Posts filed under ‘British Literature’
MODERNISM 1900 – 1945
1900 – 1914: Incredible Period of Invention.
Whereas philsophy and theology continued to grow darker, the mood surrounding industry, science and technology greeted the new 20th century with excitement and invention. There had never been a period of such rapid and massive invention than the early 20th century. If you tick off in your mind all of the things that we take for granted today that were invented in the period just prior to World War I, it is mind boggling: the light bulb, the airplane, the passenger automobile, the phonograph, indoor bathrooms, modern waterworks and sewage, the cinema, the radio that anyone could buy for home, and on and on.
The Masters of the World go to War
Such invention, however, was the product of the western world’s gigantic industrial machine and its imperial and colonical control over most of the world. Most of the tensions that led to World War I involved balances of power, who owns or controls what portions of the world, with Germany jockeying to control more than they had.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 coincided with massive advances in weapon technology. The war began with both sides equipped with an endless supply of weaponry that had never been used in such a war before: the machine gun, artillery, chemical warfare, grenade launchers, jelly bombs, airplanes and zeppelins. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of months, at least, that is what the hundreds of thousands of idealistic Brits who volunteered to cross the Channel and fight with the French believed. It lasted over four years, and caused 37 million casualties. Of those 37, over 1 million young British men and women died in battle. (Over 100,000 British civilians died, by the way, from such things as the Zeppelin attacks over London, which terrorized the city. No one had ever imagined they would be bombed from the sky.) In the Battle of Somme alone, over 1 million soldiers died. In one day of that battle alone, more soldiers died than in the entire Viet Nam War.
The Division in History: Before and After War.
I only emphasize the grim facts of this war to make it clear that one cannot overestimate the impact this war had on all of history, one a British mentality, and, consequently, on all literature and art that followed. The Western World went into the war in 1914 optimistic, believing that they were the masters of civilization, providentially chosen. The Western World came out of the war in 1918 with all millenarian beliefs crushed. For the first time in history, England questioned what humanity and civilization is. The incredible industry and invention that had made the country great was also responsible for the incredible machines of killing that allowed for such amazing loss of life. People wondered how the most civilized nations in the world could slaughter each other over a four year period.
I cannot do justice emphasizing in one short online lecture the monumental changes to British culture the war had. There are many good books on the subject. One I highly recommend, The Great War, by Paul Fussell. He was an English professor, and had first-hand experience with the war. He writes about the ways in which the war even changed the English language as we know it.
Modernist Spirit in Literature.
Up until the war, literature became caught up in the spirit of change and invention that was occurring in the world. The desire among writers and artists was to “Make it New!” There was a strong drive to break with a literary tradition, and to try new forms and ways with written expression. One can also see this drive in visual arts, with post-expressionism and cubism.
After the war, the desire to Make it New prevails, but with a different tenor. There is a dominant mood of darkness, alienation and betrayal in the post-War literature, combined with a spirit to break completely with the past and to try to make sense of a world that had become fractured and meaningless. Writers were in a state of shock of the destruction of the war, but they also wanted to use art in order to create meaning in the world, or at least to try to re-create meaning.
Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot.
Thomas Hardy is a very interesting poet because he straddles both a late Victorian world and an early Modernism. His poems are generally dark and pessimistic, and, like “Channel Firing,” he seems to sense the growing darkness.
T.S. Eliot is arguable the father of Modern Poetry. He wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” several years before the war, and when he was still a United States citizen. He was unable to find a journal to publish the poem until the middle of the war. The poem was shocking to audiences. The subject matter of the poem was new and unusual: the dramatic monologue of a balding, middle aged man who feels that life has passed him by. Eliot makes a concerted break with the sappy, romantic poetry of his time that was very popular. With this poem and his subsequent prose, Eliot calls for a more strict, classical, difficult and challenging poetry. He emphasizes experimentation with form combined with a classical, labored and stringent content.
During and after the war, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” hit a chord with American and British audiences who identified with Eliot’s expression of loneliness, alienation, confusion, desparation, betrayal and meaninglessness. His major poem, The Wasteland, which came out in 1922, depicted culture as dried up, dereacinated, futile–all of the greatness of literature and art of the past becoming twisted, corrupted, mutated and forgotten. The poem was a wild success with a generation feeling dark and diaffected by the war.
T.S. Eliot and Prufrock
The Poem as an Interior Monologue. As you read the poem, keep in mind that it is an “interior monologue.” This means that everything in the poem is spoken from inside of Prufrock’s mind. Therefore, try to understand the poem as an assembly or collage of images that all somehow reflect Prufrock’s state of mind. As you do so, keep your eye on the dramatic situation: Prufrock is walking somewhere through a bad side of Boston. He has somewhere to go. Where? Ask yourself where you think he has to go, and who he wants to see, and why he is anxious about the meeting. Then, notice three quarters through the poem that he passes up his destination. By the end of the poem, he is on the seashore, admitting his failure to reach his destination.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Use the questions below to help you in re-reading the poem. The questions could serve as points of interest and places that are important. Here, by the way, is T.S Eliot reading this poem in the 1920s, a famous recording. Perhaps you could listen to it as you read the poem, or read my questions. It is a beautiful and helpful reading. Eliot\’s reading.
