Letteratura inglese

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Download:	329
Data:	06.11.2000
Numero di pagine:	18
Formato di file:	.txt (File di testo)

English Literature - Written by Bresciani Umberto
http://digilander.iol.it/umbecr
[email protected]
Introduction - The Romantic Period
1. Jane Austen
2. William Blake
a. The Lamb
b. The Tyger
c. Elohim Creating Adam
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
a. The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
4. William Wordsworth
a. I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
b. My Heart Leaps Up
5. Percy Bysshe Shelley
a. Ozymandias
6. John Keats
a. Ode On A Grecian Urn

Introduction. The Romantic Period (1776-1837). The Context
The Romantic Period is also labelled the "Age of Revolution", because it starts with the American Declaration of Independence (signed in Philadelphia in 1776) and is characterised by the effects of the political revolution in France (1789) and the Industrial Revolution at home.
The French Revolution destroyed the old social order in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. The English reaction to the French Revolution was initially positive. The event was greeted with general enthusiasm and poets like Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth belevied that the event was one of the most important moments of history. Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France expressed his negative view of the French Revolution: he believed that the event was a return to savagery and he thought that the reforms were better than the revolution. He thought that the human misery was caused by an unfair an uncaring society. Tom Paine was a Radical and criticized the corrupt and malign established institutions. He hoped that a democratic movement might spread in the whole of Europe. The English Radicalism was a result of the French Revolution. English Radicalism was based on the demand for radical reforms of the electoral system and for universal suffrage. It was combatted by the Tory Government through restrictions on freedom of speech and association and through the armed forces. In 1819 there was Peterloo Massacre, a conflict between the government and the reformers: five people were killed and many were wounded in a meeting for Parliamentary Reform. The success of the Government tactis (for example the First Reform Act of 1832) and the disillusionment over the unsuccesful French Revolution placated the Radical movement.
The Industrial Revolution began in England around 1780. It was a radical change in the way goods were made (hand-made before and factory-based later). One of the most important factors that produced the Industrial Revolution was the population growth. In fact the growing population provided a great number of consumer and workers for factories. In 1811-12 there was a conflict between employers and workers: in the Luddite Riots textile workers attacked the new mills and machinery which had put them out of work.
More people looking for work helped keep down wages and led to low prices and higher profits. Many people moved to the factory towns to find work in the mills and factories. Their living conditions were in general very poor and working conditions in factory and mines very dangerous. As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution there was a phenomenon called the Transport Revolution. More and better roads and a network of canals were built to bring raw materials to factories and send finished goods to market. During the Industrial Revolution there were also working-class movements. The workers started to form trade unions to look after their interests. Their aim was to improve the working conditions and obtain higher wages.
Romanticism was not an English phenomenon only. It affected in different ways and at different times the whole of European culture.
The four leading ideas of the English Romanticism were:
- the stress on imagination and on individual experience;
- the conception of the artist as an original creator free from any neo-classical control by models and rules;
- the conception of the nature as a living organic structure;
- use of imagery, symbolism and mith.
Beautiful is referred to regular, harmonious and delicate things; sublime is referred to gigantic, violent and gloomy ones. It includes picturesque views (waterfalls, volcanoes, wild countryside...).
1. Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane Austen led a very uneventful life. She was educated at home by her own father.
Her fiction reveals eighteen-century influence: her concept of the novel derived from Richardson and Fielding (delineation of character through dialogue and use of narrative tecnique). Cronologically she belongs to Romantic Period, but she's anti-Romantic. Their works were not fully appreciated by her contemporaries. In fact she didn't share her contemporaries'attitude towards life and satirized its excesses. She believed, in the classical tradition, that human feelings should be controlled by reason, both in novels and in real life.
The world of her novels is about love and marriage among the landed gentry; her main theme is the protagonist's growing self-awareness, judged with irony and according to the narrator's strict moral code. Her novels are serious but very entertaining. She disapproved the lack of self-command, the lack of self-knowledge, vanity and irresponsability.
