Christopher Ricks
- Published in print:
- 1984
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128298
- eISBN:
- 9780191671654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128298.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
In this book, the author argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value of works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and ...
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In this book, the author argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value of works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and a man, John Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.Less
In this book, the author argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value of works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and a man, John Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.
Jennifer Radden
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195151657
- eISBN:
- 9780199849253
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151657.003.0020
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter discusses two poems by John Keats — “Ode of Melancholy” and “What the Thrush Said.” Keats knew much suffering and died while still a young man. Consumptive and weak, he experienced many ...
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This chapter discusses two poems by John Keats — “Ode of Melancholy” and “What the Thrush Said.” Keats knew much suffering and died while still a young man. Consumptive and weak, he experienced many phases of despondency and moodiness. By the time he received recognition for his work, he was seriously ill with tuberculosis. The ode on melancholy starts with the world of darkness and pain, so vividly described that we are reminded that Keats wrote from personal experience. His evocation of the dual aspects of melancholy, the stress on the paradox uniting sensual pleasure, energy, and vitality, on the one hand, and despair, suffering, and passivity, on the other, elevates his writing on melancholy to a place beside that of Elizabethan authors.Less
This chapter discusses two poems by John Keats — “Ode of Melancholy” and “What the Thrush Said.” Keats knew much suffering and died while still a young man. Consumptive and weak, he experienced many phases of despondency and moodiness. By the time he received recognition for his work, he was seriously ill with tuberculosis. The ode on melancholy starts with the world of darkness and pain, so vividly described that we are reminded that Keats wrote from personal experience. His evocation of the dual aspects of melancholy, the stress on the paradox uniting sensual pleasure, energy, and vitality, on the one hand, and despair, suffering, and passivity, on the other, elevates his writing on melancholy to a place beside that of Elizabethan authors.
Herbert F. Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232987
- eISBN:
- 9780191716447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that ...
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British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that pressure Scottish, Welsh, Dissenting, and female perspectives gained a fresh purchase. A new generation of Romantic poets broke with their elders' revolutionary/reactionary formation by breaking down the master narrative of trauma and healing that went with it. Instead, epic became a stylistic option, a manipulable and marketable repertory of forms. The Regency became an epic era of special effects, including Moore's epic-scented entertainment, Hunt's hedonist indulgence on Dantesque premisses, the epic resonance that Keats miraculously achieved without benefit of plot, and Shelley's utopian art of permanent revolution spinning outside history. To crown all, Byron's radical transvaluation of the genre both summed the tradition to date and, by the thoroughness of an inimitable celebrity irony, threatened to put an end to epic as his countrymen had known it.Less
British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that pressure Scottish, Welsh, Dissenting, and female perspectives gained a fresh purchase. A new generation of Romantic poets broke with their elders' revolutionary/reactionary formation by breaking down the master narrative of trauma and healing that went with it. Instead, epic became a stylistic option, a manipulable and marketable repertory of forms. The Regency became an epic era of special effects, including Moore's epic-scented entertainment, Hunt's hedonist indulgence on Dantesque premisses, the epic resonance that Keats miraculously achieved without benefit of plot, and Shelley's utopian art of permanent revolution spinning outside history. To crown all, Byron's radical transvaluation of the genre both summed the tradition to date and, by the thoroughness of an inimitable celebrity irony, threatened to put an end to epic as his countrymen had known it.
Porscha Fermanis
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637805
- eISBN:
- 9780748652181
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637805.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars ...
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John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats' intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The book re-examines some of Keats' most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats' poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.Less
John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats' intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The book re-examines some of Keats' most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats' poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. The book contributes to one of the most important current debates in literary scholarship — the understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
Thomas McFarland
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186458
- eISBN:
- 9780191674556
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186458.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Making life masks — which represented how something was when it was living — and making death masks — the counterpart that accounts for a being's impressions when they had died, was not an uncommon ...
