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Tema 48: 
El Romanticismo en 
Gran Bretaña: 
Novela y poesía.  

Madhatter Wylder 
06/06/2009 
 
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretañ
ña: Novela y poe
esía.
2

Ta
able of contents
1. The Roman
ntic Period (1785 – 18830) ________________
_________________________ 3
1.1. The pollitical Backgground: Revvolution and
d reaction __
___________________________ 3
1.2. Poetic theory
t and poetic
p practice. __________________
___________________________ 5
1.2.1. The concept of pooetry and the poet
p ____________________ ______________________________ 6
1.2.2. Poettic Spontaneitty and freedom
m ______________________ ______________________________ 7
1.2.3. Rom
mantic “Naturee Poetry” ___________________________ ______________________________ 8
1.2.4. The Glorification of the Comm monplace ________________ ______________________________ 9
1.2.5. The supernatural and the “stranngeness in Beaauty” _______
______________________________ 9
1.3. The Noovel _______________________________________
__________________________ 10
2. Romantic poets:
p The older
o generration. ______________
________________________ 12
2.1. William
m Wordsworrth (1770 - 1850).
1 ________________
__________________________ 12
2.1.1. Bioggraphic datum
m. __________________________________
_____________________________ 12
2.1.2. His poetry.______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 13
2.1.3. Tinttern Abbey ___
____________________________________
_____________________________ 14
2.2. S.T. Cooleridge (17772 - 1834) ___________
_ ___________
__________________________ 14
2.2.1. Bioggraphic datum
m. __________________________________
_____________________________ 14
2.2.2. His poetry ______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 15
3. Romantic Poets:
P The younger
y geeneration. __________
_ ________________________ 16
3.1. Georgee Gordon, Loord Byron (1788-1824)
( __________
__________________________ 16
3.1.1. Bioggraphic datum
m. __________________________________
_____________________________ 16
3.1.2. His poetry.______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 16
3.1.3. Donn Juan. ______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 17
3.2. Percy Bysshe
B Shellly (1792-18222) ___________________
__________________________ 18
3.2.1. Bioggraphic datum
m. _______________________________________________________________ 18
3.2.2. His poetry.______
____________________________________ _____________________________ 19
metheus Unboound. _______________________________
3.2.3. Prom _____________________________ 20
3.2.4. A Defense
D of Poeetry. ________________________________
_____________________________ 20
3.3. John Keats
K (1795-11821) ___________________________
__________________________ 21
3.3.1. Bioggraphic datum
m. __________________________________
_____________________________ 21
3.3.2. His poetry.______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 22
3.3.3. The Eve of St Aggnes. _______________________________
_____________________________ 22
3.3.4. Odees. __________
____________________________________
_____________________________ 23
4. Romantic Novelist.
N M
Mary Shelly’’s Frankensstein. _____
________________________ 23
4.1. About the
t novel. __________________________________
__________________________ 23
4.2. Analysiis of Major Characters _____________________
__________________________ 24
4.2.1. Victtor Frankensteein_________________________________
_____________________________ 24
4.2.2. The monster _____________________________________________________________________ 24
4.3. Themess and Symbools _____________________________
__________________________ 25
4.3.1. Them
mes ________
____________________________________
_____________________________ 25
4.3.2. Sym
mbols _______
____________________________________
_____________________________ 26
Biibliography __________
_ __________
____________________
________________________ 27
Brrief summarry.__________________
____________________
________________________ 28

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña: Novela y poesía.
3

1. The Romantic Period (1785 – 1830)

1.1. The political Background: Revolution and reaction
The romantic period was a turbulent time, during which England
experienced the change from a primary agricultural society, where Change from an
agricultural to an
wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a industrial nation

modern industrial nation. This change occurred in a context of the

American Revolution and then a much more radical French Revolution, of
wars, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of constant
threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to
which the ruling classes responded by heresy hunts and the repression of
traditional liberties.
The early period of the French revolution, marked by the
Romantics enthusiastic
declaration of the rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille to about the French Revolution

release imprisoned political offenders, evoked enthusiastic support from

English liberals and radicals. TWO INFLUENTIAL BOOKS indicate the radical Books which influenced
the French revolution:
social thinking stimulated by the revolution: Tom Paine’s Rights of man -Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
(1791-2) justified the French revolution and considered England a
democratic republic state which was to be achieved by popular - William Godwin’s
Inquiry Concerning
revolution. More important as an influence on Wordsworth, Shelley and other Political Justice

poets was William Godwin’s1 Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793),

which predicted an inevitable but peacefully evolution of society to a final stage
in which all property would be equally distributed and all government would
disappear. Later, however, English sympathizers dropped off as the They drop off bc of the
increasing violence
revolution followed its increasingly violence course: Jacobin
extremists; The “September Massacres” of the imprisoned and helpless
nobility in 1792; the execution of the royal family; the guillotining of
thousands in the Reign of Terror under Robespierre and the emergence of
Napoleon first as dictator and then as emperor of France.

1
Father of Frankenstein author’s Mary Shelly

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In England this period was one of cruel repressive measures. Repressive measures
in England.
Public meeting were prohibited, and advocates of even moderate political
change were charged with high treason in time of war. The outlook of the
Napoleonic wars put an end to almost all political life in England for almost
three decades
Yet, this was the very time when profound economic and social
Economic & social
changes were creating a desperate need for corresponding changes in political changes.

arrangements, and new classes were beginning to demand a power in

Industrial revolution
government proportionate to their wealth. The industrial revolution had
begun in the mid-18th Century with improvements in machines for processing
textiles, and was given an immense impetus when James Watt perfected the
Steam Engine in 1765. In the succeeding decades steam replaced wind and
water as the primary source of power in all types of manufacturing. A new
laboring population grouped in the towns that suddenly appeared in central and
northern England. The population was becoming increasingly polarized into
Polarization of society:
what was later called “the two nations”: the large owner or trader and the - Large owner/ trader
- Wageworker
possessionless wageworkers; THE RICH and THE POOR.
WORKING CLASS
No attempt was made to regulate this shift from the old
economic world to the new, not only because of inertia, but because even
liberal reformers were dominated by the social philosophy “laissez- Laissez-faire (=let alone):
Government maintained a
faire”. This theory of “let-alone” holds that the general welfare can be policy of strict non-
interference and leave
ensured only by the free operation of economic laws. The government must people to “hunt” their
private interests
maintain a policy of strict non-interference and leave people to “hunt”
their private interests. For the great majority of the laboring class the result
of such policy was inadequate wages, long hours of work under cruel discipline
in sordid conditions. In 1815 the conclusion of the French war, when the
enlargement of working force by demobilized troops coincided with the fall in
the wartime demand of goods, brought the 1st modern industrial
depression. Since workers had no vote, their only way to complain was
through petitions, protests meetings and riots, which only frightened the
ruling class into more repressive measures. In addition, the introduction
of new machines resulted in technological unemployment, which

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provoked sporadic attempts by fired workers to destroy the machines. After one
such outbreak the House of Lords (after Lord Byron’s eloquent protest) passed
a bill (1812) making death penalty for destroying such machines.
WOMEN
Suffering was largely confined to the poor, however, for all this while the
landed classes (industrialists and many merchants) prospered. Women also
constituted a deprived class which cut across social classes, for they were
- Inferior in intellect
widely regarded as inferior to man in intellect and in all but domestic
talents. They were provided limited schooling and had no facilities for - Limited schooling

higher education. They also were subjected to a rigid code of sexual - Rigid code of
sexual behaviour
behavior and possessed (especially after marriage) almost no legal rights. - Almost no legal rights
2
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote an early defense of the French revolution, A
vindication of the rights of Men (1790) and followed a vindication of the Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
vindication of rights of
rights of Women (1792), founding a classic of the women’s movement. Women (1792)

Wollstonecraft asserted that women possess equal intellectual capacity than

men, and demanded for them a greater share of social and educational
privileges.
Gradually, the working class reformers acquired the support of the
First Reform Bill (1832)
middle classes and the liberal Whigs. Finally, the first REFORM BILL was carried
in 1832, amid widespread satisfaction. It eliminated the “rotten boroughs3”, -Eliminated the “rotten
boroughs”
redistributed parliamentary representation to include the new -Redistributed parliamentary
representation to include the
industrial cities, and extended the vote. Although half the middle class, new industrial cities
-Extended the vote
almost all the working class and all women were not allowed to vote, the
reform was to go on until, by stages, England acquired universal adult
suffrage.

