English Romanticism and Victorian Poetry:

Synopses and Exercises in Inferring Meaning

Conf. dr. Ruxanda Bontila

2012

Contents
I.
II.

Romanticisms: Preliminaries
English Romantics: William Wordsworth
(i)
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
(ii)
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
III.
English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(i)
Kubla Khan
(ii)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
IV.
English Romantics: George Gordon Byron
(i)
Don Juan
V.
English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley
(i)
Mutability
(ii)
Ode to the West Wind
(iii) Ozymandias
VI.
English Romantics: John Keats
(i)
Ode to Psyche
(ii)
Ode to a Nightingale
VII. English Essayists on their Epoch
VIII. Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson
(i)
In Memoriam, Section 54
(ii)
The Lotos-Eaters
(iii) The Lady of Shalott
IX.
Victorian Poets: Robert Browning
(i)
My Last Duchess
(ii)
Fra Lippo Lippi
(iii) Andrea Del Sartro
X.
Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins
(i)
The Starlight Night
(ii)
The Windhover
Bibliography

I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries
1.
2.
3.
4
5
6
7
8

Romantic: etymology
19th century: cultural milieu
Elements of Romantic poetics.
Defining Romanticism.
Romanticism vs. Classicism.
Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics.
Recent influential studies on Romanticism.
Romantic reconciliations.

1. romantic, mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring,
charming, enchanting, idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly.
2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital ] --Syn. romanic, romance,
Mediterranean, Italic, Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh,
Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese, Castilian.
3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital]
--Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic,
Wordsworthian, Sturm und Drang (German).
2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in
France (1790). Reactions for: Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine, Rights
of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791), Vindication of
the Rights of Woman(1791);William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register; W.Godwin, Inquiry
Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness,(1793).
3. The poet; creative power; nature of poetry
.
4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of a
society which was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of
production.(R. Williams)
Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itself for
the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness. (G. Hartman)
Dynamic organicism based on a philosophy of becoming not of being. (Rene Wellek, 1949)
5. Change in the view of (1) the character and function of poetry and (2) the whole conception
of the nature of MAN and the world in which he finds himself.
6.

A turning from-------- to i.e. reason--------------------------------senses, feelings

impersonal objectivism------------subjectivism
ideal of order------------------------ideal of intensity etc.
M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, OUP,
1953
Rene Wellek, Comparative Literature, 1949
H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976
Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory, 1986; The
Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1986
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,
Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol)
I.A.Preda, English Romantic Poetics, 1995

8. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.

II. English Romantics: William Wordsworth

1. The Romantic Periods birth certificate
2. W. Wordsworth (1770 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of convictions
that he presents in his poetry.
3.1 W. Ws influence in literature
3.2 W. Ws philosophical vision: the egotistical sublime(J. Keats)
3.3 W. Ws Pantheism
3.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads
3.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads
4. Exercises in inferring meaning: A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal; Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood.
1. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of the Romantic
Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.
3.1 Use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature
3.2 Egotistical Sublime (J. Keats) egotistical<strong autobiographical element;
sublime<permanent indeterminence of his vision of Nature<human nature esp. simple
solitary people.
3.3 Nature, both in her sublime and her most lowly states radiates a power that meets and interoperates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man which is given various names:
soul or simply power; the leap of the heart at a rainbow.
3.4 Everyday tragedies in society; sufferings of old age; basic relationships; tales; children
perceiving nature; poet as social missionary; poet as preacher
3.5 S.T. Coleridge would deal with supernatural things insisting upon the dramatic truth of
such emotions that would transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance
of truth.
W. Wordsworth would give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and would excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the minds attention from the lethargy
of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.
4. (i) A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal is a well-worn example for serious discussion of
hermeneutics. Consequently, consider the two opposing views advanced by famous critics and
try to rebuild their argumentation.
1. Find evidence in support of the opinion that the poem can be read as an unremittingly sombre
elegy. (eg. Cleanth Brooks will substantiate this idea)
2. Find evidence supporting an opposite opinion i.e. the poem as a gloriously optimistic tale of
pantheistic fusion of the beloved with Nature. (F.W.Bateson goes within this line)
A slumber did my spirit seal;
No motion has she now, no force;
I had no human fears;
She neither hears nor sees;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
Rolled round in earths diurnal course,
The touch of earthly years.
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
(1800)
Here is a nice example of undecidability at work in the poem, built on the adjective diurnal,
consisting of a collection of divergent glosses compiled by Norman E. Holland.
Hugh Kenner calls it (diurnal) an abstract, technical term, and F:R:Leavis says the word has a
scientific nakedness but also evokes the vast inexorable regularity of the planetary motions.
By contrast, Cleanth Brooks finds in it a violent but imposed motion, a whirl. FW:Bateson
calls it a solemn Latinism which contrasts with the other, simpler words, to set off the
invulnerable Ariel-like creature against her present lifeless and immobile state. E.Drew finds
this one long, formal word in the poem not lifeless at all, but contributing to a majestic
affirmation. Robin Skelton finds in it a fear that, if the poet unites his soul with nature, he will

