REPUTATION

Byron rebelled not so much against classicism in literature, as against the proprieties and moral restrictions of the time. His poetry is saturated with the revolutionary spirit. The great power of Byron’s poetry consists in its wealth of expression, its vigor, its passion, its variety and passionate and rolling rhetoric.

Byron’s work was widely criticized on moral grounds and frequently attacked by critics. However, it was immensely popular in England and the rest of Europe. As a Romantic icon, his importance was enormous. Byron embodies the Romantic spirit and gave it a recognizable face: the Byronic hero.

Shelley is one of the most ardent, independent and reckless English poets inspired by the French revolution. Tender, fearless, full of desire to reform the world and hatred for any form of tyranny, Shelley failed to adjust himself to the customs and laws of his actual surroundings. He was despised by the public at large and idolized by his intimate friends.

LIFE

Shelley emerged from a solidly conservative background. His ancestors had been Sussex aristocrats since early in the seventeenth century. He was educated in Eton and Oxford. He was slight of built, eccentric in manner, unskilled in sports or fighting and was mercilessly baited by older and stronger boys. Even then he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative man’s general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to war against injustice and oppression. At Oxford Shelley’s political and philosophic readings led and his friend to write a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, the first open profession of atheism to be printed in England. To his shock and grief Shelley was peremptorily expelled, terminating a university career that had lasted six months. This event opened a breach between Shelley and his father that widened, when Shelley eloped to Scotland with a sixteen-year-old daughter of a coffee house proprietor.

Shelley continued writing works expounding his radical views. He promoted political rights for Catholics, ‘free love’, vegetarianism and condemned, among other things, royalty and religion. In 1813, Shelley published his first big work Queen Mab, a visionary and ideological poem, which Byron considered his best work.

In 1814, he moved to London, where he came under the influence of the radical social philosopher William Godwin and fell in love with his sixteen-year-old daughter Mary. The death of his grandfather temporarily solved Shelley’s financial problems and allowed him and Mary to elope to Europe. They settled in Geneva, where in 1816 they were joined by Byron. It was during this period of relative tranquility that Shelley composed some of his best poems and Mary began work on her novel, Frankenstein.

In 1816, Shelley returned to England for a while, where he associated with Keats and other literary figure, but soon, disillusioned with Britain, in debt and suffering from bad health, Shelley moved with his family to Italy never to return to England. Thereafter he saw himself in the role of an alien and an outcast, scorned and rejected by the human race to whose welfare he dedicated his powers and his life. The summer of 1819 witnessed extraordinary outburst of creative energy. Shelly wrote some beautiful lyrics including To a Skylark, The Cloud and perhaps his best-loved Ode to the West Wind. In 1the same year he completed his masterpiece Prometheus Unbound and a fine tragedy The Cenci. He wrote also The Mask of Anarchy (a discerning and witty call for a proletarian revolution); Peter Bell the Third (a satire on Wordsworth); Adonais (his noble elegy on the death of Keats), etc.

In 1822, at the age of thirty, Shelley was drowned.

WORKS

Queen Mab, like Shelley’s other early works is characterized by intense political passion. It attacks such social ‘evils’ as commerce, marriage, religion and eating meat. The poem is set in a fantastic frame of a journey of disembodied spirit through space to the fairy-ale castle of Queen Mab who reveals visions of the woeful past, the dreadful present and the utopian future. Mab decries that institutional religion and codified morality are the roots of social evil. She prophecies that under the rule of the Goddess Necessity, all institutions will whither away, and society will return to its natural state of goodness and felicity.

The tragedies Prometheus Unbound and Hellas are based on Grecian materials. The first is partly a mythical drama (or a psychodrama) and partly political allegory. Shelley began with completing the Aeschylean story of Prometheus who is bound to his rock for all eternity by a jealous Jupiter. He presents Prometheus as a figure of moral perfection, the ideal of freedom and justice. He embodies the moral salvation of Man from tyranny. (Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour of redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of revolution represented by Zeus’s son Demogorgon who represents Fate, Historical Necessity, or perhaps, the “People-Monster”. He hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness throughout mankind. Prometheus triumphs over tyranny in the name of mankind). The work is executed in a bewildering variety of verse forms: rhetoric soliloquy, dramatic dialogues, love songs, dream visions, lyric choruses, and prophecies.

Hellas is a lyrical drama, also based in form on Aeschylus’s tragedy – The Persians. It was inspired by the Greek war of Independence against the Turkish empire. Shelley uses visionary figures – Christ, Mahomet, The Wandering Jew – to explore a cyclic philosophy of history.

The Cenci, a verse tragedy,is Shelley’s masterpiece. The melodramatic plot is taken from a true story of Beatrice Cenci, who was tried and executed for the murder of her father at Rome in 1599. Shelley was attracted by the themes of incest and atheism: the play concentrated on the evil of the court and the inner sufferings of Beatrice. The poet saw tragedy as the most important dramatic form: sufferings chasten the hero, make him morally superior. The Cenci is one of the most “Shakespearean” works of English Romanticism. The sinister image of Francesco Cenci and his avenging daughter – is Shelley’s great artistic accomplishment. The main theme is fighting the evil. However, according to Shelley, evil can only be beaten by love and generosity. The poet denounces violence in all forms, but, almost unwillingly, he admires the romantic character of Beatrice.

Adonais is a lament for the early death of Keats. The elegy is inspired partly by the Greek elegies (Shelley had translated), partly by Milton’s Lycidas. Keats is lamented under the name of Adonais, the Greek god of beauty and fertility, together with other poets who had died young, such as Chatterton, Sidney, Lucan. Adonais’s deathbed is attended by different figures, both allegorical and contemporary, including Byron, “the Pilgrim of Eternity”. Shelley, the atheist, accepts the physical form of Death, but insists on some Neoplatonic resurrection in the eternal Beauty of the universe.