1.2. Poetic theory and poetic practice.

Wordsworth justified this new “Romantic poetry” by a critical manifesto,
or statement of poetic principles in the preface of the second edition of the Preface to the Lyrical
ballads (1800-2)
Lyrical Ballads (1800) which he enlarged still further in its third edition in
1802. In it he set himself in opposition to the literary “ancien régime”, Opposition to the
literary ancient
those writers of the preceding century who had imposed on poetry regime

2
Mother of Frankenstein author’s Mary Shelly
3
Depopulated areas whose seats in the Commons were at the disposal of a nobleman

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artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural expression.

Coleridge declared that the Preface was “half a child of his own brain”. However,
he soon developed doubts about some of Wordsworth’s statements and
corrected them in Biographia Literaria (1817).
During the 18th Century, there had been increasing opposition to the
tradition of Dryden, Pope and Johnson, and especially in the 1740s and
later, there had emerge many of the critical concepts. Wordsworth’s
preface nevertheless deserves its reputation as a turning point in English
literature, for Wordsworth recollected isolated ideas, organized them Wordsworth recollected
isolated ideas and
into a coherent theory and made them the rationale for his own organized them into a
coherent theory.
massive achievements as a poet. We can use the concepts in this influential
essay as points of departure for a survey of distinctive elements in the theory
and poetry of the romantic period.

1.2.1. The concept of poetry and the poet Poetry

18 TH
CENTURY POETRY was regarded as primarily an imitation of
18th C poets
human life (“a mirror held up to nature”) that the poet artfully puts into an A mirror held
up to nature.
order to instruct and give artistic pleasure to the reader. WORDSWORTH, Wordsworth
The spontaneous
on the other hand, described all good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of overflow of
powerful feelings
powerful feelings”. Reversing earlier theory, he located the source of a
Source of the poem located
poem not in the outer world, but in the individual poet, and the essential in the individual poet

materials of the poem were not external people and events, but the inner Essential materials of the
poem are the inner feeling
of the author.
feelings of the author, or external feelings only after they have been
transformed by the author’s feelings. Many other writers identified poetry
as the “expression” (a metaphor parallel to Wordsworth “overflow”) of
emotion. COLERIDGE 4 introduced the organic theory of the imaginative Coleridge
Organic theory of the
process based on a model of the growth of a plant. He conceived a great imaginative process
(plant growth)
work of literature to be self-originating and self-organizing process that
begins with a seed-like idea in the poet’s imagination grows by
assimilating both the poet’s feelings and experience and evolves into

4
Following German precedents

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an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each

other and to the whole.
In accord with the view that poetry expresses the poet’s own
feelings and temperament, the LYRIC POEM written IN THE FIRST PERSON,
Lyric poem in 1st
person became a
earlier regarded as a minor kind, BECAME A MAJOR FORM, and was often major form of poetry.
described as the most essentially poetic of all genres. In the Romantic lyric,
the “I” is not a conventionally typical lyric speaker, such as the Patrarchan
lover and the Elizabethan poets, but has recognizable traits of the poet in
This speaker smtimes has
his own person and circumstances. In the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, some common personal
or /& biographical traits
Shelly and Keats the experiences and states of mind expressed by the speaker with the poet.

often accord closely with the known facts of the poet’s life and with
the personal confessions in his letters and journals.
The Prelude exemplifies two other important tendencies in the The Prelude.

period. Like Blake, Coleridge in his early poems, and later on Shelley,
- A poet is the persona &
Wordsworth presents himself as what he calls a chosen son or Bard 5. That is, voice of a poet-prophet.

he assumes the persona and voice of a poet-prophet and offers

spokesman
himself as a spokesman for traditional Western civilization at a time of
profound crisis. The Prelude is also an instance of a central literary form of
English Romanticism: A long work about the formation of the self, often - A long work about the
formation of the self.
centering on a crisis, and presented in a metaphor of an interior journey
in the quest of one’s true identity. Other examples similar to this are
Blake’s Milton, The crucial episode of Asia’s underground journey in Shelly’s
Prometheus unbound, and Keats’ Endymion.

1.2.2. Poetic Spontaneity and freedom

Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow, but as “the
spontaneous overflow” of feeling. IN TRADITIONAL THEORY, poetry had been
regarded as supremely an art. An art that in modern times is practiced by poets
who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the “rules” governing
the kind of poem they are writing and employ tested means to achieve

5
Bards were originally Celtic composers of satires.

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foreknown effects upon an audience. However, TO WORDSWORTH, although Wordsworth

Emotions recollected
the composition of the poem originates from “emotions recollected in in tranquility. Act of
composition is
tranquility” and may be preceded and followed by reflection, the spontaneous.

immediate act of composition must be spontaneous. Other romantic

poets even went further. KEATS listed as an “axiom” that “if poetry comes Keats
Poetry should come
not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. naturally as leaves to
a tree
SHELLY also maintained that it is “an error to assert that the finest passages
Shelley
of poetry are produced by labor and study,” and suggested instead that Poetry is the product
of unconscious
they are the products of unconscious creativity. The surviving manuscripts creativity

of the Romantic poets, however, show that they worked and reworked their
texts a lot, perhaps more than poets of earlier ages.
The emphasis in this period on the free activity of the imagination
is related to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition and
the feeling of “the heart” to supplement the judgments of the purely
logical faculty of “the head”.

1.2.3. Romantic “Nature Poetry”

Because of the prominence of landscape in this period, “Romantic Poetry”
has become almost synonymous with “Nature poetry”. The aim of Romantic
poetry was to describe Nature for its own sake. Wordsworth in fact insisted
that the ability to observe and describe objects accurately, although
necessary, is not at all a sufficient condition for poetry. The longer
romantic “nature poems” are in fact usually MEDITATIVE POEMS, in which the Meditative poems:
presented scene serves to raise an emotional problem or personal Nature awakes
emotions to the poet
crisis whose development and resolution constitute the organizing
principle of the poem.
Thus, CORRESPONDING WITH THE INVESTIGATION OF THE SELF appears this
new interest in Nature as a way of coming to understand the self. Thanks to Nature one
can come to
understand the self
Many so-called “nature poems” by Romantic writers are studies of
EPISTEMOLOGY6: By examining the individual’s perception of Nature, they try to
explore the complication relationships btw things, feelings and ideas.

6
The study of the origin, nature and limits of human knowledge.

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1.2.4. The Glorification of the Commonplace

The aim of the Lyrical Ballads was to “choose incidents and - Day-to-day incidents

situations from COMMON LIFE” and to use “a selection of LANGUAGE really - Day-to-day language

SPOKEN BY MAN”. This was a more social than literary definition of the

proper materials & Lg for poetry. Wordsworth underwrote his poetic practice by
a theory that inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genre, subjects Wordsworth elevated the
modest & rustic life and the
and style by elevating the modest and rustic life and the plain style, plain style to the principal
subject for poetry.
which in earlier theories were appropriate only to the lowly pastoral, into the
principal subject for poetry in general. Wordsworth went even further and
turned for the subjects of his serious poems not only to modest people, but to
the ignominious, the outcast, the delinquent …
It must be noted that WORDSWORTH’S AIM in Lyrical Balads was not
simply to represent the world as it is, but to throw over “situations of
common life (…) a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary
things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”. Wordsworth’s
concerned in his poetry was not only with “common life”, but also “ordinary
things”. His aim throughout is to smash the apathy of custom so as to Smash the apathy of
custom so as to refresh
refresh our sense of WONDER in the everyday, the commonplace and our sense of wonder in
the ordinary/common
the trivial.