1. The famous first three lines always stumped people first reading the poem as they still do today. Can you imagine an editor reading this poem in 1915, and getting past the first three lines? More than likely, the opening of the poem is what made it end up in the wastebasket more than anything. How do you interpret the odd simile of lines 1 – 2: “Let us go then you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table.” How can the dusk look like a patient on a surgeon’s table about ready for the scalple? Further, what does it say about Prufrock’s state of mind, the way he sees the world?
2. Lines 4 – 12 essentially situates Prufrock and the reader in his location. It sort of gives both a sense of his environment, where he is, while it further develops his state of mind. Based on “half deserted steets,” “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells,” what part of town (Boston) is he in? How would you describe such an area of town? What do you think Prufrock means by the simile (again, describing his surroundings), “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent” ? What do the images of Boston he sees say about his frame of mind? How he sees the world?
3. Lines 11 – 12 suggest Pruforck’s destination, his intent in the poem: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.” In the context of the poem, where is Prufrock walking? Where may he be going? (Granted, you have very little information so far).
4. Like the first three lines, lines 13 -14 always throw students: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Why on earth are these two lines here, in the middle, suddenly? What do they have to do with Prufrock’s thoughts? It might be easier to consider oppositions. How do the two lines suggest a very different environment from the preceding lines?
5. Lines 15 – 23 are a wonderful meditation upon “yellow fog” that Prufrock obviously sees as he is walking to his “visit.” 
This passage is an example of imagism: when a poet uses “pictures,” visual “images” of usually natural aspects of the world to convey mood, impressions, meaning. Eliot was very influenced by “imagist’ poetry at the time, poets who would write very short poems that often would focus on just one image. In many ways, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a long series of imagist poems, linked together like a collage, in this case a sort of imagist-tapestry of Prufrock’s thoughts. Look at the passage of “yellow fog.” How does he describe the fog? Why is it “yellow?” Most importantly, what does the yellow fog resemble in Eliot’s description, as when it “rubs its muzzle” and “licked its tongue” and “Curled once about the house and fell asleep.” Why does Eliot compare the yellow fog to such resemblance? What does it say about Prufrock, and how he feels?
6. In lines 24 – 34, Prufrocks repeats “There will be time” six times. What type of mentality does Prufrock exhibit by repeating this line? What kind of anxiety is he expressing? Why might he be expressing this particular type of anxiety? (Remember, the visit.) When does a person, “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”? What does he mean by, “time yet for a hundred indecisions /And for a hundred visions and revisions”?
7. In lines 37 – 49, Prufrock offers the first real details about the place /event he is possibly walking to. Notice that the passage is in the future tense, as he imagines what might happen if he goes. What is Prufrock self-conscious of? even paradoid about? What does his anxiety say about his supposed “crisis”?
- A rough draft of Eliot’s poem. The piece of paper that launched poetic modernism! What’s cooler than that?
8. In lines 49 – 69, Prufrock gives a long description of various social things. What people and type of society is he talking about? How does he feel about these people he describes, who we may assume are the people he would interact with at the “visit?” How does he feel about his position in this world?
9. In lines 87 – 98, Eliot makes a very subtle but important shift in the poem. It is a shift in grammar, in tense, “And would it have been worth it . . . ” What is the shift in tense, and what clue does this give us as to the action and development in the poem? What may it say about what Prufrock does (or doesn’t do)?
10. Up until lines 110, what type of scenario does he imagine as possibly might have happened in the future? What situation does he imagine could have happened? What does it say about Prufrock’s anxiety? What clue does it give us as to why Prufrock is old and alone?
11. Lines 111 – 119 are famous, beginning with “No! I am not Prince Hamlet” and ending, “the Fool.” Notice the movement–from Hamlet to the Fool. This is a kind of movement that happens a lot in the poem: Prufrock takes us often from a great height (“I have seen my head brough in upon a platter”) to a depth (‘I am not prophet.”). Why do you think Prufrock compares himself to Hamlet? And then why does he, in the same breath, deny that there is a comparison? What assessment does Prufrock make of himself in this passage?
12. Notice the shift in mood, tone and rythm in the final stanzas of the poem, lines 120 – 131. How does the mood, tone and rythm of the poem change? How might it reflect a change in Prufrock’s frame of mind? How does the setting of a seashore contribute to the change in tone? Why does Prufrock bring up mermaids? What do mermaids symbolize (they have to be symbols, since mermaids don’t exist)? Why does he shift from mermaids in the very end to “sea-girls”?
- TS Eliot was not the happiest human being. And he tended to make people around him fairly unhappy, too. The movie “Tom and Viv” is a pretty good portrait of his disasterous marriage with Vivian
13. Those last three lines of this poem haunt me. They always haunt me. Combined with the previous three lines, I think that the last two stanzas of this poem are the most beautiful in any poetry. High praise! What is Eliot saying? What do you think he means that “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,” and why do we linger “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”? Why do we drown? Why is it “human voices”? What other kinds of voices can there be?
