15721899 John Keats Romanticism

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John Keats

An Overview

John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months (1795-1821), yet his poetic

achievement is extraordinary. His writing career lasted a little more than five years (1814-

1820), and three of his great odes--"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Odeon Melancholy"--were written in one month. Most of his major poems were written between

his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and all his poems were written by his twenty-fifth

year. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank him as one of the great English poets.

He also wrote letters which T.S. Eliot calls "the most notable and the most important ever

written by any English poet."

His genius was not generally perceived during his lifetime or immediately after his

death. Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his

tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But nineteenth century

critics and readers did come to appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a

partial understanding of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual poet; they focused on hisvivid, concrete imagery; on his portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and on his

immersion in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic went so far as to assert not

merely that Keats had "a mind constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had no

mind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!"

(letter, November 22, 1817) has been cited to support this view.

With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry expanded; he was and is

praised for his seriousness and thoughfulness, for his dealing with difficult human conflicts

and artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living

"the ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what determines truth is

experience ("axioms are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses"). The publication

of Keats's letters, with their keen intellectional questioning and concern with moral and

artistic problems, contributed to this re-assessment. His letters throw light on his own poetic

practices and provide insight into writing in general.

Keats and Romanticism

Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of

their theories of literature and life, were drawn to lyric poetry; they even developed a new

form of ode, often called the romantic meditative ode. The literary critic Jack Stillinger

describes the typical movement of the romantic ode: The poet, unhappy with the real world,escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal. Disappointed in his mental flight, he returns to

the real world. Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because he

has not found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of his

situation, of the world, etc.; his views/feelings at the end of the poem differ significantly from

those he held at the beginning of the poem.

Themes in Keats's Major Poems

Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out

of...inner conflicts." For example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale"

and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined withdeath in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of

Basil."

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Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale"

somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of

actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast."

Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:

transient sensation or passion / enduring art dream or vision / reality

joy / melancholy

the ideal / the real

mortal / immortal

life / death

separation / connection

being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion

Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry. He wrote of a

young woman he found attactive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the

same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..." Love and death are

intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La

Belle Dame sans Merci." The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is destructive to love, like

Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia."

Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a

Nightingale") and narrative poems. Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not itself--it has

no self--it is every thing and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in

gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls the poet

"chameleon."

Keats's Imagery

Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch,

smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Keats

repeatedly combines different senses in one image, that is, he attributes the trait(s) of one

sense to another, a practice calledsynaesthesia. His synaesthetic imagery performs two major

functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally

experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings, the oneness of

all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these images the product of his "unrivaled ability to

absorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects."

Major Works

Endymion, while still displaying some of the flaws of Keats's earlier poetry, was alsograced with mythological, poetical, and artistic imagery. The story itself, chronicling the love

of Endymion and Diana, is based in myth, although Keats's knowledge of it was taken from

other English renderings of the myth, as Keats never learned Greek. The primary theme of the

poem has been described by critics Samuel C. Chew and Richard D. Altick (1948) as "the

quest of a unity transcending the flux of the phenomenal world." Keats's Hyperion, published

in his 1820 volume of poetry, was followed by the incomplete The Fall of Hyperion, which isregarded by most critics as Keats's attempt to revise the earlier work. Hyperion and The Fallof Hyperion, like Endymion, focus on mythological themes; the story centers on the Titans'

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fall to the triumphant Olympians. Some critics have suggested that the history of the French

Revolution played some role in Keats's construction of the poem. Other works considered to

be among Keats's greatest are the odes published in the 1820 volume, including "Ode to

Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The poems examine such

themes as the relationship between art and life, and the nature of human suffering.

Keats's Odes

Context

In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems in

the English language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes,

written between March and September 1819--astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four

years old. Keats's poetic achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which itended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode "To Autumn," in February 1821.

Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was still

young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease that

eventually killed Keats himself. When he was fifteen, Keats entered into a medical

apprenticeship, and eventually he went to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty,

he abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first

book of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential magazine, and

his second book attracted comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keats's

brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in

Hampstead.

In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During this

time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that enabled him to

write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he died. His health and his

finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer

climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death brought to an untimely

end one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century--indeed, one of the

most extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for

his work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was

writ on water"), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortlybefore his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among "the English poets" when

he had died.

Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism,

a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty

of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats's great odes are

quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination

and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of

human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their

idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all

Romantic preoccupations--though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats's.

