THE YOUNG ROMANTICS:
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
“Childe
Harold on the Loose”: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Read the introduction to Byron’s
poetry in your Norton text and peruse
the information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron. Read the introduction to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Harold%27s_Pilgrimage. Read verses 1-6 of Canto I, verses 1-16,
17-28 [
“That Beautiful and Ineffectual Angel”:
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Read the introduction to Shelley in
the Norton Anthology or see the
information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley. Read “
“From the Egotistical to the Material
Sublime”: John Keats (1795-1821)
Read the introduction to Keats in the
Norton Anthology and peruse the
information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
and at http://englishhistory.net/keats.html. Read Keats' letters to John Hamilton Reynolds
(February 3, 1818), George and
SOME GENERALITIES
ABOUT THE YOUNG ROMANTICS:
1.
All had relatively short and intense lives.
*2.
All knew each other—Byron and the Shelleys very close.
3.
While Shelley is
idealistic and revolutionary, as was early Wordsworth, Byron was cynical and his poetry, much of it satiric, rooted in the
18th Century. Keats, perhaps the
greatest poet of the period, turned away from the "egotistical
sublime" of Wordsworth, Bryon, and Shelley toward the "material
sublime." Much of Keats’ work, like Mary
Shelley's, warns of the dangers of "going beyond the bourn," of
the pitfalls encountered when one's reach exceeds his grasp and the dangers of
questing an unattainable ideal.
Our story of the young romantics really
begins with 2 18th C. figures whose influence was profound: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Wollstonecraft (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft)
was a rebel, a fascinating, beautiful woman, part of Joseph
Johnson's brilliant circle of revolutionaries, a woman who thought it shameful
that both men and women were prisoners, slaves to society's thoughtless rules
and inequities. She wrote two
Vindications, one for The Right of Men
and the other for The Rights of Woman. After a sojourn in
Godwin (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin) was equally iconoclastic. Author of Political
Justice, Godwin believed that governments were corrupt, and men and
women in their hearts, without the repressive influences of religion,
government, were uncorrupt and potentially “perfectible”: "Romantic
idea of Perfectibility."
Both
Wollstonecraft and Godwin had little faith in man-made institutions such as
organized religion and marriage, and in 1796, they put their philosophy to
the test when they fell in love and began living together. After Wollstonecraft found herself pregnant,
Godwin prevailed upon her to cast aside their scruples about marriage and the
two were wed. On September 10, 1797,
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was
born; ten days later her
famous, now infamous, mother died,
and Godwin was crushed.
Though she never saw her mother, the
presence, fire, and spirit of
Wollstonecraft burned white hot in the veins of her daughter (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley). Young Mary was captivated by her mother's
memory, questioning old friends, her father, pouring through her works, often
reading by her graveside or stealing into her father's study to work, where
portrait by Opie hung. Godwin describes
his daughter at 15 as being "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active
of mind. Her desire of knowledge is
great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost
invincible."
At 16, Mary met at her
father's home a most remarkable young man—Percy
Bysshe Shelley, who at
twenty-two had already lived a life to tire many men (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley). From one of
Shelley had read Political
Justice and became devoted to Godwin and his ideas, considering himself a
disciple. He had also read
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of
the Rights of Woman and found her ideas about women like his own. He had just published Queen Mab: A
Philosophic Poem (1813), a poem much inspired by Godwinian
philosophy. In the poem, Shelley
1) decried codified religion and
oppressive patriarchal institutions,
2) announced the old patriarchal God
was dead, and
2) called for a female deity! There is in this and other works of Shelley a
strong strain of androgyny--he believed the ideal human condition was a
blending of the anima and animus, the male and female principles. The patriarchal society in which he lived was
too corrupt, too oriented in the masculine, and thus must be revisioned. So by the spring of 1814, Shelley was ready
to pay homage to Wollstonecraft and Godwin . . . and to their young daughter!