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Making life masks — which represented how something was when it was living — and making death masks — the counterpart that accounts for a being's impressions when they had died, was not an uncommon practice during the nineteenth century, especially since photography had yet to become a more efficient trend. Because John Keats lived a relatively short life, both his life mask and his death mask look almost exactly alike. It is also important to note that the fact that these masks exist represents the commitment and strength of ‘the Keats circle’ — the support group which played no small part in Keats's intellectual development. Because these two masks possess the same features, these serve as significant figures in accounting for Keats's existence.Less
Making life masks — which represented how something was when it was living — and making death masks — the counterpart that accounts for a being's impressions when they had died, was not an uncommon practice during the nineteenth century, especially since photography had yet to become a more efficient trend. Because John Keats lived a relatively short life, both his life mask and his death mask look almost exactly alike. It is also important to note that the fact that these masks exist represents the commitment and strength of ‘the Keats circle’ — the support group which played no small part in Keats's intellectual development. Because these two masks possess the same features, these serve as significant figures in accounting for Keats's existence.
Emily Rohrbach
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823267965
- eISBN:
- 9780823272440
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823267965.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: ...
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Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: Romanticism’s future-oriented poetics. This book explores the epistemological uncertainties that arise from the sense of an unknowable futurity at the outset of the nineteenth century. It situates that uncertainty in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity’s Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—“what might will have been”—the imagining of the historical present as opening up a range of interpretive and dramatic possibilities, whereby the present becomes a process that will always remain incomplete. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity’s Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age, and it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetic grammar of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical dimensions of the present when faced with the temporal situation of modernity.Less
Whereas Romantic studies often have focused on British Romanticism in its relations to the past—Romanticism as ruins, memory, and mourning—Modernity’s Mist draws attention to an understudied aspect: Romanticism’s future-oriented poetics. This book explores the epistemological uncertainties that arise from the sense of an unknowable futurity at the outset of the nineteenth century. It situates that uncertainty in relation to an intellectual history of changing concepts of time and to the shifting historiographical debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the future was newly characterized both by its radical unpredictability and by the unprecedented speed with which it approached. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity’s Mist describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—“what might will have been”—the imagining of the historical present as opening up a range of interpretive and dramatic possibilities, whereby the present becomes a process that will always remain incomplete. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Modernity’s Mist is interested in why they felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age, and it describes the poetic strategies they used to convey that sense of mystery. In the poetic grammar of anticipation, these writers do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make available to the imagination a new way of thinking about the historical dimensions of the present when faced with the temporal situation of modernity.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his ...
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This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his response to Romantic culture by setting that response in dialogue with his evaluation of Dante. It is argued that Yeats's exaltation of Dante for being able to attain ‘Unity of Being’ cannot disguise his recognition of affinity with, and indebtedness to Romantic poets such as Shelley. The chapter's second half explores in detail the nature of Yeats's self-declared status as a ‘last Romantic’ in relation to a number of later poems, including ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ and ‘The Gyres’. Complex intertextual relations are discussed between Yeats and his Romantic precursors (including Keats in his Odes). The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Yeats returns to the Romantics, less for a system of belief than for examples of how to dramatize conflict.Less
This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his response to Romantic culture by setting that response in dialogue with his evaluation of Dante. It is argued that Yeats's exaltation of Dante for being able to attain ‘Unity of Being’ cannot disguise his recognition of affinity with, and indebtedness to Romantic poets such as Shelley. The chapter's second half explores in detail the nature of Yeats's self-declared status as a ‘last Romantic’ in relation to a number of later poems, including ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ and ‘The Gyres’. Complex intertextual relations are discussed between Yeats and his Romantic precursors (including Keats in his Odes). The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Yeats returns to the Romantics, less for a system of belief than for examples of how to dramatize conflict.
Juliette Atkinson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199572137
- eISBN:
- 9780191722967
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572137.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter considers yet another way in which obscurity was valued: for many Romantic poets, it was a sign of their sophistication, and would be overcome by a later audience who would confer on ...