me turned daily like the earth, selfless and unthinking. Skelton also finds a subconscious effect
of the syllable de, which to the ear suggests that a word having reference to division, to the
dichotomy of the world, is about to be spoken. To whose ear? And yet, I hasten to admit, I hear
in diurnal the word urn as saying another way the whole earth has been made Lucys funeral
vessel. (from M.Riffaterre, Undecidability as Hermeneutic Constraint, in Literary Theory
Today, (eds.) Peter Collier & Helga Geyeryan, Oxford, 1990)
(ii) W. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Considering the fact that W.Wordsworth saw the poets job in terms of restoring the equilibrium
in which pleasure consists (Preface), discuss the poets solution to the essence of identity in
the last two stanzas of the poem, ll. 168-203. Reflect upon the following constituents of
Wordsworths poetics.
1. The conflicting constituents of the principal themes and categories within the text.
2. The poets awareness of the rhetorical level of language towards reaching consistency
between statement and performance
3. The relationship to history through time
4. The characteristics of the poetic discourse, achieved in this particular poem.
10
Then sing, ye Birds, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabors sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
11
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch oer mans mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joy, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears
(1807)

III. English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834)s views of poetry and nature.
2. S.T. Coleridges philosophy.
3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest.
4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning.
4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization.
4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion.
5. Coleridges technique.
6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel.
7. Exercises in inferring meaning: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS.
2. Coleridges antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kants The
Critique of Pure Reason).
The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the
correlation of being.(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only of lifeless
and sightless notion; reason is a source of actual truth, the soul beholds, it does not
hypothesize.
Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding; imagination /
fancy exemplified on Shakespeares work.
3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight.
Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, in which
Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominal Philosopher
without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is his Stuff- and
Verbiage the Stamp & Impression.(Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444)
4. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh
of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endless power of
semination.'(The Statesmans Manual (1817),Lay Sermons)
a Symbol is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in the
Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it
enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the
representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with
apparitions of matter Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures.
4.1 Symbolization = the imaginative containment of a living idea.
Verbalization = the manipulation of fixed counters(The Friend)
4.2 It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to this
negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that at times we
should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry & Religion.(Notebooks, vol.3 no
3632)
5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850) s technique in the Sonnets >viz.
the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spatially in a
particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation of auditory powers.
What I call this auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far
bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the
most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking
the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in
the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the current and the new
and surprising the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.(T. S. Eliot, The Use of
Poetry, p.111)
6. The TRAGIC LOSS OF INITIATIVE: e.g. The Ancient Mariner only increasing selfawareness and a spontaneous moment of empathy will restore, however imperfectly, a more
creative, imaginative spirit with the mariner; Christabel through the themes of
LONELINESS and ISOLATION OF SPIRIT, the old conflict between LIFE and LIFE-IN-

DEATH is being brought to the fore; Kubla Khan the frustration of creative purpose is
described in a language charged with the sense of tragic loss.

