Keats, Shelley , Coleridge free essay sample

Member of the Second generation of Romantic poets who blossomed early and died young. He is Romantic in his relish of sensation, his feeling for the Middle Ages, his love for the Greek civilization and his conception of the writer. He was able to fuse the romantic passion and the cold Neo-classicism, just as Ugo Foscolo did in â€Å"LE GRAZIE† and in â€Å"I SEPOLCRI†. * He was born in London; he attended a private school in Enfield; he attended also at the early deaths of his father (killed in a riding accident), his mother and his brother (of tuberculosis). He became a surgeon but six years later he decided to leave the profession and announced in the sonnet â€Å"ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER† his decision to devote his life to writing verse . * His mother and brother died because of TB and his ever-frail health deteriorated rapidly following a walking tour to the Highlands (Scotland). * He fell in love with Fanny Brawne but poverty and his bad health made marriage impossible. * The symptoms of consumption became evident; in 1820 he travelled to Italy in an effort to recover his health but died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1821. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. * There is some deeply felt personal experience behind the ODES of 1819, but the significant fact is that this experience is â€Å"behind† the odes, not their substance. * The poetical personal pronoun â€Å"I† does not stand for a human being linked to the events of his time, but for a universal one. * He remarks: â€Å"Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer† The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective moods and emotions is rarely present in his poetry It has nothing of the Wordsworth pantheistic conviction, and no sense of mystery. He’s a Romantic poet thanks to his belief in the supreme value of imagination. IMAGINATION: the world of his poetry is predominantly artificial (one that he imagines); his poetry comes from imagination in sense that a great deal of his work is a vision of what he would like human life to be, stimulated by his own experience of pain and m isery. * BEAUTY: What strikes his imagination most is beauty; he feels a disinterested love for beauty that differentiates him from the other Romantic writers (â€Å"Art for Art’s sake†). The contemplation of beauty is the central theme in Keats’s poetry. It is mainly the Classical Greek world that inspires Keats. The expression of beauty is the ideal of all art. The world of Greek beliefs lives again in his verse, recreated and re-interpreted with the eyes of a Romantic. His first contact with beauty proceeds from the senses, from the concrete physical sensations. All the senses, as in Wordsworth’s poetry, are involved in this process. This â€Å"physical beauty† is caught in all the forms nature acquires; but beauty can also produce a much deeper experience of joy, which introduces a sort of â€Å"spiritual beauty† that is one of love, friendship and poetry. Keats indentifies BEAUTY and TRUTH as the only type of knowledge, as he affirms in the two last lines of â€Å"ODE ON A GRECIAN URN†. MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851) * Her parents had been heavily influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution and were part of a small radical group. * Her child house (Godwin’s) was visited by some of the most famous writers of the day, like the Romantic poets Samuel Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. * Shelley was immediately attracted by the young Mary Godwin; in 1814 the couple fled to France and later they decided to rent a country house on the banks of Lake Geneva near Villa Diodati. It was there that the writing of â€Å"FRANKENSTEIN† took place. * In 1816 Mary Shelley began to write her famous novel, which was published anonymously in 1818. * In 1822 the Shelleys moved to Lerici, Percy died in a storm; Mary returned to England in 1823 where she died. * â€Å"FRANKESTEIN† A Swiss scientist, manages to create a human being by joining parts selected from dead corpses. The result of the experiment is ugly and revolting; the creation become an outcast and a wicked, he becomes cruel because he is not accepted by society; afterwards the Monster becomes a murderer and in the end he destroys his creator. The story is not told chronologically and is introduced to us by a series of letters written by Walton, a young explorer on a voyage of expedition to the North Pole who saved Frankestein, to his sister, Margaret Saville. Walton is an explorer of the upper classes; indeed he has got money to travel the world. The social class of Frankenstein in the same of Wlaton’s. * INFLUENCES OF â€Å"FRANKENSTEIN† 1. The monster can be considered Rousseau’s natural man, that is a man in a primitive state, not influenced by civilization; 2. The ghost stories read at Villa Diodati provided an immediate stimulus even if â€Å"Frankenstein† differs from the Gothic tradition, since it is not set in a dark castle and does not deal with supernatural events; 3. Another important influence was the work of the Romantic poets in general (Byron), the most meaningful element she derived from Coleridge’s