September 4

Songs of Innocence
And
Songs of Experience

 Poet and Painter
 Engraver
 Developed own
mythology/religion
 Used Christian
symbols but not
Christian concepts
 First major
“Romantic” poet

“The Great Red Dragon and the Women Clothed with the Sun”

“Satan Inflicting Boils Upon Job”

 The belief that
“good” and “evil”
as defined by
contemporary
religions are not
really opposite, but
different parts of
one great whole.

William Wordsworth
PowerPoint slide adapted from Marco Mulas: http://www.slideshare.net/mulasmarco/wordsworth-11192648?from_search=2

William
Wordsworth was
born in 1770 in a
little town in the
Lake District in
the north-west of
England.

In 1787 he entered Cambridge and while still a university student he went
on a three-month walking tour of France, the Swiss Alps and Italy, and was
greatly impressed by the beauty of the landscape.
When he finished his degree he returned to France and became a
passionate supporter of the democratic ideals of the French
Revolution.

 In 1794 he went to live with his sister Dorothy in a small
village in Dorset.
 In the same year he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a
poet with similar radical political and literary views.
This friendship had a lasting impact on both poets.
 William and Dorothy went to live close to Coleridge.
Together they discussed political issues, read, wrote,
exchanged theories on poetry and commented on each
other‟s work. In this period of intense creativity they
produced the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems.
The second edition of 1800 contained Wordsworth‟s
famous Preface, which was to became the Manifesto of
English Romanticism.

In 1799 William and Dorothy moved to Grasmere, one of the
loveliest villages in the Lake District, a region that
Wordsworth immortalised in his poetry.

 In 1802 he married a childhood friend and together they
had five children.
 During this period he produced Poems, in Two Volumes
(1807) a collection which includes some of his best
poems.
 In 1805 he finished his masterpiece The Prelude, a long
autobiographical poem published posthumously in
1850. It describes the crucial experiences and stages of
the poet‟s life and is an introspective account of his
emotional and spiritual development.

 His reputation began to grow and his works
became increasingly popular.
 In 1843 he was given the title of Poet Laureate, in
recognition of his contribution to English literature.
 In the last years of his life Wordsworth became
more conservative in his political views,
abandoning the radical politics and idealism of his
youth.
 He died in 1850, at the age of eighty.

 Wordsworth was a great innovator.
 He found his greater inspiration in nature.
 His poetry offers an account of the interaction between
man and nature, of the influences, emotions and
sensations which arise from this contact.
 His main interest is the poet‟s response to a natural
object.
 One of the most consistent concepts in his poetry is the
idea that man and nature are inseparable.

 Man is an active participant in the natural world.
 Nature is something that includes both inanimate and
humane nature, each is a part of the same whole.
 Nature comforts man in sorrow.
 Nature is a source of pleasure and joy.
 Nature teaches man to love and to act in a moral way.
 Wordsworth‟s poetry celebrates the lives of simple rural
people, he sees them more sincere than people living in
cities.

 Children are regarded as pure and innocent,
uncorrupted by education and the evils of
the world.
 Childhood is the most important stage in
man‟s life.
 What the child sees is both more
imaginative and more vivid than the
perception of the adult.

 Wordsworth believed that intuition, not
reason, should guide the poet.
 Inspiration should come from the direct
experience of the senses.
 Wordsworth exploited especially the
sensibility of the eye and ear.

 Poetry, he wrote in the Preface, originates
from „the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings‟ which is filtered through „emotion
recollected in tranquillity‟.
 Memory plays a fundamental role in the
creative process of poetry.
 Poetry results from the active relationship of
present to past experience.

Through the re-creative power of memory, the emotion is reproduced and
purified in poetic form so that a second emotion, „kindred‟ to the first one, is
generated.
The entire process would be:
object poet sensory experience emotion memory
recollection in tranquillity „ kindred‟ emotion
reader
emotion
poem

 The poet has greater sensibility and the ability to
penetrate to the heart of things.
 The power of imagination enables him to communicate
his knowledge.
 The poet becomes a teacher who shows men how to
understand their feelings and improve their moral
being.
 The poet‟s task consist in drawing attention to the
ordinary things of life, to the humblest people, where the
deepest emotions and truths are to be found.

This is Percy This is Mary
PowerPoint slide adapted from a presentation from the following site: elizabethdearcos.com/.../2012/01/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley.ppt

 Bullied all through school and university
 Led to his obsession with reading, rumored to
be 16 hours a day
 Unpopular with both students and teachers (he
never attended class)
 Published poetry and periodicals while still in
school
 Was expelled from school because of a poem he
wrote

 Moved away from England at 19 to get married
( to 16 year old Harriet).
 Wanted an open marriage, but his wife
wouldn‟t allow it – moved to Ireland
 Unhappy with his marriage, Shelley would
leave his wife and child to visit friends
 Fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, women‟s
rights activist

 Abandons his pregnant wife and child to run
away with Mary. They had only been married
three years.
 Deeply influenced by William Blake‟s poetry
 Met Lord Byron through Mary‟s step-sister –
both men influenced each other‟s work
 Shelley tried to gain custody of his children,
whose mother had killed herself. He lost and
they were given to foster parents

 In 1822, Shelley and a friend went sailing off
the northwestern coast of Italy.
 A storm caught them by surprise, capsized the
boat, and both men drowned.
 Shelley was only 30 years old.

