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Outline
Introduction to the Romantic Age: Part II
The
Second Generation of Poets
Byron,
Shelley and Keats
Thomas
Moore
Thomas Campbell
Samuel Rogers
Leigh
Hunt
James
Hogg
Charles
Lamb
William
Hazlitt
Thomas
Love Peacock
Washington
Irving
James
Fenimore Cooper
Thomas
De Quincey
Introduction to the
Romantic Age: Part II
The Romantic age in
literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which
preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different
attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of
seeing and experiencing life.
The Classical or
Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of
reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled
(although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements
in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments
in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress on a
grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect society was
mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was within man’s grasp if his
baser, bestial instincts could be controlled. The Classical temperament trusts
reason, intellect, and the head. The Romantic temperament prefers feelings,
intuition, and the heart.
There are further
contrasts in the ways in which children are regarded and represented in
Classical and Romantic literature. For the Augustan writer the child is only
important because he or she will develop into an adult. The child’s savage
instincts must be trained, making it civilised and sophisticated. For the
Romantic writer the child is holy and pure and its proximity to God will only
be corrupted by civilisation. The child then is a source of natural and
spontaneous feeling. When Wordsworth wrote that ‘the Child is father of the
Man’ (in My Heart Leaps Up)
he stressed that the adult learns from the experience of childhood.
The two ages may be
contrasted in other ways: the Classical writer looks outward to society,
Romantic writers look inward to their own soul and to the life of the
imagination; the Classical writer concentrates on what can be logically
measured and rationally understood, Romantic writers are attracted to the
irrational, mystical and supernatural world; the Classical writer is attracted
to a social order in which everyone knows his place, Romantic writers celebrate
the freedom of nature and of individual human experience. In fact, the writings
of the Augustan age stress the way societies improve under careful regulation;
Romantic literature is generally more critical of society and its injustices,
questioning rather than affirming, exploring rather than defining.
The language and
form of the literature of the two ages also shows these two different ways of
seeing. The Augustans developed a formal and ordered way of writing characterised
by the balance and symmetry of the heroic couplet in poetry and by an adherence
to the conventions of a special poetic diction. The Romantics developed ways of
writing which tried to capture the ebb and flow of individual experience in
forms and language which were intended to be closer to everyday speech and more
accessible to the general reader.
LORD BYRON:
Instant Success Born of Mediterranean
Travels:
In 1807
Byron’s early works were collected under the title Hours of Idleness; it was harshly
criticized by the Edinburgh
Review.
The irate author counterattacked in his next book, English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers (1809). In this
volume, Byron showed the first signs of his satiric wit and aristocratic
education. In 1809 a two-year trip to the Mediterranean countries provided
material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Their publication
in 1812 earned Byron instant glory, as they combined the more popular features
of the late-eighteenth-century romanticism: colorful descriptions of exotic
nature, disillusioned meditations on the vanity of earthly things, a lyrical
exaltation of freedom, and above all, the new hero, handsome and lonely,
somberly mysterious, yet strongly impassioned despite his weariness with life.
Scandalous
Social Life:
While
his fame was spreading, Byron was busy shocking London high society. After his
affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, his incestuous and adulterous
love for his half sister Augusta not only made him a scandal, but also
reinforced the sense of guilt and doom to which he had always been prone. From
then on, the theme of incest was to figure prominently in his writings,
starting with the epic tales that he published between 1812 and 1816: The Giaour, The Bride of
Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, and Parisina.
Hero in the
Greek War of Independence: After serving as an organizer in the Carbornari, and Italian revolutionary
group that opposed Austria, Byron became an active participant in the Greek War
of Independence (1821–1829) against the Ottoman Empire. He used part of his
considerable personal fortune to refit the Greek fleet and helped organize an
attack on the Ottomans at Lepanto. In April 1824, before the attack could take
place, Byron fell seriously ill. He died on April 19, 1824, during a violent
electrical storm.
In memorial services throughout the country, he was proclaimed a
national hero of Greece. His death proved effective in uniting Greece against
the enemy and in eliciting support for its struggle from all parts of the civilized
world. In October 1827 British, French, and Russian forces destroyed the
Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino, assuring Greek independence.