1.2.5. The supernatural and the “strangeness in Beauty”

In most of his poems, Coleridge, like Wordsworth, dealt with the
everyday things of this world, and in Frost at midnight he showed how well he
too could achieve the effect of wonder(=amaze) in the familiar. But COLERIDGE
tells us in his Biographia Literaria that according to the division of labor in
Lyrical Ballads, his special function was to ACHIEVE WONDER by a frank Achieve wonder by a
violation of the natural
violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events in poems of laws and the ordinary
course of events.
which “the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural”.
And in The Rhyme of an Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan
Coleridge opened up to poetry the realm of mystery and magic, in which Imaginary of
mystery & magic:
materials of ancient folklore, superstition and demonology are used to ancient folklore,
superstition &
impress upon the reader the sense of occult powers and unknown modes of demonology

being. Such poems are usually set in the distant past or in faraway places. Distanct past or faraway
places.

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Next to Coleridge, the greatest master of this romantic mode –in which
supernatural events have a deep psychological import- was John Keats. In La
Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes he adapted the old forms of
ballad and romance to modern sophisticated use and established a
medieval setting for events that violate our sense of realism and
natural order.
Another side of the tendency called “the addition of strangeness of “Strangeness of beauty”
Romantic interest in
beauty” was the Romantic interest in unusual modes of experience7. unusual modes of
experience
COLERIDGE was interested in hypnotism and, like Blake and Shelly, studied the
Coleridge
literature of the occult and esoteric. Coleridge also shared with De
- Occult & esoteric
Quincey a concern with dreams and nightmares. Both authors exploited in - Dreams & nightmares
- Altered consciousness
their writings the altered consciousness and distorted perceptions they and distorted perceptions
under the effects of opium
experienced under their addiction to opium. BYRON made repeated use of
Byron
the fascination with the forbidden and the appeal of the terrifying - The forbidden
- Satanic hero
Satanic hero. These phenomena had already been explored by 18th C writers
of terror tales and Gothic fiction.

1.3. The Novel

Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late 18th C. One was Two new types of fiction:

the GOTHIC NOVEL, which had been inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole’s a. Gothic Novel:
European Romantic
Castle of Otranto: A Gothic story. The term derives from the frequent pseudo-medieval fiction
having a prevailing
setting of these tales in a gloomy castle of the Middle Ages, but it has atmosphere of mystery
and terror.
been extended to a large group of novels, set somewhere in the past, which Horace Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic story
exploit the possibilities of mystery and terror, decaying mansions with
dark dungeons, secret passages, chilling supernatural phenomena and often
sexual persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed villain. These Showed the dark &
irrational side of
novels opened up to later fiction the dark and irrational side of human human nature.

nature (savage egoism, perverse impulses and the nightmarish terrors beneath Horace Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic story
the conscious mind). ANN RADCLIFFE developed the figure of the mysterious
and solitary home fatale, torturing others because he is himself Ann Radcliffe The misteries of
Udolpho (1794) & The Italian
tortured by guilt, who, as villain, usurps the place of the hero. (1797).

7
Largely ignored in the 18th C because it was too trivial and aberrant for serious literary
concern

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Gothicism appears also in Romantic poetry: In Coleridge medieval terror poem

Christabel, in Byron’s recurrent hero-villian, in the setting and descriptive
passages of Keats’ Eve of St Agnes, and in Shelley’s inclinations towards the
fantastic, the macabre and the exploration of the unconscious.
The second fictional mode popular at the turn of the century was the b. Novel of Purpose:
Novels written to
NOVEL OF PURPOSE, often written to propagate the new social and propagate the new social
and political theories
political theories current in the period of the French Revolution. The current in the period of the
French Revolution
best examples combine didactic intention with elements of Gothic terror.
WILLIAM GODWIN, the political philosopher, wrote Caleb Williams (1794) to William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams (1794)

illustrate the thesis that the lower classes are helplessly subject to
the power and privilege of the ruling class. MARY SHELLY wrote a Mary Shelly’s
Frankenstein (1817)
thematic novel of terror which not only is a literary classic, but has become a
popular myth. Her Frankenstein (1817) transforms a story about a
fabricated monster into a powerful representation of the moral
distortion imposed on an individual who, he diverges from the rest, is
rejected by society.
Two major novelists:
The Romantic period produced two major novelists: Jane Austin
and Sir Walter Scott. JANE AUSTIN is one of the greatest English novelists yet a.Jane Austin (1775-1817):

she is the only important author who seems to be untouched by the Seems to be untouched by
the revolutions of her age
political, intellectual and artistic revolutions of her age. However, she
elected to work within her own experience (provincial life) and to She elected to work within
her own experience and to
maintain the decorum of the novel of manners 8 and novels of the earlier limit both subject and form

women authors. Within these, elected limits both of subject and form. So,
Austin achieved a setting within which to examine and criticize the
values men and women live in their everyday lives. On of the main topics
in Austin’s novels is MARRIAGE. This was a central preoccupation and problem
of young leisure-class lady of that age. Austin, however, chose the subject The topic of marriage
provided her with the
because it provided her with the best realistic opportunities for testing best realistic opportunity
for testing her heroines
her heroines’ morality and their capacity to demonstrate grace under social morality.

and financial problem.

8
William Congreve is a perfect antecedent

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SIR WALTER SCOTT was a contemporary with Jane Austin and admired b. Sir Walter Scott (1771-
1832):
her greatly, but his work of fiction was at an extreme from hers. In 1814, with
Anonymous Waverly
the anonymous Waverly, he turned from narrative verse (in which Byron has
His prose is as a
displaced him in popularity) to narrative prose. He himself defined his prose romance the interest of
which turns upon
as a Romance, “the interest of which turns upon marvelous and marvelous and
uncommon incidents.
uncommon incidents”, in contrast to J. Austin’s style. Scott’s originality lay in
His originality lay in
opening up to fiction the realm of history; he sometimes alters the order of introducing the realm of
history in his novels.
events for novelistic purposes, yet he maintains fidelity to the spirit of the past.
Like Byron, Scott wrote with rush in a kind of constant improvisation;
He wrote with rush in
a kind of constant
his plots are often open, his romantic lovers pallid and his kings large-scale improvisation
puppets. And although Scott’s political sympathies were aristocratic and feudal,
his most vivid and convincing characters are members of the middle
and lower classes, usually speaking a rich Scottish dialect.

In English literature we normally speak of TWO GENERATIONS: Blake,

Wordsworth and Coleridge belong to the older generation while Byron,
Mary & Percy Shelley and Keats belong to the younger generation.

2. Romantic poets: The older generation.

2.1. William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850).
2.1.1. Biographic datum.
W. Wordsworth was born in North Cumberland. His father died when he
was 13. During his first year in France (1971), Wordsworth became a
fervent “democrat” and follower of the French revolution. There he had
a love affair with Annette Vallon with whom he had a child. His gradual
disillusion with the course of the revolution in France brought him to
the edge of an emotional breakdown. A young friend of his died and left
him a sufficient sum of money to enable him to live by his poetry. He settled in
a rent-free cottage with his beloved sister, Dorothy. At that same time (1790s)
Wordsworth met S.T. Coleridge. They met almost daily, talk for hours about
poetry and composed prolifically. So close was their association, that they find
the same phrases occurring in poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge. The

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tw
wo poets co
ollaborated
d in some writings and
a Colerid
dge even completed
d a few
po
oems that Wordswort
W th had leftt unfinished
d. The resu
ult of theirr joint efforts was
e Lyrical Ballads, with a fe
the ew other poems. Wordswort
W th enunciatted the
ace of the 2nd edition of the L
rattionale forr the new poetry in the prefa Lyrical
Ba
allads. Th
he life of his midd
dle age was one of gradually incre
easing
prrosperity and reputation,, as well as of political and relligious
co
onservatis
sm. Most of
o Wordsw
worth greattest poetry
y had been written byy 1807.
In 1810 a growing
g se
eparation from
f Coleridge, culm
minating in
n a quarre
el from
wh
hich they were
w not co
ompletely reconciled for almostt two decades.