She employs a first person omniscient narrator, but an unobtrusive one. In fact her judgements are implicit in the choice of words and phrases, in the use of verbal and situational irony and in the general tone.
The main features of her novels are: use of an omniscient narrator, use of an ironical tone and the ability to create well-rounded characters and lively dialogue.
Pride And Prejudice is based on the Bennet family, who belong to the country gentry, a middling social class living in the country. Mrs Bennet is anxious to get her daughters married, because their estate is 'entailed'.
In Northanger Abbey the protagonist, Catherine Morland, is the target of the narrator's irony. Jane Austen didn't share the Gothic literature, based on a heavy emotional atmosphere.
William Blake (1757-1827)
William Blake was born in London in 1757 into a lower-class family. In 1789 he published Songs of Innocence. He engraved, instead of printing, his poems, adding a picture that translated the poetic theme in visual terms.
The state of innocence is the condition of man in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. It is also the condition of the child who has not yet experienced the evils of life. The world of innocence is based on the feelings of love and generosity (happines, freedom, harmonious relationships). Blake uses the images of the child and the lamb to externalize the concept of innocence. Experience is the world of adult life, characterised by sounds and sights of distress.
Themes and main features of Blake's poetry:
Imagination - For Blake is the ability to see more deeply into the life of things. The poet, the child and the man in a state of innocence are gifted with imagination. There are many ways of seeing and responding to reality. The poet through the eyes of imagination can see beyond surface reality.
Criticism of society - Blake was involved in the political and social issues surrounding the American and French Revolutions. He supported the London riots for American independence and was sympathetic to the egalitarian claims of the French revolution. He criticized the marriage and the the institution of monarchy, that oppressed the people. He didn't share the indifference of the Church, that didn't protect the weak.
Interest in children - The child and the theme of childhood are to be found in Songs of Innocence (The Lamb, The Chimney Sweeper)and in Songs of Experience. In The Lamb the child is an innocent new-born infant loved and protected by God. In Songs of Experience the child, neglected by parents and society, is symbolic of the oppressed.
Style - It's fresh, simple, child-like and rich in images.
2a. The Lamb (from Songs Of Innocence, 1789)
This poem is taken from Blake's Songs of Innocence, published in 1789. This collection of poems is in contrast with another one: Songs of Experience, printed later, in 1794. The two collections of poems are contrasting but also complementary, because they are "two contrary states of the human soul". Childhood is age of ignorance and innocence, while adult life is age of experience.
The poem consists of two stanzas. In the first line of each stanza the poet is talking to the lamb about creation. The two first lines of the first stanza are both retorical questions.
In this poem Blake shows his positive view of God and creation. A harmonious relationship exists between the loving creator and the lamb. God demonstrates his love for his creatures and shows his happy attitude towards his creation. He is good and generous: he "gave life", "gave clothing", "gave voice" and "bid thee [the lamb] the feed"; in the second stanza Blake says that the creator is "meek" and "mild".
In the poem the lamb is the religious symbol of innocence. The lamb, as a child, is in a state of innocence (the condition of man in the Garden of Eden before the Fall) because he has not yet experienced the evils of life.
In the second stanza the poet says that he's a child: "I, a child, and thou a lamb". He is not really a child but he's as a child in a state of innocence.
Blake uses simple lexis and syntax like in the Bible. He uses also art devices typical of children's songs, like the repetition. The poem is fresh, simple and child-like. It is also more optmistic than The Tyger.
2b. The Tyger (from Songs of Experience, 1794)
The Tyger is usually considered the companion poem of The Lamb. The text is a long sequence of questions for which there is no answer. The questions in the poem are all about the Creator of the tiger. They describe the creature with negative connotations and suggest what the Creator might be like.
The tiger is powerful, strong, terrifying, but it is also fine in its "fearful symmetry": the negative adjective (fearful) is in contrast with the positive connotation (symmetry). God is compared to a blacksmith. He is powerful and strong.