Satire: After his first
attempts at poetry were criticized by the Edinburgh Review, Byron struck back
in his English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a longer satirical poem taking jabs at
both some of the better-known English poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge as
well as the critics. The volume was well received and displayed Byron’s gifts
for comedic satire that would eventually find fuller expression in Beppo and Don Juan.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Taken together, the four
cantos of Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage helped establish Harold as the archetype of the ‘‘Byronic
Hero,’’ a world-weary but intelligent and attractive hero traveling the world.
Sir Walter Scott declared in 1816 that Byron had created a new and significant
Romantic character type, and others praised the poem for its seriousness and passion.
Don Juan: After writing the lighter parody of Beppo, Byron turned
toward the mock heroic quest of Don Juan. However, Byron’s treatment
of this Romantic hero and libertine legend did not garner the same type of
admiration, and both the poem and the poet were vilified in the reviews.
Critics called the poem ‘‘filthy and impious,’’ and the poet ‘‘a cool,
unconcerned fiend.’’ Fortunately, the criticism has abated and now scholars
view the sixteen cantos of Don Juan to be an excellent example of the lengthy narrative poem, some
claiming that Byron’s narrative skill in poetry is only matched by Chaucer’s.
Note:-
Many of Byron’s works were inspired by or describe travels. Here
are some other works inspired by journeys:-
The Odyssey (eighth or ninth century BCE), an epic by Homer.
This epic poem exerted a marked influence on all of Western literature. It
tells the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus as he tries to return home to Ithaca
after fighting in the Trojan War.
The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century), a work of fiction
by Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer has each of the voyagers on a pilgrimage to
Canterbury tell a story as they journey along together.
Don Quixote (1605), a novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes’s
mentally unbalanced knight sets off on a quest through Spain with his sidekick
Sancho Panza.
The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), a trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien.
These three novels follow the effort by Frodo Baggins, a mythical humanlike
being called a hobbit, to destroy a magical ring and, with it, an evil lord.
On the Road (1957), a novel by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s famous
novel about his road trips across the country (and to Mexico) helped inspire a
generation of travelers, poets, and hipsters.
SHELLEY:
Percy
Shelley was a poet, literary theorist, translator, political thinker,
pamphleteer, and social activist. An extensive reader and bold experimenter, he
was a major English Romantic poet. His foremost works, including The Revolt of
Islam
(1818), Prometheus
Unbound
(1820), Adonais (1821), and The Triumph of
Life
(1824),
are recognized as leading expressions of radical thought written during the
Romantic age, while his odes and shorter
lyrics are often considered among the greatest in the English
language. In addition, his essay A Defence of Poetry (1840) is highly valued as a statement of
the role of the poet in society.
William Godwin had a great influence on Shelley. Godwin’s
concept of ‘Political Justice’ and his philosophy of utilitarianism shaped
Shelley’s political outlook and also the radical humanism in him.
Although Shelley began writing poems while at Eton, some of
which were published in 1810 in Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire and some of which
were not published until the 1960s as The Esdaile Notebook, his first publication
was the gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810).
Ousted for ‘‘Atheism’’: During his brief
stay at Oxford, Shelley wrote a prose pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), which was to
have a disastrous effect on his relationship with his family and a dramatic
effect on his life. Indeed, Shelley’s decision to publish The Necessity of
Atheism
and send
copies of it to the conservative Oxford dons, seemed more calculated to
antagonize and flaunt authority than to persuade by rational argument. Actually
the title of the pamphlet is more inflammatory than the argument, which centers
upon ‘‘the nature of belief,’’ a position Shelley derived from the skeptical
philosophies of John Locke and David Hume. Nevertheless, the Oxford authorities
acted swiftly and decisively, expelling both Shelley and his cohort Hogg in
March of 1811.
In 1819 and 1820 Shelley wrote two of his most ambitious works,
the verse dramas Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. Prometheus
Unbound,
- on its surface a reimagining of a lost, ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, - is
also a statement of Shelley’s revolutionary political ideas. In Shelley’s version of the play—which was meant to be
read, not performed—the leader of the Greek gods, Zeus, is overthrown and the
Titan Prometheus, who had been condemned to eternal punishment for providing humanity
with fire, is set free. Shelley based the tragedy of The Cenci on the history of a
sixteenth-century Italian noble family. The evil Count Cenci rapes his
daughter, Beatrice; she determines to murder him, seeing no other means of escape from continued violation, and is executed for
parricide, or the killing of a close relative.
