing in eighteen twenty-two. Atheist, radical, idealist. Shelley's politics run through his lyrics.

A sonnet about a broken statue.

ENL 1208 "Ozymandias"

"Ozymandias," a sonnet published in eighteen eighteen, came from a friendly contest with Horace Smith on Ramesses the Second, whose Greek name was Ozymandias. A traveller "from an antique land" describes a ruined statue whose boastful inscription now stands over empty sand. A broken statue; a boast in the desert. The irony is time's against tyranny.

An ode to a destroying wind.

ENL 1209 "Ode to the West Wind"

"Ode to the West Wind," of eighteen nineteen, is in five sections of terza rima, each ending in a couplet. The wind is "Destroyer and preserver"; the speaker pleads, "Be thou me, impetuous one," to scatter his words, and ends, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" The wind destroys and renews. The speaker wants to be the wind's instrument.

A bird of pure joy.

ENL 1210 "To a Skylark"

"To a Skylark," completed in eighteen twenty after an evening walk near Livorno, hails the bird as a spirit, "Bird thou never wert," whose unpremeditated song exceeds human art. Humans cannot match its joy: "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." A bird as pure joy. The lark is ideal; human song is mixed.

Shelley rewrote a Greek myth.

ENL 1211 Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Unbound, published in eighteen twenty, is a four-act lyrical drama inspired by Aeschylus. Unlike Aeschylus, Shelley allows no reconciliation: the tyrant Jupiter falls from power and Prometheus is freed, an allegory of humanity's liberation. Tyranny falls; Prometheus is freed. Shelley rejects the reconciliation in Aeschylus.

Shelley mourned Keats.

ENL 1212 Adonais

Adonais, of eighteen twenty-one, is Shelley's pastoral elegy for John Keats, in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, in the tradition of Milton's "Lycidas." It ends with the poet's spirit driven "far from the shore," lines the anchor reads as foreshadowing Shelley's own drowning. A pastoral elegy for Keats. Adonais follows "Lycidas."

Shelley defended poetry.

ENL 1213 A Defence of Poetry

Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry in eighteen twenty-one, answering Thomas Love Peacock's essay "The Four Ages of Poetry"; it was published only in eighteen forty. Poets are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Poets as legislators. It answers Peacock, and through him Plato.

Now Keats, and the myth around him.

ENL 1214 John Keats: Life and Letters

John Keats, son of a livery-stable keeper, trained as a surgeon before giving his life to poetry. Harsh reviews and his death at twenty-five led some to believe he died of a broken heart; he died of tuberculosis in Rome. His letters show remarkable conceptual thinking. Surgeon's apprentice, poet, letters. The broken-heart story is a myth.

Keats named a quality in a letter.

ENL 1215 Negative Capability

In a letter of December eighteen seventeen to his brothers, Keats described Negative Capability, which Shakespeare possessed: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." He set it against Coleridge's need for certainty. Living in uncertainty without grasping. It is from a private letter.

A sonnet of discovery.

ENL 1216 "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

Keats's Petrarchan sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," of eighteen sixteen, records his wonder at reading Chapman's Elizabethan translation of Homer. The octave describes his earlier reading; the sestet compares discovery to an astronomer finding a planet or an explorer sighting the Pacific. Octave, then the shock of discovery. Keats names Cortez where Balboa saw the Pacific.

A sonnet of fear.

ENL 1217 "When I Have Fears"

"When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be," written in January eighteen eighteen, is a Shakespearean sonnet in which the young poet fears dying before he has written his poems or known love. In the couplet, love and fame sink to nothingness. Fear of death before achievement. The couplet dissolves the ambitions.

Keats revived the ballad.

ENL 1218 "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

"La Belle Dame sans Merci," of eighteen nineteen, is a ballad in which a knight, "Alone and palely loitering" where "the sedge is wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing," tells how a fairy lady enchanted and abandoned him. The title means the beautiful lady without mercy. A wasted knight, a fairy lady. Keats revives the ballad's mystery.

A romance of cold and warmth.

ENL 1219 The Eve of St. Agnes

The Eve of St. Agnes, written in eighteen nineteen in forty-two Spenserian stanzas and set in the Middle Ages, tells how Porphyro steals into a hostile castle on St. Agnes' Eve and elopes with Madeline into the storm. Its imagery is richly sensuous. A cold castle, a warm chamber, an escape. The sensuous detail is the poem's method.

One year produced six odes.

ENL 1220 The Great Odes of 1819

In eighteen nineteen Keats wrote his great odes: "Ode to Psyche," probably first, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence," and, last, "To Autumn." Each meditates on beauty, transience and the limits of imagination. Six odes in one year. "To Autumn" is the last of the odes.

The first ode longs to escape.