As Shelley became close to the
Godwin
Godwin forbade any such union and
ordered Shelley away; and on the morning of July 29, 1814, he arose to
find that Mary, Shelley, and his step-daughter Jane/Claire Clairmont gone. Godwin locked himself in his study, wrote and
published his own account of the elopement, and vowed never to forgive Mary and
Shelley; Mrs. Godwin, on the other hand, pursued the trio . . . all the way to
They began
their travels through
When the donkey tired out and the
money ran out, Mary, Claire, and Percy went back home, but Godwin (though he
freely asked Shelley for money) remained cold and distant. Their only link with home was through Fanny,
Mary's older half-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft’s other child. Mary and Shelley, whether they had wished it
or not, had become infamous. At this
point in the saga, enter Byron (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron)!
As sarcastic and roguish as Shelley
was gentle and well-meaning, Byron was born to controversy and infamy. Coming from decadent aristocrats on both
sides of the
The year 1816 had been traumatic for
the Shelleys. Shelley had tried to
befriend Harriet by inviting her to live with him and Mary as a sister,
Mary less enthusiastic over the offer.
Harriet had become involved in an unhappy affair, had found herself pregnant,
become despondent, and then committed suicide.
When the news came, both Mary and Shelley were shocked and saddened. They could marry now but there was little
joy. After a failed attempt to gain custody of Shelley's children, they had
another shock: Fanny, the only
daughter to remain loyal to Godwin but who always felt herself an outsider,
committed suicide. So Mary, Shelley,
Claire, and Byron were all, for a variety of different reasons, ready to leave
The four
converged at
The greater challenge, however, was
maintaining a semblance of sanity in the volatile relationship between Claire and Byron. The fiery Claire and the tempestuous Byron
were not destined for amorous bliss.
Shortly after Allegra was born, Byron left Claire, though he
continued to wrangle and plague her, most often using the child. Shelley was angered over Bryon’s treatment of
Claire, and for a time the two poets were estranged.
The next
years were filled with sadness for the Shelleys: the death of their two children, Clara
and William. Mary slipped into a dark
depression that shut out Shelley;
Shelley often turned to other women, befriending them and idealizing them to
Mary’s bane. The birth, however, of
their son Percy Florence, more than anything, helped to pull Mary
back into the world and back into the life of her husband, and for a while,
until 1822, their lives seemed to stabilize.
Byron's life too achieved a degree
of stability—comparatively speaking that is.
Weary of his life of debauchery, Byron settled down (1818-1820) to
domestic life with Countess Teresa Guiccioli, a member of the politically
powerful Gamba family, who fought for the Italian independence. When the Gambas were exiled to
The
A little more than a year after
Keats' death, on the afternoon of
July 8, 1922, Shelley and Edward Williams had set sailed in Byron’s
new boat, the Don Juan, for
Lerici. All was fine as they began to cross
the Bay, but suddenly the sky turned
dark, the sea began to churn and boil in the squall, and little boat quite
literally disappeared. Ten days later
Shelley's body was found buried in the sand—two volumes in his pocket, Sophocles and Keats. Shelley’s body had to be cremated; Trelawny
climbed upon the burning pyre and plucked out the heart for Mary (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Funeral_of_Shelley_by_Louis_Edouard_Fournier.jpg).
Byron, who was often chastised by
his idealistic friend, said of Shelley: He was "without exception the
best and least selfish man I knew."
Two years later, bored and restless with domestic life, Byron
traveled to northern
Mary said of Byron that he was a "fascinating,
faulty, childish, philosophical being—daring the world—docile to a private
circle—impetuous and indolent—gloomy and yet more gay than any other." Mary was often perturbed by Byron, at
what she called his "waywardness," yet she was also charmed by the
appeal of his "buoyant" conversation and wit. Mary Shelley was possibly
the one woman Byron was never able to seduce.
Byron said of himself, shortly
before he died: "I am so changeable, being everything by turns and
nothing long—I am such a strange mélange of good and evil." Goethe thought Byron, however, was the great of English poets!
And what
of Mary? She devoted the rest of her life to
her child Percy Florence and to the memory and work of her husband, though
dashing men such as Trelawny pursued her.
Ironically, at her husband's death, her own literary reputation paled
his, so she worked hard to prepare his poems for publication and champion his
work, while publishing novels to support her child. By the time of her death, Percy Shelley's
star had risen and hers began to wane. Today, however, Mary Shelley’s work is
being re-evaluated, for not only its philosophic but for its psychological and
literary significance, and she has once again taken her place with the men of
her century—a fact that would have pleased no one more than Percy Shelley (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_modern_1.html).