One of Shelley’s best-known works, Adonais, an elegy on the
death of fellow poet John Keats, was written in 1821. Drawing on the formal
tradition of elegiac verse, Shelley laments Keats’s early death and, while
rejecting the Christian view of resurrection, describes his return to the
eternal beauty of the universe.
Mary Shelley took on the challenge of editing and annotating
Shelley’s unpublished manuscripts after his death. Her 1840 collection included
Shelley’s greatest prose work, A Defence of Poetry. Writing in response to The Four Ages
of Poetry
(1820),
an essay by his friend Peacock, Shelley details his belief in the moral
importance of poetry, calling poets ‘‘the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.’’ In addition to several other philosophical essays and translations from
the Greek, Shelley’s posthumous works include the highly personal odes
addressed to Edward Williams’s wife, Jane. ‘‘To Jane: The Invitation,’’ ‘‘To Jane: The
Recollection,’’ and ‘‘With a Guitar: To Jane’’ are
considered some of his best love poems. At once a celebration of his friends’
happy union and an intimate record of his own attraction to Jane, these lyrics are
admired for their delicacy and refined style.
Shelley’s first mature work, Queen Mab, was printed in
1813, but not distributed due to its inflammatory subject matter. It was not until
1816, with the appearance of Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, and
Other Poems, that he earned recognition as a serious poet. In Alastor, a visionary and
sometimes autobiographical poem, Shelley describes the experiences of the Poet
who, rejecting human sympathy and domestic life, is pursued by the demon
Solitude.
Shelley also used a visionary approach in his next lengthy work,
Laon
and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City (1818), written in
friendly competition with Keats. An imaginative account of a
bloodless revolution led by a brother and sister, the poem deals with the positive
power of love, the complexities of good and evil, and ultimately, spiritual
victory through martyrdom. Laon and Cythna was immediately suppressed by the printer
because of its controversial content, and Shelley subsequently revised the work
as The
Revolt of Islam, minimizing its elements of incest and political revolution. Even
the author’s attempts at more popular work met with disapproval: Although
Shelley hoped for success on the English stage with his play The Cenci, his controversial treatment
of the subject of incest outraged critics, preventing the play from being
produced.
Lyrical Poetry
and the Core of Shelley’s Themes: Throughout his career Shelley wrote
numerous short lyrics that have proved to be among his most popular works.
Characterized by a simple, personal tone, his minor poems frequently touch on
themes central to his more ambitious works: The ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’
and ‘‘Mont Blanc’’ focus on his belief in an animating spirit, while ‘‘Ode to
the West Wind’’ examines opposing forces in nature. In other lyrics, including ‘‘Lines
Written Among the Euganean Hills,’’ ‘‘Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near
Naples,’’ and ‘‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici,’’ Shelley explores his own
experiences and emotions. Political themes also inspired several of his most
famous short poems, among them ‘‘Ode to Liberty,’’ ‘‘Sonnet: England in 1819,’’
and The
Masque of Anarchy, composed 1819 and published 1832.
JOHN KEATS: John Keats is
recognized as a key figure in the English Romantic movement, a period in which
writers placed the individual at the core of all experience, valued imagination
and beauty, and looked to nature for revelation of truth.
Although his literary career spanned only four years and consisted of a mere
fifty-four poems, Keats demonstrated remarkable intellectual and artistic
development.
In 1803, Keats enrolled at the Clarke School in nearby Enfield,
where he was distinguished only by his small stature (he was barely over five
feet tall as an adult) and somewhat confrontational disposition. At the Clarke
school, Keats first encountered the works that influenced his early poetry,
including Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Lempriere’s Classical
Dictionary,
on which he based his knowledge of Greek mythology.
An Influential
Circle of Friends: Keats’s meeting in 1816 with Leigh Hunt influenced his decision
to pursue a career as a poet, and Hunt published Keats’s early poems in his
liberal journal, the Examiner. Keats was drawn readily into Hunt’s
circle, which included the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, the critic William
Hazlitt, and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. Poems, an early
collection, was published in 1817 but received little attention. His next work,
Endymion:
A Poetic Romance, a full-length allegory based on Greek mythology, was published
the following year to mixed reviews. Soon after the appearance of Endymion, Keats began to
experience the first symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his
mother and in 1818 his brother, Tom. Following Tom’s death, Keats lived with
his close friend Charles Armitage Brown in Hampstead.
