. The
language of sense impressions
. ROMANTICISM:
The age of Revolutions
Poetry: The art of writing poems.
Poetry derives its name from the Greek verb poiéin which means `to
create'. It originated as an oral art generally accompanied by dancing and
music and is the oldest form of literature. People used it as a means to
express the most remarkable events in their lives and to convey the feelings
associated with them.
There are several figures of speech an author can use to translate abstract
concepts into concrete images; certainly the most effective are the simile and
the metaphor.
A simile is a comparison between two things, which is made explicit
through the use of a specific word of comparison such as like, as, than or
resembles. A simile is usually more striking if it compares two
essentially dissimilar things.
.The functions of a simile are, in fact:
.to convey a more vivid idea of the scene or object; to make the meaning
easier to understand;
.to introduce an element of surprise;
.to create an emotional response in the reader.
Similes and metaphors have
more or less the same function even if the latter has a stronger emotional
impact thanks to its ability to compress meaning in a single image.
Personification
Personification is a type of metaphor
which attributes to abstract things or to inanimate objects the characteristics
of a living being. Personification can be recognized by the use of the capital
letter, of personal pronouns, adjectives or verbs.
A symbol is anything, person, place or action that has a literal
meaning and also stands for something else, such as a quality, an attitude, a
belief, or a value. Most symbols are shared by the members of the same cultural
community and are therefore easy to understand. For example, a rose is often
the symbol of love and beauty; a skull is a symbol of death; spring and winter
symbolise youth and old age respectively.
The language of sense impressions
In order to convey his perception of reality, the poet often employs words
and expressions which generate visual, auditory, olfactory or tactile images.
In other words, the poet uses the language of sense impressions which
includes nouns, adjectives and verbs. Finding the words in a poem which
refer to the five senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch — is important
in understanding the poet's physical experience and to evalutate its
contribution to the meaning of the poem. Verbs such as to see, to look, to
stare introduce the sense of sight together with adjectives referring to
colour. Temperature, texture and materials convey touch, while verbs of sound
are linked to hearing.
(da Lit&Lab)
Figurative Language
When we say "il vento ululava" or in English they say “the wind
was howling", it is figurative language that is being used
(literally speaking, only a wolf howls) but as the expression has become quite
common nobody ever thinks of connecting it with its origin.
Using figurative language therefore means transferring meaning from one
object / idea / event to another and it implies recognizing the analogy
existing between different objects / ideas / events and going beyond their
literal or denotative meaning.
According to the dictionary an ant is "a small social
hymenopterous". But in the course of time man, observing this insect, has
attributed human qualities to it associating it with hard work, frugality and
cooperation. So, when the poet John Donne orders the sun:
"Call country ants to
harvest offices"
referring to countrymen preparing to harvest, he uses the word ant in
its associated or connotative meaning.
In everyday speech we often make comparisons between things or events. In
poetry comparisons are called similes and, to be effective, they must be
vivid and original. A simile invites you to transfer your imagination from what
is described to what is used as a term of comparison to make the description or
the idea more vivid. In Wordsworth's simile
"I wandered lonely as a
cloud That floats on high..."
you are invited first to imagine the speaker's loneliness, then a single
cloud in a clear sky and finally to connect the two images.
ROMANTICISM: The age of Revolutions
The period from the
Declaration of American Independence (1776) to 1830 was marked by great
revolutions: the Industrial Revolution reshaped the social and political
background of Britain, the British colonies on the other side of the Atlantic
became a new and free nation; the French Revolution spread its ideas of freedom
and equality all over Europe. All this was also to affect the cultural and
literary aspects of life.
A new sensibility
In the last thirty years of
the 18th century a new sensibility became dominant which came to be known in
literature as 'Romanticism' and presented itself as a reaction against the
faith in reason that had characterised the previous age, promoting instead the
supremacy of feelings and emotions. It contained elements of introspection,
nostalgia, emotionalism; individualism and led to a new way of
considering the role of man in the Universe. The newly born appeal to the heart
and to the relationship between reason and emotions expressed itself in various
ways.
There was a growing interest
in humble and everyday life and great attention was paid to the country as a
place where nature was as opposed to in the industrial town. The concept of
Nature too was submitted to revolution.
A new taste for the desolate, the love of
ruins, such as ancient castles and abbeys, was part of a revival of a past
perceived as contrasting with present reality.
The importance of imagination and childhood
Imagination gained a key role
as a means of giving expression to emotional experience not strictly accountable
to reason.
The
willingness to explore less conscious aspects of feeling was accompanied by a
serious concern about the experience of childhood. In a Romantic mind a child
was purer than grown-up people because he was unspoilt by civilisation. His
uncorrupted sensitiveness brought him closer to God and the sources of
creation, therefore childhood was admired and cultivated.
Emphasis on the individual
Consequently great emphasis
was placed on the significance of the individual. The Romantics saw the
individual essentially in the solitary state; they exalted the atypical, the
outcast, the rebel. This attitude led on the one hand to the cult of
the hero.
It followed that 'natural' behaviour, that is to say, unrestrained
and impulsive, is good, in contrast to behaviour
which is governed by reason, and by
the rules and customs of society.