Yeats The Second Coming
1. How would you describe the tone of “The Second Coming”? In the first stanza, what vision of the world does the poet express? How does he describe the state of things?
- One version of Yeats’ philosophy concerning gyres.
2. What do you think Yeats means by the first two lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Look up the word “gyre,” particularly Yeats’ use of the word. Consider what Yeats suggests about the world situation with the image of the falcon that cannot hear the falconer.
3. What is the tone of the first few lines of the second stanza? How would you describe the emotion of this voice? What is the “second coming?” What is it about the second coming that the poet seems to beseech? How does the second coming become darkly ironic by the end of the poem?
4. Starting on the fourth line of the second stanza, describe the poets vision. What is the “vast image” he sees? How do you interpret what he sees, and what it represents?
5. The poem was written in 1922, not too long after the end of World War I. Even though many thought it was the war to end all wars, what does Yeats seem to prophecy in this poem? What type of future does he seem to envision?
6. What do you think is the poet’s attitude toward Christianity?
A site the tries to explain Yeats’ philosophy concerning the gyre. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://aliscot.com/ensenanza/4033/gyre.gif&imgrefurl=http://aliscot.com/ensenanza/4033/victorian/yeats_sys.htm&usg=__l8qd9ONHR_Fa2wx8blDvPhUtmEE=&h=201&w=377&sz=15&hl=en&start=2&tbnid=UfIYR6vFMu7RnM:&tbnh=65&tbnw=122&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dyeats%2Bgyres%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den
Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” Questions for Reading and Thinking.
1. How would you describe the tone of “The Second Coming”? In the first stanza, what vision of the world does the poet express? How does he describe the state of things?
One version of Yeats' philosophy concerning gyres.
2. What do you think Yeats means by the first two lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” Look up the word “gyre,” particularly Yeats’ use of the word. Consider what Yeats suggests about the world situation with the image of the falcon that cannot hear the falconer.
3. What is the tone of the first few lines of the second stanza? How would you describe the emotion of this voice? What is the “second coming?” What is it about the second coming that the poet seems to beseech? How does the second coming become darkly ironic by the end of the poem?
4. Starting on the fourth line of the second stanza, describe the poets vision. What is the “vast image” he sees? How do you interpret what he sees, and what it represents?
5. The poem was written in 1922, not too long after the end of World War I. Even though many thought it was the war to end all wars, what does Yeats seem to prophecy in this poem? What type of future does he seem to envision?
6. What do you think is the poet’s attitude toward Christianity?
A site the tries to explain Yeats’ philosophy concerning the gyre. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://aliscot.com/ensenanza/4033/gyre.gif&imgrefurl=http://aliscot.com/ensenanza/4033/victorian/yeats_sys.htm&usg=__l8qd9ONHR_Fa2wx8blDvPhUtmEE=&h=201&w=377&sz=15&hl=en&start=2&tbnid=UfIYR6vFMu7RnM:&tbnh=65&tbnw=122&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dyeats%2Bgyres%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den
MODERNISM: 1901 – 1945. The New World.
1900 – 1914: Incredible Period of Invention.
Whereas philsophy and theology continued to grow darker, the mood surrounding industry, science and technology greeted the new 20th century with excitement and invention. There had never been a period of such rapid and massive invention than the early 20th century. If you tick off in your mind all of the things that we take for granted today that were invented in the period just prior to World War I, it is mind boggling: the light bulb, the airplane, the passenger automobile, the phonograph, indoor bathrooms, modern waterworks and sewage, the cinema, the radio that anyone could buy for home, and on and on.
The Masters of the World go to War
Such invention, however, was the product of the western world’s gigantic industrial machine and its imperial and colonical control over most of the world. Most of the tensions that led to World War I involved balances of power, who owns or controls what portions of the world, with Germany jockeying to control more than they had.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 coincided with massive advances in weapon technology. The war began with both sides equipped with an endless supply of weaponry that had never been used in such a war before: the machine gun, artillery, chemical warfare, grenade launchers, jelly bombs, airplanes and zeppelins. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of months, at least, that is what the hundreds of thousands of idealistic Brits who volunteered to cross the Channel and fight with the French believed. It lasted over four years, and caused 37 million casualties. Of those 37, over 1 million young British men and women died in battle. (Over 100,000 British civilians died, by the way, from such things as the Zeppelin attacks over London, which terrorized the city. No one had ever imagined they would be bombed from the sky.) In the Battle of Somme alone, over 1 million soldiers died. In one day of that battle alone, more soldiers died than in the entire Viet Nam War.
The Division in History: Before and After War.
I only emphasize the grim facts of this war to make it clear that one cannot overestimate the impact this war had on all of history, one a British mentality, and, consequently, on all literature and art that followed. The Western World went into the war in 1914 optimistic, believing that they were the masters of civilization, providentially chosen. The Western World came out of the war in 1918 with all millenarian beliefs crushed. For the first time in history, England questioned what humanity and civilization is. The incredible industry and invention that had made the country great was also responsible for the incredible machines of killing that allowed for such amazing loss of life. People wondered how the most civilized nations in the world could slaughter each other over a four year period.