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Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story--there is no unifying "plot" and no

recurring characters--and there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as

a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations

between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and develop the same themes, partake

of many of the same approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way, exhibit an

unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do not stand on

their own--they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of the sequence is that it canbe entered at any point, viewed wholly or partially from any perspective, and still prove

moving and rewarding to read. There has been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat

the voices that speak the poems--are they meant to be read as though a single person speaks

them all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode?

There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question itself is

wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is unmistakably Keats's own. Of

course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it is unlikely that all the events really

happened to Keats), but given their sincerity and their shared frame of thematic reference,

there is no reason to think that they do not come from the same part of Keats's mind--that is to

say, that they are not all told by the same part of Keats's reflected self. In that sense, there isno harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same voice. The

psychological progress from "Ode on Indolence" to "To Autumn" is intimately personal, and a

great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to imagine that the odes are spoken by a

sequence of fictional characters. When you think of "the speaker" of these poems, think of

Keats as he would have imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speaker's

trajectory from the numb drowsiness of "Indolence" to the quiet wisdom of "Autumn," try to

hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of Keats's extraordinary language.

In "Ode to a Nightingale"and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats tries to free himself from the

world of change by identifying with the nightingale, representing nature, or the urn,

representing art. These odes, as well as "The Ode to Psyche" and the "Ode to Melancholy,"

present the poet as dreamer; the question in these odes, as well as in "La Belle Dame Sans

Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," is how Keats characterizes the dream or vision. Is it a

positive experience which enriches the dreamer? or is it a negative experience which has the

potential to cut off the dreamer from the real world and destroy him? What happens to the

dreamers who do not awaken from the dream or do not awaken soon enough?

Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

Summary

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though

he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing

somewhere in the forest and says that his "drowsy numbness" is not from envy of the

nightingale's happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely; he is "too happy" that

the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and

shadows.

In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish

for wine, "a draught of vintage," that would taste like the country and like peasant dances,

and let him "leave the world unseen" and disappear into the dim forest with the

nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like toforget the troubles the nightingale has never known: "the weariness, the fever, and the fret"

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of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth

"grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," and "beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes."

In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not

through alcohol ("Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards"), but through poetry, which

will give him "viewless wings." He says he is already with the nightingale and describes

the forest glade, where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light thatbreaks through when the breezes blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says

that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them "in embalmed darkness":

white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, "the murmurous haunt of flies on

summer eves." In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying

that he has often been "half in love" with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in

many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale's song, the speaker thinks that the idea of

death seems richer than ever, and he longs to "cease upon the midnight with no pain" while

the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would

continue to sing, he says, but he would "have ears in vain" and be no longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not

"born for death." He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient

emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open

magic windows looking out over "the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." In

the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his

preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther

away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can no

longer recall whether the nightingale's music was "a vision, or a waking dream." Now that

the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.

Form

Like most of the other odes, "Ode to a Nightingale" is written in ten-line stanzas.

However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable--though not so much as

"Ode to Psyche." The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic

pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented

syllables instead of five. "Nightingale" also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme

scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final

three or four lines except "To Psyche," which has the loosest structure of all the odes).

Each stanza in "Nightingale" is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats's most basic scheme

throughout the odes.

Themes

With "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats's speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration

of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the

transience of life and the tragedy of old age ("where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray

hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies") is set against the eternal

renewal of the nightingale's fluid music ("Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!").

The speaker reprises the "drowsy numbness" he experienced in "Ode on Indolence," but

where in "Indolence" that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in

"Nightingale" it is a sign of too full a connection: "being too happy in thine happiness," asthe speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to

flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through

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alcohol--in the second stanza, he longs for a "draught of vintage" to transport him out of

himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the

idea of being "charioted by Bacchus and his pards" (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine

and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses

instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in "Indolence,"

"the viewless wings of Poesy."

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the

nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself

with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to

embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the

nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when

his meditation causes him to utter the word "forlorn," he comes back to himself,

recognizing his fancy for what it is--an imagined escape from the inescapable ("Adieu! the

fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf"). As the nightingale flies

away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to remember

whether he is awake or asleep.

In "Indolence," the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In "Psyche," he was willing to

embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the

nightingale's song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the

imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace

Poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and

renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his

celebration of music, the speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress

the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, "But

here there is no light"; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he "cannot see what

flowers" are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"which is in many ways a companion poem to "Ode to a Nightingale." In the later poem,

the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of

time; in "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it,

but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and without physical

manifestation.

Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He

is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the "still unravish'd bride

of quietness," the "foster-child of silence and slow time." He also describes the urn as a

"historian" that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and

asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems

to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could

be: "What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild

ecstasy?"