 Idealism
 Nonconformity
 Opposition to all injustice
 Change the world through love, imagination,
and poetry
 Too radical for most romantics
 Vegetarianism

1759-1797
PowerPoint slide adapted from Gregory Priebe: http://www.slideshare.net/gpriebe/mary-wollstonecraft-4071116?from_search=5

 Described as a
"hyena in
petticoats"
 Self-taught
 Led a troubled life
 Father was a
bully
 Left home at 19
 Helped sister
escape an
abusive husband
 Suicidal at times

 Had jobs as
governess,
translator,
literary
advisor, article
writer
 A radical
 Argued her
whole life for
the liberation
and education
of women.

 Observed the
Revolution
first-hand
 Wrote
Vindication of
the Rights of
Man in
rebuttal to
Burke

 Eventually married
her long time
friend, radical
William Godwin
 Lost some
credibility with
radical friends
 Mother of Mary
Shelley, author of
Frankenstein
 Died in childbirth

 A true “child of the Revolution”
 saw a new “age of reason” and benevolence coming
 desired to bridge the gap between:
 humanity‟s present circumstance
 ultimate idealized state of perfection
 She was a parishioner of minister Richard Price, who started
the whole debate
 He praised the French Revolution
 British people also had the right to overthrow a bad king
 Was personally mad at Burke
 She saw him as two-faced
 Burke defended the American Revolution
 She admired him at that time
 Attacked Price when he supported the French
Revolution

 Her ideas concerning the rights of women were
truly revolutionary
 The first real feminist
 Desired to help women not only for their own sake,
but also for the sake of their children and husbands
 Elevated to the rank of modern heroine in the 1970s
 “Lived out" her own theories.
 Practiced what she preached

 June 20, 1743–March 9, 1825
 Prominent poet, essayist, and children‟s author
 A “woman of letters” who published in
multiple genres
 Barbauld had a successful writing career at a
time when female professional writers were
rare
PowerPoint slide adapted from a presentation for Central Texas College: www.ctcd.edu/.../documents/FemaleRomanticWriters.ppt

 Barbauld was a noted teacher at the Palgrave
Academy and an innovative children's writer; her
primers provided a model for pedagogy for more
than a century.[1]
 Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a
woman to be publicly engaged in politics, and
other women authors emulated her.[2]
 Even more important, her poetry was
foundational to the development of Romanticism
in England.[3]
 Barbauld was also a literary critic, and her
anthology of eighteenth-century British novels
helped establish the canon as known today.

 Barbauld's literary career ended abruptly in 1812 with
the publication of her poem “Eighteen Hundred and
Eleven,” which criticized Britain's participation in the
Napoleonic Wars. Vicious reviews shocked Barbauld ,
and she published nothing else during her lifetime.[4]
 Her reputation was further damaged when many of
the Romantic poets she had inspired in the heyday of
the French Revolution turned against her in their later,
more conservative, years.
 Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic
children's writer during the nineteenth century, and
largely forgotten during the twentieth century, but the
rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed
interest in her works and restored her place in literary
history.[5]

 Look at each reading (begin with your favorites)
 Blake “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (pp. 148-158)
 Wordsworth The Prelude from Book Tenth. Residence in France
and French Revolution (pp. 391-395)
 Shelley “To Wordsworth” (p. 752) and “England in 1819” (p.
790)
 Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “Dedication
to M. Talleyrand-Perigord” and “Introduction” (pp. 211-217)
 Barbauld “The Rights of Woman” (pp. 48-49)
 Highlight/note how the reading fits with the theme of
“Revolution, Freedom, and Rights”
 What line or passage stands out to you as particularly
fitting to that theme and how do you interpret/explain
it?

Write your answer on a piece of paper.

Readings listed on syllabus:
 Wordsworth “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) (pp. 292-304)
 Byron Don Juan (pp. 673-674, canto 1-7) (feel free, of course, to
continue reading if you like!)
 Watch introduction to Don Juan to help you make sense of the entire epic
because we will only read a miniscule part
 Blake Songs of Innocence: “Introduction” (pp. 118-119), “The Lamb”
(p. 120), “The Chimney Sweeper” (p. 121-122), “Holy Thursday”
(pp. 122-123) and Songs of Experience: “Introduction” (p. 125),
“Holy Thursday” (p. 127), “The Chimney Sweeper” (p. 128), “The
Tyger” (pp. 129-130)
 Shelley “To a Sky-Lark” (pp. 834-836) and from A Defence of Poetry
(pp. 856-869)
 Keats “Ode to a Nightingale” (pp. 927-929), “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” (pp. 930-931), and “Ode on Melancholy” (pp. 931-933)
Choose the reading you would most like to discuss and create three
discussion questions
Turnitin assignment

September 4

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