2.1.2. His poetry.

p
His poetrry.
al poetic legacy ressts on a large num
Wordssworth's monumenta
m mber of
mportant po
im oems, varrying in length and weigh
ht from th
he short, simple
lyrrics of the 1790s to the o The Pre
t vast expanses of elude, thirteeen books long in
itss 1808 edittion. But th
he themes that run through Wo
ordsworth's poetry, a
and the
language and
a imag
gery he uses to embody those th
hemes, rremain Characteristic
C cs:

re
emarkably
y consistent throu
ughout the
t Word
dsworth canon,
c ad
dhering
larrgely to th
he tenets Wordsworrth set outt for himself in the 1802 prefface to
Lyyrical Ballad
ads. Here, Wordswort
W th argues that poettry should
d be writtten in
- Poetry written
n in the Lg
th
he natural languag
ge of com
mmon spe
eech. He argues
a thatt poetry s
should of
o common spe eech
- Emotions con
ntained in
offfer acces
ss to the emotions
s contain
ned in me
emory. An
nd he argues that memory
m

the
e first prrinciple of
o poetry should be
b pleasu
ure, that the
t chief d
duty of - First principle
e of poetry
should
s be pleaasure.
po
oetry is to provide pleasure
p th
hrough a rhythmic
r and
a beautiful expression of
fee
eling
Wordw
worth's styyle remains plain-spoken an
nd easy to underrstand
evven today, though th
he rhythmss and idiom
ms of common English have ch
hanged
fro
om those of the ea
arly ninete
eenth centtury. Many of Word
dsworth's poems
(in
ncluding masterpiece
m a "Tinterrn Abbey" and the "Intimati
es such as tions of
Im
mmortality" ode) dea
al with th
he subjectts of childhood an
nd the me
emory
off childhoo
od in the
e mind of
o the ad
dult in particular,, childhood
d's lost
co
onnection with
w nature
e, which ca
an be presserved only
y in memo
ory. Wordsw
worth's
im
mages and metaphorss mix natu
ural scenerry, religiou
us symbolissm and the
e relics
of the poet'ss rustic chilldhood-- places wherre humanitty meet ge
ently with n
nature.

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretañ
ña: Novela y poe
esía.
14

2.1.3. Tinte
ern Abbey
y
The subject
s off Tintern
n Abbey is memorry, specificcally, childhood
memories of comm
munion with
w nattural bea
auty. Both
h generally and
pecifically, this
sp t subjecct is hugelyy importan
nt in Wordsworth's work,
w reapp
pearing
in poems as late as the mortality" ode. Tinte
e "Intimations of Imm ern Abbey
y is the
oung Word
yo dsworth's first
f great statementt of his principle (grreat) them
me: that
th
he memorry of pure unity with
w natu
ure in childhood works
w upo
on the
mind even in adulth
hood, whe
en access to that pure unity ha
as been lo
ost, and
tha
at the matturity of mind presen
nt in adulth
hood offerss compenssation for tthe loss
of that unitty (specificcally, the ability to "look on nature" and hear ""human
mu
usic").
Tinte
ern Abbey
ey is a monologue
e, imagina
atively spo
oken by a single
sp
peaker to himself,
h refferencing the
t specific objects of
o its imag
ginary scen
ne, and
occcasionally addressing others (the
( spirit of nature,, the speaker's sister). The
lan
nguage of the poem
m is striking
g for its siimplicity and forth
hrightnes
ss. The
po
oem's imag
gery is largely confine
ed to the natural
n worrld in which
h he move
es.

2.2. S.T. Coleridge

C e (1772 - 1834)
2.2.1. Biographic da
atum.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
C w born in
was n Devonsh
hire, as the
e youngestt son of
a vicar. Afte
er his father's death
h Coleridge
e was sentt away to Christ's H
Hospital
Scchool in London. He also
a studie
ed at Jesus College. In Cambrid
dge Coleridge met
the
e radical, future
f poe
et laureate Robert Southey.
S He moved
d with Soutthey to
Brristol to esttablish a co
ommunity, but the pllan failed.
He sta
arted a clo
ose friendsship with Dorothy
D and William Wordswort
W th, one
of the most fruitful cre
eative rela
ationships in English literature. From it re
esulted
Lyyrical Ballad
ds, which opened
o ge's "Rime
witth Coleridg e of the Ancient
An Ma
ariner"
an w Wordssworth's "Tintern
nd ended with T Ab
bbey".
The brothers
b J
Josiah and
d Thomas Wedgewo
ood grantted Colerid
dge an
an
nnuity of 150 poun
nds, thus enabling him to follow
f hiss literary career.
Disenchanted with political deve
elopments in France, Coleridge visited Ge
ermany
in 1798-99 with
w Doroth
hy and William Wordsworth, an
nd became
e interested
d in the
orks of Imm
wo manuel Kant.

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretañ
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esía.
15

Sufferring from neuralgic

n and rheu
umatic pa
ains, Colerridge had b
become
ad
ddicted to
o opium. During th
he 1810s he
h lived in
n London, on the ve
erge of
su
uicide. He found a permanent
p t shelter in
n Highgate
e in the household
h of Dr.
James Gillm
man, and enjoyed an almost legendary reputation amon
ng the
ounger Rom
yo mantics. During
D thiss time he rarely lefft the hou
use. In 18
816 the
un
nfinished poems
p "Ch
hristabel" and "Kub
bla Khan" were pub
blished, an
nd next
ye ed "Sibyllline Leave
ear appeare ves". His most
m imporrtant produ
uction during this
eriod was the Biog
pe graphia Lite
teraria (18
817). Afterr 1817 Co
oleridge d
devoted
him
mself to th
heological and politico-sociolog
gical work
ks. Coleridg
ge was ele
ected a
felllow of the
e Royal Socciety of Lite
erature in 1824.

2.2.2. His poetry

p
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
C place in the canon of
o English poetry ressts on a
co
omparatively small body
b of ac
chieveme
ent: a few poems fro
om the late
e 1790s
an
nd early 18
800s and his
h particip
pation in th blication of Lyrical
he revolutionary pub
Baallads in 1797. Unlikke Wordsw
worth, his work cann
not be und
derstood tthrough
the
e lens of the
t 1802 preface
p to the d edition of that book; though it does
t second
ressemble Wo
ordsworth's in its ide
ealization of a its emphasis on human
o nature and
joyy, Colerid
dge's poem
ms often favour musical
m er the plainness
efffects ove
off common
n speech.
If Wo
ordsworth representts the ce
entral pilla
ar of earrly Roman
nticism,
Co
oleridge is neverthele
ess an important structural su
upport. His emphasis on
th
he imagin
nation, its independence from
f the
e outside
e world a
and its
crreation off fantastic picture
es such as those fo he "Rime of an
ound in th
an
ncient ma
ariner", exxerted a prrofound in
nfluence on later writers
w su
uch as
Sh
helley. The heighten
ned undersstanding of
o these fee
elings also
o helped to
o shape
the
e stereotyp
pe of the suffering
s Romantic
c genius, often further characcterized
byy drug add
diction: th
his figure of
o the idea
alist, brilliant yet tragically
t unable
to attain his own idealss, is a majjor pose fo
or Coleridge
e in his po
oetry. While
e much
d of emotiion recolle
of romantic poetry is constituted
c lected in tranquilliity, the
origin of Co
oleridge's poems offten seemss to be “emotion
“ recollectted in
motion”.
em

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña: Novela y poesía.
16

3. Romantic Poets: The younger generation.

3.1. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
3.1.1. Biographic datum.
Lord Byron was the son of Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon.
He was born with a clubfoot and became extreme sensitivity about his
lamenessi. He inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798.
In 1807 Byron's first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared,
which received bad reviews. Next year he took his seat in the House of
Lords, and set out on his grand tour, visiting Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece,
and the Aegean. Real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the
first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818). He became an
adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords
effectively on liberal theme. Byron's The Corsair (1814), sold 10,000 copies on
the first day of publication.
When the rumours started to rise of his incest and debts were
accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return. He settled in
Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont,
who became his mistress. There he wrote the two cantos of Childe Harold and
"The Prisoner Of Chillon". After a long creative period in Italy, Byron had
come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a
ship, the Hercules, and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen
against their Ottoman overlords. However, before he saw any serious military
action, Byron contracted a fever from which he died on 19 April 1824.

