John Milton (1608 - 1674)
On his blindness, Paradise Lost (1667)
Musicality of his poetry: “a poet of the ear rather than the eye”
Aeropagatica - defense of a free press
“Satan emerges as a real hero of Paradise Lost”
“For this poem Milton created a new kind of English and a new kind of English verse”; “it served to slow the development of English poetry as a natural medium of expression”
Byronic hero
Epic poem
Pentateuch
Paradise regained
Andrew Marvell (1621 - 1678)
To His Coy Mistress (`metaphysical' voice of John Donne)
Poet of many facets (“wit, seriousness, intellectuality, sensuousness, force and compassion”)
Metaphysical Poets
Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674)
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Carpe diem poem, anti-puritanical philosophy of carpe diem
Ben Johnson's follower (Cavalier poets)
Hesperides
“a lover of pleasure, a singer of the beauty of women and of flowers, a praiser of wine”
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)
The Rape of the Lock (1712)
Mock-heroic
Sylphs
“the singer of order in the universe and… and of order in society”
Essay on Man (1734)
Perfection in the heroic couplet
The Augustans (avoiding experiments)
“summing up admirably the rational notions of the day”
Rape of the Lock
Mock-heroic
Translation of Iliad and Odyssey (“it was very pretty, but not Homer”)
Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1754)
Gulliver's Travels (1726)
A Tale of a Tub (1704) -satire of the main non-conformist religions (Catholicism and Presbyterianism)
The grand academy of Lagado - satire of the Royal Society
Menippean satire
The Romantics
“The new orthodoxy”
“returning to the old way of writing”
French and German influence
Tom Paine, William Goldwin
1798 - Lyrical Ballads
Wordsworth: poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
Democratization of poetry
1832 - the death of Walter Scott, the beginning of the Victorian Era
The Lake School - Wordsworth, Coleridge
The Cockney School - Keats
The Satanic School - Byron, Shelley
“the language of poetry should be the language of ordinary men and women”
“return to imagination, legend, the human heart”
Poet = prophet
Poetry treated not as a hobby, but as a vocation
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)
Daffodils, We are seven, Tintern Abbey
Nature as a teacher of morals; “in Nature resides God”
Pantheism
Veneration of the simple folk
“Children as the real repositories of virtue and even wisdom”
Poet laureateship
William Blake (1757 - 1827)
The Lamb, The Tyger, Chimney Sweeper
Songs of Innocence (1789)
Songs of Experience (1794)
Pre-romantic poetry
“He wished to built up a huge mythology of his own”
Los & Urizen (imagination vs. reason)
“Marriage of Heaven and Hell turns the existing 18th century world upside-down”
Against the repression of law, religion and science
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
The Rime of The Ancient Mariner
“return to the magical and mysterious”
“introduction of the supernatural into poetry”
Christabel
Kubla Khan