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of ayoung man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says

that the piper's "unheard" melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are

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unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is

frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third

stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never

shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be "for ever new," and

happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which

lapses into "breathing human passion" and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a

"burning forehead, and a parching tongue."

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a

group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going ("To

what green altar, O mysterious priest...") and from where they have come. He imagines

their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be

silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza,

the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, "doth tease us out of

thought." He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling

future generations its enigmatic lesson: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The speaker says

that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

Form

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" follows the same ode-stanza structure as the "Ode on

Melancholy," though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza.

Each of the five stanzas in "Grecian Urn" is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise

iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which

are variable. The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but

the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one,

lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four,

CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially "Autumn"and "Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the

second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first

four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly

explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas

more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic

structure closely at all.)

Themes

If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement with the fluid

expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays his attempt to engage withthe static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless

centuries to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense--it

does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker's

meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of

the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not

have to confront aging and death (their love is "for ever young"), but neither can they have

experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never

return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each timehe asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad

pursuit" and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: "What men or gods are

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these? What maidens loth?" Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens,

and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of

questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover

beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on

the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape fromtemporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the

eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is "far above" all

transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement

of intensity--when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a

sorrowful heart, a "burning forehead," and a "parching tongue." His recollection of these

conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he

abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though

they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the

"little town") and a destination (the "green altar"). But all he can think is that the town will

forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In

this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the

urn the whos and wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know

the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to

engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt

identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind

and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a

real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attemptfails simply because there is nothing more to say--once the speaker confronts the silence

and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this

subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts

to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change,

with its ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth eternity." If human life is a

succession of "hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a

separate and self-contained world. It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it

cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is

ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to

mankind--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret

in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"

no one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and

all ye need to know." It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn

addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate

his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the

equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for

such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary

human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the

weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all

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human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is

largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

Keats - La Belle Dame sans Merci - The role of the nature

In KeatsLa Belle Dame sans Merci, the role of nature is relatively simple. In this

poem, nature represents all that the protagonist (the knight) loves and needs. Obviously that

desire is embodied in the lady he meets in the meadows, but the subtle symbolism within

nature runs throughout the poem as well. If everything is right with the knight, nature is

blossoming. Indeed, perhaps part of the knight himself is nature, as hinted at in stanza three

when the unseen questioner comments I see a lily on thy brow/With anguish moist and fever

dew/And on thy cheeks a fading rose/Fast withereth too. On the surface, the two flowers can

be taken to designate the colour of the knights facial features - he is obviously tormenting

himself over some matter, and it is causing him to sweat and become pale. However, that the

metaphors used are flowers represents the force, the almost representation of nature within the

knight.

In literature, the sun is always brighter and the flowers always hold more beauty when

the main character is going through happy times. Humans tend to associate good weather and

health in the land around with good times in characters lives (and vice versa). This is exactly

what happens in La Belle Dame sans Merci. It is even evident from the very first line the

knight says, in stanza four: I met a lady in the meads. A meadow is the perfect location in

this instance for the knights woeful tale to begin. In the readers mind, it is a simple setting,

but clearly a place of great natural growth. We imagine everything as bright and grass-

covered, with perhaps a sprinkling of flowers here and there. This is the very essence of

nature at her best, and so begins the knights happiest time.

Soon after the knight and the lady meet, he makes three garlands for her out of the

flowers found in the meadow. Stanza five, where this event can be found, is entirely a

metaphor for making love. The knight, in a way, is nature, so when the lady puts on the

garlands, she is actually adorning herself with the knight. To solidify the lovemaking theory,

the last two lines speak of the ladys reaction: She looked at me as she did love/and made

sweet moan. The connection is quite evident - the lady is enjoying the knights advances

intensely, in both the surface scene and the sexual underneath.

The same symbolism that is true for stanza five also applies to seven. Finally, we see

that perhaps the lady represents nature in a way as well when she gives the knight roots of

relish sweet/And honey wild, and manna dew. These things are sweet, it is true, but have

little real substance. Man does not live on bread alone; likewise, one cannot survive on

honey alone. The manna dew is especially symbolic. Manna is the substance sent by God to

the Israelites in order to survive in the wilderness. Obviously the lady cannot have given the

knight real manna, but what she did give him he thinks of as equal to that which God gave the

children of Israel. However, she only gave him manna dew. As the knight reflects upon his

encounter, he speaks of it in those terms because, while at the time he thought it was the stuffof life, the end-all be-all of experiences, he realises now that it was merely a hoax, and has no

realsubstance. In the final stanza, the symbolism is clear. ...the sedge is withered from the

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lake/And no birds sing exemplifies the knights intense sadness. The whole experience can

be summed up in that nature meets something that looks like its counterpart, but is rather its

undoing.