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This chapter considers yet another way in which obscurity was valued: for many Romantic poets, it was a sign of their sophistication, and would be overcome by a later audience who would confer on them a posthumous fame. Victorian biographers formed the bulk of this ‘posthumous audience’ and possessed an important canonizing function. Richard Monckton Milnes's biography of Keats (1848), Alexander Gilchrist's life of Blake (1863), and Frederick Martin's biography of Clare (1865) place the idea of neglect at the heart of their work. They depict themselves as tireless champions of their cause, and use their authority as patrons to exhort the public to take better care of their literary heritage. These works were therefore as much sincere attempts to resurrect poets as they were an opportunity for the biographers to stake their cultural importance, despite the qualms of other members of the literary sphere.Less
This chapter considers yet another way in which obscurity was valued: for many Romantic poets, it was a sign of their sophistication, and would be overcome by a later audience who would confer on them a posthumous fame. Victorian biographers formed the bulk of this ‘posthumous audience’ and possessed an important canonizing function. Richard Monckton Milnes's biography of Keats (1848), Alexander Gilchrist's life of Blake (1863), and Frederick Martin's biography of Clare (1865) place the idea of neglect at the heart of their work. They depict themselves as tireless champions of their cause, and use their authority as patrons to exhort the public to take better care of their literary heritage. These works were therefore as much sincere attempts to resurrect poets as they were an opportunity for the biographers to stake their cultural importance, despite the qualms of other members of the literary sphere.
H. J. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300174793
- eISBN:
- 9780300213300
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300174793.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. ...
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Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or … might there be other reasons that account for an author's literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. The author wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period—some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn't tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? The author offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain's most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers' conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.Less
Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or … might there be other reasons that account for an author's literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. The author wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period—some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn't tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? The author offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain's most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers' conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.
Jack Stillinger
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195130225
- eISBN:
- 9780199855209
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195130225.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Using the 180-year history of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, this book explores the nature and whereabouts of “meaning” in complex works. A proponent ...
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Using the 180-year history of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, this book explores the nature and whereabouts of “meaning” in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, the author argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy that includes the endlessly multifarious reader’s response as well as Keats’s guessed-at intent. The author also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats’s work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.Less
Using the 180-year history of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, this book explores the nature and whereabouts of “meaning” in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, the author argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy that includes the endlessly multifarious reader’s response as well as Keats’s guessed-at intent. The author also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats’s work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.
Nicholas Roe
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186298
- eISBN:
- 9780191674495
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186298.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers ...
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This book sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on his poetry. Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the ‘Cockney’ milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The book reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.Less
This book sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on his poetry. Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the ‘Cockney’ milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The book reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.
Thomas McFarland
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186458
- eISBN:
- 9780191674556
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186458.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book surveys the poetic endeavour of John Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of ...
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This book surveys the poetic endeavour of John Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of his quotidian self. The first mask is formed by the attitudes and reality that ensue from a conscious commitment to the identity of poet as such. The second, called here the Mask of Camelot, takes shape from Keats's acceptance and compelling use of the vogue for medieval imaginings that was sweeping across Europe in his time. The third, the Mask of Hellas, eventuated from Keats's enthusiastic immersion in the rising tide of Romantic Hellenism. Keats's great achievement, the book argues, can only be ascertained by means of a resuscitation of the defunct critical category of ‘genius’, as that informs his use of the masks. To validate this category, the volume is concerned throughout with the necessity of discriminating the truly poetic from the meretricious in Keats's endeavour. The book constitutes a criticism of and a rebuke to the deconstructive approach, which must treat all texts as equal and must entirely forego the conception of quality.Less
This book surveys the poetic endeavour of John Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of his quotidian self. The first mask is formed by the attitudes and reality that ensue from a conscious commitment to the identity of poet as such. The second, called here the Mask of Camelot, takes shape from Keats's acceptance and compelling use of the vogue for medieval imaginings that was sweeping across Europe in his time. The third, the Mask of Hellas, eventuated from Keats's enthusiastic immersion in the rising tide of Romantic Hellenism. Keats's great achievement, the book argues, can only be ascertained by means of a resuscitation of the defunct critical category of ‘genius’, as that informs his use of the masks. To validate this category, the volume is concerned throughout with the necessity of discriminating the truly poetic from the meretricious in Keats's endeavour. The book constitutes a criticism of and a rebuke to the deconstructive approach, which must treat all texts as equal and must entirely forego the conception of quality.
Morton D. Paley
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262175
- eISBN:
- 9780191698828
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262175.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by ...