POSTSCRIPT: Of her son Percy
Florence who lived a long and uneventful life, Mary once said, when asked if
she were not going to "teach him to be an individualist," to be a
young rebel like herself and Shelley:
"Oh God, no! [I shall] teach
him to think like other people!"
JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
"From the
Egotistical Sublime to the Material Sublime:
Adonais Unreconstructed"
John Keats (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
and http://englishhistory.net/keats.html)
was the youngest and perhaps the greatest of the second generation
Romantics, and except for M. Shelley he is quite different from the
others--different in that he is solidly grounded in this world rather than
in the Ideal or in his own egotism.
For one touched early by tragedy
(his father was killed in a horse accident and mother died of consumption by
the time Keats was fourteen), there was a
reasonableness, an adjusted temperament, a wisdom which makes the
tragedy of his short life especially sad.
Though Keats was a particularly good student and was studying to be a
doctor, he fully understood that he was created to be a poet, writing early on:
"I am fit for nothing but literature" (see http://englishhistory.net/keats/images/keats-min.jpg).
His earliest poetic efforts were in the style of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt--a colloquial language which
earned him the label "Cockney Poet" by the critics. During this period of his formative years as
a poet, 1816, he met the Shelleys in
Major Ideas in Keats’ Verse: Lines from “Endymion”:
1) Love for beauty:
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Its
loveliness increases; it will never
Pass
into nothingness, but still will keep
A
bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full
of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing." (lines
1-5)
Here are the seeds
for Keats' aestheticism
and the influence he would exert over the Pre-Raphaelites (1848), Walter
Pater and Oscar Wilde of the fin d'siecle, “new critics” of the 20th
Century, and Modernists such as Eliot and Fitzgerald.
2) Awareness of
the danger of the Romantic hero going "beyond the bourn":
Endymion quests
after the Ideal, represented in Diana, the fairy goddess, and in the process, in his monomania to
achieve his idealistic vision, he almost loses his humanity. At the end, he feels that he has loved and
pursued “a dream”:
". . . I have clung
To nothing, loved a
nothing, nothing seen
Or felt but a great
dream!” (636-638)
3) Material
Sublime: For Keats, life must be
grounded in the things of this world, the common and the ordinary, perhaps a
more attainable beauty—the Material
Sublime:
"There never lived
a mortal man who bent
His appetite beyond his
natural sphere
But
starved and died." (646-648)
The ideal, while
special and timeless, is still, for Keats, "a hope beyond a shadow of a
dream” (857). Later, Keats would
replace the “quest for the ideal” with the more attainable "material
sublime"—an understanding
that this world, the temporal and transient, has all the joy we could hope for:
"Oh, that our dreamings all of
sleep or wake / Would all their colours from the sunset take, / From something
of material sublime” (67-69)–"Verse Letter To J. H. Reynolds"
4) Negative
Capability (see Keats’ prose
letters).
After Endymion, Keats resolved to
shake himself free of the influence of Wordsworth and Hunt (the
colloquial style and language) and to
free himself of Byron's egotism.
He wrote to John Hamilton Reynolds: "I will cut all this--I will
have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular . . . why should we be owls,
when we can be Eagles?"
In the summer of 1818, Keats (see http://englishhistory.net/keats/images/keatssev.jpg) had gone on a walking tour of the
In the year that their friendship
blossomed into love 1819, Keats grew increasingly weaker and wrote his
greatest poetry: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "Eve of St.
Agnes," "
If I
should die, I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends
proud of my name--but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and
if I had time I would have made myself remembered.
The next winter,
after several hemorrhages, he went to
During the night of
In his
verse letter to J. H. Reynolds, Keats wrote:
"Oh, that our dreamings . . . / would all
their colors from the
sunset take” (67-68). Indeed his poetry
is extraordinarily sensual, as one
critic says, "a
riot of sounds, colors, perfumes." All his late work is firmly grounded in the material
world and its temporal, transient, exquisite beauty. While Keats is often tempted by the timeless
quality of the Ideal, he
will not lose himself in empty egotism or Idealism. Keats submerges and
suffuses his ego into the
world about him, and in the process awakens us to its glory,
as does no other poet of the period, perhaps even
Wordsworth!