While in The Lamb there is a positive view of the Creator and the creation, in this poem there is a negative view of God. The tiger is the symbol of his power: "what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?". He is no longer a good father but the dreadful Creator of the tiger: "did he who made the Lamb make thee?". The tiger belongs to the world of experience, a state of mind where imagination is repressed.
2c. Elohim Creating Adam (1795)
The work is a colour print finished in pen and watercolour. The technique used is peculiar to Blake. It represents the creation of Adam by Elohim (one of the names used in the Bible for God the Father). In the picture the creation is not a happy event. Blake represents the Creator like a winged God that doesn't look very happy. He is old, powerful and worried. Adam is entwined by a snake symbolic of the world of pain and sorrow he is about to enter. The man, portrayed in a state of submission, is anxious, unhappy; perhaps he's afraid of ignote. We are not sure that he's really coming to life.
Behind the Creator and his creature there is the sphere of the world sorrounded by black clouds and thick beams of light against a dark blue sky. The cold and dark colours of the background suggest a dull and gloomy atmosphere. Distinct and sharp outlines are used to foreground the shapes of Elohim, Adam and the natural elements of the picture. Blake's strong and mainly curved lines suggest the tension and the energy of the creation.
The painting suggests a negative view of the creation. In Songs of Innocence the lamb is a demonstration of God's love for his creatures, while in this painting God seems to create men to suffer. Adam is about to enter in a world that represses spontaneity.
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
In 1797 he became friendly with William Wordwsorth and his sister Dorothy. Together they assembled an anthology of their work, Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the major landmarks in the history of English Literature. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner belongs to this collection. His drug addiction broke his friendship with Wordsworth in 1810. The publication of Christabel And Other Poems in 1816 and of Biographia Literaria in 1817 made his literary reputation. His works on Shakespeare were particularly successfull: they helped to lay the basis for modern Shakesperean studies. The dream-like quality and the higly evocative language of his poems (he is remembered especially for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and for Kubla Khan) have established him as one of the great Romantic poets.
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798) tells the story of a Mariner who is punished for killing an Albatross. His shipmates are also punished because they justified his crime. They die from thirst one by one while the ship is becalmed on the ocean. The Mariner's penance is more terrible because it will never end. He manages to return to his country but he has to travel endlessly to tell people about his experience and teach them to love and respect all the creatures of God. The sun is a symbol of a stern divine justice, the calm symbolizes the desolation of a sinful soul, the rotting sea reflects the Mariner's soul troubled by guilt, the moonlight announces God's forgiveness. Strange incidents and disquieting details (e.g., the hypnotic power of Mariner's eyes and his ghostly appearance) build up a supernatural and eerie atmosphere. The Rime reproduces the traditional form of a ballad but with variations. The stanza is basically a 4-line stanza but there are also stanzas with 5 or more lines. The typical abab rhyme of the ballad is not very regular. Untypical are the length of the story, the long descriptions of natural landscapes and the moral drawn at the end. Two interpretations of the rime are particulary interesting. The first interpretation is religious. The killing of the Albatross is a sin against God or nature, the Mariner's sufferings are a form of purgatorial fire and his return to his country represents salvation. The second interpretation may be called aesthetic: the Mariner is seen as the artist searching for beauty and self-knowledge. He passes through a terrible time of trial, and is eventually saved by the power of imagination (watching the beautiful sea snakes). His mission is to pass on his discovery of truth to ordinary men, but he only finds a largely uncomprehending audience (the Wedding-Guest).
3a. The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)
PART I An ancient Mariner stopped one of three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast. The Wedding-Guest was costrained to hear the adventure of the old man. His ship sailed with a good wind and a fair weather. When he reached the equator a strong storm drove the ship towards the South Pole. Then a great Albatross appeared and followed the ship till it was killed by the ancient Mariner.
PART II The ancient Mariner was cursed by his shipmates because he killed the bird of good luck. But when the fog disappeared they justified the crime and became complices. But the ship suddenly stopped when it reached the equator. Slimy things went out from the sea and frightened the shipmates. Later they hanged the Albatross around the Mariner's neck because they considered him the responsible for what happened.