I cannot do justice emphasizing in one short online lecture the monumental changes to British culture the war had. There are many good books on the subject. One I highly recommend, The Great War, by Paul Fussell. He was an English professor, and had first-hand experience with the war. He writes about the ways in which the war even changed the English language as we know it.
Modernist Spirit in Literature.
Up until the war, literature became caught up in the spirit of change and invention that was occurring in the world. The desire among writers and artists was to “Make it New!” There was a strong drive to break with a literary tradition, and to try new forms and ways with written expression. One can also see this drive in visual arts, with post-expressionism and cubism.
After the war, the desire to Make it New prevails, but with a different tenor. There is a dominant mood of darkness, alienation and betrayal in the post-War literature, combined with a spirit to break completely with the past and to try to make sense of a world that had become fractured and meaningless. Writers were in a state of shock of the destruction of the war, but they also wanted to use art in order to create meaning in the world, or at least to try to re-create meaning.
Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot.
Thomas Hardy is a very interesting poet because he straddles both a late Victorian world and an early Modernism. His poems are generally dark and pessimistic, and, like “Channel Firing,” he seems to sense the growing darkness.
T.S. Eliot is arguable the father of Modern Poetry. He wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” several years before the war, and when he was still a United States citizen. He was unable to find a journal to publish the poem until the middle of the war. The poem was shocking to audiences. The subject matter of the poem was new and unusual: the dramatic monologue of a balding, middle aged man who feels that life has passed him by. Eliot makes a concerted break with the sappy, romantic poetry of his time that was very popular. With this poem and his subsequent prose, Eliot calls for a more strict, classical, difficult and challenging poetry. He emphasizes experimentation with form combined with a classical, labored and stringent content.
During and after the war, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” hit a chord with American and British audiences who identified with Eliot’s expression of loneliness, alienation, confusion, desparation, betrayal and meaninglessness. His major poem, The Wasteland, which came out in 1922, depicted culture as dried up, dereacinated, futile–all of the greatness of literature and art of the past becoming twisted, corrupted, mutated and forgotten. The poem was a wild success with a generation feeling dark and diaffected by the war.
Victorian Era 1830 – 1901
The Victorian Era, which dominates most of the nineteenth century (1830 – 1901) is named after Queen Victoria, who (until now) was England’s longest reigning monarch. Although it is fallacious to characterize this nearly century long period in British history monolithic-ally, for our purposes I will focus on some Victorian issues that impact the development of literature. There were, actually, three distinct stages in Victorianism:
Stage One.
The first from 1830 -50, which was marked by radical social uphevals in both Europe and England in which a working class began to revolt, and socialism began to accelerate as either a danger or a salvation (depending upon your politics, I suppose). The result in England were a series of Reform Bills in the 1830s – 40s that revolutionized the principles behind a working nation. For instance, it gave more political power to workers, unions, voting, etc. It established the first child labor laws and health and safety mandates. Also, England began to change tax codes to help the middle and working class. It was far from modern and the “welfare” state England would develop even further in the early 20th century, but it showed England becoming much more socially conscious.
Stage Two:
The Second Period, 1850 – 1870 marked the period of incredible growth of “Empire” and economic prosperity, the things we tend to characterize Britain with of this time. The explosion of industry, the expansion of trade and colonization around the world, and the beginnings of modern science and technology made England into THE superpower on the globe. England was by this time, consummately, Great Britain, and the sun never set on the Yukon Jack.
Stage Three:
Third Period: 1870 – 1901. During this time there came a growing suspicion and criticism within England of its role as superpower, or Empire. There was also a growing skepticism and even loathing of Victorianism and its sense of pride, moralisms and enervating sense of culture (as you see in Matthew Arnold’s prose, and Oscar Wilde’s wit and satire aimed at Victorian prudery and moralistic attitude). During this period, some of the greatest and, for many, most shocking discoveries and advances in natural science were being made, particularly Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and the confirmation by geologists that the earth was far far far far far far far more older than 5,000 years.
The Earthquake of Natural Science.
The effects of advances in natural science on culture, religion and society cannot be overstated. Darwin’s books on evolution and natural selection proved uncomfortable aspects of our world at the same time that they were an assault on Christian religious truths (and often not so subtle in its attack). By theorizing (and proving some of it pretty well for a nineteenth century scientist) that we evolved from lower species, Darwin outright rejected the notion that humans are singularly created. In rejecting Creationism, Darwin also proceeds to reject all notions that humans function by the guidance of transcendent moral codes. Instead, Darwin argues that our sense of morality has been socially constructed, engendered over centuries of the human as a social and instinctual animal.
If Darwin had been an isolated phenomenon, an individual speaking alone, he may have been simply considered a crackpot. However, Darwin was researching and writing during this time in which natural scientists in England were canvasing the globe in an attempt to empirically understand the world with the same energy and ambition as explorers and colonizers took over the world. At the same time that Darwin posited Evolution and Natural Selection, geologists were successfully proving that the earth was no 5,000 years old, but millions, perhaps billions of years old, another assault upon Biblical truth and mythology that had established religious ideology in England for nearly 1,800 years.