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The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but in their various ways the major Romantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley—question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. No matter how confidently the sequence of apocalypse and millennium seems to be affirmed in some of the major works of the period, the issue is always in doubt: the fear that millennium may not ensue emerges as a significant, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period. Related to it is the tension in Romantic poetry between conflicting models of history itself: history as teleology, developing towards end time and millennium, and history as purposeless cycle. This subject matter is traced through a selection of works by the major poets, partly through an exposition of their underlying intellectual traditions, and partly through a close examination of the poems themselves.Less
The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but in their various ways the major Romantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley—question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. No matter how confidently the sequence of apocalypse and millennium seems to be affirmed in some of the major works of the period, the issue is always in doubt: the fear that millennium may not ensue emerges as a significant, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period. Related to it is the tension in Romantic poetry between conflicting models of history itself: history as teleology, developing towards end time and millennium, and history as purposeless cycle. This subject matter is traced through a selection of works by the major poets, partly through an exposition of their underlying intellectual traditions, and partly through a close examination of the poems themselves.
Anthony Quinton
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199694556
- eISBN:
- 9780191731938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter discusses the life and works of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes is less important in himself than in his connections. He knew everybody: Tennyson, Gladstone, Peel, Palmerston, Thackeray, ...
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This chapter discusses the life and works of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes is less important in himself than in his connections. He knew everybody: Tennyson, Gladstone, Peel, Palmerston, Thackeray, King Louis Philippe, the Emperor Napoleon III, Guizot, Thiers, Tocqueville, Lamennais, Montalembert, Emerson, Whitman, Henry Adams, and Henry James — to take at random a few of the people whom he had not simply met and talked to, but got to know well. He was held in deep affection by two notoriously difficult men: Landor and Carlyle. He helped to rescue Keats from the abyss of neglect and remote disapproval into which he had fallen soon after his death. He did much to assist and generally bring on Swinburne, although in the course of doing so he helped to fuel Swinburne's obsession with the Marquis de Sade by supplying the poet with Sade's works from his large pornographic collection.Less
This chapter discusses the life and works of Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes is less important in himself than in his connections. He knew everybody: Tennyson, Gladstone, Peel, Palmerston, Thackeray, King Louis Philippe, the Emperor Napoleon III, Guizot, Thiers, Tocqueville, Lamennais, Montalembert, Emerson, Whitman, Henry Adams, and Henry James — to take at random a few of the people whom he had not simply met and talked to, but got to know well. He was held in deep affection by two notoriously difficult men: Landor and Carlyle. He helped to rescue Keats from the abyss of neglect and remote disapproval into which he had fallen soon after his death. He did much to assist and generally bring on Swinburne, although in the course of doing so he helped to fuel Swinburne's obsession with the Marquis de Sade by supplying the poet with Sade's works from his large pornographic collection.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122852
- eISBN:
- 9780191671579
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122852.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
In this wide-ranging study the author examines the phenomenon of the ‘self-conscious poem’ — that is, a poem concerned with poetry or, more centrally if often connectedly, a poem that displays ...
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In this wide-ranging study the author examines the phenomenon of the ‘self-conscious poem’ — that is, a poem concerned with poetry or, more centrally if often connectedly, a poem that displays awareness of itself as a poem — in the work of the major Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The book freshly illuminates many famous lyrics and longer poems and re-values less regarded works such as The Excursion. For the author, self-consciousness is allied to the new status granted to poetry by the Romantics. His closely attentive readings suggest that self-consciousness in Romantic poetry often accompanies exploration of, even anxiety about, poetry's significance. Yet his emphasis falls on the imaginatively productive ends to which such exploration and anxiety are put. An extended coda looks at the bequest of Romantic self-consciousness to post-Romantic writers. It offers chapters comparing Yeats and Stevens, discussing later Auden's scepticism about poetry, and exploring the affecting intricacies of Amy Clampitt's Voyages: A Homage to John Keats. Throughout, the author challenges recent accounts of Romanticism by placing at the centre of his study poetry's imaginative and aesthetic value.Less
In this wide-ranging study the author examines the phenomenon of the ‘self-conscious poem’ — that is, a poem concerned with poetry or, more centrally if often connectedly, a poem that displays awareness of itself as a poem — in the work of the major Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The book freshly illuminates many famous lyrics and longer poems and re-values less regarded works such as The Excursion. For the author, self-consciousness is allied to the new status granted to poetry by the Romantics. His closely attentive readings suggest that self-consciousness in Romantic poetry often accompanies exploration of, even anxiety about, poetry's significance. Yet his emphasis falls on the imaginatively productive ends to which such exploration and anxiety are put. An extended coda looks at the bequest of Romantic self-consciousness to post-Romantic writers. It offers chapters comparing Yeats and Stevens, discussing later Auden's scepticism about poetry, and exploring the affecting intricacies of Amy Clampitt's Voyages: A Homage to John Keats. Throughout, the author challenges recent accounts of Romanticism by placing at the centre of his study poetry's imaginative and aesthetic value.
