Byron,Keats e Shelley

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	2 (2)
Download:	144
Data:	08.02.2001
Numero di pagine:	7
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

George Gordon, Lord Byron (e dì Byron !)
LIFE
Byron was born in London in 1788, and was born lame (zoppo), although he was a man of great personal beauty. In 1807 he published a volume of lyrics entitled Hours of Idleness.
In 1809 he took a seat in the House of Lords, and did a long travel through many Europe country. In 1811 he returned to England and was introduced to the elegant Whig society of London, and acquired vast notoriety. In 1812 and 1813 the publication of some of his work made him more famous, emphasising his image as a romantic lover, but tormented by melancholy and scepticism.
He married Anne Milbanke, but after some months Anne left London, demanding a separation from her husband. There was a great scandal, so Byron left England and spend the rest of his life at first in Switzerland, near Shelleys, and after in Italy in Venice, where he met Countess Guiccioli, who was his mistress for 4 years. He settled in Ravenne, where took part in the Carbonari conspiracy, n Pisa and in Genoa. He was elected a member of the London Greek Committee, a group who supported the cause of Greece against Turkish domination, and he spend his energy and money in this campaign. He died in 1824.
WORKS:
• Oriental Tales (The Corsair and Lara): these tales, set in oriental countries and based on the same plot (love, separation, death and revenge), brought Byron great popularity. In all of them the male protagonist embodies the ideal of Byronic hero.
• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (autobiographical poem), in 4 cantos,. It is based on Byron’s travel. Harold is another version of Byronic hero, with many autobiographical elements. In the first and second cantos Byron speak about his travel in Europe, especially in Portugal, Spain and Greece. The third was written in Switzerland and show a deeper power of self-analysis. The fourth was composed in Italy and contains impression of Italian towns and their monuments.
• The vision of Judgement: a political satire in ottava rima.
• Don Juan: an epic satire in 16 cantos. It’s a humorous poem, full of wit and brilliance, but also scenes of pathos, idyll and tragedy. With the pretext of telling the story of Don Juan’s love adventures, Byron attacks the false respectability and the social codes current in England at the time.
FEATURES AND THEMES:
Byron was a mixture of idealism and rationalism, so we can find 2 contrasting sides of B.’s personality and poetry: the romantic (as in Childe Harold and in the Oriental Tales) and the satirical (as in Don Juan)
Byron can be regarded as a romantic in:
• His life: he was an aristocrat and handsome; he was a prolific, successful poet, but misunderstood.
• His worship of liberty and his rebellion against any form of sham (finzione) and oppression.
• His titanism.
• His satanism.
• His individualism.
• His melancholy.
• His interest in history, mainly past ages and fallen empires.
• His nationalism, which led him to join first the Carbonari and then the Greeks against the Turks.
• His appreciation of nature: he hasn’t pantheistic view of nature, he sees nature as a reflection of himself.
• His taste for exoticism and Gothicism.
• His realisation of the so-called Byronic hero.