3.1.2. His poetry.

Byron became famous like a thunder-burst when he published the first
two Cantos of Childe Harold on his return to England after a journey to Spain
“I woke one night and found myself famous”. With Childe Harold Byron
introduced into English literature the figure of the disillusioned man, the hero
satiated with pleasures and morally corrupted, hating mankind, living on the
edge of society and in revolt against its laws. Byron provided his age with its
“ruling personage”: The Byronic hero. This character owes something to

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17

Milton’s Satan, to the dauntless figures of Contemporary German Literature,

to the dark heroes of the Gothic novels.
Byron’s contemporaries insisted on identifying the author with his
fictional characters. However, Byron’s letters and some of his friends’
testimonies showed that his own temperament was in many aspects the
antithesis to that of his heroes.
During the last six years of his life, Byron dropped his romantic
positioning with these passionate heroics and discovered his true bent as a
comic poet. In the fall of 1817 he established himself in Venice, where he
begun various affairs that culminated in a mad period which involved more than
200 women, mainly in the lower classes. This period was, nevertheless, one of
great literary creativity, often working through the late hours at night. He
finished his tragedy Manfred, wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold and after
finishing Beppo, a short preview of the narrative style and stanza of Don Juan,
began de composition of Don Juan itself.

3.1.3. Don Juan.

This poem ends in the 16th canto, but even in its unfinished state, it is
the longest satirical9 poem in English. Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had
in the original legend been a superhuman being in his sexual energy.
Throughout Byron’s version the hidden joke is that this archetypal homme
fatal is in fact more acted on than active. With no doubt kind and well
intentioned, he is guilty of youth, charm and courteous spirit. Women do all the
rest.
The chief models for the poem were the Italian seriocomic versions
of medieval chivalry romances, genre introduced by Pulci in the 15th C and
achieved its greater success in Ariostos Orlando Furioso (1532). From these
writers Byron caught easy colloquial management of the complex OTTAVA RIMA.

The Ottava Rima is an eight-line stanza in which the initial interlaced rhymes
(ababab) increases the comic turn in the couplet (cc). Other recognizable

9
indeed of any kind

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El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña: Novela y poesía.
18

antecedents are Swift’s Gulliver travels which also employed the naïve
traveler as a satiric device.
Byron’s most trusted literary advisers thought the poem unacceptably
immoral, and it was first published without the author’s and publisher’s name.
I do not agree with the fact that it is immoral, but morally nihilistic: The
poem is destructive without limits, as it proposes no positive values or
morality, but sees life as a strange meaningless show. Yet Byron insisted
that Don Juan is “a satire on abuses on the present state of society” and
“the most moral of all poems”.
It is a mistake to look to Don Juan primarily for the story. The
controlling element is not the narrative but the narrator, and his
temperament gives the work its unity. The poem is really an incessant
monologue, in the course of which a story is told. It opens with the 1st person
pronoun and immediately let us into the storyteller’s predicament “I want a
hero …“. The voice then goes on using the occasion of Juan’s misadventures to
reveal to us the speaker’s thoughts and devastating judgements upon the
major institutions, activities and values of Western society.

3.2. Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)

3.2.1. Biographic datum.
English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and
conservative values. Shelley drew no essential distinction between poetry
and politics, and his work reflected the radical ideas and revolutionary optimism
of the era.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, in Sussex, into an
aristocratic family. His father a member of Parliament. Shelley attended Syon
House Academy and Eton and in 1810 he entered the Oxford University College.
In 1811 Shelley was expelled from the college for publishing The
Necessity Of Atheism, which he wrote with Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
Shelley's father removed his inheritance in favour of a small annuity, after he
eloped with the 16-year girl, daughter of a London tavern owner. The pair
spent the following two years travelling in England and Ireland, distributing

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ña: Novela y poe
esía.
19

pa
amphlets and
a spea
aking aga
ainst pollitical injjustice. In
I 1813 Shelley
pu
ublished hiss first impo m, the atheistic Que
ortant poem een Mab.
The poet's
p marrriage was a failure. In
I 1814 Sh
helley trave
elled abroa
ad with
Ma
ary Wollsto
onecraft Godwin.
G Du
uring this journey Shelley wro
ote an unffinished
ovella, The
no he Assassin
ns (1814). Their co
ombined journal,
j S Weekss' Tour,
Six
rew
worked byy Mary Sh
helley, app
peared in 1817. Afte
er their re
eturn to LLondon,
Sh
helley came
e into an annual
a inco
ome underr his grandfather's will. Harriet died in
18
816 and Sh
helley marrried Mary Wollstonec
W craft and his
h favorite
e son Willia
am was
bo
orn in 181
16. Shelleyy spent th
he summer of 1816 with Lord
d Byron a
at Lake
Ge
eneva.
In 1818 the She
elleys movved to Italyy, where Byron
B was residing. In 1819
the
ey went to
o Rome and in 1820 to Pisa. Sh his period include
helley's works from th
Ju
ulian And Maddalo
M w Byron and Prom
, an exploration of his relations with metheus
Un
nbound, a lyrical dram
ma.

3.2.2. His poetry.

p
The central
c the
ematic concerns of Shelley's poetry arre: beautty, the
pa
assions, nature,
n p
political l
liberty, c , and the sanctity of the
creativity,
im
magination. What makes
m She
elley's treattment of these
t them
mes unique
e is his
ph
hilosophical relationsh
hip to his subject
s ma
atter and his tempera
ament, whiich was
exxtraordinarily sensitivve and responsive even
e for a Romantiic poet. S
Shelley
fe
ervently believed
b in the po
ossibility of realiz
zing an id
deal of h
human
ha
appiness as
a based on beautty.
Shelle
ey's inten
nse feelin
ngs abou
ut beautty and expressio
e on are
ocumented in poems such as "Ode
do O to th
he West Wind
W " and "To a Sky
kylark,"
in which he invokes metaphors
m from natu
ure to charracterize his
h relationship to
hiss art. The centre off his aesth
hetic philossophy can be found in his imp
portant
esssay A Def
efence of Poetry, in
n which he
e argues that
t poetrry brings about
moral goo
od. Poettry, Shellley argue
es, exerciises and expands
s the
im
magination, and the ima
agination is the source of sympathy,
co
ompassion
n, and lov
ve, which rest on th
he ability to project oneself in
nto the
po
osition of another perrson.

Iván Matella
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 Tema 48:
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20

No other English poet of the early 19th C emphasized the connection

between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's
sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron's pose was one of amoral
sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and
aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry
makes people and society BETTER; his poetry is suffused with this kind of
inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously,
spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.

3.2.3. Prometheus Unbound.

This drama is based on Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, which
dramatizes the sufferings of Prometheus who because he had stolen fire
from heaven was condemned by Zeus to be chained to mount Caucassus and
to be tortured by a vulture(=buitre) feeding on his liver. Shelly continued
Aeschylus’ story but transformed it into a symbolic drama about the origin of
evil and the possibility of overcoming it.
Implicit in Prometheus unbound is the view that both the origin of evil
and the possibility of reform are the moral responsibility of men and
women themselves. Social chaos and wars are a gigantic projection of
human moral disorder and inner division and conflict.

3.2.4. A Defense of Poetry.

In 1820 Shelly’s good friend Thomas Love Peacock published an ironic
essay, The Four Ages of poetry, implicitly directed against the claims for
poetry and the poetic imagination by his romantic contemporaries. The result
was The Defense of Poetry, planned to consist of three parts.
For many decades Shelley’s Defense was regarded as one of the classic
essays in literary criticism. His emphasis is on the universal and
permanent forms, qualities and values that all great poems possess.
Shelly extends the term poet to comprehend all creative minds that break
out of the limitations of their age and place to approximate to what
he regards as enduring and general forms of value.

