Two more Romantic poets

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is born a member of the aristocracy; his father is a member of Parliament, and Shelley is in line to become a baron. From an early age, Shelley is opposed to injustice and oppression—he dislikes convention and orthodoxy, While attending Oxford, he publishes a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, which argues the existence of God can’t be proven on empirical grounds. The university asks him to repudiate the document, but Shelley refuses and he is therefore expelled from Oxford in 1811.

That same year, he elopes with a woman named Harriet Westbrook and begins studying with the radical social philosopher William Godwin, who believes in, among other things, the abolition of private property. Shelley falls in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary and, believing that cohabitation without love is immoral, leaves Harriet and goes to live with Mary in France. Before leaving, however, the two invite Harriet to come and live with them as a sister.

When Shelley returns to England, he finds that word has gotten around about his actions and most people consider him some kind of monster. Before too long, Harriet drowns herself. Shelley marries Mary and leaves England for Italy in 1818, never to return. In 1822, Shelley himself drowns while sailing his open boat in a storm.

As we might expect, given his unorthodox lifestyle, Shelley is the most politically radical of the Romantic poets. Most Romantic thinkers are influenced by the American and French revolutions, that sense that the common people can overturn centuries-old traditions and create entirely new governments. The poem “England in 1819” (Norton 821) illustrates Shelley’s political beliefs: the first twelve lines list the corruption and oppression in England, leading up to the revolutionary promise of the final two lines. All these problems “Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may/Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.” It’s ironic, too, that these radical sentiments are presented in the form of a sonnet, a highly traditional form .

Shelley’s essay, “A Defence of Poetry,” was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s essay “The Four Ages of Poetry,” in which Peacock claimed that in an age of science and technology, poetry is no longer relevant. Shelley claims, by contrast, that poetry has never been more necessary than it is at the present moment. The progress in science has not been accompanied by similar progress in moral understanding, and Shelley makes the case that poetry, by which he means all sorts of creativity, is essential to the moral life:

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.”

In other words, in order to live a moral life, we must empathize with the problems of other people, and this requires imagination—we have to put ourselves in another person’s place. Poetry exercises that process of imagination: reading poetry or other creative work strengthens our moral sense, making us better able to be the kind of empathetic people we ought to be. Poetry is the exercise room of the moral sense.

In the conclusion of the essay, which is found on pages 823 and following in the Norton anthology, Shelley writes that English poets have historically anticipated the political movements that lead to greater freedom.

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the messengers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve the Power which is seated on the throne of their own soul” (824-25).

The example Shelley is thinking of is almost certainly John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost. Not only was Milton a great, serious English poet, but Shelley, like many Romantic thinkers, saw the portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost being kind of prophetic—he would see Satan as being a noble rebel against the tyranny of God’s reign. Milton wouldn’t have agreed with that characterization—he was a Puritan, after all—but Shelley saw him as subconsciously anticipating the revolutionary spirit that would reach full fruition during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. No matter what he thought he believed, Milton communicated the spirit of the age.

The ending of the essay is very stirring, trumpeting the prophetic role that poets play in history:

“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

This all seems like a bit of an overstatement, but many people in our era feel the same way. Creative people control the way we view the world. Lots of people are worried about the values of the creative people in Hollywood, because their products shape the way that the rest of us view the world. Television, music, movies, video games, all sorts of entertainment is believed to have significant influence on the values of Americans, and even though most of the people who advocate we be careful about our entertainment wouldn’t use Shelley’s phrasing, they really do believe that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Moving from Shelley’s ideas about poetry to one of his actual poems. “Ode to the West Wind” is made up of five sections, each containing fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. This is the traditional sonnet form, although the rhyme scheme is not traditionally associated with sonnets. Notice that sections I through III are introductory: each of them addresses the west wind and ends with the plea, “Oh hear!” It’s only in Section IV that we actually get to hear what the speaker wants the west wind to hear.

Sections I through III present the west wind as active and powerful at various locations throughout the earth. In Section I, it scatters the dead leaves in autumn and seems to have some sort of power over life and death—it drives the seeds into their graves, but in the spring the wind will also bring new life. In Section II, our view shifts to the sky, where the west wind is blowing clouds around like leaves, brewing up a storm that the speaker associates with the end of the year:

Thou Dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst (lines 23-28).

It’s not just any storm—it’s a dramatic, apocalyptic storm.

Section III takes us to the sea, where the wind wakes up the Mediterranean, stirring up the waves into mountains and valleys, and even reaching beneath the sea, causing “the sea blooms and the oozy woods” to tremble with its power.

In Section IV, the speaker, having finished painting his picture of the winds power, reveals what he wants the wind to hear: he wants the wind to move him—he wants the strength of the wind. Notice that there’s an admission of loss that should be familiar after reading Wordsworth and Coleridge:

If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. (47-52)

When he was a boy, the speaker had no need of the wind’s help, but now that he’s older, he doesn’t have the energy that he once had—he’s crying out to the wind in a sort of prayer (Natural Supernaturalism!) to give him the strength to do the things that he wants to do.

What does he want to do? The answer is in Section V:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! (63-69)

Obviously, the speaker wants his poetry to have an impact on the world—he wants to have a prophetic impact on his world. Yet he finds himself chained and bowed, having fallen on the thorns of life. And so he calls out to the west wind, asking to be lifted up, to be strengthened in his effort to bring this prophecy to humankind. Inspiration has traditionally been associated with breath or wind, and so we see the poet crying out for help, asking to be lifted up and inspired so that he can fulfill his mission of bringing his message to the world.

