8.2 Literature
William Wordsworth
As a young man, Wordsworth memorized passages from Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. His lyrical poetry, therefore, bears the imprint of the musical quality of the early modern poets who lived before him. From Milton’s concept of the sublime, he created work that celebrates the sublimity of the natural world. Wordsworth, who is now considered the premier poet of the Romantic movement, enjoyed most of his acclaim long after his death. During his lifetime, his work was overshadowed by the more immediate popularity of Lords Tennyson and Byron. When the Romantic Movement spread to other parts of Europe and America, however, Wordsworth’s connection of nature and the human imagination sparked an immense following.
Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, Wordsworth’s literary circle became known as the “Lake Poets,” named after the Lake District in England. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, which was popular and brought them some financial success. The book contained one of Wordsworth’s best-known poems, “Tintern Abbey,” the study of a natural location with thematic undertones of loss and consolation. The book also contains one of Coleridge’s famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, the innovation of Lyrical Ballads influenced a rising, younger group of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.
In the Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth proposes a theory that connects poetry and the workings of the human mind. His intended audience is not the high-brow literary elite, but the common men and women. For example, he addresses those who were caught in the industrial confines of cities due to the loss of common land in the country in his poignant poem “Michael.” In the “Preface,” Wordsworth writes, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” an example of which he demonstrates in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Perhaps his most powerful and influential poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” captures the human mind and its connection to the natural world.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
License: Public Domain
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge is the first critic of the Romantic literary movement in England. His father was a school-master and a vicar, and Coleridge grew up in a household full of books, which he read voraciously. His father’s fascination with astronomy created in the young man a vision of the vastness of the world, a vision that would later inform his own work. His character and literary style were formed when he was an adolescent student at Christ’s Hospital school in London; there, he immersed himself in the classics and English poets such as Shakespeare and Milton. From the English poets, he drew the significance of sound and imagery. Coleridge saw poetry as a means of enjoyment and science as a means to scientific truth; according to Coleridge, however, the best poetry uses metaphor and imagery to express truth. He is responsible for bringing the ideas of Immanuel Kant and human understanding to the literary circles of England. He also introduces an innovative supernatural context in much of his poetry, which requires that his audience release their grip on reason. He collaborated with William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, a foundational book of verse for the Romantic period. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge introduces the concept of a “willing suspension of disbelief”: In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
The suspension of disbelief or poetic faith is necessary for the enjoyment of two of Coleridge’s famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Kubla Khan” (1817). Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” appeared in his imagination in the waking moments of an opium-induced sleep; the poem represents the poet’s fascination with the human imagination and the vastness of nature, the unconscious and fantasy. This poem, though not Coleridge’s most prized work, has stimulated scholarly conversation for its potent and vivid imagery and language, and foreshadows the work of poets like William Blake and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe.
Kubla Khan
License: Public Domain
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
From an early age, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a controversial figure. He was the first-born male of his family, and therefore he had expectations of a substantial family inheritance. He was expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism (1811), copies of which he sent to every conservative professor at the college. Shelley and his father parted company upon his refusal to accept Christianity as a means of reinstatement to the college, forcing Shelley to wait for two years to receive his inheritance. Shelley would continue to defy religious hypocrisy and espouse politically radical ideas for the rest of his short life. Shelley’s defiance of social traditions extended to his personal life. His first wife, Harriett Westbook, committed suicide when Shelley began an affair with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The group of radical intellectuals with which Shelley associated touted free love and lived on the fringe of respectable society. Shelley legally married Mary, but continued to have affairs with many women as the couple made their way across Europe. Mary Shelley would later write the Romantic masterpiece Frankenstein. Shelley’s death by drowning in 1822 established him as a tragic figure in the Romantic era. In spite of the few years in which he lived and composed, Shelley leaves behind some of the period’s most elegant poetry. He is buried beside John Keats in Italy. Shelley’s poetry practically trips from the lips in tremendous similes, alliterations, and phrases. In “Ozymandias,” he explains the vanity of greatness in the fall of Ramesses II of Egypt.
Ozymandias
License: Public Domain
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831). As the daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the expectations for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were high. Her mother died shortly after her birth, and her father gave her an unconventional education. Mary grew up listening to her father’s guests, who ranged from scientists and philosophers to literary figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Mary was sixteen when she fell in love with one of her father’s admirers, the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who was estranged from his wife), and ran away with him. The two of them married, several years later, after the death of Shelley’s first wife. In the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy became the neighbors of Lord Byron, with whom they developed a close friendship while vacationing on the shores of Lake Geneva. During a stretch of bad weather, Byron suggested that each of them should write a ghost story. Mary’s initial idea, which resulted from a nightmare she had, quickly evolved into Frankenstein.
The story of Victor Frankenstein is a cautionary tale of what happens when Romantic ambition and Enlightenment ideals of science and progress are taken too far. This theme also appears in the story of the narrator, the unlucky explorer Robert Walton, who encounters Victor and hears his story. Victor’s most important failure is his abandonment of his Creature, who never receives a name. Victor leaves his initially innocent “child” to survive on his own simply because of his appearance. Although Victor questions whether he himself is to blame for everything that follows, he continues to be repulsed by the Creature’s looks. The impassioned speeches that Mary Shelley writes for the Creature implicitly criticize society for rejecting someone for the wrong reasons. In the end, it is left to the reader to decide whether Victor, the Creature, and/or society in general is the most monstrous.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Read an excerpt of Frankenstein here
World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.