PART III All the crew died. The Mariner was the only to survive.
PART IV The Wedding-Guest thought that the ancient Mariner was a ghost, but the Mariner assured him of his bodily life and continued to tell the story. He sailed seven nights and seven days alone and he saw the curse in the eyes of his dead shipmates. When he took a look to the sky he beheld God's creatures by the light of the moon, the spell started to break and the Albatross fell off and sank into the sea.
PART V and VI After the spell was broken, angelic spirits entered the bodies of the ship's crew and made the ship move on. They left the bodies only when the Mariner was again in sight of his native country. The ship sank but the Mariner was saved.
PART VII He had been forgiven but his penance had not ended. His fate was to travel from land to land to tell his tale and teach to love and respect all the creatures of God.
The mariner should still suffer penance after being forgiven because he has to tell people about his experience and teach respect for life and for God's creatures.
The Mariner's portrait is not very detailed. He is described with few adjectives: he has "skinny" hands, "glittering" eyes and a "long grey beard". I'm not sure that he is a real and true-to-life figure. The Wedding-Guest thought that he was a dead soul.
In the Rime there are different natural elements:
ANIMATE ELEMENTS the ice, the blast, the Albatross;
INANIMATE ELEMENTS the sea, the mist, the snow, the breeze, the ocean;
PERSONIFIED ELEMENTS the sun, the storm blast and the moon.
The nature is presented in a realistic and in a symbolic way. Natural elements evoke real images in the reader's mind (the fury of the storm, the land of ice, mist and snow), but they have also a deeper symbolic meaning (the sun, the calm, the rotting sea and the moon light). The world of the Rime is, like that of a dream, a juxtaposition of ordinary experience and supernatural events.
Part IV marks a turning point in the story. The Mariner sails seven days and seven nights alone ("Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!"), he sees the curse in the eyes of his dead shipmates ("But oh! more horrible than that / Is a curse in a dead man's eye!") and he despises the creature of the calm ("The many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie: / And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I"). When he beholds God's creatures of the great calm and blesses them in his heart ("O happy living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare: / A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware") the spell begins to break and he is able to pray ("The selfsame moment I could pray: / And from my neck so free / The Albatross fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea"). At the beginning of Part IV the Mariner is tired and frightened by the curse; he can't pray and he wants to die. At the end of Part IV he blesses the sea snakes and he declares their beauty and their happiness; finally he is able to pray.
4. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth on the edge of the Lake District. In 1797 a visit by Coleridge marked the beginning of an important literary friendship which resulted in the planning of the Lyrical Ballads (1798). He spent most of his life in the Lake District, "his dear native region". When he travelled to France in 1791 he was sympathetic to the French Revolution, but when the revolution turned to tyranny his political views became conservative.
Themes
a) Nature It is Wordsworth's most important subject and it is used in a variety of senses in his poems. Wordsworth would be described as the poet of the relationship between man and nature.
- The first meaning is that of the countryside as opposed to the town. The landscape is mainly rural and solitary as in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud where the poet sees "a host of golden daffodils".
- The second meaning is that of nature as a source of feelings. Many of his poems are essentially a record of man's response to nature. In these poems man becomes a part of nature.
- Nature is also a life-force. It is a goddes that manifests herself in the wild countryside. Wordsworth has a pantheistic view of the world which is seen as an expression of God and permeated by God.
b) The child and childhood "The age of Reason" had generally valued children not for what they are but for the adults they might become. Because of its emphasis on reason the previous age did not appreciate the irrationality of childhood. In the latter part of the 18th century Rousseau reversed the status of childhood. He saw it as the most important period in man's life because it is the time when man is closest to God and can feel the glorious splendour of the natural world around him. Wordsworth shared Rousseau's ideas and thought that when the child grows into a man his relation to the world of nature changes because the grown-up man cannot feel its splendour.
c) Poetry and the poet In his opinion, the poet was a gifted craftsman observing and copying nature. He rejected the eighteenth-century rules which restricted the poet's freedom. He used "a selection of language really used by men" instead of the artificial poetic diction of the previous age. He believed in the creative power of imagination and he felt that the poet was "a man speaking to men", yet set apart from the rest by his ability to feel deeply, to respond to nature and to articulate his feelings. His task was to unveil the beauty of familiar sights and to teach men to enter into communion with nature.