John Kerrigan
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199248513
- eISBN:
- 9780191697753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248513.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This book's chapters reproduce essays on such major figures as Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton, but also less celebrated writers, including Thomas Carew and — in a new piece — William Drummond, to ...
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This book's chapters reproduce essays on such major figures as Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton, but also less celebrated writers, including Thomas Carew and — in a new piece — William Drummond, to reconfigure the familiar and help extend the canon. Shakespeare looms large; his plays and poems, and his influence on Keats, are the subject of half the book. But themes and issues are pursued from the 1580s to the late Restoration. The book reassesses the nature of early modern texts — their production and reconstruction by writers, printers, theatre companies, and readers — and their relationship with socio-political circumstance. This book shows what criticism can do when closely engaged with verbal fabric and form. It concentrates on drawing out the distinctive qualities of poems and plays.Less
This book's chapters reproduce essays on such major figures as Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton, but also less celebrated writers, including Thomas Carew and — in a new piece — William Drummond, to reconfigure the familiar and help extend the canon. Shakespeare looms large; his plays and poems, and his influence on Keats, are the subject of half the book. But themes and issues are pursued from the 1580s to the late Restoration. The book reassesses the nature of early modern texts — their production and reconstruction by writers, printers, theatre companies, and readers — and their relationship with socio-political circumstance. This book shows what criticism can do when closely engaged with verbal fabric and form. It concentrates on drawing out the distinctive qualities of poems and plays.
Genevieve Liveley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199588541
- eISBN:
- 9780191741845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588541.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter explores an unexpected affinity between Romans and Romantics ‘on love’. It shows that one Roman poet in particular appears repeatedly reflected in the writings of the English Romantic ...
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This chapter explores an unexpected affinity between Romans and Romantics ‘on love’. It shows that one Roman poet in particular appears repeatedly reflected in the writings of the English Romantic poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Byron, Keats) on the subject of love: Ovid, in his Amores, Ars Amatoria, and his Metamorphoses offers an uncannily Romantic image of love — not least of all in his representation of Narcissus. Challenging received readings in which Narcissus is seen as a figure for aesthetic, poetic, and emotional superficiality, it is argued that the Romantic reception of Narcissus reveals hidden depths to this Roman figure, whose love for his own image rather represents a desire for beauty, poetry, and sympathy — a Romantic Narcissus who holds up a mirror to show Romans themselves reflecting Romantics ‘on love’.Less
This chapter explores an unexpected affinity between Romans and Romantics ‘on love’. It shows that one Roman poet in particular appears repeatedly reflected in the writings of the English Romantic poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Byron, Keats) on the subject of love: Ovid, in his Amores, Ars Amatoria, and his Metamorphoses offers an uncannily Romantic image of love — not least of all in his representation of Narcissus. Challenging received readings in which Narcissus is seen as a figure for aesthetic, poetic, and emotional superficiality, it is argued that the Romantic reception of Narcissus reveals hidden depths to this Roman figure, whose love for his own image rather represents a desire for beauty, poetry, and sympathy — a Romantic Narcissus who holds up a mirror to show Romans themselves reflecting Romantics ‘on love’.
Paul Turner
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122395
- eISBN:
- 9780191671401
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122395.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848 including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wanted ...