‘‘Half in love
with easeful Death . . .’’: It was around this time that he composed his famous ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ a moody,
sumptuous poem in which the speaker lauds the beautiful sound of the
nightingale and fantasizes about dying—‘‘to cease upon the midnight with no
pain’’—and forgetting all ‘‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret.’’ The poem
seems to be a clear reaction to Tom’s death and his own infirmity, as Keats laments
that he lives in a world where ‘‘youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies.’’ At the same time, the poem calls the bird ‘‘immortal’’ and timeless.
The bird represents Keats the poet, capable of producing a beautiful ‘‘song’’
that will live after he is gone.
Keats’s poems, especially the later works published in Lamia,
Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), are praised
not only for their sensuous imagery and passionate tone but also for the
insight they provide into aesthetic and human concerns, particularly the
transience of beauty and happiness. The artistic philosophy described in the
famous quote from Keats’s ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’—‘‘beauty is truth, truth
beauty’’—is clarified in his correspondence with his family and friends. In
these letters, which some readers value as much as his poems, it is possible to
trace the evolution of Keats’s poetic thought and technique as he matured.
Negative
Capability:
Two
prevalent themes in Keats’s poetry are the power of imaginative perception and
the capacity of a truly creative nature to go beyond the self. In a letter
written to his brothers, Keats mentions having seen a painting by Benjamin West
and finding it lacking:
‘‘It is a wonderful picture . . . ; But there is nothing to be
intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss. . . . the excellence of every Art
is its intensity.’’
Keats then coined a term that is one of his most distinctive
contributions to aesthetic discourse: negative
capability,
which is present, Keats explains,
‘‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’’
Perhaps Keats himself provided the best gloss on this term when
he wrote, in a marginal jotting on a passage in John Milton’s masterwork Paradise Lost, of ‘‘the intense
pleasure of not knowing[,] a sense of independence, of power, from the fancy’s
creating a world of its own by the sense of probabilities.’’
The history of Keats’s early reputation is dominated by two
hostile, unsigned reviews of Endymion, one credited to John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine,
and the other to John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review. Lockhart, a
vociferous critic of what he termed ‘‘The Cockney School,’’ named for its
members’ ties to London and their alleged lack of refinement, attacked not only
Keats’s poem, which he denigrated on artistic and moral grounds, but on what he
perceived as the poet’s lack of taste, education, and upbringing. While Croker
was neither so vitriolic nor personally degrading as Lockhart—critics
acknowledge, in fact, the legitimacy of several of his complaints—his essay was
singled out as damaging and unjust by Keats’s supporters, who rushed to the
poet’s defense. While Keats was apparently disturbed only temporarily by these
attacks, they gave rise to the legend that his death had been caused, or at
least hastened, by these two reviews. A chief perpetrator of this notion was
Percy Bysshe Shelley, who composed and published his famous Adonais: An
Elegy on the Death of the Poet John Keats shortly after Keats’s death. The preface to
this work implicated Croker as Keats’s murderer. In conjunction with the
writings of Keats’s well-meaning friends, Shelley’s work effectively created an
image of Keats as a sickly and unnaturally delicate man, so fragile that a
magazine article was capable of killing him. Lord Byron commented wryly on this
idea in a famous couplet in his poem Don Juan:
‘‘‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle /
Should
let itself be snuffed out by an article.’’
The influential Francis Jeffrey wrote an approving, if belated,
essay in The
Edinburgh Review, and the obituary in The London Magazine (April 1921), noted,
‘‘There is but a small portion of the public acquainted with the
writings of this young man, yet they were full of high imagination and delicate
fancy.’’
By 1853 Matthew Arnold could speak of Keats as ‘‘in the school
of Shakespeare,’’ and, despite his weak sense of dramatic action and his overly
lush imagery was ‘‘one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him
forever interesting.’’
Note:-
Issues of immortality and human transience have preoccupied thinkers
for millennia. Rulers, philosophers, and poets have pondered whether human
accomplishments will be remembered or make a lasting impact. Keats was
extremely interested in his own literary legacy. Here are some other works that
examine the idea of the transience or permanence of man’s efforts:
The Iliad (7th–8th century B.C.E.), by Homer. The
famous hero of this epic, Achilles, chooses death in battle over a long,
peaceful life because attaining glory in battle means his name will be
immortalized.