Explosion of Existential Thought.
Contiguous to the advances in natural science, philosophers began to radically question established truths, assumptions and ideologies by which the British lived by and in which they had believed for centuries. Philosophers such as Nietzsche posed often frightening challenges to comfortable metaphysical philosophy by engaging in what you might call a “demythologizing” philosophy, an inquiry suspicious of anything by which we hang on to as truth, questioning everything. For the first time, God’s existence came into question in an organized and systematic way. And, for one of the first times, atheists, spiritualists, occultists, anarchists, etc., gathered and publicallyspoke and wrote, whereas many with such beliefs only a century earlier would have been persecuted.
A De-mythologizing Era.
Paul Ricoeur(one of the greatest late twentieth century philosophers) famously labelled the discourse of the late 1800s, “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” It is a period in which many sacred, assumed, and sometmies naive truths become “demythologized.” For one of the first time, there is a dominantly growing philosophical and theological discourse rejecting Creation, and a more minority voice that begins rejecting God.
In short, the late 1800s undergoes seachangesin British thought. Although such thinking does not radically change the British and Victorian social fabric and Europe’s belief in their dominant and God-given role to lead the world, it establishes the darker, more suspicious and existential tone that would be instrumental in the radical breaks with tradition in the fervent period of Modernism during and after World War I.
Literary Movements in Victorianism.
The literature of the period we are looking at for April 20th is from roughly 1850 until 1900, falling during the greatest expansions of British Empire and the consequent skepticism and disillusion with Empire as the 1900s approach.
The Novel.
The dominant genre during the Victorian era was prose, particularly the novel. The novel came into its own in the mid 1800s with such greats as Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and many others. We would not have time in the intensity of a mod combined witha survey course to do justice to the novel of the 1800s (which is why I run a course on this every other year). The Victorian novel was very much a product of an explosion of middle class literacy and a growing publishing industry. Novels were, for the most part, a form of high entertainment. Most novels were published in serial format in newspapers in England, where people could follow on a weekly basis a novel by, say, Dickens. They were, in a sense, the “soap operas” of the 1800s. In fact, most novels serialized in newspapers were extravagantly illustrated withincredible prints and drawings, an element that is lost from our experience with the reprinted book format.
Poetry.
Poetry underwent changes (many would argue, including me, not for the better). A dominant group of poets, like Robert Browning, reacted against what they felt was the soppy, rose-colored, sweet and flighty poetry of late Romanticism (think Shelley), and developed a more prosey poetry that focuses more on narrative, concrete issues in a “real” world. But, as the 1800s moved on, there was also a growing group of poets who react against the increasingly prosaic “realism” of the 1800s, and write a very romantic poetry that grows at times as ridiculously sweet and vacuous at the same time that it can be beautiful. In the early 1900s, T.S. Eliot would famously argue that since the 1700s, poetry has undergone a radical and unfortunate shift: poetry is either intellectual / cerebral, or it is emotional / romantic. Never again, he argued, since the Metaphysical poets of the late 1600s has poetry fused both intellect and emotion. It would be the really soppy, moody poetry of the late 1800s that Eliot reacts against with his groundbreaking modernist poems in the 1910s and 1920s.
Prose–The Essay.
Prose, particularly the essay, becomes just as central as the novel during this period. I’ve already talked about the earth-shaking effects of people like Darwin’s published books. The dominance of the essay mirrors the growing concern with the world around us, the real social issues of people, during Victorianism. The terms “Realism” has often been used to describe this period. Most Victorian novelists and essayists were interested in realism, in depicting the world as accurately as possible. A result of looking at the world head on is a growing criticism and suspicion of what authors see. Hence, Dickens many novels that expose social ills.
Matthew Arnold: Critic and, Possibly, Cultural Prophet.
Matthew Arnold is one of the great social voices of the Victorian era. He is the era’s greatest critic, while at the same time he is also the epitome of Victorianism in his belief that we all can change and reform everything (the idea of Utopianism has its explosion during this era).
Particularly in Culture and Anrachy, Arnold criticizes the narrow-minded, mechanical, industrial and material mindset of Victorian England, particularly amonst its middle class. He believed that industry and the machine had developed a “Puritanical” British middle class, one more intereted in moralisms and rules designed to benefit social/financial advancement. Arnold hankers for a return to “Hellenistic” thought. By this, he means a mind (like the ancient Greeks) that breaks from its narrow, material concerns, and roams over all possibilities, all interests, particularly cultural interests.
Arnold (rightfully, I believe) feared that the material culture of England was developing minds growing narrower, more concerned with self-interest, expediancy, and industry. He feared this would lead to ignorance and bigotry. He famously called the puritanical middle class in England, “Philistines,” which has come to mean shallow, narrow minded and uncultured. What Arnold envisioned was an England that would shift more emphasis to the study of literature, art and music (now that England was Empire and had excelled in industry) in order to cultivate minds for a more literate future. His notion of studying the “touchstones of history” had a huge effect on our present day notion of a literary “canon,” the implicitly accepted list of works that appear on a syllabus and that a student reads and studies in secondary school and college.