WORSDWORTH: Life and works
William Wordsworth was born in the English Lake District. In 1790 his
contact with Revolutionary France filled him with enthusiasm for the democratic
ideals which he hoped could lead to a new and just social order.
The brutal, destructive developments of the revolution and the war between
England and France brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. The despair
and disillusionment of these years were healed by the contact with nature.
With his friend Coleridge produced a collection of poems called Lyrical
Ballads which appeared
anonymously in 1798. The second edition of 1800 also contained Wordsworth's
famous Preface, which was to
become the Manifesto of English Romanticism.
In 1799 settled in the Lake District and in 1802 William married a
childhood friend. His reputation as a poet grew steadily and he died in 1850 at
the age of eighty.
The Manifesto of English
Romanticism
In his Preface, he stated
that the subject matter should deal with everyday situations or incidents and
with ordinary people. The language should be simple, originating not in the
extraordinary but in the ordinary, the objects mentioned homely and called by
their ordinary names. The reason for Wordsworth's choice lies in the fact that
in humble rural life man is nearer to his own purer passions. Therefore the
poet is not a man in an ivory tower, but a man among men, writing about what
interests mankind.
Man and nature
Wordsworth is interested in the relationship between the natural world and
the human consciousness. His poetry offers a detailed account of the complex
interaction between man and nature, of the influences, insights, emotions and
sensations which arise from this contact, rather than precise and objective
observation of natural phenomena.
When a natural object is described, the main focus of interest is actually
the poet's response to that object. Wordsworth believes that man and nature are
inseparable; man exists not outside the natural world but as an active
participant in it. Nature comforts man in sorrow, it is a source of pleasure
and joy.
The senses and memory
Nature means also the world of sense perceptions. Wordsworth exploited
above all the sensibility of the eye and ear through which he could perceive
both the «beauteous forms» of nature and the sounds of the winds or waters or
the silence of secluded places.
Sensations lead to simple thoughts, which later combine into complex and
organised ideas. Memory, therefore,
is a major force in the process of growth of the poet's mind and moral
character, and it is memory that allows Wordsworth to give poetry its life and
power. Recollection in tranquillity Wordsworth claimed imagination as his
supreme gift.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales
and hills,
When all at once I saw a
crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the
trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the
breeze.
Continuous as the stars that
shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending
line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a
glance,
Tossing their heads in
sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced;
but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in
glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little
thought
What wealth the show to me had
brought:
For oft, when on my couch I
lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward
eye
Which is the bliss of
solitude;
And then my heart with
pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
(William Wordsworth)
(1770-1850)
KEATS: Life and works
Keats is perhaps
the greatest member of that group of the second generation of Romantic poets
who blossomed early and died young. He is Romantic in his relish of sensation,
his love for the Greek civilisation and his conception of the writer, but the
synthesis he made of all these elements was very much his own. He was able to fuse
the romantic passion and the cold Neo-classicism, just as Ugo Foscolo did in Le Grazie (1812-1813).
Keats was born in
London in 1795. His mother and brother died because of TB and his ever-frail
health deteriorated rapidly. He also fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but
poverty, his bad health and his almost religious pursuit of poetry made
marriage impossible. Notwithstanding these difficulties, Keats wrote a series
of masterful poems during the following year. He travelled to Italy in an
effort to recover his health but died in Rome in February 1821
The role of Imagination
It was his belief
in the supreme value of the Imagination which made him a Romantic poet.
Beauty: the central theme
of his poetry What strikes his imagination most is beauty, and it is his
disinterested love for it that differentiates him from the other Romantic
writers and makes him the forerunner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes, who saw
in his cult of beauty the expression of the principle 'Art for Art's sake. In
fact, the contemplation of beauty is the central theme of Keats's poetry. It is
mainly the classical Greek world that inspires Keats. To him, as to the
Hellenes, the expression of beauty is the ideal of all art. Thus the world of
Greek beliefs lives again in his verse, re-created and re-interpreted with the
eyes of a Romantic.
Physical beauty and spiritual beauty
His first
apprehension of beauty proceeds from the senses, from the concrete physical
sensations. All the senses, not only the nobler ones, sight and hearing, as in
Wordsworth's poetry, are involved in this process. This 'physical beauty' is
caught in all the forms nature acquires, in the colours it displays, in the
sweetness of its perfumes, in the curves of a flower, in a woman. Beauty can
also produce a much deeper experience of joy. "A Thing of
Beauty is a Joy for ever", and it introduces a sort of 'spiritual
beauty, that is one of love, friendship and poetry. Thus physical beauty is
mutable and is linked to life, enjoyment, decay and death; while spiritual beauty is immortal. Through
poetry Keats is also able to reach something that he believes to be permanent
and unchanging in a world characterised by mortality and sorrow.
Negative capability
Keats asserts his idea of 'negative capability' in a
letter to his brothers George and Thomas: "when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
& reason". The great mind is one that can enjoy itself in the unknown,
the uncertain, without feeling the need to analyze everything into certainty.
Keats's style is also marked by close attention to details.
|
Ode on a Grecian Urn Thou still unravished bride of
quietness, Heard melodies are sweet, but
those unheard Ah, happy, happy boughs! that
cannot shed Who are these coming to the
sacrifice? |
|
O Attic shape! Fair attidude! with
brede |