The Stranger (1942), by Albert Camus. This novel’s
protagonist is convinced that the universe is indifferent to the desires and
actions of humans.
‘‘Annabel Lee’’ (1849), by Edgar
Allan Poe. This long poem commemorates, rather morbidly, the death of a young
girl and her influence on the speaker. The Diary of a Young Girl (1942), by Anne
Frank. Written while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, this diary details the
trials Frank’s family went through before they were sent to a concentration
camp.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982), by Milan Kundera.
Set in springtime in a politically unbalanced Prague, the characters, most of
them artists, feel that their lives are fleeting; thus, although they create
with purpose, they also hesitate and often choose badly when it comes to their
personal lives.
THOMAS
MOORE: Moore was a
friend of Byron and a prominent literary figure of the time. Most of his life
was passed as a successful man of letters. His poems were highly successful
during his lifetime, but after his death there was a reaction against them. His
Irish Melodies are set to the traditional musical airs
of Ireland. They are graceful, and adapt themselves admirably to the tunes. His
Lalla
Rookh
(1817) is an Oriental romance, written
in the Scott-Byron manner then so popular. The poem had an immense success,
which has now almost totally faded.
It contains an abundance of florid description, but as poetry it is hardly second-rate.
Moore's political satires, such as The
Twopenny Postbag (1813),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823), are keen and lively, and show
his Irish wit at its very best.
His
prose works include his Life
of Byron (1830), which
has taken its place as the standard biography of that poet. It is an able and
scholarly piece of work, and is written with much knowledge and sympathy,
though it lacks the clear-cut vigour of the masterpieces of Boswell and
Lockhart (see pp. 268 and 358).
Thomas
Campbell: After studying
at Glasgow University he became tutor to a private family; but his Pleasures of Hope (1799) brought him fame, and he adopted
the career of a poet. He visited the Continent, and saw much of the turmoil
that there reigned. Returning, he settled in London, where he was editor of The New Monthly Magazine from 1820 to 1830. His longer poems are
quite numerous, and begin with the Pleasures
of Hope, which consists of
a series of descriptions of nature in heroic couplets, written in a style that
suggests Goldsmith. Other longer poems include Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a longish tale of Pennsylvania,
written in Spenserian stanzas, and The
Pilgrim of Glencoe (1842).
Campbell, however, is chiefly remembered for his stirring songs, some of which
were written during his early Continental tour and were published in newspapers.
His most successful are Ye
Mariners of England and The Battle of the Baltic, which are spirited without containing
the bluster and boasting that so often disfigure the patriotic song.
Samuel
Rogers: He was a
generous patron of the man of letters, and was acquainted with most of the
literary people of the time. His breakfasts were famous. His The Pleasures of Memory (1792) is a reversion to the typical
eighteenth-century manner, and as such is interesting. He could compose
polished verses, but he has little of the poet. Other works are Columbus (1812), Jacqueline (1814), a tale in the Byronic manner,
and Italy (1822), of which a second part appeared
in 1828. Rogers was a careful and fastidious writer, but his excellence does
not go much further. His name is a prominent one in the literary annals of the
time, but his wealth rather than his merit accounts for this.
Leigh
Hunt: He was born in
Middlesex, educated at Christ's Hospital, and while still in his teens became a
journalist, and remained a journalist all his life. His Radical journal The Examiner (1808) was strongly critical of the Government,
and Hunt's aptitude for abuse landed him in prison for two years. His captivity,
as he gleefully records, made a hero of him; and most of the literary men who prided
themselves upon their Liberalism-- among them being Wordsworth, Byron, Moore,
Keats, and Shelley --sought his friendship. Hunt had a powerful influence on Keats,
and published some of the latter's shorter poems in The Examiner. He tried various other journalistic
ventures, but none of them had the success of The Examiner, though
The Indicator (1819) contained some of his finest
essays; his attempted collaboration in
journalism with Byron was a lamentable failure.
Too
often his poems are trivial, and most, if not all, are marred by lapses of
taste or slipshod workmanship. His best long poem, The Story of Rimini (1816), is an Italian tale modelled on
Dante's lines on Paolo and Francesca, and is quite well told in easy, facile couplets.
