English Romanticism and Victorian Poetry:

Synopses and Exercises in Inferring Meaning

Conf. dr. Ruxanda Bontila

2012

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 Contents

I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries
II. English Romantics: William Wordsworth
(i) A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
(ii) Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
III. English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(i) Kubla Khan
(ii) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
IV. English Romantics: George Gordon Byron
(i) Don Juan
V. English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley
(i) Mutability
(ii) Ode to the West Wind
(iii) Ozymandias
VI. English Romantics: John Keats
(i) Ode to Psyche
(ii) Ode to a Nightingale
VII. English Essayists on their Epoch
VIII. Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson
(i) In Memoriam, Section 54
(ii) The Lotos-Eaters
(iii) The Lady of Shalott
IX. Victorian Poets: Robert Browning
(i) My Last Duchess
(ii) Fra Lippo Lippi
(iii) Andrea Del Sartro
X. Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins
(i) The Starlight Night
(ii) The Windhover
Bibliography

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I. Romanticisms: Preliminaries

1. Romantic: etymology
2. 19th century: cultural milieu
3. Elements of Romantic poetics.
4 Defining Romanticism.
5 Romanticism vs. Classicism.
6 Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics.
7 Recent influential studies on Romanticism.
8 Romantic reconciliations.

1. romantic, mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring,
charming, enchanting, idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly.
2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital ] --Syn. romanic, romance,
Mediterranean, Italic, Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh,
Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese, Castilian.
3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital] --Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic,
Wordsworthian, Sturm und Drang (German).

2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in
France (1790). Reactions for: Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine, Rights
of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791), Vindication of
the Rights of Woman(1791);William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register; W.Godwin, Inquiry
Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness,(1793).

3. The poet; creative power; nature of poetry

.
4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of a
society which was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of
production.(R. Williams)
Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itself for
the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness. (G. Hartman)
Dynamic organicism based on a philosophy of becoming not of being. (Rene Wellek, 1949)

5. Change in the view of (1) the character and function of poetry and (2) the whole conception
of the nature of MAN and the world in which he finds himself.

6. A turning from-------- to i.e. reason--------------------------------senses, feelings

impersonal objectivism------------subjectivism
ideal of order------------------------ideal of intensity etc.

7 M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, OUP,
1953
Rene Wellek, Comparative Literature, 1949
H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976
Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory, 1986; The
Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1986
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,
Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol)
I.A.Preda, English Romantic Poetics, 1995

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8. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.

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II. English Romantics: William Wordsworth

1. The Romantic Periods birth certificate

2. W. Wordsworth (1770 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of convictions
that he presents in his poetry.
3.1 W. Ws influence in literature
3.2 W. Ws philosophical vision: the egotistical sublime(J. Keats)
3.3 W. Ws Pantheism
3.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads
3.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads
4. Exercises in inferring meaning: A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal; Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood.

1. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of the Romantic
Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self.
3.1 Use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature
3.2 Egotistical Sublime (J. Keats) egotistical<strong autobiographical element;
sublime<permanent indeterminence of his vision of Nature<human nature esp. simple
solitary people.
3.3 Nature, both in her sublime and her most lowly states radiates a power that meets and inter-
operates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man which is given various names:
soul or simply power; the leap of the heart at a rainbow.
3.4 Everyday tragedies in society; sufferings of old age; basic relationships; tales; children
perceiving nature; poet as social missionary; poet as preacher
3.5 S.T. Coleridge would deal with supernatural things insisting upon the dramatic truth of
such emotions that would transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance
of truth.
W. Wordsworth would give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and would excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the minds attention from the lethargy
of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

4. (i) A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal is a well-worn example for serious discussion of
hermeneutics. Consequently, consider the two opposing views advanced by famous critics and
try to rebuild their argumentation.
1. Find evidence in support of the opinion that the poem can be read as an unremittingly sombre
elegy. (eg. Cleanth Brooks will substantiate this idea)
2. Find evidence supporting an opposite opinion i.e. the poem as a gloriously optimistic tale of
pantheistic fusion of the beloved with Nature. (F.W.Bateson goes within this line)
A slumber did my spirit seal; No motion has she now, no force;
I had no human fears; She neither hears nor sees;
She seemed a thing that could not feel Rolled round in earths diurnal course,
The touch of earthly years. With rocks, and stones, and trees.
(1800)
Here is a nice example of undecidability at work in the poem, built on the adjective diurnal,
consisting of a collection of divergent glosses compiled by Norman E. Holland.

