The Second Romantics and Romantic Prose

Part one ended on Scott, who made history a lived setting. This second part opens on the prose writers who made the essay personal, and then gathers the whole period into methods. The unit's governing idea pays off at the capstone: Romanticism made imagination and the individual the centre of literature, yet the period also includes Austen's ironic realism. We move in three steps: the essayists, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Lamb, with the women poets, Hellenism, the fragment and Romantic irony; then four procedures, for a Keats ode, a Shelley lyric, Byron's satire and Austen's narrator, and a fifth for naming a poet from a few lines; and then the period's errors, deaths and endings, a matching procedure and the capstone.

We begin with the essay made personal, the women who sold widely, and three ideas that recur across the period.

First, the essayist of the age.

ENL 1234 Hazlitt's Familiar Essay

William Hazlitt, essayist, drama critic and painter, is placed among the greatest English essayists. His Spirit of the Age, of eighteen twenty-five, sketched his contemporaries, and in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" he recalled hearing Coleridge speak. Portraits of the age. Hazlitt's essays are personal and critical.

Next, a confession.

ENL 1235 De Quincey's Confessions

Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater appeared anonymously in two parts in the London Magazine in eighteen twenty-one. It recounts the pleasures of opium and then its pains: insomnia, nightmares, frightening visions and physical suffering. The pleasures, then the pains. The pains section is the longer one.

Lamb wrote as Elia.

ENL 1236 Lamb's Essays of Elia

Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia appeared in the London Magazine from eighteen twenty and in book form in eighteen twenty-three. Written under the persona "Elia," in a personal, conversational tone, they established him as "the most delightful of English essayists." A persona; a conversational voice. Elia is a persona, not Lamb plain.

Women poets sold widely.

ENL 1237 Women Poets of the Romantic Era

Women poets were central to the era's market: Charlotte Smith revived the sonnet, Barbauld wrote against slavery and war, Hemans outsold almost everyone, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, writing as "L.E.L.," developed the metrical romance toward the Victorian dramatic monologue. Smith, Barbauld, Hemans, L.E.L. These poets sold widely in their day.

Greece meant two things.

ENL 1238 Romantic Hellenism

The second generation turned repeatedly to Greece. Keats celebrated Chapman's Homer and a Grecian urn; Shelley rewrote Aeschylus in Prometheus Unbound; and Byron, a philhellene, died supporting Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, a cause Shelley also championed. Homer, the urn, Prometheus, Missolonghi. Greece meant art and liberty.

Some poems stop.

ENL 1239 The Romantic Fragment

Many Romantic works are fragments, left or presented as unfinished: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," subtitled a fragment, and Christabel; Byron's Don Juan, broken off at his death; Shelley's Defence of Poetry, never completed. The fragment suits a poetry of reaching beyond what can be finished. Poems that stop. Some fragments are deliberate.

Some works know their limits.

ENL 1240 Romantic Irony

Romantic irony, a term credited to Friedrich Schlegel and the early German Romantics, names a self-conscious stance in which the work recognizes its own limits, striving toward truth and meaning without ever fully grasping them. It differs from ordinary verbal irony. A work aware of its own limits. This definition rests on one reference source.

Now five procedures that turn this period into answers.

Here is the method for a Keats ode.

ENL 1241 Reading a Keats Ode

Keats's odes share a movement. Find the object addressed: a nightingale, an urn, a season. Find the desire, usually to escape time or mortality by joining the object. Find the turn, where the desire fails: "Forlorn" tolls him back, and the urn's lovers never kiss. Find what he settles for, acceptance of transience in "To Autumn," or an open question, "Do I wake or sleep?" Notice the sensuous detail that carries the argument. Then state the poem's attitude to beauty and mortality. Do not stop at the escape; the meaning lies in the return.

Here is the method for a Shelley lyric.

ENL 1242 Reading a Shelley Lyric

Shelley's lyrics move fast and aim high. Find the natural force invoked, wind, skylark, cloud, a power beyond the human that destroys and renews or sings an unmixed joy. Find the speaker's relation to it; often he asks to become its instrument, "Make me thy lyre." Look for the political hope beneath the imagery: the scattered words become "The trumpet of a prophecy," and the Defence makes poets unacknowledged legislators. Notice the forms, terza rima in the West Wind, the sonnet in "Ozymandias." Do not read the West Wind as weather only.

Here is the method for Byron's comic voice.

ENL 1243 Byron's Satiric Voice

Byron writes in two voices. The Byronic voice of Childe Harold and Manfred broods; the satiric voice of Don Juan mocks. To recognize the satiric voice, notice the narrator's asides, his digressions and addresses to the reader. Watch the ottava rima's final couplet, where he deflates the stanza with a joke. Notice the targets: hypocrisy, cant, pretension and public figures. Notice the quick shifts from feeling to irony. A passage that builds emotion and laughs at it in a couplet points to Don Juan, whose narrator mocks the feelings his heroes indulge.

Here is the method for an Austen passage.