It is somewhat spoilt by its maudlin sentimentality and the looseness of some of
its verse, but it is of peculiar interest because its style was the model for
Keats's Endymion.
Hunt is seen at his best in his shorter
pieces, such as his sonnet on The
Nile and Abou Ben Adhem, where he retains all his usual ease and
has less opportunity for his too frequent lapses.
His
prose includes an enormous amount of journalistic matter, which was
occasionally collected and issued in book form. Such was his Men, Women, and Books (1847). His Autobiography (1850) . contains much interesting
biographical and literary gossip. He is an agreeable essayist, fluent and
easygoing; his critical opinions are solid and sensible, though often
half-informed. He wrote x
novel, Sir Ralph Esher (1832), and a very readable book on
London called The
Town (1848). Hunt is
not a genius, but he is a useful and amiable second-rate writer.
James
Hogg: Hogg became
known to the world as "the Ettrick Shepherd," for he was born of a
shepherd's family in the valley of the Ettrick, in Selkirkshire. He was a man
of much natural ability, and from his infancy was an eager listener to the
songs and ballads of his district. He was introduced to Walter Scott (1802)
while the latter was collecting the Border minstrelsy, and by Scott he was supported
both as a literary man and as a farmer. Sometimes, however, his native talent
prevails, and he writes such poems as Bonny
Kilmeny and When the Kye comes Hame, The latter is a lyric resembling those
of Burns in its humour and simple appeal. The former was one of a series of
songs and lays, modelled on the lays of Sir Walter Scott, which made up The Queen's Wake (1813), the work which established
Hogg's poetic reputation. In it he achieves what is commonly held to be the
true Celtic note: the eerie description of elves and the gloaming, and
murmuring and musical echoes , of things half seen and half understood. He has
also to his credit a number of vigorous Jacobite war songs, of which the best
known is Lock the
door, Lariston. Some
of his books are The
Forest Minstrel (1810),
a volume of songs, of which the majority were by him and the rest by his friends,
and The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), a prose tale.
CHARLES LAMB’S elegant prose made
him a major essayist of the Romantic era, and has formed a part of the canon of
English literature ever since. His essays have delighted generations of
readers, and his literary criticism testifies to his versatility and
perceptiveness. He was also well-known to his contemporaries as a novelist, journalist,
poet, writer for children, and fine critic, devoted to ‘‘antiquity’’— particularly
Latin literature and that of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers. His
popularity extended through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, but waned
after 1934, the centenary of his death. Since the 1960s, however, his
reputation has risen again.
In 1782, Lamb was accepted as a student at Christ’s Hospital, a
London school for the children of impoverished families. He excelled in his
studies, especially in English literature, but the seven years away from home proved
lonely. Later, Lamb wrote that his solitude was relieved only by his friendship with a fellow student, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. The friendship with Coleridge, who would become one of England’s
premier Romantic poets, had a particularly strong influence on Lamb’s development
as a thinker and an artist.
Working first as a clerk, he became an accountant at the East
India Company, a rapacious jointstock company whose function in the British colonies
was at times quasi-governmental and even military. He remained there until his
retirement in 1825. In working for the East India Company, Lamb was
participating, however distantly, in one of British history’s ugliest chapters.
The Honourable East India Company, as it was officially known, acquired a
monopoly on trade with India and, until this monopoly was limited in 1813, succeeded
in colonizing—often quite brutally, as was standard colonial practice—nearly
the entire Indian subcontinent. During his career at the East India Company’s London
offices, Lamb read widely and corresponded frequently with such friends as
Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey. It was at Coleridge’s insistence
that Lamb’s first sonnets were included in Coleridge’s collection Poems on
Various Subjects, published in 1796.
Lamb’s first published works were his sonnets, which critics
praised for their simple diction and delicate poetic manner, but he quickly
discovered that his greater talent and inclinations lay elsewhere. His first
serious work in prose, A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind
Margaret, appeared in 1798. Lamb, an avid theatergoer, decided to try his
hand at drama next; however, John Woodvil (1802), a tragedy in the Elizabethan style,
was neither a popular nor a critical success. His next two projects also
testify to his love of Elizabethan literature.