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21

3.3. John Keats (1795-1821)

3.3.1. Biographic datum.
Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795 as the son of a livery-
stable manager. He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply
devoted to each other. His father died in 1804 and her mother in 1810 of
tuberculosis.
At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarke's School in
Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. In 1814 he moved to
London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guy's hospital.
Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Before
devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats worked as a dresser and junior house
surgeon. In London he had met the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who
introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley.
Keats's first book, Poems, was published in 1817. It was about this time
Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry.
"Endymion", Keats's first long poem appeared, when he was 21. Keats's
greatest works were written in the late 1810s, among them "Lamia", "The Eve
of St. Agnes", the great odes including "Ode to a Nightingale", “Ode To
Autumn" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
Keats spent three months in 1818 attending his brother Tom, who was
seriously ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in December, Keats moved to
Hampstead. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on "Hyperion". In
1820 the second volume of Keats poems appeared and gained critical success.
However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and his poems were marked
with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the
woman he loved.
Declining Shelley's invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome,
where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, 1821. Keats told his friend
Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "Here lies one
whose name was writ in water."

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22

3.3.2. His poetry.

Keats’ poems in conjunction with his letters are the work of a great man
and a poet of extraordinary gifts. It will be remembered how the heroic
conception of poetry died with Milton, and was replaced by the mock
heroic. The Romantic era was not, after the false fire of the early
revolutionary period, heroic. Individual sensibility was the theme of
poetry from Wordsworth onwards. Keats did not believe in the poet as
a moral philosopher: He believed that he was dedicated to the exercise of
imagination in the pursuit of beauty and truth (truth in the artistic sense, rather
than in the moralist’s).
What Keats came to discover was the use of all the suggestive
power of words –Their music, associations and sensuous appeal. His poems
are very rarely autobiographical, as Coleridge’s often were; yet we feel that
his best things are informed through his personal joys and sufferings.
Some poets who died young have owned some of their fame to their death.
However, Keats’ work has a beauty that is absolute and wholly individual. The
influences of Spencer, Shakespeare and especially of Milton can be felt in
it.

3.3.3. The Eve of St Agnes.

From January, 1819 until September, 1820 when he left England for the
first time, Keats’ life was a mounting fever, in which poetry, love and death
were the recurrent themes. In The Eve of St. Agnes he adopts a medieval
theme reminiscent of Christabel. It is a work of pure inspiration, in which
are fused Keats’ sorrowful despair at the death of his brother, and his
sense of devastating effects of obsessive passion. It is the solemn elegy
upon himself of a man aware that he is doomed by hereditary illness,
the love of woman and the ambition for fame.

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23

3.3.4. Odes.
The crown of his work is generally agreed to his great Odes: To Psyque,
On Melancholy, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, which
are the most exquisite expression of his genius. In these he explore the
theme of the serenity and performance of great art in contrast to the
misery and brevity of life. In To a nightingale he is aware of his personal
situation, and of the world of ideal beauty to which he is transported by the
bird’s song. In On a Grecian Urn he sees a work of classical art as a thing of
serene tranquility symbolizing the identity of truth and beauty. The Ode to
Autumn evokes in three stanzas the spirit of the season of calm fruition, and
breathless sense of reconciliation of the part of Keats with his fate.

4. Romantic Novelist. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

4.1. About the novel.
The early 19th C was not a good time to be a female writer particularly if
one was brave enough to be a female novelist. Contemporary "wisdom" held
that no one would be willing to read the work of a woman; Frankenstein
established Wollstonecraft Shelley as a woman of letters when such a thing was
believed to be a contradiction in terms.
Though Frankenstein is now customarily classified as a horror story, it is
interesting to note that Mary Shelley's contemporaries regarded it as a serious
novel of ideas. It served as an illustration of many of the tenets of
William Godwin's10 philosophy, and did more to promote his ideas than his
own work ever did. The novel does not, however, subscribe to all of Godwin's
precepts. It stands in explicit opposition to the idea that man can achieve
perfection in fact, it argues that any attempt to attain perfection will
ultimately end in ruin.
Frankenstein is part of the GOTHIC MOVEMENT in literature; a form that
was only just becoming popular in England at the time of its publication. The
Gothic mode was a reaction against the humanistic, rationalist literature
of The Age of Reason. Frankenstein might be seen as a cooperation

10
His father

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esía.
24

be
etween the
e Gothic approach
a and the Romantic
c one: it addresses
a serious
ph
hilosophical subjects in a fantasstical manner thoug
gh it confro
onts recog
gnizable
hu
uman prob
blems, it can hard
dly be sa
aid to tak
ke place in a "rational,"
omprehensible, recog
co gnizable natural world
d.
e against women wrriters was quite stro
e prejudice
As the ong, Mary Shelley
de
etermined to
t publish
h the firstt edition anonymo
ously. Desspite this fa
act, the
no
ovel's unprrecedented
d success paved
p the way for so
ome of the
e most pro
ominent
wo
omen writters of the
e nineteen
nth centuryy, includin
ng George
e Eliot, G
George
Sa
and, and the
t Brontté sisters. All of the
em owed Mary
M a tre
emendous literary
de
ebt. Withou
ut the pion
neering work of Mary Wollstone
ecraft Shellley, a grea
at many
fem
male autho
ors might never
n have
e taken up their penss.

4.2. Analy
ysis of Ma
ajor Cha
aracters
4.2.1. Victo
or Franke
enstein
Victorr Frankenstein's life story is att the heartt of Franke
kenstein. A young
Sw
wiss boy, who
w learnss about mo
odern scien
nce and, within
w a few
w years, m
masters
all that his professorss have to teach him
m. He beccomes fasscinated w
with the
ecret of life," disccovers it, and briings a re
"se epulsive monster
m tto life.
Victor changes over the
e course of the novel
n from
m an inn
nocent
yo
outh fasccinated byy science into a disillusio
oned, guiilt-ridden
n man
de
etermined to
t destroy the fruits of his arro
ogant scien
ntific attem
mpt. As a re
esult of
hiss desire to
o attain th
he godlik
ke power of creatin e, he cuts himself
ng new life
offf from the
e world and eventually committs himself entirely to
o an anim
malistic
ob
bsession with
w reve
enging him
mself upo
on the mo
onster.

4.2.2. The monster

m
The monster
m is Victor Fra
ankenstein''s creation, assemble
ed from old body
pa
arts and sttrange che
emicals, an
nimated byy a thunde
er. He ente
ers life eig
ght feet
talll and enorrmously sttrong but with
w the mind
m of a newborn.
n A
Abandoned
d by his
cre
eator and confused, he tries to
o integrate
e himself into
i societyy. Looking
g in the
miirror, he re
ealizes his physical grrotesquene
ess, an as
spect of his person
na that
blinds socie
ety to his
s initially gentle, kind
k nature. It perfe
ectly fits th
he ideal

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña: Novela y poesía.
25

of Rousseau’s Nobel savage11. Seeking revenge on his creator, he kills Victor's

younger brother. After Victor destroys his work on the female monster meant to
ease the monster's solitude, the monster murders Victor's best friend and then
his new wife.
While Victor feels unmitigated hatred for his creation, the monster
shows that he is not a purely evil being. The monster's eloquent narration
of events (as provided by Victor) reveals his remarkable sensitivity and
benevolence. He assists a group of poor peasants and saves a girl from
drowning, but because of his outward appearance, he is rewarded
only with beatings and disgust. Torn between vengefulness and
compassion, the monster ends up lonely and tormented by guilt. Even the
death of his creator-turned-would-be-destroyer offers only bittersweet relief:
joy because Victor has caused him so much suffering, sadness because Victor is
the only person with whom he has had any sort of relationship.