ROMANTICISM

Romanticism was arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s. Itsinfluence was felt across continents and through every artistic discipline into the mid-

nineteenth century, and many of its values and beliefs can still be seen in contemporary

poetry.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the Romantic movement, as its beginnings

can be traced to many events of the time: a surge of interest in folklore in the mid- to late-

eighteenth century with the work of the brothers Grimm, reactions against neoclassicism and

the Augustan poets in England, and political events and uprisings that fostered nationalistic

pride.

Romantic poets cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world, idealism,

physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural. Romantics set

themselves in opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic

precepts to embrace freedom and revolution in their art and politics. German romantic poets

included Fredrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and British poets such as

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord

Byron, and John Keats propelled the English Romantic movement. Victor Hugo was a noted

French Romantic poet as well, and romanticism crossed the Atlantic through the work of

American poets like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. The Romantic era produced many of

the stereotypes of poets and poetry that exist to this day (i.e., the poet as a highly tortured and

melancholy visionary).

Romantic ideals never specifically died out in poetry, but were largely absorbed into

the precepts of many other movements. Traces of romanticism lived on in French symbolism

and surrealism and in the work of prominent poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Rainer

Maria Rilke.

Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic,"

although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international

artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in

Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.

Historical Considerations

It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic

Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages

themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the

convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the

first edition ofLyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of

Hymns to the Nightby Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of bothSir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts,

Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth

century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, likemusic and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also

permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England,

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the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for

Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of

revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an

age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the

initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at thecore of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and

practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major

precepts have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period.

Imagination

The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This

contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The

Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or

creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even

deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is

the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps

humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world

around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it

with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate

synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of

appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally,

imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to

be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Nature"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often

presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language.

For example, throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting

commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine

elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the

Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature as a

healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial

constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature

the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the

scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the

rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with theanalogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics

gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing

"sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature

poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature

poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.

Symbolism and myth

Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art.

In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic

language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, andwere thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have

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been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of

language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts.

Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on theimportance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater

attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this

emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred.

Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful

feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in

the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for

its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic

theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of

illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person

lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a

persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Songof Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind

(the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components.

Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and

Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such asByron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the

development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The

artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.

Contrasts With Neoclassicism

Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast

with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface"

to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later

statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United

States--they self-consciously asserted their differences from the previous age (the literary

"ancien regime"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special

features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two

major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the

human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and

indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general

or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable subject matter than thepeculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of

Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I

dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am

different."--this view was challenged.

Individualism: The Romantic Hero

The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the

eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. In

another way, of course, Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has

already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types from Prometheus to CaptainAhab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was

Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic

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striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for

activity--that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact

Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's ParadiseLost.)

In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint,

maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the"rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as

"inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master. Although in both

Germany and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part

the Romantics allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had

dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire

had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith

were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute

systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and

humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live.

The Everyday and the Exotic

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was

complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local

color" (through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday

language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through

popular literary forms, such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to

imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above

examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage

had promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather

than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad,

to contemporary country folk who used "the language of commen men," not an artificial

"poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often

idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).

Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time

and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of

existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of

"objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical

combinations. In the Lyrical Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to

divide their labors according to two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural:

Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridgewould try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge

vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly body, as

characterized in Victor Hugo'sHunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, is

another variant of the paradoxical combination

The Romantic Artist in Society

In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world

around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they

began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists

interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social andpolitical consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so

strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or

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wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another

trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining

boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and

differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also

sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a partial

inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary

and life styles.) Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, oftenuncomprehending audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence

about this situation--it was earlier pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her

"letters" to the world would go unanswered. Yet a significant Romantic theme became the

contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine." Unfortunately, in many ways, this

distance between artist and public remains with us today.

Spread of the Romantic Spirit

Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic

Movement affected not just literature, but all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of

Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also geographicallysignificant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia, and westward to America. For example, in

America, the great landscape painters, particularly those of the "Hudson River School," and

the Utopian social colonies that thrived in the 19th century, are manifestations of the

Romantic spirit on this side of the Atlantic.

Adapted from A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion Text for Core Studies 6,

Landmarks of Literature, English Department, Brooklyn College.

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15721899 John Keats Romanticism

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