In 1807, he and Mary collaborated on Tales from Shakespeare, a prose version of
William Shakespeare’s plays intended for children. The Tales were generally well received,
and the Lambs were commended for expanding the scope of children’s literature
in England, though a few critics regarded the Tales as distorted renderings of the plays. That
same year, Lamb completed his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the
Time of Shakespeare, an anthology that included selections from the plays of such
Elizabethan dramatists as Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, George Chapman,
and Thomas Middleton. Since many of these works were previously unavailable to
readers, Lamb’s anthology was an important reference source.
Unexpected
Success as an Essayist: In 1820, the editor of the London Magazine invited Lamb to
contribute regularly to the periodical. Lamb, eager to supplement his meager
income, wrote some pieces under the pseudonym of ‘‘Elia’’ for the magazine.
With the overwhelming success of these essays, Lamb became one of the most
admired men in London. He and Mary presided over a weekly open house attended
by his many literary friends, including Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt,
and Henry Crabb Robinson. Besides his diverse friendships, Lamb found his chief
pleasure in writing, which consumed his evenings and holidays. After his
retirement from the East India Company, he devoted more time to his favorite
occupation. Charles ‘‘Elia’’ Lamb was still at the peak of his popularity as an
essayist when he died suddenly from an infection in 1834.
Lamb’s virtually ignored dramas were inspired by his affinity
for the theater. His short experimental writing, such as the novel Rosamund Gray (1798) displays the influence
of Henry Mackenzie and Laurence Sterne. His criticism and ‘‘Elia’’ works are
similar in language to the writings of Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, though
Lamb made them his own. He claimed that he read mainly works from the past,
though the assertion was not strictly true. He celebrated the ‘‘quiddities’’ of
his favorite little-known books, the theater, childhood and youth, the daily
round, the daily grind, and most particularly the surprising qualities of some
of his friends, for nearly all of his observations are drawn—or transmuted—from
life.
Literary
Criticism and Whimsically Personal Essays: In his essays of literary criticism, such
as in Specimens
of English Dramatic Poets (1807), Lamb supplements each author’s
entry with explanatory notes that are now considered his most important
critical work. Lamb further elaborated on his views in such essays as ‘‘On
the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Presentation.’’ There, he argues
that the best qualities of Shakespeare’s plays can be fully appreciated only
through reading; according to Lamb, stage performances often diminish the
play’s meaning, and individual performers often misinterpret Shakespeare’s
intended characterizations.
Note:-
A key component of Lamb’s ouevre is his selection of works about
the style and content of pieces by other writers. Here are a few works by
authors who also wrote important essays of literary criticism:
Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a survey of the field by Northrop
Frye. In this book, the critic reviews the principles and techniques of
literary criticism.
Biographia Literaria (1817), a collection of essays by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. In this set of autobiographical writings, Coleridge includes
pieces on literary criticism and explains his now famous theory of the
suspension of disbelief.
The Sacred Wood (1920), critical essays by T. S. Eliot. In this
work, Eliot critiques drama and poetry, including that of Dante, William Blake,
and William Shakespeare.
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1981), a collection
of essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. In this complex study set, Bakhtin closely
examines such genres as parody, romance, and the picaresque.
WILLIAM HAZLITT: The year 1812 saw him in London, where
he was in turn lecturer, parliamentary reporter, and theatre critic. From 1814
until his death he contributed to The Edinburgh Review, while others of his articles appeared
in The Examiner, The Times, and The London Magazine. All through his life his unusual
political views and headstrong temperament involved him in frequent quarrels.
(His
reputation rests on the lectures and essays on literary and general subjects
all published between 1817 and 1825. Of the former we have his lectures on Characters
of Shakespeare' s Plays
(1817), The English Poets (1818), The English Comic Writers (1819), and The Dramatic Literature of the
Age of Elizabeth
(1820). His best essays were collected
in The Round Table (1817), Table Talk; or, Original Essays on
Men and Manners
(1821-22), and The
Spirit of the Age;
or, Contemporary Portraits (1825). Between 1828 and 1830 he
published an unsuccessful biography of Napoleon).
Thomas
Love Peacock: His
fame rests upon his novels rather than upon his verse, though the songs which
he scattered through his novels are extremely good. His early verses, such as Palmyra, and Other Poems (1806), The Genius of the Thames (1810), and The Philosophy of Melancholy (1812) lack the finish of his later
lyrics, but Rhododaphne;
or the Thessalian Spell (1818)
shows some felicity and smoothness.