4.3. Themes and Symbols

4.3.1. Themes
- DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE: The pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of
Frankenstein, as Victor attempts to surge beyond accepted human limits and
access the secret of life. This brutal pursuit of knowledge, of the light, proves
dangerous, as Victor's act of creation eventually results in the destruction of
everyone dear to him.
- SUBLIME NATURE: The sublime natural world, embraced by Romanticism as
a source of emotional experience for the individual, initially offers
characters the possibility of spiritual renewal. The influence of nature on
mood is evident throughout the novel, but for Victor, the natural world's
power to console him decreases when he realizes that the monster will haunt
him no matter where he goes.
- MONSTROSITY: Obviously, this theme pervades the entire novel, as the monster
lies at the centre of the action. The monster is rejected by society. However,
his monstrosity results not only from his grotesque appearance but

11
Every human being is born noble, but s/he corrupts himself when puts in contact with society.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretañ
ña: Novela y poe
esía.
26

als
so from the unnatural manner
m off his creation, wh
hich involvves the
se
ecretive aniimation of a mix of stolen
s bodyy parts and
d strange chemicals.
c He is a
product not of collaborrative scien
ntific effortt but of dark, superna
atural workings.
The monster
m e most litteral of a numberr of monstrous
is only the
en
ntities in the nov
vel, includ
ding the knowledge that Victor us
sed to
crreate the
e monsterr. One ca
an argue that
t Victo
or himsellf is a kiind of
monster, as his amb
bition, secrrecy, and selfishness
s s alienate him from human
so
ociety.
- LANGUAGE: Langua
age plays
s an enormous role in the mon
nster's
de
evelopme
ent by hea
aring and watching
w t peasan
the nts, the mo
onster learns to
sp
peak and read, wh
hich enab
bles him to
t unders
stand the
e manner of his
crreation, ass described
d in Victor''s journal. He later le
eaves notes for Victo
or along
the
e chase into the norrthern ice, inscribing words in trees
t and on rocks, tturning
na
ature itself into a writting surface.

4.3.2. Symb
bols
- LIGHT AND FIRE: In Frankenste
F ein, light symbolize
s es knowle
edge, disc
covery,
an
nd enlighttenment. The natu
ural world
d is a plac
ce of dark
k secrets, hidden
pa
assages, an
nd unknow
wn mechan
nisms; the
e goal of the scien
ntist is th
hen to
re
each lightt. The dan
ngerous and more powerful
p cousin
c of light
l is fire
e. The
monster's first
f expe
erience with a flam
me reveals
s the DUAL OF FIRE:
L NATURE O

he
e discoverss excitedly that it cre
eates ligh
ht in the darkness
d of the night, but
als
so that it harms hiim when he touche
es it.
The prresence of
o fire in the text also brings
s to mind
d the full ttitle of
Sh
helley's novel,
n Fraankenstein:: or, The Modern
M Prometheus
Pr s. The Greek god
Prometheus gave the knowledg
ge of fire to humanity and was
w then severely
pu
unished fo
or it. Victtor, attem
mpting to become a modern Promethe
eus, is
ce
ertainly punished,
p but unlike
e fire, his "gift" to humanitty—knowle
edge of
the
e secret off life—rem
mains a se
ecret.

Iván Matella
anes’ Notes
 Tema 48:
El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña: Novela y poesía.
27

Bibliography
Cen Edu & Editorial Mad
1.
Norton Anthology
2. , 3. & 4
http://www.online-literature.com/ http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/
Keats, J. [traducción Arturo Sánchez], Obra completa en poesía: John Keats (3a ed) Barcelona: Libros Río Nuevo, 1978-
1980 --- UAB: 820"18" Kea

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 48: Brief summary
28

Brief summary El Romanticismo en Gran Bretaña (1785-1830): Novela y poesía.

- THE ROMANTIC PERIOD:
- The political Background:
♦ The Romantic Period occurred in a context of the AMERICAN REV. & the much more radical FRENCH REV Æ (1) RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION.
♦ The early period of the French revolution, marked by the DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN (2) POPULISM & the storming of the
Bastille, evoked enthusiastic support from UK radicals. TWO INFLUENTIAL BOOKS indicate the radical social thinking stimulated by it:
___ TOM PAINE’s Rights of man (1791-2) justified the French revolution & considered England a democratic republic state to be imitated.
___ WILLIAM GODWIN’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which predicted an inevitable but peacefully evolution of society to a
final stage in which all property would be equally distributed and all government would disappear. Æ (3) UTOPIANISM
♦ Later, however, English sympathizers dropped off as the revolution followed its increasingly violence course: Jacobin extremists;
The “September Massacres”; the execution of the royal family; the Reign of Terror under Robespierre and the emergence of Napoleon.
- Poetic Theory and poetic practice: Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) & Biographia Literaria (1817)
- THE CONCEPT OF POETRY & POET. - POETIC SPONTANEITY & FREEDOM
♦ 18 C poetry was regarded as an imitation of human life (“a mirror ♦ Ww defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow” of
th

held up to nature”) that the poet artfully puts into an order to instruct & feeling.
give artistic pleasure to the reader. __ to Ww, although the composition of the poem originates from
♦ Ww, against the preceding tradition, described good poetry as the “emotions recollected in tranquility” & may be preceded
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (1) RESISTANCE TO OPRESSION. and followed by reflection, the act of composition must be
__ Located the source of a poem not in the outer world, but in the spontaneous.
individual poet. __ Keats listed as an “axiom” that “if poetry comes not as
__ The essential materials of the poem were not external people & naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
events, but the inner feelings of the author Æ Individualized poetry. all”.
♦ Poetry expresses the poet’s own feelings and temperament. The ♦ The emphasis on the free activity of the imagination is
st
LYRIC POEM written in the 1 pers, earlier regarded as a minor kind, related to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition
became a major form. A poet is a Man speaking to a man, but a man and the feeling of “the heart” to supplement the judgments of
with more organic sensibility. the purely logical faculty of “the head”.
- THE GLORIFICATION OF THE COMMON PLACE. - THE SUPERNATURAL. - ROMANTIC “NATURE POETRY”
♦ The aim of the Lyrical Ballads was to “choose ♦ COLERIDGE tells us in his Biographia Literaria ♦ ROMANTIC POETRY ≈ NATURE
incidents and situations from common life” and to that according to the division of labor in Lyrical POETRY.
use “a selection of Lg really spoken by man”. Ballads, his special function was to achieve ♦ Romantic NATURE POEMS are
__ Ww elevated the modest & rustic life & the plain wonder by a frank violation of natural laws & the meditative poems, in which
style to the principal subject for poetry. ordinary course of events in poems of which “the the scene serves to raise an
♦ Ww’s aim in Lyrical Balads was not simply to incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, emotional problem whose
represent the world as it is, but to throw over supernatural”. resolution constitute the
“situations of common life (…) a certain coloring __ Materials of ancient folklore, superstition & principle of the poem.
of imagination” (2) POPULISM. demonology are used to impress the reader.
th
- The novel: Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late 18 C
♦ (1) The GOTHIC NOVEL, which had been inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: A Gothic story. The term derives
from the frequent setting of these tales in a gloomy castle of the Middle Ages, but it extended to a large group of novels, which exploited
the possibilities of mystery & terror, chilling supernatural phenomena & often sexual persecution of a beautiful maiden by an villain.
___ These novels opened up to later fiction the dark and irrational side of human nature.
♦ (2) The NOVEL OF PURPOSE was often written to propagate the new social & political theories of the French Revolution Period.
___ WILLIAM GODWIN, the political philosopher, wrote Caleb Williams (1794) to illustrate the thesis that the lower classes are helplessly

