Session 4: Art and Death (Dec. 10)

Prepare for class by reading the following poems:

William Wordsworth

• "A slumber did my spirit seal"

Lord Byron

• "Darkness"

John Keats

• "Ode on a Grecian urn"
• "Ode to a Nightingale"

Other suggested poems:

• Keats' "This living hand"
• Byron's "The dream"
  

Terminology

This section defines the following key, related concepts : ecstatic, Gothic, mystical, Romanticism, sublime, and visionary.

Ecstasy, ecstatic (or ekstasis) from the Ancient Greek, έκ-στασις (ex-stasis), "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere .... [There is] a form of ecstasy described as the vision of, or union with, some otherworldly entity … of which Plotinus spoke; this pertains to an individual trancelike experience of the sacred or of God.... Spiritual ecstasy is an altered state of consciousness characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness which is frequently accompanied by visions and emotional/intuitive (and sometimes physical) euphoria.... Spiritual ecstasy can be distinguished from spirit possession and hypnosis in that ecstasy is not accompanied by a loss of interior consciousness or will on the part of the subject experiencing it. Rather, the person experiencing ecstasy notices a dramatic heightening of awareness of the spiritual, and a total concentration of the will on it.
Excerpted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_(philosophy) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_ecstasy

Gothic fiction (sometimes referred to as Gothic horror) is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance…. [T]he literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere…. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.... [C]ontributions to the Gothic genre were provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci which feature mysteriously fey ladies.
Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction#The_Romantics

Mysticism, mystical (from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, an initiate of a mystery religion) is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight.… The emphasis that is placed on subjective direct experience of the "divine and otherworldly transcendent goal of unity", makes it highly controversial to individuals who place a greater emphasis on empirical verification of knowledge and truth (such as scientists for example).
Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism

Romanticism and Romantic poetry: Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.... The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom to something noble….

[P]oets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban…. Romantic poetry referred to the natural aspects of the world, focusing on the feelings of sadness and great happiness…. Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply”…. They, along with William Blake believed that they were reviving the true spirit of English poetry by pursuing the "romance" and the sublime that was lost since Milton. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron then comprised the latter half of the movement, largely continuing in the same tradition, though deviating slightly into more metaphysical matters.
Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism  and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_poetry

Sublime: In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.... [Edmund] Burke's doctrine of the sublime was powerfully influential on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. He believed that a painful idea creates a sublime passion and thus concentrates the mind on that single facet of experience and produces a momentary suspension of rational activity, uncertainty, and self-consciousness. If the pain producing this effect is imaginary rather than real, a great aesthetic object is achieved. Thus, great mountains, storms at sea, ruined abbeys, crumbling castles, and charnel houses are appropriate subjects to produce the sublime.

… The sublime is that in nature which is so much greater than man that its attraction actually includes a certain degree of fear and trepidation on the part of the beholder, although a fear not so immediate that it traumatizes. … Natural landscapes that often evoke the sublime include mountains, chasms, Northern wastelands, massive waterfalls, etc.
Excerpted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy), http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/guide.html#sublime, and Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, Kunsthalle Hamburg. Romantic artists during the 19th century used the epic of nature as an expression of the sublime.

Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visionary

Visionary: Defined narrowly, a visionary is one who purportedly experiences a vision or apparition connected to the supernatural. At times this involves seeing into the future. The visionary state is achieved via meditation, drugs, lucid dreams, day dreams, or art…. Artists may produce work loosely categorized as visionary art for its luminous content and/or for its use of artistic techniques that call for the use of extended powers of perception in the viewer [e.g., William Blake].