â€Å"RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER† is the fact that both Coleridge’s ballad and Mary Shlley’s novel are tales of a crime against nature: Frankenstein’s creation of the monster and the Mariner’s shooting of the albatross; 4. The myth of Prometheus is also important: Prometheus in Greek mythology was a giant who stole the fire from Gods in order to give it to men, In so doing, he challenged the divine authority and freed men from Gods’ power. He is a clear example of an overreacher, just like Dr Frankenstein and Walton; 5. Mary dedicated her novel to Godwin and used many of the ideas held by her parents including social justice and education. She clearly sympathizes with the monster but she is afraid of the consequences of his actions. In this there is the tension between fear of revolution and interest in the revolutionary ideas, two attitudes which were characteristic of English intellectuals; 6. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary were interested in science and particularly chemistry. She was aware of the latest scientific theories and experiments of the day in the fields of chemistry, evolutionism and electricity. The protagonist of the novel is the first embodiment and its responsibility to mankind. In fact Frankenstein tries to create a human being through the use of electricity and chemistry without respecting the rules of nature as far as creation and life are concerned; 7. The memories of Mary’s sense of loss at the death of her own mother (first feminist). * The novel is told by three different narrators: 1. Walton that informs his sister, whose initials are the same as those of Mary Shelley, MS, that is Margaret Saville; 2. Frankenstein informs Walton, who informs his sister; 3. The monster who informs Frankenstein, who informs Walton, who informs his sister. All the novel has Walton’s sister as receiver, but presents three different points of view. The form of the novel is epistolary; perhaps the writer wanted to disguise her own voice as a woman by hiding behind three male narrators. * THEMES 1. The quest for forbidden knowledge Human beings have the same God’s knowledge: ability to create new lives. 2. The overreacher (Walton, Doctor Frankenstein, Prometheus) 3. The double (Doctor Frankenstein and the monster, Doctor Frankenstein and Walton), anticipates the double identity of â€Å"DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE† by Robert Louis Stevenson 4. The penetration of nature’s secrets, which is related to the theme of the overreacher 5. The usurpation of the female role, since the creation of human beings becomes possible without the participation of women 6. Social prejudices through the figure of the monster as an outcast * DOUBLE Walton is a double of Frankenstein since he manifests the same ambition, the wish to overcome human limits (Prometheus myth) in his traveling towards the unknown, and the same wish for loneliness and pride of being different. Frankenstein and his creature are complementary: they both suffer from a sense of alienation and isolation, both begin with a desire to be good but become obsessed with hate and revenge. The creature stands for the scientist’s negative self. One sure sign of the double is the creation’s haunting presence: even if Frankenstein initially flees from his creature and even if their direct confrontations are few, the monster is constantly present in his life. His rejection of his creature is crucial and this makes the monster an outcast, a murderer and a rebel against society. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) * He attended the Christ’s Hospital School in London; then Cambridge, where he never graduated. * He and the poet Robert Southey planned to establish an utopian community in Pennsylvania under the name of Pantisocracy, where private ownership did not exist and every economic activity was done in common This project came to nothing in the end. * He suffered from chronic rheumatism, consequently the doctors prescribed him opium to ease his bodily pains and he developed a growing addiction to this drug. Most of his poems are probably written under the effect of opium (Visionary poems). * In 1797, he met the poet William Words worth and settled in Somerset, where an important collaboration started. Most of his best poetry belongs to these years. * In 1799, he joined Wordsworth and his sister in the Lake District. He then spent a period of solitude in Malta, after which he returned to England and began a career lecturing in literary concerns and in journalism. * He settled in London where he produced â€Å"BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA† (1817), a classical text of literary criticism and autobiography. Here he explained the dual task which he and Wordsworth had set themselves in the â€Å"LYRICAL BALLADS†: in contrast to Wordsworth’s subjects from ordinary life, his own task was to write about extraordinary events in a credible way. * IMAGINATION He stressed the role of imagination: he distinguished between â€Å"primary imagination† and â€Å"secondary imagination†. He described â€Å"PRIMARY IMAGINATION† as a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images; this human power was also the power to give chaos an certain order to