7.
(i) In The Pains of Sleep, Coleridge tackles with poignant bewilderment the self-division he
experienced in frightening dreams. Coleridge himself described his poetry as rationalized
dream. It is interesting to distinguish between dream/vision and reverie within rare,
unforgettable moments in Coleridges poetry, that enwrap them inside one another and
balance, in his own words, judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with
enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. This is to be found in the rhapsodic, if selfdoubting close of Kubla-Khan, with its haunting glimpse (and hearing) of unrecapturable
beauty.
An analysis of Kubla Khan is substantially complicated by its extraordinary preface, as well
as by the way the verse seems to fall into two sections, or separate visions, the body of the
poem (ll. 1-36), and the last 18 lines, we may call the epilogue.
Notice how the preface distances the reader from specific imagery and content of the poem,
while raising a host of subsidiary issues such as: the relation of art to dream and
extraordinary states of consciousness generally, sources of art in the unconscious, the
relation of images seen with the inward eye and the correspondent expressions, the relation
of the resulting poem to the original vision, and the role of memory in imaginative activity.
You may also note the creation of a persona for the preface writer, an alternative authority
responsible for the views presented, which will immediately alert the reader to the
possibility of irony (gesture well familiar with Coleridge from The Ancient Mariner and
Biographia Literaria).
There may be some more profound significance to the statement that the poet fell asleep
while reading the quoted lines from Purchas his Pilgrimage, than merely that it was the
occasion of the dream. See if there might be implied some connection between explicit
sources and original transformation of those sources from other authors into new creations.
And, if the chasm between such sources and the original use of them emphasizes the
mystery surrounding the passage from ordinary consciousness into creative states.
Identify other ways of thinginfying (Kathleen M. Wheeler) and reaching meaning, besides
the role of the preface, we have already mentioned.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As eer beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the threshers flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice.
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed.
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Describe how ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive is/are rendered.

Identify the symbols in the poem.
Speak about peculiarities of form.
Describe atmosphere through imagery: provide evidence.
Detect possible religious connotations in the poetic discourse.

10

English Romantics: George Gordon Byron

1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition.
2. G.G. Byrons own poetics.
3. Byron and the interpreting act.
4. The lure of biography.
5. Byronism and the Byronic hero.
6. Byrons metafictional strategy.
6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality.
7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Don Juan
1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
Milton appealed to the avenger, Time;
If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs
And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,
He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,
Nor turn his very talent to a crime;
He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,
But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10)
You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish;(Don Juan, Dedication, St.3)
2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in individual words,
as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish.
3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our own
fallible mental activities.
Byron declared about Don Juan, I have no plan I had no plan but I had or have
materials; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story as
he observed, I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy.
4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my
sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
Hours of Idleness (1808)Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816)
5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer.
= a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and
misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong
affection. (Macaulay)
Byronism = the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion; Bertrand Russell, History of
Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron.
I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange
mlange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. (Letter to a friend of his
Lady Blessington)
There are but two sentiments to which I am constant a strong love of liberty and a
detestation of CANT.

11

6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose enough to
contain an intermittent ironic commentary on contemporary life and manners as well as
himself.
6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance Luigi Pulgi, Francesco Berni > a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence is magnificently
exploited.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the process whereby
literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referential creating those
myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] create the gaps in which
his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

G. G. Byron, Don Juan, from Canto 4 [Juan and Haide]

1.
2.
3.
4.

Explore the sources that might have contributed to its being an intertext.
Detect intertextual traces within the text.
Consider some on-going appeals of the poem.
Think of points of similarity and difference between Byrons hero and the original Don
Juan.
5. Express your thoughts on how tone and atmosphere are achieved.
6. Detect the strategies for achieving the comic.