Syllabus

Title: Mystical Themes in English Romantic Poetry: “To see a world in a grain of sand”

Instructor: Maggi Kramm
Schedule: Tuesdays, December 1, 8, 2009; 7:00-9:00 p.m.; Thursdays, December 3, 10, 2009; 7:00-9:00 p.m.; Redmond, Trilogy at Redmond Ridge
Class Website: http://mysticalromantics.blogspot.com/

Course Description:
Some of the most expansive and well-loved poetry in English derives from the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century. The Romantics often emphasized intuition over reason and imagination over the literal, and many of their poems explored states of experience that have been termed mystical, visionary, ecstatic, or sublime. As William Blake writes of this state in “Auguries of Innocence,” one might “see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower.”

In this course we will study Romantic poems with mystical or sublime themes, including Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and several of Blake’s poems, as well as brief prose works, such as Keats’ letters. Special emphasis will be placed on reciting the works aloud. Selected poems will be provided to course participants. A class website will enable course participants to share comments and read online source materials outside of class.

Session One: Nature (December 1)
Session Two: Love, Beauty, and States of Despair (December 3)
Session Three: Religion, Politics, and Spirituality (December 8)
Session Four: Art and Death (December 10)

Instructor:
Maggi Kramm received her doctorate in English at the University of Minnesota after completing a dissertation on Shakespeare. She taught for many years at the University of St. Thomas and at the University of Minnesota, focusing in particular on British literature. For the Osher Institute she has taught a course on Jane Austen. She currently develops Web-based courses for graduate online programs.

William Blake

William Blake (28 November 1757–12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he only once journeyed farther than a day's walk outside London during his lifetime, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg.
Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake

John Keats

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet, who became one of the key figures of the Romantic movement. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats was one of the second generation Romantic poets. During his short life his work was not well received by critics, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen was significant. The poetry of Keats was characterised by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery, most notably in a series of odes which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. The letters of Keats, which include the development of his aesthetic theory of negative capability, are among the most celebrated by any English poet.

Early life

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the oldest of their four surviving children—George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889). A son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London, (though there is no clear evidence exactly where) [2]. His father was working as an ostler at the Hoop and Swan pub when John Keats was born.... On 15 April 1804, only nine months after Keats had started at Enfield, his father died of a fractured skull, falling from his horse on a return visit to the school.... In March 1810, when Keats was fourteen, his mother died, leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother....

A young poet—the Cockney School

His first surviving poem—An Imitation of Spenser—comes in 1814, when Keats was nineteen. On 1 October 1815, Keats registered to become a student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College London) where he would study for five years... He was also devoting increasing time to the study of literature [and to writing poetry].

The Hampstead period

Unhappy with living in London and in bad health, Keats moved into rooms at 1 Well Walk, in April 1817, with his brothers. Both John and George nursed their brother Tom, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The house in Hampstead was close to [Leigh] Hunt and others from his circle, as well as the senior poet Coleridge, living in Highgate.

In June 1818, Keats began a walking journey around Scotland, Ireland and the Lake district with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then headed to Liverpool, from where the couple would emigrate to America. (They lived in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky until 1841 when George's investments went bad. Like both his brothers, he would die penniless and racked by tuberculosis. There would be no effective treatment for the disease till 1921.) In July, while on Mull for the walking tour, Keats caught a bad cold and by August Brown writes that his friend "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey". On his return south, Keats continued to nurse Tom, continuously exposing himself to the highly infectious disease. Motion argues "It was on Mull that Keats' short life started to end, and his slow death began", although biographers disagree on when the first signs of tuberculosis appear....

John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house, the newly built, Wentworth Place, also on the edge of Hampstead Heath.... Keats composed five of his six great odes in April and May and, although it is debated in which order they were written, Ode to Psyche starts the series. According to Brown, Ode to a Nightingale was composed under their mulberry tree.

At this time he met the eighteen year old Frances (Fanny) Brawne, who eventually lived next door to Wentworth Place with her widowed mother.... He fell in love with Fanny and a year later they were betrothed, although the engagement was later broken off as his health worsened. On 21 September, Keats wrote to his friend Reynolds, introducing his last great ode: To Autumn. He says, "How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it [...]I never lik'd the stubbled fields as much as now—Aye, better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow the stubble plain looks warm—in the same way as some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it. During 1820 Keats began showing increasingly serious signs of tuberculosis and suffered two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. He lost large amounts of blood in the attacks and was then bled further by his attending physician. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to leave London and move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13th September, he left for Gravesend and four days later Keats and Severn boarded the sailing brig The Maria Crowther. Keats wrote his final version of Bright Star aboard the ship.

