PRECURSORS OF THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

PRE CURSORS OF THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

Rousseau’s idea of liberty, fraternity and Equality helped in Romanticism. It is against Neo-classicism. Rousseau is the major pre cursor, father of his concept, began his social contract with “Man is born free, now everywhere he is in chains”

James Thomas

1.   The Seasons (1730) – his great work. It is a blank verse poem, in four books, one for each season. It began with ‘Winter’ and finished with ‘Autumn’.

The seasons are: Winter, Summer, Spring, Autumn

2.   The Castle of Indolence – written in Spenserian stanza it imitates the medieval allegory, personification, moral lesson and other trappings used by Spenser.

3.   Rule, Britanica- one of the national songs of England still

4.   City of Dreadful Night – poem of pessimism and despair.

Thomson bade goodbye to Pope’s Heroic couplet and used other measurers i.e., blank verse, spencerian stanza.

John Dyer

1.   Grongar Hill- it is remarkable for its fine description of natural scenery.

2.   Country Walk-

William Shenstone

1.   The School Mistress- It is the imitation of Spenser and is written in his stanza.

Thomas Chatterton: He was called by Wordsworth “The Marvelous boy” in his “Resolution and Independence”.  Committed suicide when he was 18.  Shelly ranks him with Sydney as Inheritors of Unfulfilled renown”. Keats dedicated his Endymion to him.

1.   The Rowley Poems-

George Crabbe

1.   The Village (1783) –written against the Goldsmiths’ ‘The Deserted Vil

2.   lage’ corrected and revised by Jonson, which made his name fixed his character as a poet. Having seen the hard life of villagers with his own eyes, he describes their poverty and misery. He says: “I paint the cot, as truth will paint it, and bards will not”

3.   The Parish Register

4.   The Borough – descriptive of the life of a country town.

5.   Tales in Verse and Tales of the Hall – he included the people of upper class.

William Cowper

1. The Task: A poem in six books (1785)– his great poem written in blank verse. Part -I of this poem “The Sofa” contains a famous quote: ‘God made the country and man-made the town’

2. John Gilpin- Lady Austen told this story to Cowper, a comic ballad about John Gilpin, a draper who rides a runaway horse.

3.The Castaway – a cry of utter despair was written shortly before his death.

4. The Solitude of Alexander Selkirck, a poem, first line is “I am Monarch of all I survey”

 

Colleridge called him ‘The Best Modern Poet’

Cowper is well known for ‘Olney Hymns’1779

His poem ‘Light shining out of darkness’ gave the phrase “God moves in a mysterious way ,His wonders  to perform”

 

Thomas Gray: He declined the poet-laureateship after the death of Cibber, and was appointed Professor of History at Cambridge.

His early odes are Horatian Odes: Ode to Eton, Ode to spring, Ode to Adversity, Ode on the death of favourite cat.

His next two odes are Pindaric odes: The Bard, The Progress of Poesy.

At Eton he became friends with Horace Walpole, Richard West and Thomas Ashton (Group termed as Quadrouple Alliance)

1.   Elegy on a country churchyard (1751)- 128 lines elegy: Famous line: “The paths of Glory lead but to the Grave”.  the death of Richard West inspired to write this poem

2.   On a Distant Prospects of Eton College: -Horatian ode. Famous line: ‘’Where ignorance of bliss, Tis folly to be wise”

3.   Odes: Ode on the Spring: Horatian ode

4.   On Adversity: Horatian ode

5.   On the Death of a Favorite Cat: Horatian ode

6.   The Progress of Poesy - Pindaric ode

7.   The Bard - Pindaric ode

 

William Collins: Studied at Oxford but left the University suddenly presumably because of his mental condition, for during a great part of his short life he was insane. Famous for 12 Odes.

1.   Dirge in Cymbeline – his famous ode

2.   Ode to the Passions

3.   Ode to Evening

4.   Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands (1750) --about fairies, witches

 

Robert Burns: National poet of Scotland. Known as “Plowman’s poet, Local poet, and Bard of Arshyre”. He addicted to drink. early representatives of Romantic Movement.

1.   Farewell to Scotland: Famous line: “Loved land of my kindred, farewell and forever”

2.   Tom O’Shanter: folk verse in octosyllabic lines, depicts his escape from witches.

3.   The Jolly Beggars

4.   His famous song “My love is like a Red, Red Rose, O my love is like a red, red Rose”

5.   Handsome Nell

It is his first poetry in the form of songs, about his first love for a girl Nellie.

6.   Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect known Kilmarnock Volume.

Burns birthday is celebrated by Scotmen all over world as a national holiday, known as Burns Night (25 January).

William Blake: early representatives of Romantic Movement. He said “Nature is window to God”

1.   Poetical Sketches1789 – these are little pictures or songs in the manner of the Renaissance poets.

2.   Songs of Innocence 1789– song of childhood and express through the mouths of babes and suckling. Blake’s own feelings of tenderness and piety, beauty and joy of the world.

“Little Lamb who made thee, 

Dost thou know who made thee”

- The Lamb Poem.

Contains 19 poems:  The Shepherd, Little Black boy, Night, Spring, A dream, The Chimney sweeper

3.   Songs of Experience 1793– these are the counter part of Songs of Innocence. It contains the finest lyric

‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? - The Tyger poem; 

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”- The Tyger poem

Contains 26 poems: The Tyger, The Lily, London, The School Boy, A Poison Tree, The Angel, The Fly, The cloud, The Pebble, The sick rose

4.   The Book of Thel

5.   The French Revolution

6.   The Marriage of Hell and Heaven: His famous lines: ‘’Without contraries there is no progression’;

7. Milton: A Poem in two books ..is the longest poem of Blake

8.  Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

9. Vala or the Four Zoas: 9 books referred to 9 nights, uncompleted prophetic book by Blake started in 1797 published by W.B.Yeats &Ellis in 1893. Four Zoas (=Tharmas, Urizen, Luvah, Urthona) were created by ‘the fall of Albion’ in Blakes Mythology 

Erasmus Darwin

           1.The Botanic Garden.