John Keats (1795-1821) came from a different background than Shelley. His father was the head stableman at a London stable who married the boss’s daughter. Keats’s father died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. Keats should have inherited a nice sum of money, but the inheritance was tied up in the courts until after Keats’s death.

Keats’s guardian apprentices him to a surgeon so he can have a trade. A surgeon at this point in history is somebody who sets bones—it’s a trade that requires a strong back and isn’t that prestigious. Keats decides he wants to be a poet instead.

He’s not an immediate success. His second book of poetry, Endymion (1818) is attacked by the magazine Blackwoods for political reasons: Keats is referred to as “the Cockney poet” because he’s from London and working class and didn’t attend a university.

In 1818, Keats’s brother Tom contracts tuberculosis, and Keats takes care of him until he dies. In the same year, he falls in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne, and they become engaged. Marriage, however, is impossible, in part due to Keats’s financial condition, in part due to his own tuberculosis.

He writes most of the poems for which he’s remembered in 1819, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In 1820, his tuberculosis worsens, and he moves to Italy, where the climate might help him recuperate. He and Shelley plan to meet, but Keats dies before the meeting can take place.

One critical assessment of Keats is that his poetry is

“characterized by a sensuous surface and a presentation of all experience as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites: melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain; the desire for a life of both indolence and thought; the attraction of the world of dreams and the actual world; aesthetic detachment and social responsibility.”

He’s also known for a concept he called “negative capability,” which he described in one of his letters as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” His poems raise questions and present paradoxes: they don’t seem to offer cut and dried solutions to life’s problems.

Some students want to connect that urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with a funeral urn and make this poem about death, but the Greeks don’t seem to have used urns in that way. Imagine instead a large, decorated urn, something that an English explorer found in Greece and shipped to a museum in London. Stanza I finds the speaker looking at the urn and examining the pictures painted (or perhaps sculpted) on it, in awe of the age of this centuries-old work of art, and asking questions of the scenes depicted on it. Who are these figures? What are they doing? In asking the questions, of course, Keats gives the reader a picture of what scenes are on the urn.

Stanza II begins with the paradoxical statement “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.” It’s meant to puzzle us a bit—in one sense, it’s a reference to the urn, on which the speaker sees a piper piping a tune that nobody can hear. It’s also related, I think, to Romantic ideas about imagination and inspiration: the melody that exists in our imaginations will always be sweeter, more beautiful, than any actual melody that we can hear. We can imagine Coleridge using this line—the unfinished poem is always more beautiful than any poem you can actually read.

We also get a comment on the permanence of the scene depicted on urn: the musician will never stop playing, the trees will always be fruitful, the lovers will always stay beautiful, always on the verge of kissing, always freshly in love.

Stanza III continues in the same vein, celebrating the permanence of the scene depicted on the urn, and comparing the experience of the lovers on the urn favorably to the experience of lovers in the actual world. In real life, the speaker seems to be saying, love is always disappointing: passion “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” Far better to be a lover on an urn, where love is always fresh and new and beautiful.

Many readers feel that the speaker protests too much in these lines—he’s trying too hard to convince us that always being on the verge of kissing somebody who will always be beautiful is far better than actually kissing that person and moving on with the relationship, and living through the joys and sorrows of real life, and growing old with someone. Many readers can’t help but make the connection with Keats’s own life: he knows, at this point, that he doesn’t have all that long to live and that he’ll never marry Fanny Brawne, and he’s projecting some of his own emotions and dreams and feelings of ambivalence into the scene on the urn.

In Stanza IV, the scene shifts abruptly—the speaker has walked to another side of the urn and is looking at a scene of celebration, a crowd of people going out with a priest and a heifer to make some kind of sacrifice. The sense we can get from this abrupt shift is that the speaker can’t face the scene with the lovers anymore—he needs to look at something else right away. And yet we can’t help but notice that what he ends up thinking about isn’t the crowd of people who are going off the to sacrifice, but the town that they’ve left behind: he pictures it as being silent and desolate, abandoned for all eternity. Again, this seems to tell us something about the speaker’s inner state—even though he’s looking at a scene that’s filled with people, he can’t stop thinking about loss and loneliness and desolation.

Stanza V takes a step back to consider the urn as a whole. The speaker calls it a “Cold Pastoral,” another kind of paradoxical statement: “pastoral” refers to pastures, with plants and animals that are living and growing, whereas “cold” offers completely different connotations of lifelessness and stillness. Which is better, to be permanently frozen and eternally beautiful, or to move and live for a brief time? I don't think Keats means for us to have an easy answer; he does say, after all, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As dost eternity” The line “When old age shall this generation waste” strikes me as tragically sad—he must know by now that he won’t be one of the people dying of old age. The final lines don’t answer the question the poem has raised as much as they intensify those questions: in the distant future, the urn will remain, saying “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Are truth and beauty really interchangeable? Is beauty enough? Do we want more out of life than beauty? Can art communicate anything other than beauty? Can a “Cold Pastoral” tell us what we need to know about human life; can something that is permanently frozen convey anything at all to the living? Instead of answers, we’re filled up with questions—perhaps this is what Keats meant by “negative capability.”