Death

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, (now the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, a museum that is dedicated to their life and work). Despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated.... John Keats died on 23 February 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tombstone, without his name, and bearing only the legend Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. Severn and Brown erected such a stone, and under the relief of a lyre with broken strings.

Poems

Keats' odes, which many consider to be his most distinctive poetical achievements, were all composed in 1819. Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his entry on Keats for the 1882 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, was scathing in his criticism of Keats's early poems [but] rapt in admiration for Keats's "unequalled and unrivalled odes," about which he wrote: "Of these perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to the triumphant achievement and accomplishment of the very utmost beauty possible to human words, may be that to Autumn and that on a Grecian Urn ; the most radiant, fervent, and musical is that to a Nightingale; the most pictorial and perhaps the tenderest in its ardour of passionate fancy is that to Psyche; the subtlest in sweetness of thought and feeling is that on Melancholy. Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see... The Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages."


Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Prometheus Unbound.... Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife.

Shelley never lived to see the extent of his success and influence in generations to come. Some of his works were published, but they were often suppressed upon publication. Up until his death, with approximately 50 readers as his audience, it is said that he made no more than 40 pounds from his writings.
He grew up in an educated and prosperous family. But after his suspension from Oxford he broke with his family. In his college days he got to know Plato and so his interest in science grew. But that caused problems to him, because questioning God and religion was not usual at that time. This feeling of control, misunderstanding and captivity always accompanied him all the time. His life was not like other lives, because of his view of life, he did not think much of the opinion of the others. His view was radical. His political activities were inspired by Locke, Paine and Godwin. For them the only function of government was to save the liberty and freedom of the people. He always tried to live his life fully in his poems. He used them to critize the social and political conditions. After a revolt of workers which resulted in many casualties he wrote a poem about it. Shelley saw in nature the solution of the problems, but his life was determined by his personal problems. His first wife, Harriet (Westbrook) Shelley committed suicide and his two children died early. These events influenced his work. Death was also a main topic of his work. Nature and the phenomena of nature like the cycle of life formed the background to his work, which is connected with his own life and the social and political circumstances at that time.

At age nineteen, Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, sixteen. Once married, Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write. Two years later he published his first long serious work, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem emerged from Shelley's friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin's freethinking Socialist philosophy. Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe.

After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England. In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, and in February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later. The following January, Mary bore another son, named William after her father. In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics, including ghosts and spirits, into the night. During one of these ghostly "seances," Byron proposed that each person present should write a ghost story. Mary's contribution to the contest became the novel Frankenstein. That same year, Shelley produced the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. In December 1816 Harriet Shelley apparently committed suicide. Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married....

Early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron.

On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.

Painting by Louis Edouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley (1889)

Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley, http://www.gymnasium-meschede.de/projekte/romantik/shelley.htm, and http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/179

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight--this experience shapes much of his later work. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed, he made his first attempts at verse. While he was at Hawkshead, Wordsworth's father died leaving him and his four siblings orphans. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John's College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities.

While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth's interest and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of the "common man". These issues proved to be of the utmost importance to Wordsworth's work. Wordsworth's earliest poetry was published in 1793 in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. While living in France, Wordsworth conceived a daughter, Caroline, out of wedlock; he left France, however, before she was born. In 1802, he returned to France with his sister on a four-week visit to meet Caroline.

Later that year, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. In 1812, while living in Grasmere, they grieved the loss of two of their children, Catherine and John, who both died that year.

Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet's views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for "common speech" within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

Wordsworth's most famous work, The Prelude (1850), is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism. The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously. Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions. Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847, Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.

from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/296