The Romantic Poets

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3, 7], is also well known. From these facets of Carter's music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet–inspired solo flute piece, Scrivo in Vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative pathways by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition. Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002; Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and common-note voice leading between the tetrachords. While acknowledging such features, my analysis emphasises oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords as separate entities which cooperate and conflict as they manoeuvre to outdo each other.

The analysis advances three theses: (1) it guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way which resonates with Carter's concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration and his affinity for all-interval tetrachords; (2) it shows that music-analytical detail can be organised into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory's relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds; and (3) it shows how detailed pc-set analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity."

Keats poetry is an amalgamation of an affirmation of the reality of death and an attempt to escape it. Through his poetry, he manages to move away from physical realm and towards a spiritual awakening. He fulfills his purpose of reshaping the chaos in the mundaneness of everyday life. There can be a link forged between the conceptions of Keats and the Lacanian scheme of things.

The cultural and historical phenomenon known as Romanticism is unwittingly gender-biased. We have based our constructions of British Romantic literary canon almost exclusively upon the writings of six male poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats). In the present paper, I have focused on the numerous women writers (such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Felicia Hemans) who produced at least half of the literature published in England between 1780 and 1830. This paper argues that a paradigm shift in our conceptual understanding of British literary Romanticism occurs once equal weight is given to the thought and writing of the women of the period. Issues like the culturally enforced relation between gender and genre, the female-specific 'quotidian' themes, the steadily increasing female readership owing to an increase in female literacy, the anxiety of the male Romantics as a result of the popularity of female-authored literary works, feminine romanticism as opposed to masculine romanticism, the emerging cult of sensibility and its gender specificity-all these have been dealt with to drive home the central argument of this paper, that is, the whys and wherefores behind the disappearance of the canon of Romantic poetry produced, in particular, by the female writers of the period.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

This paper gives information about Lord Byron (George Gordon) and his family ancestry, as well as his being an Inner-Circle member, with Inner-Circle friends. The purpose of this paper is to further and better educate people to the true nature of history and of those who wrote literature and history. The aim is that by more people knowing of the Inner-Circle and its existence that they will be better able to understand it and benefit from the knowledge of what they left us. With this knowledge, we hold the key to knowing what the past was actually like; and once knowing that, we can better know what to do in terms of our future.

During the twentieth century, women poets who were immensely influenced by the most revolutionary aspects of modernism, gave rise to what French feminists called 'écriture feminine' as a desired way of writing differently. In feminist writings emphasis seems to be more on how women are oppressed in the society as well as their anxieties about their bodies. Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) the Canadian nationalist poetess is a prominent figure concerned with the need for a new language to explore relations between subjects and society, the power relations that define one's identity as well as the inadequacy of phallocentric discourse. What is also noteworthy in Atwood's writings is the rewriting of images and myths born by the patriarchal society and Western civilization. This study is an attempt to shed light on the ways Atwood pursues French feminists with emphasis on female body and language to show the poetess's exploration of female identity in her less-referred-to poem "This is a Photograph of Me." The writers have tried to show Atwood's tackling identity and restriction through the act of rewriting such established images as light and water.

Beautiful (1756). In the treaties, Burke explains that beauty is a quality of something that is ordered and controlled while the sublime is awe-inspiring and outside of an individual's control.4 Also, Romanticism addresses the themes of a person's identity, and the individual's relationship to nature, and place in society. Although the movement was present in many artistic fields and widespread throughout Europe, this paper will focus on The English Romantic Era (1798-1820)5 that saw the creation of works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (to name a few), where Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818) embodies the movement. Frankenstein illustrates the tension between society's scientific progress and the individual's natural human development.

Inspired by recent studies of Romantic botany and geology, this essay explores the intersection of the rise of the modern science of entomology and the insect poetics of the English laboring-class poet John Clare. Besides the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833), Clare’s time saw the publication of William Spence and William Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology (1815-26), and John Curtis’s British Entomology (1824-39). Building on the common language that Romantic writers applied to the poetic imagination and the insect world (Coleridge’s “endless variety of form”), Kirby, Spence, and others traced the origins of song to insect sounds; moreover, they associated intention, mind, expression, and reception with insect motion and antennae.

Returning to the poetic entomology of the so-called Northamptonshire peasant, I argue, affords a vision of new nonhuman concepts of affect, language, aesthetics, and intelligence. A natural historian and descriptive poet, Clare builds on Kirby’s and Spence’s insights to account for the ways in which insects mediate between plant and animal kingdoms, local and global natures, and textual and real materials (ink and paper derived in part from insect life during the period). Coordinating the perceptive powers of the nature poet and the entomologist, Clare aligns the size, complexity, and camouflage of what he terms the “insect-world” (The Shepherd’s Calendar, [1827]) with the brevity, subtlety, and opacity of lyric form (Keats, Smith, and Wordsworth also wrote sonnets on insects).

