Romanticism and Poetry Flashcards
He could be vague as to period (his poetry has Elizabethan as well as fifteenth-century features); but so keen was his enthusiasm, and so great his ability to evoke historical distance, that he did much to intensify the mood of medieval romance. Who is this?
Thomas Chatterton (1752-70)
Name two scholarly folklorists (still working largely from written sources) who were collecting and popularizing antiquities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Bishop Thomas Percy (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765) and Sir Walter Scott (Border Minstrelsy, 1802-3)
The ballad had received approval of the Augustans long before Romanticism, thanks to
Addison
What was Walter Scott’s folklore collection and when was it published?
Border Minstrelsy, 1802-3
What did Bishop Thomas Percy collect?
Folklore (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765)
Robert Burns confessed himself to be not really an untutored ploughman–that was
“a part of the machinery . . . of his poetical character.”
Burns’s poems were not originary; he acknowledged a debt to
Robert Fergusson (1750-74)
Nature for Pope was a composition of balanced opposites, much like a painting. And in The Landscape (1794), Richard Payne could still speak of joining landscape’s “various parts in harmony…With art clandestine, and concealed design.” But in The Seasons (1726-30) the Scottish poet James Thomson looks at nature in a very different way:
with the informed eye of the scientific enthusiast
Richard Payne wrote of joining landscape’s “various parts in harmony…With art clandestine, and concealed design” (The Landscape, 1794). What other Augustan writer takes this painterly view of nature?
Pope
When is James Thomson’s The Seasons published?
1726-30
James Thomson’s descriptions of nature are never merely literal, but always expressive of
scientific or philosophical ideas (e.g. refraction)
“…the inchanting and amazing crystal fountain, which incessantly threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute, forming a bason, capacious enough for large shallops to ride in, and a creek of four or five feet depth of water, and near twenty yards over, which meanders six miles through green meadows, pouring its limpid waters into the great Lake George, where they seem to remain pure and unmixed.” What work is this and what work borrows from it?
Travels (1791) by American quaker William Bartram; Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan draws on imagery from what two works, at least?
Milton’s PL; American quaker William Bartram’s Travels (1791; London 1792)
British theorizing about the experience of the sublime begins before Burke. It goes all the way back to ________, who took it from the ancient rhetorician ________
Shaftesbury; Longinus
British theorizing about the sublime went back to Shaftesbury (who took it from ancient rhetorician Longinus); but it received its first full development from
Edmund Burke (1729-97)
Terror, darkness, solitude, and the infinite, when felt in safety, give delight. This theorizing by ______ constituted the very element of __________ excluded from the neo-classical ideal of beauty.
Burke; irrationality
The neo-classical ideal of beauty had been based on _______ proportions; but the sublime belongs to an altogether different, non-______ scale.
human; human
Beattie’s enthusiastic narrator in The Minstrel says:
“And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb, / When all in mist the world below was lost. What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime, / Like shipwrecked mariner on desert coast” and see the mountains rising through the mist. What aesthetic principle is evoked, and what subsequent literary episode draws on these images?
the sublime; The Prelude, climbing Helvellyn
George ______ (1754-1832) flouted convention by choosing sordidly realistic subjects. He wrote a kind of ____-________, substituting weeds for the customary flowers, laborious misery for the expected idyll.
Crabbe; anti-pastoral
Some readers have tried to say WW’s diction is not low as he pretends it is in the Preface. Respond.
In reality the diction is fairly low; although the poems are not unfurnished with poetical ornaments like inversion and rhyme.
WW spoke of a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but revised his work extensively. But the contradiction is only apparent: “spontaneous” has changed in meaning, and what he meant was
“voluntary overflow.” (“Arising or proceeding from natural impulse, without any external…constraint; voluntary and of one’s own accord” -OED)
*The perspective or dialectic leaps in “This Lime Tree Bower” are ______; in “Frost at Midnight” they are ______
spatial; temporal
