1832: First Reform Bill, which made changes in the system of representation and voting rights:
Eliminated "rotten boroughs"depopulated areas whose seat in Commons was at the disposal of a nobleman. Redistributed parliamentary representation to include the new industrial cities. Extended the vote.
More Dates
1765: James Watt invented the steam engine. Industrial Revolution begins. Extremes of rich and poor (cf. Blake). 1776: American Revolutions begins. 1789: July 14The storming of the Bastille: start of French Revolution, 1789-1815 (sympathy with American and French Revolutions, optimism about positive social change, but later disappointment when the Fr. Rev. lapsed into anarchy and tyranny). 1789: Blake publishes Songs of Innocence 1794: Robespierre guillotined. 1794: Blakes's Songs of Innocence and Experience published.
Cosmological model: Earth:Blake, WW, Col, Shelley, and Keats::Byron:moon. Different schools:
Lake school: WW, Coleridge Cockney school: Keats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_School) Satanic school: Shelley and Blake
Definition
What IS Romanticism? Write for 1 minute about what you think it means. Discussion.
What Romanticism IS
Romanticism stresses the mind's dialectical relationship to nature: (a) it is used to define the poet's ego, and (b) Rom poetry is about how the mind shapes perception. Examples:
Blake explored the "fearful symmetry" of his own mind. How a forest figures forth the night of the mind. He also said, Where man is not, nature is barren. WW: told the story of his own mind's growth in an epic poem: poetry about the making of poetry and about the interaction of mind and nature. WW: "the Mind of Man" is "my haunt, and the main region of my song"Prospectus to The Recluse.
POINT: The poetry emphasizes the acts of mind of the speakers/poets, especially with respect to their relationship with nature.
What Romanticism IS
Imagination is the supreme organizing and unifying power: "For the romantic poets[,] imagination was a supreme organizing and unifying power; it went beyond merely recording and rearranging sense data to create both itself and the world that an individual could know" (Adams 363).
18C:reason:mirror::19C:imagination:lamp. The essential source for this homology is M.H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp.
What Romanticism IS
A poetry focusing on the role of the poet and of poetry in society.
Opposition to the status quo. The poet becomes a prophet addressing individuals and society, and the poetic act becomes a metaphor for any imaginative act in society at large. Shelley's Defense: any act of creation is poetry. So the poetic act is a metaphor for any imaginative act in society at large. Goal was unity: of individual and society. Imagination is the agency of this unity.
Clarification
The eye/brain is not a faithful camera, but tinkers with the world before it gives it to us.
--Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, p. 163 Wordsworth, Preface, page 597: What distinguishes the poems in Lyrical Ballads from others is that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.
Exercise
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ ENGL%20203/203%20Three%20Key%20 Passages.htm Match these passages to the 18th or 19th century and be able to defend your choice.
Answers
Rasselas: Interest in characteristics of a general type, rather than in individual deviations from type; emphasis on universals; art should portray things as they ought to be, not as they sometimes are in actual life. Think of art as a mirror. 18th century. Coopers Hill: The poet wants to model his poetry on a river, so that poetry not only describes the river accurately and prescriptively (ideal conditions) but also takes on the rivers essential characteristics: clarity in depth, gentleness in excitement, strength without rage. In other words, the lines celebrate a mean between extremes. The mean is a neoclassical ideal: precisely what Denham, though he wrote in the 17th century, expresses. Restraint vs. Elizabethan excesses. 18th century. Tintern Abbey: The minds relationship to nature and the role of the imagination in creating the world around us: the mind does not just receive sensory data; it also plays a key role in creating the surrounding world. Mirror (Johnson & Denham) vs. lamp (WW). Positive attitude toward nature: nature as a quasi-divine ministering presence vs. what we will see in Blake. Romantic period.
Summary
You have a divine spark inside you; to affirm it is to live imaginatively and to embrace virtues; to separate yourself from your own true nature, which participates in the divine, is to embrace spiritual death.
Alternatives
Divine spark live imaginatively embrace virtue
OR
Divine spark separate from it vice, spiritual death
Images
General title page: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.01&java=yes Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.02&java=yes Title page from Songs of Innocence: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.03&java=yes The Lamb: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.16&java=yes Frontispiece from Songs of Experience: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.29&java=yes Title page from Songs of Experience: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie. b.illbk.30&java=yes
Analogy
Innocence: When youre a really little kid, you think that your parents have no faults. Experience: When you get a bit older, your realization of your parents faults outweighs their positive characteristics. Organized innocence: When you get older still, you gain a better perspective and learn to appreciate your parents good points in spite of their shortcomings.
Summary
Pre-existence of the soul birth/descent into the wilderness of this world innocence experience organized innocence return to the spirit world. POINT: Innocence and experience are not static states: you move from one to another; and if you are lucky, you move to a higher state of organized innocence. POINT: Organized innocence is very much like our concept felix culpa, the fortunate fall: the fall enables a rise. As in sacred history, so in individual experience: Romantic poets like to secularize the sacred.
Earths Answer
This poem identifies the problem of sexual jealousy. Healthy sexuality and darkness are incompatible. Stanzas 2-5 are spoken by Earth. Touch is important in Blakes poetry. Proper sexual relations, he suggests, are not dark and secret.
To Tirzah
This poem identifies imagination and touch as the keys to transcending fallen perception. Positive: marriage, Jerusalem, imagination (next slide), and touch Negative: whoring (cf. London), Tirzah, nature, and legalism The speaker steps back from the fallen world of experience and repudiates the Mother of my Mortal part. The death of Jesus set me free: i.e., free from bondage to nature. In other words, Tirzah parallels natural bondage. Life in the spirit innocence experience organized innocence life in the spirit. Again, see #4 on handout. Also see the original of To Tirzah, which shows a guy dying, and the caption reads: It is raised a spiritual body.
POINT: This should be the goal of our intellectual/spiritual endeavors. Blake is getting at the need not just to see things but to see through them to their significance.
Blakes London