A Guide to STARTING to Think About a Paper.
Decide which Writing Option you Want to Take.
As we discuss our readings, you may want to start thinking about the paper(s). First, you may wish to decide which writing option you want to choose. 1) Two five page papers. 2) One ten page paper. 3) A five page paper and an in-class presentation on your paper. The option you choose may have an impact on what you wish to write about.
Start to Jot Down (brainstorming) Issues /Ideas we Discuss that Interest You, that You May Want to Write about.
As you do the readings and we discuss them in class and online, start to note to yourself things that interest you, confuse you, fascinate you, intrigue you–think of issues and / or literary ideas that draw you toward writing. My number one rule of thumb is that you should write an English paper on a piece of literature and an issue / topic that you are interested in. You should look forward to the paper you are writing as opposed to dreading it.
Brainstorm Things with which you Identify in the Pieces of Literature we Look at.
One way in which to choose something that interests you that could compel you to write is to think about something with which you identify in in a piece of literature. Is there something in a poem or a story that relates to you as a person and / or your life in some way? Is there something that you can bring to bear upon a piece of literature?
Consider Which Approach Toward Writing that Interests You (The Type of Paper you Might Write)
Another way to start thinking about writing is to think about what type of paper you want to write. There are many approaches to writing a paper on literature.
1. A Formal Approach. If you want to write a paper that takes a formal approach, this means you are interested in the piece of literature as a structure unto-itself. You would be interested in objective issues, like theme, or the figurative devices an author uses (metaphor, imagery, symbolism, etc.), or narrative structure, or point of view, etc. This would be a paper in which you are interested in what makes a piece of literature tick, as opposed to its relationship to anything else.
2. A Cultural Approach. If you are interested in a cultural approach, you would be interested in how a piece of literature relates to some aspect of the contemporary world: an issue in our world the piece points to; a problem in the world with which we can identify. In this approach, you might find some universal problem or issue that the writer explores, something that transcends time.
3. An Historical Approach. If you wrote a paper with an historical approach, you would be interested in how certain aspects in history of the time the piece was written influences it. For instance, how war influences a particular poem; or how the economic conditions during a period affects a particular piece; or how the living conditions of a culture influences a work. An historical approach writes about how a piece of literature is situated and influeced by a the particular time or period it was written in, OR, how a piece of literature reflects / mirrors its historical period.
4. A Personal Approach (or Reader Response). You could write a paper in which you explore an individual or personal experience with a piece of literature. You could write about how you identify in some way with a piece. Or you could write about your experience interpreting a piece of literature. However you do it, this approach involved situating you as the reader in some way with what you are analyzing.
5. Inter-disciplinary Approach. With this approach, you can use the methods of another disicpline to interpret a piece of literature. For instance, using terms or methods of psychology to read a poem, or a particular philosophical movement to understand a piece of literature.
This week, start to brainstorm the type of paper(s) you would like to write. Brainstorm the various things that interest you in life, perhaps, that you might bring to an analysis of a piece of literature. Consider which approach above might be the most interesting for you.
As the course progresses, and I continue to pose questions for thinking and reading here, gather some of the questions as possibilities to respond to in a paper(s).
Right now, don’t try to start writing a finished paper. Instead, do some messy, creative, “brain-storming” type writing. Jot down ideas, notes, interests, quotes on pieces of paper that you can refer to. Re-read some pieces, writing down thoughts, ideas and questions in the margins. Don’t worry about getting polished writing done yet.
John Keats: Some Discussion Points for Ode on a Grecian Urn
We do not know at which Grecian urn Keats was looking. Nonetheless, the Grecian urns are some of the most beautiful works of art / craft in the world.
John Keats: the Consummate Romantic.
John Keats was, in many ways, the epitome of the romantic poet. He was of a generation of poets known as “high romantics,” which included Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. They were writing most of their poems in the early 1800s, and are considered high-romantics because they follow the initial romantic breakthrough of Wordsworth, Coleridge and the German and French romantic philosophers.
For the most part, romantic poetry had become more accepted when Keats was writing, although there still remains a feeling amongst high-brow intellectuals that romanticism is a sort of dirty, low-brow literature. It is interesting to see moments when Jane Austen clearly satirizes romantic poetry in her novels. Often when one of her characters enjoys romantic poets, they are the individuals Austen holds up in scorn. Austen’s novel Northinger Abbey is a very funny satire of the Gothic tradition growing in popularity in the early 1800s.
John Keats is a tragic figure. He contracted a particular form of tuberculosis when he was a child. As he grew up, he knew that he would die young. By the time he was twenty four years old, he knew he had only months to live. Despite a very short adult life, Keats wrote prolifically, and much of his poetry constitutes the best and most loved poetry in England. In particular, his “odes,” which he wrote in the last months of his life, are some of the most powerful romantic poetry. They are all the more powerful when you consider that he was aware that at any moment he was going to die. Look at the combination of agony and ecstasy, beauty and terror in “Ode: to a Nightengale.”