ENL 1221 "Ode to a Nightingale"

"Ode to a Nightingale" opens, "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense." The speaker longs to fade into the bird's world, admits "I have been half in love with easeful Death," then the word "Forlorn" tolls him back, ending, "Do I wake or sleep?" Escape toward the song, then return. The ode ends in uncertainty.

The second freezes time.

ENL 1222 "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

"Ode on a Grecian Urn," of May eighteen nineteen, addresses an urn as a "still unravish'd bride of quietness." Its painted figures are frozen forever before fulfilment: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter." Art is permanent but cold, life warm but passing. Frozen lovers, unheard music. Permanence costs life.

The urn speaks a famous line.

ENL 1223 "Beauty Is Truth, Truth Beauty"

The ode ends with the urn's message, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Twentieth-century critics debated these lines; one called them "a serious blemish on a beautiful poem." Who speaks the final clause is also disputed. The urn's message, and the debate. Treat the ending as contested.

The last ode accepts the season.

ENL 1224 "To Autumn"

"To Autumn," composed on the nineteenth of September eighteen nineteen after a walk near Winchester, opens, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." Its three eleven-line stanzas move from ripening to harvest to the last days of autumn, accepting the season without reaching for escape. Ripeness, harvest, the year's end. The ode accepts transience calmly.

Now the prose of the period: a popular poet, Mary Shelley's created being, Austen's irony, and Scott's history.

First, the most popular poet of her day.

ENL 1225 Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans, the leading woman poet of her day, was second only to Byron in sales. Her lines "The boy stood on the burning deck," from "Casabianca," and "The stately homes of England" became classics. The anchor reads her heroines as a critique of women's subjection. Popular, patriotic, domestic. Her popularity hid a critique.

A ghost-story contest produced a novel.

ENL 1226 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, began Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in a ghost-story contest proposed by Byron in Switzerland. Published anonymously in eighteen eighteen, revised in eighteen thirty-one, it tells of a student who brings a creature to life. A ghost-story contest; a created being. Frankenstein is the maker, not the creature.

The novel nests its narrators.

ENL 1227 Frankenstein: Frame and Creature

Frankenstein is a frame narrative: the explorer Robert Walton writes letters to his sister, inside which Victor tells his story, inside which the creature tells his own. The creature pleads, "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel," and "misery made me a fiend." Letters, a confession, the creature's voice. The creature's eloquence complicates "monster."

Austen wrote six novels.

ENL 1228 Jane Austen

Jane Austen wrote six novels of the English landed gentry, known for realism, wit and irony. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma were published anonymously from eighteen eleven; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared after her death in eighteen seventeen. Six novels, irony, the gentry. Austen published anonymously.

Her most famous novel begins with irony.

ENL 1229 Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, of eighteen thirteen, a novel of manners, opens, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Elizabeth Bennet learns the cost of hasty judgment as she misreads the proud Mr Darcy. Hasty judgment, then recognition. The opening sentence is ironic.

Two more heroines err and recover.

ENL 1230 Emma and Persuasion

Emma, of eighteen fifteen, presents "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich," a heroine who overestimates her matchmaking and misreads those around her. Persuasion, published after Austen's death, follows Anne Elliot, persuaded eight years earlier to break her engagement to Captain Wentworth, who meets him again. A meddling heroine; a second chance. Emma's errors drive the plot.

Austen's method has a name.

ENL 1231 Austen's Irony and Free Indirect Style

Austen's narrator often uses free indirect discourse, presenting a character's thoughts in the narrator's third-person voice, so that the two voices merge. The reader hears a heroine's opinions and the narrator's irony at once, and must judge where the character is mistaken. Character's thought, narrator's voice. Ask whose judgment a sentence carries.

Austen also mocked the Gothic.

ENL 1232 Northanger Abbey and the Gothic

Northanger Abbey, completed in seventeen ninety-nine and published after Austen's death, is a coming-of-age novel and a satire of Gothic novels. Its naive heroine, Catherine Morland, distorts her world through the Gothic fiction she loves and slowly learns to see it as it is. A Gothic reader misreads real life. Austen parodies the Gothic.

Scott made history a setting.

ENL 1233 Scott and the Historical Novel

Scott, already famous as a poet, published Waverley anonymously in eighteen fourteen: a young Englishman, before the Jacobite rising of seventeen forty-five, is torn between the Crown and the Jacobite cause. The critic Lukács argued that Scott first treated history as a distinct social world. History as a lived setting. The Lukács claim is his own.

This first part followed the second generation and the novel. We described Byron, the Byronic hero and the comic voice that punctures its own stanza. We read Shelley's broken statue, his West Wind and skylark, and his poets as legislators. We explained Negative Capability and followed Keats from Chapman's Homer to the odes, ending in the calm of To Autumn. We described Hemans, and Frankenstein, whose maker is not the creature. And we read Austen's irony and free indirect style, and placed Scott's history as a lived setting. Part two turns to the essayists and the methods.