12

English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822)s specific poetics.
1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery.
2. P.B. Shelleys creed.
3. P.B. Shelleys works.
4. P.B. Shelleys views on the social part of the poet and poetry.
5. P.B. Shelleys symbolism
6. Exercise of inferring meaning: Epipsychidion
1.1 The pure lyric = a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poets own soul with few or
no attendant circumstances.
Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, The Revolt
of Islam.
Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g. The Triumph of Life
The feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it.
2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwins views: evil is not inherent in the system of
creation but an accident that might be expelled.
3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; The Witch of
Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems.
4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811); A Defence of Poetry (1821).
5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelleys symbolism has an air of rootless fantasy because it has
never lived in the mind of a people.
P.B. Shelley, Mutability
Compare and contrast the two poems in point of structure and imagery.
(see guide to poetic discourse in Seminar Outline)

13

English Romantics: John Keats

1. Characteristics of John Keatss (1795-1821) poetics.
1.1 The poet as central concept.
2. J. Keatss thinking system.
3. The Bower principle vs. the Buildung principle.
4. A chronology of J. Keatss work.
4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes
5. Keatss conception of a general and gregarious advance of intellect in cultural history.
6. Keats and the poetic principle of self-development.
7. The allegorical function of self.
8. Keatss principle of vale of soul-making.
9. Keatss sense of the fellowship with essence.
10. Exercise of inferring meaning: Ode to Psyche.
1.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts affections and the truth of
imagination.(Letter to Bailey)
I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.(Letter to
George)
M. Arnold said that No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has in expression
quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.
Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greek mythology
and Middle Ages.
1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Platos theory of the Daimon.
2.

3.

Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, not naming
things but suggesting them.
Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts:
Beauty and Truth.
Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work:
The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave rather than a decadent state of Oneness
with nature.
The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation and not
quite the principle of the quest.
= it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g. Endymion)
or a poetics of historicity ( e.g. the Two Hyperions).

4.

Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion
(1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; Ode On
Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; The Eve of
St. Agnes (1820);
4.1 Leading theme: the theme of transience and permanence.

5.

The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the
mind.(Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818)
The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the minds mansion, and all doors open
from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is imperceptibly impelled
to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, by forces which have strangely
awakened, on the lines of Coleridges recognition that at times we should awake and step
forward.

6.

I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men seeing how
great a thing it is. (Letter to Hunt)

14

7.

The selfs function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of Poetry
the thinking principle, motivated by the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty- and the
Memory of Great Men. (Notebooks)
They are very shallow people who take everything literal A Mans life of any worth is a
continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life a life like the
scriptures, figurative. (Shakespeares Criticism)
Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

8.

Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man they make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a
Passion. (The Friend) the principle of Vale of Soul- Making.
A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination it can scarcely be conceived how
Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault.
(marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Students Manual, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White,
1972)
Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his own process
of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing or digesting, (frequent
metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids in the Vale of Soul- making,
nerving the spirit.

9.

The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essential verse.(in
Keatss sense of a fellowship with essence).

Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing the richness of any
potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a range of complex
sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc.
I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative
of essntial Beauty.
According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on) the
being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) reflects the mystery of being.

J. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

1.
2.
3.
4.

Detect mood by identifying means of construing the meaning.

Explain the function of rhetorical figures in the economy of the text.
Identify the features triggered by the word Ode in the title.
Identify the included participants or growth points vs. excluded participants in the
text.
5. Draw a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants.
6. Comment upon the poems symbolism.

15

English Essayists on Their Epoch

1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and their Vision
on their Own Epoch.
1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment.
1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy.
Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context.
2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse.
Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation.
20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age.
Characteristics of Victorian Literature.
Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation.
Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry.
Victorian Theories of the Poet.

1.

Reformers (Politics + Religion)

Conservatives

L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830)

Periodicals
practical critic
l (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality)
everyday life)
impressionist criticism
e.g. Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating
Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Survivor of the great 18th c. tradition
of satire
e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry

Uncommitted

Ch. Lamb (1775-1834)

personal essays
e.g. Essays of Elia

Th. De Quincey (1785-1859)

impressionist criticism
e.g. Style; Rhetoric
nightmarish side of human
consciousness
e.g. Confessions of an English
Opium Eater

1.2 Supporters of Personal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848

year of The Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about which The
Queen had to say: Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which makes the
Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different
then let them remain each in their position.
In Mills view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : For the apotheosis of
Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations.
The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History.
The Ages Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: To me the Universe was all void of
Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-Engine,
rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
J. Ruskin: The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and the
mountains.