Romantic entomology, which includes Clare’s farsighted poetic vision of weather-wise beetles, signifying grasshoppers, and ant architects, not only revises the “animal claim” that Tobias Menely has recently identified with the poetics of sensibility, but also anticipates present-day scientific discussions of nonhuman forms of rhythm, memory, temporality (the term “beetle” is an archaic word for “clock”), organization, and mass communication. To be sure, buzzing Romantic-era bugs suggest, on the one hand, the swarming clouds of universal pestilence, and, on the other, the juvenile microenvironments of minute ephemera. Simultaneously accounting for human famines and insect victims (the minute and helpless prey of the sporting boys and stalking birds whose songs scholars have more often analyzed), Clare’s insect poetics figures and anticipates a twenty-first century concern: a species capable of simultaneously representing the agent and object of ecological calamity.

This essay takes a contrastive approach to the expediency of an intertextual approach to Keats’s poetry and his thinking about the nature of poetry. Keats, it is argued, becomes ‘indissolubly united’ to his predecessors, and such intertextual relations are explored in relation to Harold Bloom’s ideas of poetic influence, Keats’s creative responses to Shakespeare, and further developed through an exploration of intertextuality and translation. The essa­y concludes with a detailed account of Italian translations of Keats’s poetry.

"Demons" is a poem, taken from the poetry book; Shamma: The Dancing Flame.
The poem highlights the complex inner conflicts between fantasy and reality. It has the war between your positive and negative self. When once can/not differentiate between two inner worlds. We all fight our own self-made demons, knowing it can be somewhat challenging.

(2019 Postgraduate Dissertation) - This study uses a two-pronged research approach to questions of identity, heritage, and landscape in present-day Cumbria. The first research chapter looks at the ‘strata’ of literature and heritage discourse over the last century to discern a structure of feeling in Cumbrian popular literature centred on Romantic and later Postromantic tropes about that county’s landscapes and culture. The second research chapter presents thematically analysed data from semi-structured interviews with eight local residents, to ascertain attitudes and perceptions about identity, heritage, and landscape. Viewed in light of the structure of feeling, the thematic analysis concludes that Cumbria represents a polity marked by both peripherality and geohistorical centrality within the British Isles; further these two concrete features have seen the region become a theatre for overlapping but contested local and national claims that are seen through the divisions between the West Coast and the central Lakeland Dome.

Byron's epic poem, Don Juan, addresses so many issues that it is difficult to narrow the scope of the poem to just one or two. Is the poem an attack on what was current Romantic Era ideology? Is the poem about love and romance? Is it primarily social commentary? Is the poem a description of the Fall of Man? Could it be Byron's own attempt at self therapy? Does the poem hold to a specific world view and if so, is it inherently nihilistic or is the poem actually a moral poem endorsing traditional principles? What, finally, is the poem about? These questions, and more, are some of the relevant issues raised when analyzing Don Juan. As it is certainly likely that Byron is rebelling against stringent Calvinistic principles, it would be remiss to construe the poem as part of the "Either/Or" Syndrome (positive/moral-negative/nihilistic, good/bad, cold/hot, heaven.hell, et cetera). Rather, the poem is a manifestation of Byron's own existential frustration - a complex masterpiece therapeutically exercising human angst and effectively addressing all of the previously mentioned issues. And unlike the angry existential philosophers who follow him some years later, Byron's existential vision is a theistic one: a vision comprised of isolation and loneliness while encompassing a compassion for humanity as a greater whole.

This essay provides an analysis of a long-forgotten novel about Lord Byron, The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968), written by the American author Frederic Prokosch (1906-1989).
Born in a cosmopolitan and well educated family in Madison, Wisconsin, Prokosch travelled widely for much of his life through Europe, writing books that aroused the admiration of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder and of his long-dated friend Gore Vidal.
At first sight a reconstruction of the lost memoirs of Lord Byron, The Missolonghi Manuscript actually is, in his author’s words, ‘a study of the romantic artist’. As a consequence, the novel seems to transcends Byron’s life involving reflections on the way Romantic art changed the history of ideas.
Focusing on the reasons that led Prokosch to write his imaginary portrait of the ‘Wicked Lord’ and examining the modalities of his literary depiction of Byron, this work explores how history and biography blend together in The Missolonghi Manuscript in order to depict the Zeitgeist of the Romantic Era.
Finally, this essay aims to revaluate the position of Frederic Prokosch in XX century literature, stressing the importance of The Missolonghi Manuscript as a precursor to that kind of postmodernist historical fiction notably practised by Anthony Burgess, A.S Byatt and Umberto Eco.

To its inventor David Brewster, the kaleidoscope, which first appeared in 1816, was less a children's toy than a "philosophical instrument" whose artistic and intellectual ramifications prompted him to write a lengthy treatise explaining its significance. The device arranged and rearranged tiny fragments of colored glass, creating an infinite number of "beautiful forms." Brewster was one among many great minds of his age fascinated with the idea of the fragment: twenty years earlier, Scottish economist Adam Smith had discussed the ways in which humans perceive random combinations of fragments, and then adjust their perceptions when the combinations change. Several Romantic poets, rough contemporaries of Brewster, are similarly preoccupied with the arrangement and rearrangement of fragments, what critic Helen Groth calls "kaleidoscopic vision." This paper examines the figurative (and sometimes literal) fascination with kaleidoscopic imagery that permeates three Romantic poems, by Amelia Opie, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. It also attempts to prove that rather than being a novelty, the kaleidoscope reveals much about the Romantic psyche, and deserves the serious treatment afforded it by Brewster.