He
wrote seven novels, Headlong
Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), Nightmare Abbey (1818), Maid Marian (1822), The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860). None of them has a plot really
worthy of the name, though all contain well-recounted incidents. In varying
degrees, they are the vehicle for his ironical and satirical attacks on the
cranks and fads of his day. His favourite butt was the contemporary cult of
romanticism and all who practised it, Wordsworth, as Mr Paperstamp of
Mainchance Villa, Coleridge, as Mr Flosky, Shelley, as Mr Scythrop, Byron, as Mr
Cypress, and many others were all caricatured with telling skill. No
contemporary idea, from paper money to modern science, escaped his pen.
Peacock's The Four
Ages of Poetry, in
which his own age is classed as the age of brass, "the second childhood of
poetry," is in the familiar mocking, ironical style of the novels. Its
only importance lies in the fact that it drew from Shelley his famous The Defence of Poetry.
Washington
Irving: was the first
American novelist to establish a European reputation. He was called to the Bar,
but his real bent was literary. His life was that of a busy man of letters, varied
with much travelling in Europe and America. His works were admired by Scott,
who did much to popularize them on this side of the Atlantic.
His History of New York (1809) was the comic history of an
imaginary Dutchman called Knickerbocker. The humour now appears strained and
overdone, but the book is written with ease and grace. His The Sketch-book (1820) brought his name before the
English public. The volume is a collection of short tales and sketches, the two
favourites, those of Rip van Winkle and of Sleepy Hollow, being the best of his
productions. It was followed by Bracebridge
Hall (1822), a series
of sketches of the life of the English squirearchy, done in the Addisonian
manner. His later travels helped him in the writing of Tales of a Traveller (1824), Legends of the Alhambra (1832), and other works. As a story-teller
Irving lacks animation and fire, but his humour in the later books is facile, though
thin, and his descriptions are sometimes impressive. His style reminds the
reader of that of Goldsmith, whose Life
(1849) he wrote. He produced other
historical works, such as History
of the Life and Voyages of Columbus (1828),
The Conquest of Granada (1829), and his Life of Washington (1859), more noteworthy for the ease of
their narrative than for their deep learning or insight.
James
Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was
born in New Jersey, and educated at'Yale College. He passed his boyhood on an
ancestral estate near Lake Otsego, and so gained much material for his Indian
works. He was in the Navy for six years, and then retired to write books. He
travelled and wrote much. He was a man of acrimonious temper, and his
extravagant estimation of his abilities drew him into many quarrels. His first
novel, Precaution
(1820), was a conventional study of
society and was of little merit. Then The
Spy (1821) began a series of vigorous
adventure stories, some of which, like The
pilot (1824) and The Red Rover (1828), deal with the sea. Cooper's
technical knowledge and appreciation of the beauty of the sea are here used to
advantage, though his characters are stiff. The best of his works, however, are
the Leatherstocking novels, which deal with frontier life in Indian territory.
They include The
Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841). Their view of the Indian is
romanticized, but they opened up a new field for American fiction, and have plenty
of incident and suspense. Cooper set himself up as a rival of Scott, but he has
little of Scott's ability. He lacks humour, his characters are, with rare
exceptions such as Leatherstocking, lifeless and unconvincing, and his style is
wordy and heavy. But at times he can make his story move rapidly, and he is
skilful in his suggestion of thecharm and dangers of the primeval forest.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY: He wrote no book of any great length,
in this respect resembling another opium-eater, Coleridge. The book that made his
name was his Confessions of an English Opium
Eater
(1821), which appeared in The
London Magazine.
The work, which is chaotic in its
general plan, is a series of visions that melt away in the manner of dreams.
Much is tawdry and unreal, but the book contains passages of great power and
beauty. The remainder of his work is a mass of miscellaneous production, the
best of which is The English Mail-coach (1849), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), and On Murder considered as One of
the Fine Arts
(1827; second part, 1839).
Next –
The Victorian Age
Source(s) -
English
Literature by Edward Albert [Revised by J. A. Stone]
History of
English Literature, by Legouis and Cazamian
The Routledge
History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, by Ronald Carter and
John McRae
Gale’s Contextual
Encyclopedia of World Literature
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