16

SCIENCE (Darwin)
LOSS OF FAITH
DOUBT / BELIEF
Utilitarianism
Philosophical Conservatives
(J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill)
EDUCATION
Agnosticism

RELIGION
FAITH
Tractarianism

T.H. Huxley(1825-1895)
controversialist
On the Physical Basis of Life

J.H.Cardinal Newman
(1801-1890)
Oxford Movement
Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Th. Carlyle (1795-1881)

Sartor Resartus
The Everlasting No
The Everlasting Yea
(vital spark)

John Stuard Mill

(1806-1873)
On Liberty
Of Individuality
What Is Poetry?
(INDIVIDUAL more important
than the State or Church.)

Th. Macaulay
(1800-1859)
History of England from
the Accession of James II
(Great debater of progress)

J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : If only the Geologists would let

Modern Painters
me alone, I could do very well,
The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! I
The Nature of Gothic
hear the clink of them at the
(a prophet)
end of every cadence of the
Bible verses. (1851)
W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888)
News from Nowhere
The Function of Criticism
(ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy
The Beauty of Life
Friendships Garland
(work-pleasure)
(CULTURE=a panacea)
(ag. PHILISTINISM)
W. Pater(1839-1894) : the legitimate contention Is, not
Appreciations
of one age or school of literary
Aesthetic Poetry
art against another, but of all
Romanticism
successive schools alike,
(epicurian preacher,
against the stupidity which is
impressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the
vulgarity which is dead to form.
3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; Punch and Judy shows
Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky)
for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: the Great Summer of Human Civilization
against: Georgian reaction: Victorian=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain;
Th. Carlyles poet as hero; Sinfields the poet of the margins; J.S. Mills and Lewess the
secular poet of the margins= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is to
aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g. Tennyson)

17

Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson

1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular poet of the margins.
2. Alfred Tennysons poetry between solipsism and social involvement.
2.1 Alfred Tennysons self renewing techniques.
3. Signposts in His Evolution.
3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery.
4. Arthur Tennysons Conception of Language.
5. Exercise of inferring meaning: In Memoriam, Section 54
1. Vex not the poets mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poets mind;
For thou canst not fathom it.
Clear and bright it should be ever,
Flowing like a crystal river;
Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poets Mind, 1830 )
2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): it is the distance
that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in
which I move.
Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered Ts relation to modern life: Ts age
was vividly with him as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom; the sad
condition of the poor; the position of women in the onward movement of the world; the
role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; the noble elements of
English character, their long descent and the sacred reverence we owed to them.
3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte dArthur]; Ulysses; The Princess,
A Medley; Idylls of the King (The Coming of ArthurThe Passing of Arthur).
3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) literary sources: Horaces Odes; pastoral elegy; love-sonnets
of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dantes Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae.
4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language <Locke: sensations are the source of all
knowledge and a word is merely a sound that is arbitrarily attached to a sensation.
(b) The idealist perspective, deriving from Kant, current among the Apostles (the GermanoColeridgean, Cambridge Society in the 1820s)
T. S. Eliot: A great poet because of abundance, variety and complete competence.
The saddest of the English poets.
Terry Eagleton: Tennyson marks the last point in English life at which poetry was still a public
genre. Yet even here the cracks are beginning to show: In Memoriam rehearses the set themes of
Victorian Society, but it is really an assemblage of lyrical fragments in which private experience
is now running too deep for public articulation. (in T. L. S. /Oct.1992)
Penelope Fitzgerald: He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of
Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the
English language,i.e. the sound of the language talking to itself.
At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does,
in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sounds that he is inexplicably able, as a great
professional, to produce. (in T. L. S. /Oct. 1992, A Hundred Years After)
Isobel Armstrong: He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for a simplicity
which is betrayed by the complexity of its language.