A critical analysis of how the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley perceived the relationship between poets and their readers. Written for the honors level English Literature course, 'Romantic Poets and their Readers' taught by Tom Mole at The University of Edinburgh, 2015. NOT co-written.

The Greek lyric poet Archilochus was able to account for the occurrence of sex and sex image in ancient Greek. The poem was not complete but had erotic context which had sparked debates about the nature of sex in the ancient Greek. Archilochus does not, like Homer, act the part of a spectator observing the consequences of futile love in others, but he gives us a description of his own unhappy love" according to D.Lavigne .In one’s view the following points detract sex as the abusive nature of Archilochus, emotional feelings triggered by Nobule, isolated place which Archilochus met a girl which mean the girl become a rape victim. However other factors does add to the good presentation of occurrence of sex and sex image in ancient Greek .Archilochus honors the virginity of the girl ,used the previous relationship to convince the girl psychologically and Archilochus hidden sex meaning was for the receptors not to trust women that was the daughters of Lycambes.

(Note: I wrote this one for my Romantic Age class in March 2010, junior year as an undergrad at Stonehill College. The class and Professor Matthew Borushko were great! PBS later linked to my essay.)

The title originally ended with a question mark, which Academia would not let me add.

À l'automne 1853, Nerval avait envisagé la publication d'une nouvelle dont le titre était alors la Pandora (ou peut-être Suite des Amours de Vienne, ou bien encore Amours de Vienne. Pandora) ; elle devait d'abord paraître dans le journal Paris, puis être intégrée au recueil Les Filles du Feu qu'il était en train d'achever. Le journal Paris disparut en décembre 1853 sans avoir rien publié de tel, et quand Les Filles du Feu parut au début de 1854, la Pandora n'y figurait pas. Le 30 octobre 1854, Le Mousquetaire d'Alexandre Dumas fit paraître le début de la nouvelle, dont le titre était devenu Pandora. Nerval disparut dans la nuit du 25 au 26 janvier 1855, et Le Mousquetaire ne publia jamais la suite de Pandora. Le Père Jean Guillaume a apporté de précieuses lumières sur la genèse de Pandora. Michel Brix et Jacques Clémens ont fait progresser la recherche par la publication en 2005 d'un manuscrit inédit qui pourrait avoir été celui que Le Mousquetaire devait publier. Le présent dossier tire quelques conclusions des travaux respectifs de Jean Guillaume, et de Michel Brix et Jacques Clémens.

Many visitors in the nineteenth century to the grave of John Keats in Rome thought it 'neglected' or 'solitary' and 'unshaded'. Today's critics often characterize the grave as 'marginal', both literally and metaphorically, while ignoring the city authorities' proposal to demolish it in the 1880s. An analysis of the grave's original setting and its subsequent renovations suggests instead that it enjoyed a privileged position. Historical descriptions, when considered together with visitors' accounts a valuable source if used critically and little-known artists' depictions of Keats's grave prompt a re-assessment of ideas of its 'marginality' and 'neglect' in the nineteenth century.

The paper focuses on the exploring of the various nuances of Vaishnava love poetry from which one can arrive at some specific features of the Romantic thought as it developed in India. The passion of Radha and Krishna being the central theme of this poetic tradition, it affords one the opportunity of studying the treatment of emotions and effects as formulated by the poets like Jaydev, Vidyapati, Chandidasa and others. Although neither Radha nor the pair of Radha and Krishna is the subject of any known major work prior to Jaydev’s Gitagovinda, their treatment in the stray verses of many prior literary works renders authenticity to Jaydev's claim that he is basing his poem on a known theme. In fact, Prakrit love poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala provides the earliest instance of the poetic appropriation to this love story. Thus the presentation also attempts to assess the traditions of love poetry that lead upto the bards of Bengal and Mithila. Overall, Vaishnavpadavali, by its evocation of a lingering lyricism, “shringar rasa” as the oldest aesthetic tenet in India, and the mingling boundaries of the finite and the infinite, point to an endless mystery of life thereby bestowing a marked character to Indian Romantic Literature. There lie embedded in it the roots of many of the aesthetic principles to be later taken up and modified by the British Romantics, be it the relation between man and nature or the sense of melancholy lying at the heart of all things beautiful. Vaishnavpadavali, in its profoundly pantheistic flavour, also sing the notes of “advaita” philosophy so integral to the Indian thought. So one can observe the curious convergences and divergences between British Romanticism and Romantic thought as is reflected in Vaishnava love poetry which makes the later, if not an alternate, at least a prominently individual branch of Romantic aesthetics. The paper also tries to examine how this tradition throbs steady in a much later poet Tagore who was exposed to and heavily influenced by the British Romantics, with Shelley in particular. Not entering the labyrinthine alleys of theology, the paper concentrates mostly on a critical study of Vaishnavpadavali by analyzing some specific pada-s to delve into a general exploration of the domain.