C.A.T. 10: The Byronic Hero
Conrad is a pirate chief, and captures the imagination because of he is taciturn and his smile is only a sneer (ghigno), his heart is made had by a self-inflicted penance, his soul is compelled to hate as a punishment for having love too deeply. His life was stormy and wild and he is a victim of fate and nature. He is very proud so sometimes has fit of generosity or commits crimes. People cannot penetrate his soul but feel attracted by his mysterious charm. In Conrad Byron reflect himself: he modelled his image on that of his ideal hero, a character taken from Milton’s Satan and from the Gothic novel; a violent, mysterious and dark man, with a great courage, at the end he redeemed by a passion for a woman. Byronic hero feels the victim of fate, but he maintains dignity and pride, making him great even in his defeat.
BYRON THE NON-ROMANTIC:
• His criticism of society.
• His deflation of romantic ideals.
• His sense of fun.
• His ironic distrust of his own emotions.
• His monk-heroic attitude.
• His great wit.
• His concern with the true reality of things opposed to the idealism.
• His concern with Man in Society opposed to Man in Nature
• His use of satirical couplets like Pope, and ottava rima.
• His lucid way of writing.
THE VISION OF JUDGEMENT:
The poem is a reply to Southey, who had written a poem to celebrate the dead king. Byron replied with a parody, he not only ridiculed the poor style, lack of inspiration and hypocrisy of Southey’s poem, but he alternated epic poetry with grotesque, social and political satire and humorous passage.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (ma che cazzo di nome ha !)
LIFE:
he was born into an aristocratic family in 1792, and he was intolerant of authority. He was also very fond (interessato) of science, which he considered as a kind of magic. At the age of 12 he was send to Elton (an aristocratic public school) where he spend 6 unhappy years, which increased his rebellious spirit. Here he came to be know as “mad Shelley”, and he showed his religious scepticism; at the end he went to Oxford in 1810, where met William Godwin, a philosopher. Bun in 1811 he was expelled, so he decided to live in London whit his sisters. In 1813 made the acquaintance of Godwin. He had many wifes (3 o 4) and travel a lot (England and Italy). He died in Viareggio in 1822.
WORKS:
all his important works were written from 1811 to 1822:
• The Necessity of Atheism: a pamphlet where he explain that there isn’t rational proof on the existence of God.
• A defence of Poetry: a long essay on the important of poetry.
• The Cenci: a drama inspired by the story of Beatrice Cenci; this is above all a hymn to heroic resistance to tyranny
• Adonais: an elegy on the death of Keats.
• Ode to the West Wind
VIEW OF POETRY AND POETS:
S.’s view of poetry is summed up in his A Defence of Poetry, where he underlined the everlasting importance of poetry:
“Poetry in something of divine / Poetry isn’t like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will / Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds / Poetry makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world / Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in Man / Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and adds beauty to that which is most deformed / Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
FEATURES AND THEMES
S. was a supporter of French Revolution, but his character was marked by strong contradictions. He was a passionate rebel, and his ideas are present in his works; most of his poem are in fact politically aggressive. He was a rationalist but was an idealist in his inner life. He rebelled against society because he loved man.
Love and freedom are the points of his character and his poetry. He believed that any type of institution (church, state) led to a superstition and selfishness and man could express his capabilities only when he is free. But freedom wasn’t to mean licence; there must be laws, but there must be love, that is the principle of all actions, the force that moved physical and inner world.
Together with Beauty, Justice and Truth, Love was for S. one of the universal ideas. He believed in the separation of the world of the senses from the super-sensory world, which could be grasped only through reason. Like Plato, he maintained: 1)matter doesn’t exist and the only reality is the spirit; 2)nature is as alive as a man and is endowed with a soul.
Each idea derives from the idea of Good, which is the source of all things, and the life here is like a veil. S. believed that man had the power to attain moral perfection. S thought that a God who was both Love and Almightiness could not exist, because the 2 terms are contradictory; he in fact condemned all dogmas and religious practices and believed that religion is an instrument of slavery. He proclaimed himself an Atheist, but from atheism he modulated to a belief in a universal spiritual force, of which man is a part: man can change and die, but his spirit will join the eternal Spirit of the Universe, which continually creates new life, so his religion was pantheistic
For him Nature, which sympathised with man, is for him an eternal source of joy and happiness. S. saw nature permeated by the great spiritual force which animated everything but, unlike Words, he found no message for man in it, but only pleasure. For S. inspiration was immediate; ecstasy was in fact the product of direct perception.
To make his ideas more vivid, S. made use of images and symbols; but too frequent a use of metaphors and symbols sometimes makes it difficult to realise what S. means.

John Keats

Keats was born in London in 1795 and he was the first of four children. After his father died, his mother with her children moved to Edmonton, but she died of tuberculosis, and K. had been sent to school, where he had not show any cultural interest, but he began to be attracted by books and particularly by classical antiquity. He received an apothecary’s certificate, but he decided to give up medicine and devoted himself to literature. In 1815 K. made friend with the editor Hunt, and in his magazine, “The Examiner”, K. published his first poems. In 1818 decided, with a friend, to travel around the England, but he was obliged to return in London. He had a terrible shock from 2 savage attacks on his poem Endymion, but K. responded with spirit and started writing another poem Hyperion. 1819 was a useful year because K. composed almost all of his greatest poems, but this creativity stopped after only a year. In 1820 K. decided to come in Italy, where he died at the age of 25. On his tombstone there isn’t his name but only these word: “here lies one whose name was writ in water”.
WORKS:
• Edymion: a long poem on the love of the shepherd Edym. For the moon goddess Diana.
• Hyperion: an unfinished epic fragment on the defeat of the Titans by Gods
• The Fall of Hyperion; A Dream: a revision of Hyp., in which, by change in the text, K. tried to get away from Milton’s influence.
• La Belle Dame Sans Merci: a ballad on the idealisation of romantic love.
• The Great Odes: Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn.
FEATURES AND THEMES:
K.’s life was troubled by family tragedies, financial problems; so his poetry was influenced by his impending death and tragic events of his life and most of his poem are imbued with a sense of melancholy, death and mortality.
K. turned to poetry as the only reason for life (poetry as something Absolute), the only means with which to defeat death. Poetry reproduced what his own Imagination suggest to him: and what strunk his Imagination most was Beauty, that beauty which reveals itself to the enchantment of the sense. Beauty became the central theme of all K.’s poem. The memory of something of beauty was to him a source of joy; in fact in his poem Hedymion he wrote: “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”. Beauty could be either physical (women, nature, etc.) or spiritual (friendship, love, etc.). but physical beauty was the expression of spiritual beauty. An artist can in fact die but the beauty he has created lives on. Imagination is very important for K. because it recognised Beauty in existing thing, but also creates Beauty in his dreams. For K. Imagination is more powerful than speculative reasoning, but a complex mind is one in which exist sensation and thought. K. formulated a theory of negative capability; the idea is that the poet as such no identity; he isn’t concerned with a moral judgement, but he must have the ability to negate his own personality and open himself to the complex reality around him. What ancient Greek art and poetry meant to him was only one thing, beauty. He turned to this distant classical world for inspiration, but he recreated it through the eyes of a Romantic