The Agony and Ecstasy of Romanticism.
Keats absorbed in a book. Romanticism gives birth to scenes such as this, people absorbed in reading or writing. It is known as "the scene of reading (or) writing." Such images were not very prevalent before the late 1700s because 1) you do not have too many people reading books, since there were not many around, or writing 2) Such an image of solitary engagement in an imaginative realm would only convey suspicion. Artistic solitude as a value is a romantic invention, one that we still value today.
The combination of happiness and despair, ecastasy and agony, best characterizes his odes. Although the combination of these moods mirrors the emotional tensions in his life at the time, he also uses his inner strife to explore the nature of joy and despair inherent in romanticism itself. Many of his poems, particularly his odes, indicate a tension in romantic poetry and philosophy. Many dichotomies highlight these tensions: the desire to emotionally express oneself and the consequences of doing so; the desire to form a union with nature and the reality of the human’s division from nature; the desire for permanence in a world that refuses to keep still; a desire for “immortality” and the reality and fear of “mortality.”
As you can see, I predicated these dichotomies with the word, “desire.” The notion of desire–what desire means, how desire inspires and drives literature–becomes a heated issue in romanticism and continues until today. Keats reveals the joys of deisre, and the disappointment and sense of incompletion that follows.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
One of the most famous romantic poems, particularly because of its puzzling final lines. (Think of all the philosophy of aesthetics courses that have dwelt upon these lines.)
First, you need to establish a sense of “place,” “perspective” and “object” in this poem. What is Keats looking at? How close is he to the object? How does the object move him, and why does he choose this particular object over anything else he might study?
What scene does the urn depict? What pictures does Keats see and record in his poem? Why do these particular images move him to write a poem? How do you think that these pictures / images speak to Keats? How do they convey “theme” (that word I despise)?
The scene on the urn that Keats depicts in his poem is full of movement, a flurry of activity that races around the urn–around and around, you might say. How is such a scene, however, paradoxical in the context of its depiction? What is, in short, ironic about the constant activity that Keats observes on an urn.
Paradox is the central trope of “Ode on a Grecian.” Can you try to come up with the varioius paradoxes that structure this poem? It is helpful to think of the many bipolar-oppositions in the poem: life / death; movement / stasis; youth / age; visual / verbal; inner / outer, etc.
What effect does the poem have that Keats is not writing about “nature” in its natural context — he is not looking at the world around him and holding a mirror up to represent it — but he is looking at “nature” as it is depicted on a work of art. In other words, Keats is creating a work of art — the poem — by looking at another work of art — the urn. If Plato were alive at the time, he would have claimed that Keats looks at an inferior object because it is one step removed from reality, and creates an even more inferior object, because his poem–an imitation of an inferior reality–is therefore two steps removed from reality. The genre in which an artist creates a work of art (or a poet writes a poem about a work of art) is known as ekphrasis. In what ways do you think that Keats plays with reality by using ekphrasis? Consider the poem as resembling (although not the same as) how Shakespeare would create a play-within-a-play.
Near the end of the poem, Keats calls the urn a “Cold Pastoral!” Why? Is this not a rather sudden and unexpected judgment? Why cold? How can a “pastoral” be “cold” in the first place?
OK, the mysterious final two lines.
| ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all | |
| Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ | 50 |
What do they mean? Why does Keats end the poem with what sounds like an adage, or a little golden-nugget of philosophical wisdom? What does he mean by beauty, and what does he mean by truth? And why are they equivalent? Why does he claims that this “adage” is “all” we “need to know?”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Brief but Incredible Career
Like those music stars of the 1960s who went down the tubes or killed themselves by the early 1970s, Coleridge came on the scene in the late 1700s, wrote a handful of brilliant poems and some of the most influential literary criticism in British history, and then broke down completely from drug addiction by 1809.
As we discussed, Coleridge partnered with Wordsworth to write the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballds in 1798. While Wordsworth dealt with rustic life (the natural), Coleridge dealt with dreams and visions (the supernatural). His biggest contribution, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is simply one of the greatest romantic poems, if not one of the top twenty best in British history. When the collection of poems first came out, most audiences and critics thought the poem was a confusing mess. Indeed, the poem is brilliant because it seems to make sense as a narrative while it also seems to defy interpretation at the same time.
Coleridge wrote most of his poems in spells of intense labor. He was never a very disciplined poet, but perhaps in a true romantic vein, he would come up with a poem as if he had gone into a trance.
Coleridge and Drug Addiction.
Because of a childhood illness, Coleridge suffered from terrible back pain into his adult life. The medical prescription at the time was laudanum, which is opium dissolved in alcohol. Basically, morphine with a grain alcohol chaser! He quickly became addicted to the drug. Although he admits that the high would inspire much of is writing, by the early 1800s, he also began to admit that the drug was ruining both his creativity and his life. He took a two year retreat to Malta to try to recover, but while he was gone, his addiction only grew worse, and by the time he returned to England in 1806, he was pretty much physically and mentally destroyed. “Dejection: an Ode,” one of his later poems, expresses the despair of drug addiction.