 

William Gifford

He was the first editor of The Quarterly Review founded by Sir Walter Scott, Southey as rival to The Edinburgh Review. His ferocious article on Endymion is said to have hasten Keats’s death.

James Macpherson

1.   Fingal, an epic poem in 6 books (1762)

2.   Temora, an epic poem in 8 books (1763)

Thomas Percy

       He is famous for his famous “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” another good work is “Northern Antiquities”                                        

 

The Gothic School:

Walpole, Clara Reve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewies and Beckford belongs to this school. The scene of the Gothic novel is invariably laid in haunted castles and ruined buildings. They create a special atmosphere of awe, terror and fear.

Horace Walpole- father of Gothic Novel

1.   The Castle of Otranto 1764– the Castle of Otranto is haunted by the gigantic ghost of Alphonso who had been murdered and whose realm had been usurped by the grandfather of Manfred who is the Prince of Otranto in the story. Other characters are: Isabella, Matilda, Theodore (he became the ruler of Otranto).

 

Serendipity:

Ø  Coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 in a letter to his friend Horace Mann. The word didn't really catch on until the 20th century

Ø  Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari by reference to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip” The princes, he told his correspondent, were "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of."

Ø  The name comes from Serendip, an old Persian name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), hence Sarandib by Arab traders. It is derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ (Siṃhalaḥ, Sri Lanka + dvīpaḥ, island).

Ø  The word has been exported into many other languages, with the general meaning of "unexpected discovery" or “fortunate chance”

 

C. R. Maturin: Irish playwright, novelist            

1.   Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820): Story of a   scholar who sold his soul for 150years of extra life.

Clara Reve

1.   The Old English Baron 1777 – imitated by Walpole

 

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe

1.   Mysteries of Udalpho (1794) – her masterpiece.  It is a tale of robber Baron’s Castle. Emily and Montoni were the major characters who got married at the end. Jane Austen laughed at this book in her Northanger Abbey, but she was the most successful writer of the Gothic novel.

2.   A Sicilian romance

3.   The Romance of the Forest

4.   The Italian.

Mathew Gregory Lewis: He was the greatest of the terror novelists.

1.   The Monk: A romance (1796): in 3 volumes. The Monk has two main plotlines. The first concerns the corruption and downfall of the monk Ambrosio, and his interactions with the demon in disguise Matilda (first known as Rosario, the young boy) and the virtuous maiden Antonia. The subplot follows the romance of Raymond and the nun Agnes. It is sensational for depiction of rape and incest. If a parent saw this book in the hands of a son/daughter, he might turn pale.

Mary Shelly: daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother died when she was 10 days. Married to P.B. Shelly without her father’s consent.

1.   Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818)- First Robotic Book (Sci.Fiction Book). She wrote this book as response to the challenge set Lord Byron to write a ghost story. Story of Victor Frankenstein(scientist), on death bed, narrates his story to Robert Watson, who wrote this story as a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Saville (epistolary novel). Frankenstein creates an intelligent, grotesque monster, who murders the scientist’s family. Scientist decides to take revenge.  At the end of the novel, the monster weeps at the scientist’s body and disappears.

William Beckford

1.   Vathek is a Gothic novel written in French in 1786 and translated to English by Samuel Henley.

Vathek builds 5 castles (5 scenes).  Vathek…an arabian tale or History of Caliph Vathek.

Jacobin novels 

They were written between 1780 and 1805 by British radicals who supported the ideals of the French revolution. They novels were suppressed by govt. The term was coined by literary scholar Gary Kelly in The English Jacobin Novel (1976) but drawn from the title of the Anti-Jacobin: or, Weekly Examiner, a conservative periodical founded by the Tory politician George Canning. Jacobin novelists: William Godwin, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Turner Smith.

The genre began in an attempt to make revolutionary thought more entertaining and easier to comprehend for the lower order. On the midst of the French Revolution, literacy was growing amongst the lower classes, the mass behind the revolutionaries. “A reading public had become a revolutionary public.”

William Godwin: was the most popular writer of this school.

1.   The Adventures of Caleb Williams or Things as they are (1794)–First novel of Crime and Detection in English. Story ofFerdinando Falkland, a British squire, attempts to destroy Caleb Williams, his secretary, for discovering a secret about him.

2.   St. Leon

3.   Political Justice

Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809):

1.   Anna St.Ives: A Novel(1792): first Jacobin novel, a utopian novel of social justice. Supports social reforms and equality.

 

Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821)):

1.   A Simple story: story of Miss Helner, unconventional heroine with virtues and vices.

2.   Nature and Art: story of a child reared without books in an African Island.

 

Robert Bage (1753-1821)):

1.   Hermsprong: or a man as he is not: philosophical and gothic novel

 

The Sentimental School:

Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters. Mackenzie and Brooke belong to this school. Their novels of threatful sentiment showing the influence of Sterne reinforced by that of Rousseau whose Nouvelle Heloise, the classical novel of French sentimentalism.

Henry Mackenzie

1.   The Man of Feeling:  It created a type of hero, Harley, a man who cries.

2.   The Man of Quality

3.   Julia de Roubigne

Henry Brooke

1.   The Fool of Quality.