- THE ROMANTIC POETS: The older generation

- William Wordsworth (1770-1850):
♦ Ww became a fervent “democrat” & follower of the French revolution. His gradual disillusion with the course of the revolution in France
brought him to the edge of an emotional breakdown. The life of his middle age was one of gradually increasing prosperity & reputation, as well
as of political and religious conservatism.
♦ In the 1790s, Ww met S.T. Coleridge almost daily & talk for hours about poetry and composed prolifically. The result of their joint efforts was the
nd
Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems(Ballad Æ from the people, Anonymous). Ww enunciated the rationale for his poetry in the 2 ed preface
♦ Ww’s poetry is written in the natural Lg of common speech.
___ He argues that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory.
st
___ He argues that the 1 principle of poetry should be pleasure.
st
♦ Tintern Abbey is the young Ww's 1 great statement of his principle (great) theme: that the memory of pure unity with nature in childhood
works upon the mind even in adulthood, when access to that pure unity has been lost, and that the maturity of mind present in adulthood offers
compensation for the loss of that unity (specifically, the ability to "look on nature" and hear "human music").
___ Tintern Abbey is a monologue, imaginatively spoken by a single speaker to himself, referencing the specific objects of its imaginary scene,
and occasionally addressing others (the spirit of nature, the speaker's sister).
- S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834):
♦ From his friendship wit Ww resulted the Lyrical Ballads, which were opened with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner .
♦ Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge had become addicted to opium. During the 1810s he lived in LND, on the verge of
suicide. He found a permanent shelter in Highgate in the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed an almost legendary reputation among
the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left the house. In 1816 the unfinished poems "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were published.
♦ Samuel Taylor Coleridge's place in the canon of English poetry rests on a comparatively small body of achievement: a few poems from the
late 1790s and early 1800s and his participation in the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797.
♦ Coleridge emphasis on the imagination, its independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic pictures such as those
found in the "Rime of an ancient mariner", exerted a profound influence on later writers such as SHELLEY.
♦ He helped to shape the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often further characterized by drug addiction.
♦ Much of romantic poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquillity, but his poetry seems to be “emotion recollected in emotion”.
Iván Matellanes’ Notes
 Topic 48: Brief summary
29
- ROMANTIC POETS: The younger generation.
- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
♦ Byron left England in 1816, never to return bc of rumors of his incest & debts. He settled in Geneva w/PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, MARY SHELLEY.
♦ After a long creative period in Italy, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a ship, the Hercules, and
sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords.
___ However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever from which he died on 19 April 1824.
♦ His poetry: Byron became famous like a thunder-burst when he published the first two Cantos of Childe Harold on his return to England after a
journey to Spain “I woke one night and found myself famous”
♦ With Childe Harold Byron introduced into English literature the figure of the disillusioned man, the hero satiated with pleasures and morally
corrupted, hating mankind, living on the edge of society and in revolt against its laws: THE BYRONIC HERO.
___ This character owes something to Milton’s SATAN & to the dark heroes of the Gothic novels.
___ Byron’s contemporaries insisted on identifying the author with his fictional characters. However, Byron’s letters and some of his friends’
testimonies showed that his own temperament was in many aspects the antithesis to that of his heroes.
♦ During the last 6 years of his life, Byron dropped his passionate heroics & discovered his true bent as a comic poet:
th
♦ Don Juan ends in the 16 canto, but even in its unfinished state, it is the longest satirical poem in English.
___ Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had in the original legend been a superhuman being in his sexual energy.
___ Throughout Byron’s version the hidden joke is that this archetypal homme fatal is in fact more acted on than active.
___ With no doubt kind and well intentioned, he is guilty of youth, charm and courteous spirit. Women do all the rest.
___ Work written in the ottava rima [an 8-line stanza (ababab-cc)].
- Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822):
♦ English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and conservative values. SHELLEY drew no essential distinction btw poetry
and politics, and his work reflected the radical ideas and revolutionary optimism of the era.
♦ In 1811 Shelley was expelled from the college for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism.
♦ Shelley married a 16-year old girl, daughter of a LND tavern owner & they spent the following 2 years travelling in England & Ireland, distributing
pamphlets and speaking against political injustice. The poet's marriage was a failure & in 1814 he met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
♦ In 1818 the Shelleys moved to Italy, where Byron was residing.
♦ In his poetry, Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty.
___ Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark".
♦ The centre of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about
moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion,
and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person.
___ Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better.
♦ Prometheus Unbound is probably his most famous drama (PROMETHEUS stole fire from heaven & was condemned by Zeus to be chained to
mount Caucassus & to be tortured by a vulture feeding on his liver).
___ Shelly continued Aeschylus’ story but transformed it into a symbolic drama about the origin of evil & the possibility of overcoming it.
___ Implicit in Prometheus unbound is the view that both the origin of evil & the possibility of reform are the moral responsibility of men &
women themselves.
♦ A defense of poetry was a response towards THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK’s ironic essay, The Four Ages of poetry, implicitly directed against the
claims for poetry and the poetic imagination by his romantic contemporaries.
___ His emphasis is on the universal and permanent forms, qualities and values that all great poems possess.
- John Keats (1795-1821):
♦ He was educated at Clarke's School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid.
♦ In 1814 he moved to LND to resum his surgical studies at Guy's hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the SOCIETY OF APOTHECARIES.
♦ Keats spent three months in 1818 attending his brother TOM, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis. AFTER TOM'S DEATH in December, Keats
moved to Hampstead. In the winter of 1818-19 he worked mainly on Hyperion.
♦ However, KEATS was suffering from tuberculosis & his poems were marked w/sadness bc he was too poor to marry the woman he loved.
♦ Declining Shelley's invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, 1821.
___ Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."
♦ Keats’ poems in conjunction with his letters are the work of a great man and a poet of extraordinary gifts
♦ Individual sensibility was the theme of poetry from Wordsworth onwards.
___ Keats did not believe in the poet as a moral philosopher: He believed that he was dedicated to the exercise of imagination in the
pursuit of beauty and truth (truth in the artistic sense, rather than in the moralist’s).
___ His poems are very rarely autobiographical, as Coleridge’s often were; yet we feel that his best things are informed through his personal
joys and sufferings.
♦ In The Eve of St. Agnes he adopts a medieval theme reminiscent of Christabel.
___ It is a work of pure inspiration, in which are fused Keats’ sorrowful despair at the death of his brother, and his sense of devastating effects
of obsessive passion.
___ It is the solemn elegy upon himself of a man aware that he is doomed by hereditary illness, the love of woman and the ambition for fame.
♦ In his Odes he explored the theme of the serenity and performance of great art in contrast to the misery and brevity of life.
___ In To a nightingale he is aware of his personal situation, and of the world of ideal beauty to which he is transported by the bird’s song.
___ In On a Grecian Urn he sees a work of classical art as a thing of serene tranquility symbolizing the identity of truth and beauty.
___ The Ode to Autumn evokes in 3 stanzas the spirit of the season of calm fruition, and breathless sense of reconciliation of Keats with his fate.
- ROMANTIC NOVELISTS: MARY SHELLY’S Frankestein
- Though Frankenstein is now classified as a horror story, MARY SHELLEY's contemporaries regarded it as a serious novel of ideas. It served as an
illustration of many of the tenets of WILLIAM GODWIN's philosophy, and did more to promote his ideas than his own work ever did.
♦ The novel doesn’t subscribe to all of Godwin's precepts. It stands in explicit opposition to the idea that man can achieve perfection.
♦ Frankenstein is part of the GOTHIC MOVEMENT in literature; a form that was only just becoming popular in England at the time of its publication.
The Gothic mode was a reaction against the humanistic, rationalist literature of The Age of Reason
♦ Frankenstein might be seen as a cooperation btw the GOTHIC APPROACH and the ROMANTIC ONE: it addresses serious philosophical subjects in
a fantastical manner though it confronts recognizable human problems, it can hardly be said to take place in a recognizable natural world.
♦ Victor changes over the course of the novel from an innocent youth fascinated by science into a disillusioned, guilt-ridden man
determined to destroy the fruits of his arrogant scientific results & desire to attain the godlike power.
♦ Looking in the mirror, the monster realizes his physical grotesqueness, an aspect of his persona that blinds society to his initially gentle,
kind nature. It perfectly fits the ideal of Rousseau’s NOBEL SAVAGE, the monster shows that he is not a purely evil being.
♦ Pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of Frankenstein, as Victor attempts to surge beyond accepted human limits andIván Matellanes’
access Notes of life.
the secret
 Topic 48: Brief summary
30
i
cojera

Iván Matellanes’ Notes