give the material of perception a certain shape. SECONDARY IMAGINATION† was something more, it was the poetic faculty, which not only gave shape and order to a given world, but built new worlds. * FANCY Imagination was more important than fancy, which, though on a higher level than mere perception, was based on the power of association of material already provided and subject to the rational law of judgement. * NATURE Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge did not view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation and happiness. His contemplation of nature was always accompanied by awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real. His strong Christian faith, however, did not allow him to identify nature with the divine, in that form of pantheism which Wordsworth adopted. He rather saw nature and the material world in a sort of neo Platonic interpretation, as the reflection of the perfect world of ideas. The material world is nothing but the projection of the real world of Ideas on the flux of time Coleridge believed that natural images carried abstract meaning and he used them in his most visionary poems. * â€Å"THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER† It is the masterpiece of Coleridge, written in 1798; it is the first poem of the collection LYRICAL BALLADS, that became, along with the Preface â€Å"A CERTAIN COLOURING OF IMAGINATION† by Wordsworth to its second edition, the Manifesto of the English Romantic movement. This ballad is made up of seven parts; it is introduced by an â€Å"Argument† containing a short summary of the whole poem an consists of two narratives: one is made up of captions to the right of the stanzas, which constitute the framework and introduce the protagonist and his listener; the other is the poem itself. In the first part the ancient Mariner stops a wedding guest to tell him his dreadful tale. He narrates of how he and his fellow mariners reached the equator and the North Pole after a violent storm. After several days an albatross appeared through the fog and was killed by the Mariner. Coleridge does not say why the Mariner kills the albatross and what matters is precisely the uncertainty of the Mariner’s motives which suggests the essential irrationality of the crime. The crime is against nature and breaks a sacred law. In the second part, the Mariner begins to suffer punishment for what he has done, and Coleridge transfers to the physical world the corruption and the helplessness which are the common attributes of guilt. The world which faces the Mariner after his crime is dead and terrible; the ship has ceased to move and the sailors are tortured by first, and the only moving things are sliming creatures in the sea at night. The third part shows how the Mariner’s guilty soul becomes conscious of what he has done and of his isolation in the world. A phantom ship closer to the doomed crew and is identified as a skeleton ship. On board Death and Life in death cast dice; the former wins the Mariner’s fellows, who all die starved, and the latter wins the Mariner’s life. In the fourth part this sense of solitude is stressed. Then the Mariner, unaware, blesses the water snakes and begins to reestablish a relationship with the world of nature. The fifth part continues the process of the soul’s revival. The ship begins to move and celestial spirits stand by the corpses of the dead men. In the sixth part, the process of healing seems to be done. In the last stanzas of the seventh part the Mariner gains the wedding guest’s sympathy. Coleridge does not tell the end of the story, but lets the reader suppose that the Mariner’s sense of guilt will end only with his death. * ATMOSPHERE AND CHARACTERS The atmosphere of the whole poem is charged with irresistible mystery because of the combination of the supernatural (old mariner, ghost ship, skeletons, albatross) and the commonplace (storm, voyage, places, ice), dream-like elements and astonishing visual realism. The Mariner and his comrades are more types than human beings and their agonies are simply universally human. The Mariner does not speak as a moral agent, he is passive in guilt and remorse. From his paralysis of conscience the Mariner succeeds in gaining his authority, though he pays for by remaining in the condition of an outcast. Coleridge makes him spectator as well as actor in the drama, so that he can recount even his worst terrors with the calm of lucid retrospection. * TRADITIONAL BALLAD This poem contains many of the features traditionally associated with ballads, that is: the combination of dialogue and narration; the four-line stanzas; the archaic language, rich in alliterations, repetitions and onomatopoeias; the theme of travel and wandering and supernatural elements. But the presence of a moral at the end makes it a romantic ballad. BALLAD: narrative poem, fixed form, easily memoraisable, with a refrain like a song, because the ballads were to pass orally and to accompanied by music. * The Mariner is freed from his sins when he bless all the creatures of the world, but he is punished going land to land to advertise people to do not what he did: crime against nature. * The ancient mariner was punished to bring around his neck the dead albatross. *