Although a very different poet, Wordsworth has much in common with Blake - youthful radicalism, visionary philosophising, reverence for the power of imagination, sympathy for ordinary people and a preference for simple language.
4a. I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud (1804)
The poem is a description of a memorable experience in the Lake District when during a walk Wordsworth came upon a bank of daffodils beside a lake.
There are different images conveyed by the poet:
IMAGES OF QUANTITY "I saw a crowd" (3), "a host" (4), "thousand saw I" (11);
IMAGES OF COLOUR "golden" (4), "continuous as the stars that shine" (7);
IMAGES OF MOVEMENT "fluttering and dancing" (6), "stretched in never-ending line" (9), "tossing their heads" (12), "the waves beside them danced" (13).
The similes, the repetitions, the inversions and the extensive use of consonantal sounds reinforce the ideas of quantity, colour and movement.
The landscape of the poem is rural and solitary. There is an emotional, responsive and joyful relation between nature and the poet. Nature is a source of feelings and produces an emotional response in the poet.
In the first three stanzas the poet is in a mood of joy. He is amazed at "the show" of the daffodils: "A poet could not but be gay / in such a jocund company". In the last stanza the memory of the bank of daffodils fills his heart with pleasure and his vacant and thoughtful mood becomes a joyful mood. In the last stanza the poet changes the tense and the setting because the scene of the daffodils is the record of a memory.
4b. My Heart Leaps Up (1802)
This poem, like many others by Wordsworth, has its starting point in a personal experience: the sight of the rainbow. The emotion he feels is a temporary one (the rainbow disappears quickly) but also a permanent one: the poet says "So was it" (line 3), "So is it now" (line 4) and "So be it when I shall grow old".
In line 7 the poet says: "The Child is father of the Man". This is a paradox, because the man should be father of the child. The sentence has the form of a maxim. The word "father" is not used literally. Its figurative meaning is that childhood experiences shape the personality of adults. The function of a paradox is to surprise the reader and alert him/her to a broader, deeper meaning. The paradox in line 7 is meant also to universalize a personal experience.
In this poem, like in the poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, nature is a source of joy. Love of nature ("natural piety") is an adult attitude formed by childhood experience.
5. Percy Bisshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 into a family of country gentry. He never gratuated because in 1811 he was expelled from University College (Oxford) for publishing The Necessity of Atheism, a pamphlet in which he asserted that God's existence is not provable. When the marriage with Harriet Westbroof failed he eloped with Mary Godwin, the daughter of the anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. They travelled to the Continent and joined their friend Byron in Switzerland for some time. He was a rebel from his early life. He supported a variety of causes: republicanism, parliamentary reform, Irish independence, vegetarianism and free love. In 1818 he published The Revolt of Islam, a long poem in which he preached bloodless revolution. He did not believe in God, but in some power pervading the universe, which he called "Love" or "the One" and visualised in images of light and fire. He was courageus, impetuos and determinated. He was drowned on the bay of Spezia in a boating accident in 1822. He claimed for the poet the function of making the world feel in harmony "with hopes and fears it heeded not". According to Shelley, the poet was a prophet of social change. Ozymandias is a sonnet. The careful choice of language underlines the remoteness of the place and conveys the character of Ozymandias as scornful, ambitious and cruel.
5a. Ozymandias (1818)
This sonnet refers to a distant place and time. The key message of the poem is about the role of time. In the text there are words that suggest remoteness: "antique", "desert", "and level sands stretch far away". In the octave a traveller describes the features of the powerful king Ozymandias which are still visible in the ruins of his statue, one of the huge monuments he had built to last for ever as a symbol of his power. The king was determinated to live on through what he created.