Lyrical poetry. A lot of Shelley’s poetry is political, manifesting his rebellious aspirations. But his Muse is, above all, a lyrical one. His most favored literary forms are the ode and the hymn, transformed from classical cannons.

The Ode to The West Wind is considered by many critics to be Shelley’s best short poem. In it the poet asks the spirit of the West Wind to be both destroyer and preserver and regenerate hope and energy in Nature, in the poet himself, and in the mankind in general. It is written in five majestic stanzas, each taking a form of a sonnet. The musical patterns, which are built on internal rhyme, assonance and run-on lines, clearly show the poet’s mastery of his art.

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!”

The poem has a logic of feeling that leads to a triumphant, hopeful and convincing conclusion: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

John Keats is one of the most lyrical poets of Romanticism. The period of his creative activity was very short: 1814-1819. The themes of his poetry – the beauty of the world, the essence of poetry and dream, love and friendship. He wrote long narrative poems, ballads and even drama, but his favored literary forms were the sonnet and the ode.

LIFE

Keats had a propitious origin – a son of a stableman. He was sent to a private school, where he was introduced to Spenser and other poets, and to Grecian mythology, in which he took special pleasure. That influence is apparent in his poetry.

In his fifteenth year he was left an orphan (his father died in 1804 falling off a horse, his mother died of tuberculosis six years later), taken from school by his guardians and apprenticed to a surgeon. But his study of poetry and mythology had a far stronger influence on him than his medical instructor. He passed the necessary exams and made a moderately good apothecary-surgeon, but almost immediately, at the age of 22, over his guardian’s protests, he gave up medicine to pursue his literary career.

In 1818 Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They became engaged, but Keats’s dedication to poetry, poverty and his growing illness made marriage impossible. The whole engagement is tinged with a deep pathos, and some of his letters to her are almost tragic.

On medical advice the poet went to Rome and died there at the age of 25.

His short life was a brave struggle against disease, poverty, and unfriendly criticism. Even while his health was good, he felt a foreboding of early death and applied himself to his art his a desperate urgency.

The rapidity and sureness of Keats’s development has no match. He did not even undertake poetry until his eighteenth year, and already in 1816 he created some of his major sonnets. His gift is obvious in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1816), one of his first important poems. In Sleep and Poetry (1816) he laid out for himself a poetic program. The title of Sleep and Poetry points to Keats’s lasting concern about the morality of imagination, and the complex relationship between art and experience. In his last major work, The Fall of Hyperion, he returns to the same theme:

The poet and the dreamer are distinct,

Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.

The one pours out a balm upon the world.

The other vexes it.

In 1817, he wrote Endymion, an ambitious undertaking of more that 4000 lines – Keats’s biggest poem. It begins with the famous words “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (‘Прекрасное пленяет навсегда’, перевод Пастернака)

Endymion is a profuse and often obscure allegory of the poet’s quest for an ideal of beauty and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibility. Its theme is reconciliation of beauty and reality, actual life with a dream, and inspiration with harmony. It is based on the Grecian myth about the love of a goddess for a youth Endymion, to whom she came in his dreams, and whom Zeus on his request put to sleep for ever, so that he could for ever be dreaming.

The poem

The poem is immature at times, and abounds in ornament, but it undeniably includes episodes remarkable for their poetic beauty.

Keats’s next work is the more ambitious Hyperion. If Endymion is the myth of beauty and love, Hyperion is a myth of fight. The poem is conceived on the model of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Hyperion was left incomplete, and was followed by A Fall of Hyperion, in blank verse, which is now considered Keats’s masterpiece.

Many of Keats’s poems are incomplete fragments, but they make a lasting pattern. Like Coleridge, he was interested in the supernatural, irrational and mysterious world of the distant past. His narrative poems often have mythic, classical or medieval backgrounds. Thus, La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad, which describes a knight fatally enthralled by an elfish woman. In The Eve of St.Agnes, Keats produces one of the most coherent of all symbolic legends, invented by the Romantic poets. Using a medieval romance setting, he brings together two lovers from feuding families.

Keats described his understanding of poetry in a letter to his publisher. In his view, poetry should strike with “fine excess”, but never seem strange. It should strike the reader as an expression of his own thoughts and seem almost a remembrance. “If poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. Keats is the poetic apostle of the beautiful. The main themes of his poetry are the search for lasting beauty and happiness and for permanent meaning in a world where everything fades and dies. These themes are central to his odes. In Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn the song of the nightingale and artistic images on the urn show that art and artistic creation can make things permanent, and that poetry can keep human feelings and ideas alive for ever in the words of a poem. His poetic creed is embodied in the following two lines:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

His poetry is always simple and graceful. He values clarity of tone and simplicity of images. Keats is an enthusiastic observer of nature: “The poetry of earth is never dead” (Sonnet on the Grasshopper and Cricket).

One of Keats’s special charms is his mastery in choosing, adapting or even creating apt poetic words and phrases. Some of his descriptive adjectives have been called ‘miniature poems’: deep-damasked wings of the tiger-moth; a rose full of dewy wine; full-throated ease of a nightingale’s song.

His early death made him a symbol for the Romantic movement. It is difficult to read Keats’s poems and letters without an undersense of the tragic waste of so extraordinary an intellect and a genius cut off so early. His achievement, when he stopped writing at the age of 24, greatly exceeds that at the same age of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. What he could have accomplished is beyond conjecture.

[1] Indeed, in the second half of the 19^th cent., “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.

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