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This chapter explores the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848 including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wanted to be a painter, but did not like studying art at the Royal Academy Schools. So at twenty he stopped doing so, and with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848). This was a gesture of revolt, in a year of political revolutions, against the academic principle that a young artist should begin by imitating the old masters, instead of obeying his own individual impulse, and acting upon his own perception of Nature. The PRB was much influenced by literature, especially the poems of John Keats and Alfred Tennyson. Its literary organ, The Germ (1850), was designed by D. G. Rossetti to be not only an artistic manifesto, but also an outlet for poetry, particularly his own.Less
This chapter explores the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848 including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wanted to be a painter, but did not like studying art at the Royal Academy Schools. So at twenty he stopped doing so, and with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848). This was a gesture of revolt, in a year of political revolutions, against the academic principle that a young artist should begin by imitating the old masters, instead of obeying his own individual impulse, and acting upon his own perception of Nature. The PRB was much influenced by literature, especially the poems of John Keats and Alfred Tennyson. Its literary organ, The Germ (1850), was designed by D. G. Rossetti to be not only an artistic manifesto, but also an outlet for poetry, particularly his own.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122852
- eISBN:
- 9780191671579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122852.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This chapter explores poetry's concern with its status as poetry and with the status of poetry more generally. It argues that Keats's relevance to us resides, to a considerable degree, in the way his ...
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This chapter explores poetry's concern with its status as poetry and with the status of poetry more generally. It argues that Keats's relevance to us resides, to a considerable degree, in the way his whole-hearted pursuit of poetic excellence is crossed (though never deflected) by a fear that poetry may itself be ‘a mere Jack a lanthern’. Above all, it is fascinated by the different forms which ‘self-consciousness’ takes in Keats's poetry, examining his oeuvre in the light of the propositions and hidden challenges, even contradictions, in the ‘poetical Character’ letter which the poet wrote to Richard Woodhouse in October 1818. Among other things, the chapter suggests that the drama of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ has much to do with Keats's sense of the burden of imaginative experience — a burden which attracts and repels the poet — and that ‘Ode on Indolence’ is an underestimated and central poem, exploring the poet's wish not to be stirred out of an ‘indolence’ at once fruitless and potentially fertile.Less
This chapter explores poetry's concern with its status as poetry and with the status of poetry more generally. It argues that Keats's relevance to us resides, to a considerable degree, in the way his whole-hearted pursuit of poetic excellence is crossed (though never deflected) by a fear that poetry may itself be ‘a mere Jack a lanthern’. Above all, it is fascinated by the different forms which ‘self-consciousness’ takes in Keats's poetry, examining his oeuvre in the light of the propositions and hidden challenges, even contradictions, in the ‘poetical Character’ letter which the poet wrote to Richard Woodhouse in October 1818. Among other things, the chapter suggests that the drama of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ has much to do with Keats's sense of the burden of imaginative experience — a burden which attracts and repels the poet — and that ‘Ode on Indolence’ is an underestimated and central poem, exploring the poet's wish not to be stirred out of an ‘indolence’ at once fruitless and potentially fertile.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122852
- eISBN:
- 9780191671579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122852.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This chapter focuses on questions about the validity of certain historicist readings of Keats that depend on notions of art as displacement, but argues that the Hyperion project does register and ...
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This chapter focuses on questions about the validity of certain historicist readings of Keats that depend on notions of art as displacement, but argues that the Hyperion project does register and give shape to historical pressures, and that a principal means of such registering is the poetry's preoccupation with writing and the status of poetry. It suggests, in relation to the Induction to The Fall of Hyperion, that post-Romantic reflexiveness is ushered in by these lines, even as they can be viewed as speaking out of that ‘felt helplessness’ which Raymond Williams sees as afflicting Romantic poets.Less
This chapter focuses on questions about the validity of certain historicist readings of Keats that depend on notions of art as displacement, but argues that the Hyperion project does register and give shape to historical pressures, and that a principal means of such registering is the poetry's preoccupation with writing and the status of poetry. It suggests, in relation to the Induction to The Fall of Hyperion, that post-Romantic reflexiveness is ushered in by these lines, even as they can be viewed as speaking out of that ‘felt helplessness’ which Raymond Williams sees as afflicting Romantic poets.