Line 6 states "its sculptor well those passions read". Some signs of "those passions" still survive: "a shattered visage", a "wrinkled lip", "the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed". These "lifeless things" suggest ambition, pride, scorn and the loneliness of power. These passions characterise people who hold power and are consistent with the content and tone of the inscription but are not consistent with the shattered statue.
Situational irony is central to the theme of the poem. In verbal irony there is a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. In situational irony there is a discrepancy between the way the characters see a situation and the way a reader, who knows and understands more, sees it. In the poem the ironical contrast between the king's words written on the pedestral of the statue and the state of the statue expresses the poet's view of the vanity of the human passions and ambitions and the end reserved for tyrannical power. Time makes a mockery of human pride and power. In the sestet the proud words of the inscription are followed by the description of the desolate scene that surrounds the shattered statue.
6. John Keats (1795-1821)
John Keats led a very unhappy life. He lost both his parents while he was still a schoolboy and was separated from his brothers and sister. His marriage with Fanny Brawne was impracticable because of their financial situation. He died in Rome at the age of 26. His literary career was not succesful during his lifetime: only a few people, mostly his friends, recognised Keat's genius. He predicted he would became famous after his death. The collection Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published in 1820, contains many of his finest poems, including his Odes. All his works were published in his life apart from a final collection, including La Belle Dame Sans Merci, published posthumously in 1848. Keat's themes are the Romantic ones of nature, emotions and imagination. The major subjects in his poetry are love and beauty and the contrast between these ideals and the real world. The originality of his approach lies in his aesthetic philosophy, as expressed in Ode on a Grecian Urn. In his Odes Keats meditates in language of great richness on matters such as love, art, beauty and death.
6a. Ode On A Grecian Urn
In this poem the poet describes a decorated urn that he probably saw in the British Museum. In stanza I the poet addresses the urn in three different ways: "bride of quietness", "foster-child of silence and slow time" and "sylvan historian". There is an apparent contradiction between the two synonyms "quietness" and "silence" on the one hand and "historian" on the other: it is silent but it tells histories. "Sylvan", "flowery tale", "Tempe" and "dales of Arcady" are expressions that build up the pastoral setting of the poem. In the second part of the stanza there are several questions which tell the reader something about the scenes depicted on the urn: people who might be human or gods, a girl who is escaping and people playing musical instruments.
Stanza II contains another paradoxical statement: "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / are swetter". Power of imagination makes music more beautiful. Three scenes depicted on the urn are described in this stanza: musical instruments that are playing "ditties of no tone", trees that will never be bare and a lover who is going to kiss a girl. These scenes share the same characteristics: they cannot change and move because they're depicted on the urn. The urn is a sort of photograph: its great limitation is that it never changes. The girl will be beautiful forever and the boy will love her forever, on the other hand the boy is unlucky because he won't kiss her: "bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / though winning near the goal". The two lovers will never experience fulfilled love.
In stanza III the words "happy" and "ever / for ever" are used several times and have a positive connotation. These words refer to a situation that will last forever and won't change. Line 27 ("forever panting, and forever young") contains a sort of consistent contradiction.
In stanza IV the poet uses questions to describe the scene depicted on the urn (an empty town and people going to a sacrifice). The dominant atmosphere is solemn and eerie.
In the final stanza the poet addresses the urn in in four further ways: "Attic shape", "Fair Attitude", "silent form" and "Cold Pastoral". They emphasize the beauty of the urn, recall those of the first stanza and point out a function of art. The paradox of stanza I is also repeated here: the urn is silent but speaks. The message of the urn to man is "Beauty is Truth, - Truth Beauty, - that is all / ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". The poet doesn't refer to factual reality but to the truth of art. The meaning of the urn's message is that: art is beautiful and true because it renders the essential elements of human experience. The world of the urn, that never changes, is a permanent source of joy in a world of change.