18

Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters; The Lady of Shalott

1. De-center the poems so as to re-center them in compliance with the poets main
objective.
2. Demonstrate how Tennyson builds his outward imagery.
3. Exemplify how Tennysons language functions in the context of the two early 19th
century theories of language.
4. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of Tennyson.

19

Victorian Poets: Robert Browning

1. Robert Browning (1812-1889)s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennysons method.
2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry.
2.1 The Dramatic Monologue as norm.
2.1.1 Definition; advantages.
3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Brownings poetry.
4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age.
5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician.
6. Exercise of inferring meaning: My Last Duchess
1.

Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare
(1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the
temptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I should
judge the conflict in the knights soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson thinks he
should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, and anything but the
soul.
My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worth
study.(Sordello) His poems are described always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.(Preface of 1868)
2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.: to the
great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, Ill tell my state as thought were
none of mine.
2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect
upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or another the
norm. (Poetry and the Age, 1953)
2.2 D.M.= A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience.
= One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address.
(1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of D.M.
provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is brought together as
the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poet.
3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest seems
desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2) language,
versification and poetic texture.
4. In point of characters and style.
Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint
Praxeds Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women.
5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man preference for the conflict
in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God is revealed to
Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ.
Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the greater
the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth.
Brownings imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and the Book;
he dealt more with Facts than Fancies.
General theme: Order Vs Disorder
General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of human happiness,
capable to overcome human suffering.
Diction is denotative to the extreme.
R. Browning, Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi.
1. Name the challenges you feel confronted with, when reading the poem.
2. Identify artistic ways of exposing the minds deviance.

20

3. Re-construct the compositional elements (theme, form, tropes and tone).

4. Identify features of the dramatic monologue.
5. Identify the included participants or growth points vs. excluded participants in the
text.
6. Explain how a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants can help or not.
7. Build up your own image of the poet.
Victorian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880
One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:
Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.
What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?
Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover:
Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.
Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:
Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.
Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels:
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels.
Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which:
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch
More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:
Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?
One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.
Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks:
Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox.
Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:
You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.
Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock:
Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock.
God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see:
Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

21

Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins

1. Gerard Manley Hopkinss (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeper
knowledge.
1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of Poetic
Language.
1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition.
1.3 Hopkinss Concept of Identity.
2. His Theory of Poetry and Language.
2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress.
2.2 Language and the taste of Himself.
2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus.
2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins.
3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse.
4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion.
4.1 The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)
5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language.
6. Hopkins as Critic.
7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets.
1.

Every true poetmust be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each
poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never
recur. (Hopkins)
1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way of
hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its
interest of meaning.
1.3 I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I
and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more
distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to
another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone
else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness and
selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this,
that other men to themselves have the feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be
explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance:
searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
2.1 Inscape
Instress

the outward signs by which a creatures inner identity could be grasped.

the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his
consciousness.
Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye.
Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects.
Power of the object to reveal its own inscape.
Secures the unity of the world.
Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything.
Running Instress
the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one in the
mind of the observer.
2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being.
2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local and cosmopolitan.
2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality.
3 Religious content: A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection.
4

Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal (1866-1875):
All the world is full of inscape; and he caught inscapes everywhere: in leaves, flowers,
trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls, clouds, sunsets
and stars.

22

 I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking
at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.
The world might be seen as the INSCAPE of GOD.
Duns Scotuss Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory of thisness.
4.1 You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and
resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of
my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces
which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 the Deutschland was wrecked in
the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck laws,
aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my
rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set
to work (letter to Dixon, 1878)
Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained in Preface to
Poems.
5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress.
Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmatic
shifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order.
5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, inscaping the world.
The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artists person.
Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art
- being in earnest with your subject-reality
Beauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of the
Holiness beauty + good
The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character
6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Carrion
Comfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
G.M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night; The Windhover; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
1. Check how LOGOPOEIA fits the poets own theory of verse making.
2. Sprung Rhythm and the wave of anapests in the 19th century.
3. Explain how I.A. Richardss definition of the poem = economy of mental effort holds
true with Hopkins.
4. Swinburne s Nephelidia and MELOPOEIA.
5. Identify how instress informs inscape.
6. Look for Hopkinss stumbling blocks. (Bridges)
7. Suggest ways of overcoming difficulties with Hopkinss poetic discourse.
8. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of G. M. Hopkins.