ENL 1244 Austen's Narrator at Work

An Austen passage asks you to separate voices. Find whose perspective the sentence follows, often the heroine's in free indirect discourse. Look for irony: "It is a truth universally acknowledged" implies that the families want the rich man, not that he wants a wife. Notice where the heroine's judgment is mistaken, as with Emma's matchmaking. Find the social facts beneath: money, rank, marriage, inheritance. Name the narrator's attitude, amused, critical or sympathetic. Then decide whether the passage endorses or ironizes the view it presents, since narrator and heroine are not one voice.

Here is the method for naming a poet from lines.

ENL 1245 Identifying Romantic Poets From Their Lines

Use form and theme together. Contraries and a child's voice suggest Blake; blank-verse memory of nature, Wordsworth; the supernatural or a conversation by the fire, Coleridge; ottava rima with a comic couplet or a brooding exile, Byron; terza rima, wind, skylark and prophecy, Shelley; sensuous detail and an ode on beauty and death, Keats; Scots dialect, Burns. Then check the ode's object, because all three generations wrote odes: an urn is Keats, a wind Shelley, childhood Wordsworth.

Last, the errors to avoid, how the period ended, and the capstone that weighs it whole.

Four errors need correcting.

ENL 1246 Common Errors About the Second Generation

Four errors recur. Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creature. Keats died of tuberculosis, not of a broken heart. Don Juan is comic satire, not Byronic gloom. And Shelley's lyrics are political as well as natural, as "England in 1819" shows. Four corrections. The creature has no name in the novel.

The second generation died young.

ENL 1247 The Romantics and Death

The second generation died young: Keats of tuberculosis in Rome at twenty-five, Shelley drowned off Italy at twenty-nine, Byron of fever in Greece at thirty-six. Death runs through their poems, from Keats being "half in love with easeful Death" to Shelley's Adonais. Three early deaths. Do not read every poem as biography.

They lived and died abroad.

ENL 1248 Keats, Shelley and Byron Abroad

All three wrote or died abroad. Byron left England in eighteen sixteen for Switzerland, Italy and Greece; the Shelleys wrote most of their major works in Italy; Keats went to Rome to die. Exile, travel and the European scene shape their poetry. Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Rome. Exile is a theme as well as a fact.

The period closed in the twenties.

ENL 1249 The End of the Romantic Period

The anchor dates the end of Romanticism to the mid-eighteen twenties, with the deaths of Shelley in eighteen twenty-two and Byron in eighteen twenty-four. Wordsworth lived until eighteen fifty, and Romantic ideas carried into the Victorian age, where women poets such as L.E.L. shaped the dramatic monologue. Deaths in the twenties; survivors after. Romantic influence outlasted the period.

Exam passages may come from letters.

ENL 1250 Romantic Prose Beyond the Novel

Romantic prose includes far more than fiction: Wordsworth's Preface, Coleridge's Biographia, Shelley's Defence, Keats's letters, Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, and the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. Criticism, letters, journals and confession all carried Romantic ideas. Prefaces, letters, journals, essays. Exam passages may come from letters.

Here is the method for matching works.

ENL 1251 Matching Second-Generation Works

Sort by author and form. Byron: Childe Harold in Spenserian stanzas, Don Juan in ottava rima, Manfred, "She Walks in Beauty." Shelley: "Ozymandias," the West Wind, the Skylark, "England in 1819," Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, the Defence. Keats: Chapman's Homer, "When I Have Fears," La Belle Dame, The Eve of St. Agnes, the odes, Negative Capability. Hemans: "Casabianca." Prose: Frankenstein, Austen's novels, Scott's Waverley, De Quincey's Confessions, Lamb's Elia, Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age. Adonais is Shelley's elegy for Keats, not a poem by Keats.

The capstone weighs the whole period.

ENL 1252 Romanticism Weighed

The Romantic period made imagination, feeling and the individual the centre of literature. The first generation set the terms: Blake's contraries, Wordsworth's recollection, Coleridge's supernatural and his theory of imagination. The second pressed them further. Byron made a public self out of poetry, the brooding hero and the mocking narrator of Don Juan. Shelley called on the West Wind, ruined a tyrant's statue, freed Prometheus, mourned Keats and called poets unacknowledged legislators. Keats, dead at twenty-five, defined Negative Capability and tested beauty against mortality, from the nightingale to the urn whose message critics still dispute, to the calm of To Autumn. Hemans outsold almost everyone, and Frankenstein gave the creature a voice. Austen's irony judged the gentry from inside, Scott invented the historical novel, and the essayists made prose personal. The period closed in the mid-eighteen twenties. It includes Austen's ironic realism as well as the poets' vision, so do not assume every work is a lyric of feeling.

This second part turned the period into method. We identified Hazlitt, De Quincey's pleasures and pains, Lamb's Elia, and the women poets who sold widely. We explained Hellenism, the fragment and Romantic irony. We read a Keats ode for its return, a Shelley lyric for its prophecy, Byron's deflating couplet, and Austen's two voices. We named poets by form and theme, and corrected the period's common errors. And we matched the works, closing on the capstone: imagination at the centre, with Austen's irony beside it. Unit fourteen, Victorian Poetry, opens the next age.