It will always remain one of the most tantalizing hypothetical questions in British literature: what if Coleridge had been able to produce poetry and prose for the duration of his life instead of the six or seven years before drugs destroyed him? Needless to say, the handful of poems he left behind, combined with his magnum opus, Literary Biography, has made him one of the most central of romantic poets.
Coleridge the Intellectual
Coleridge on the Central Power of the Imagination.
Central to Coleridge’s literary criticism is his romantic concepts concering the Imagination. Like the romantics to follow, Coleridge placed the role of the Imagination in a dominant position. He argued that the Imagination functions like a divine spark that urges one on to create. Further, the Imagination is bound to God’s creative act. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who would find romantic inspiration from Coleridge several decades later, the natural world around us is like a big canvas of God’s creation. Essentially, God is a great artist, and when we experience the world around us, His creation inspires the artist to create a representation of it.
But for Coleridge, making a representation of God’s creation is not
This is a wonderful book written by Dorthy Sayers in the 1920s in which she develops a literary criticism based upon the notion that artists and poets are like co-creators of God's great and ongoing creation. It is a very interesting approach toward literary interpretation by basing reading and meaning upon Christian theology.
just an act of imitation. Because we have an Imagination that can take in and break up our experience in the world as a means to create a personal expression, we are like co-creators, co-authors, in God’s divine and infinite creative act. Coleridge, therefore, inspires a great deal of the romantic notion that poets and artists are “gifted,” vested with a “vision,” and whose creations turn them into a “genius.”
William Blake, the Visionary Poet. Songs of Innocence and Experience.
William Blake: a Visionary.
No poet of all the poets we will explore was quite as enigmatic, visionary and, well, far-out as William Blake. Although he ranks as one of the most important and influential of all romantic poets, he had very little (if any) contact with romantic poetry or philosophy. In fact, from a very early age, Blake felt that he had a “Divine Vision,” a spiritual calling which meant for him a life of isolation in which to pursue poetry and art. Throughout most of his life, his brilliant poetry and illustrations gained little, if any, public recognition, and he lived in loneliness and abject poverty. He is, in many respects, one of the first British individuals to choose writing and art as a profession, and, therefore, one of the first stereotypical “starving artists,” someone who sacrifices a social and material life for the sequestered life of creation.
Blake’s Creation of a Romantic Christian Epic.
Particularly in his later career, Blake’s poetry grows in tremendous length as he creates phantasmagorical epics in which he creates a byzantine and fantastic world that allegorizes Christianity, creating poetic narratives out of the Fall of Man, the Passion story, the struggle between good and evil. He follows in the shadow of his precursor, John Milton and Paradise Lost, the one great British Christian epic poem that you will have to suffer through some day if you are an English major. Blake, however, suffuses the Christian narrative with his own wild, visionary, allegorical and, quite often, bizarre poetry.
Blake as an Artist.
As you can see by my inclusion of some of his illustrations, no less important than his poetry was Blake’s art. In fact, the illustrations and prints that he created for all of his volumes of poetry are as influential on romanticism (if not more so) than his poetry itself. He created wild, swirling illustrations of angels, devils, scenes from the Bible and brilliantly colorful prints showing scenes form his own poems. These are truly incredible pieces of art. Blake’s poetry is meant to be read with their accompanying illustrations. Thankfully, your anthology includes a few of the illustrations along with the poems.
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
The short poems you have read are from his two collections of poems, The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of 
Experience. Both books are companion pieces. Blake writes the poems in the former from the point of view of childlike innocense, and generally represent both a perspective that has not gained knowledge and experience concerning evil, i.e., poems that derive from experience before the Fall of Man and Original Sin. Blake writes poems in the latter from the point of view of adult experience in the world, or, more aptly, adulterated experience, the perspective from human experience with sin, i.e, poems that represent experience after the Fall of Man and when sin becomes wrapped up in life.
Generally, each poem in each collection has its analog in its opposite. In other words, a poem from the Songs of Innocense has its companion poem in the Songs of Experience. The most clear and famous example of this poetic dichotamy is “The Lamb” from Innocense, and “The Tyger” from Experience. Read the two side by side. Notice how the first mirrors a sort of nursery-rhyme voice of a child (of course, really, an adult creating the world as it might be seen by the child). “The Lamb” explores the Christian mystery of God’s unconditional love evidenced through Christ with complete and simple closure. All of the poems questions in stanza one are answered with Christian but child-like affirmation in the second stanza. “The Tyger,” from Experience, however, is a comparatively dark and terrifying experience. In contrast to the innocent cuddliness of the Lamb, and the sweet question-answer between the child and the lamb, the Tyger depicts a fiery, powerful and dangerous creature. Notice the evident imagery of fire, darkness and hell. Importantly, whereas “The Lamb” answers all of the questions posed, “The Tyger” consists entirely of unanswered questions. Of course, a majority of the theological questions posed in the poem do not have answers.
Masterworks of British Literature 