23

Bibliography
English Literature and its background, 1780-1900
I. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory
1. D. Buchbinder, Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry, Macmillian, 1991
2. H. Bloom, (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness, 1970
3. D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975
4. M. S. Day, History of English Literature, Doubleday & Company, N.Y., 1963
5. B. Ford, (ed.) The Pelican Guide to English Literature
6. E. Gavriliu, Lectures in English Literature from the Rise of the Realistic Novel in the 18th
century to the Crisis of Aestheticism in the 19th century, Galati, 1980
7. D. Lodge, (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, 1988
8. J. Peck, How to Study a Poet, Macmillan, 1988
9. C.Racovita, Lectures in English Literature (The Victorian Novel and the 20th century English
Literature), Galati, 1981
10. J. Stevens & R.Waterhouse, Literature, Language and Change, from Chaucer to the Present,
London and N.Y., 1990
11. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, An Anthology, Blackwell, 1994
12. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1995
13. M. Toolan, Narrative, A Critical Linguistic Introduction, Routledge, 1992
14. G. Leech & M. Short, Style in Fiction, A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose,
Longman, 1994
15. G. Cook, Discourse and Literature, O.U.P. 1994
16. R. Pope, Textual Intervention. Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, Routledge,
London, 1995
17. R. Bontila, Readings from 19th Century English Novel, Alma, Galati, 1999
II. Biblical and Classical
Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey (translated in The World's Classics, Oxford)
The Bible, Genesis; Exodus; The Psalms; The Songs of Songs; Ecclesiastes; The New Testament
III. Individual Authors: 1780-1900
1. W. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads ***; The Prelude ***; Preface to Lyrical Ballads ***;
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ***.
2. S. T. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner***; Christabel ***; Kubla Khan ***;This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison***; Dejection: an Ode***; Frost at Midnight***; The Aeolian Harp***;
Biographia Literaria***; Lectures on Shakespeare ***.
3. Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers**;The Vision of Judgement**; Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage**; Manfred***; Don Juan***.
4. P. B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life***; Hymn to Intellectual Beauty***; Ode to the West
Wind***;To a Skylark***; Ozymandias***; Mutability***; Prometheus Unbound***
Preface to Prometheus; A Defence of Poetry ***.
5. J. Keats, Sleep and Poetry***; The Eve of St.Agnes***; Lamia***; La Belle Dame Sans
Merci***; To Autumn***; Ode to Psyche***; Ode to a Nightingale***; Ode on
Melancholy**; Ode on a Grecian Urn***;Endymion, Book I***; Hyperion;The Fall of
Hyperion***;Letters***.
6. Th. Carlyle, The Hero as Poet **; Carlyle's Portraits of His Contemporaries***.
7. J. S. Mill, What Is Poetry**; Coleridge***; On Liberty***.
8.J. Ruskin, Of the Real Nature Of Greatness of Style**

24

9. A.Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters**; Ulysses**; In Memoriam**; Maud***; The Lady of

Shalott***; Mariana***; The Princess***; Idylls of the King***.
10. R. Browning, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix***; My Last
Duchess***; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church***; Fra Lippo
Lippi**; Andrea del Sarto**; Caliban upon Setebos.
11. M. Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time**; The Study of Poetry**; Culture
and Anarchy, ch.I***; Dover Beach***; Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse***;
Thyrsis***; The Scholar Gypsy***.
12. G. M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night***; Spring***; The Windhover***; Pied Beauty***;
Binsey Poplar***; As Kingfishers Catch Fire***; Carrion Comfort***.

**The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol.II,

***The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol.2

25