Hugh Kenner calls it (diurnal) an abstract, technical term, and F:R:Leavis says the word has a
scientific nakedness but also evokes the vast inexorable regularity of the planetary motions.
By contrast, Cleanth Brooks finds in it a violent but imposed motion, a whirl. FW:Bateson
calls it a solemn Latinism which contrasts with the other, simpler words, to set off the
invulnerable Ariel-like creature against her present lifeless and immobile state. E.Drew finds
this one long, formal word in the poem not lifeless at all, but contributing to a majestic
affirmation. Robin Skelton finds in it a fear that, if the poet unites his soul with nature, he will

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me turned daily like the earth, selfless and unthinking. Skelton also finds a subconscious effect
of the syllable de, which to the ear suggests that a word having reference to division, to the
dichotomy of the world, is about to be spoken. To whose ear? And yet, I hasten to admit, I hear
in diurnal the word urn as saying another way the whole earth has been made Lucys funeral
vessel. (from M.Riffaterre, Undecidability as Hermeneutic Constraint, in Literary Theory
Today, (eds.) Peter Collier & Helga Geyeryan, Oxford, 1990)

(ii) W. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Considering the fact that W.Wordsworth saw the poets job in terms of restoring the equilibrium
in which pleasure consists (Preface), discuss the poets solution to the essence of identity in
the last two stanzas of the poem, ll. 168-203. Reflect upon the following constituents of
Wordsworths poetics.
1. The conflicting constituents of the principal themes and categories within the text.
2. The poets awareness of the rhetorical level of language towards reaching consistency
between statement and performance
3. The relationship to history through time
4. The characteristics of the poetic discourse, achieved in this particular poem.

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Then sing, ye Birds, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabors sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

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And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch oer mans mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joy, and fears,

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To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears
(1807)

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III. English Romantics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834)s views of poetry and nature.

2. S.T. Coleridges philosophy.
3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest.
4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning.
4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization.
4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion.
5. Coleridges technique.
6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel.
7. Exercises in inferring meaning: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS.

2. Coleridges antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kants The
Critique of Pure Reason).
The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the
correlation of being.(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only of lifeless
and sightless notion; reason is a source of actual truth, the soul beholds, it does not
hypothesize.
Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding; imagination /
fancy exemplified on Shakespeares work.
3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight.
Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, in which
Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominal Philosopher
without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is his Stuff- and
Verbiage the Stamp & Impression.(Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444)
4. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh
of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endless power of
semination.'(The Statesmans Manual (1817),Lay Sermons)
a Symbol is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in the
Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it
enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the
representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with
apparitions of matter Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures.
4.1 Symbolization = the imaginative containment of a living idea.
Verbalization = the manipulation of fixed counters(The Friend)
4.2 It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to this
negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that at times we
should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry & Religion.(Notebooks, vol.3 no
3632)
5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850) s technique in the Sonnets >viz.
the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spatially in a
particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation of auditory powers.
What I call this auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far
bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the
most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking
the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in
the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the current and the new
and surprising the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.(T. S. Eliot, The Use of
Poetry, p.111)
6. The TRAGIC LOSS OF INITIATIVE: e.g. The Ancient Mariner only increasing self-
awareness and a spontaneous moment of empathy will restore, however imperfectly, a more
creative, imaginative spirit with the mariner; Christabel through the themes of
LONELINESS and ISOLATION OF SPIRIT, the old conflict between LIFE and LIFE-IN-

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 DEATH is being brought to the fore; Kubla Khan the frustration of creative purpose is
described in a language charged with the sense of tragic loss.

7.
(i) In The Pains of Sleep, Coleridge tackles with poignant bewilderment the self-division he
experienced in frightening dreams. Coleridge himself described his poetry as rationalized
dream. It is interesting to distinguish between dream/vision and reverie within rare,
unforgettable moments in Coleridges poetry, that enwrap them inside one another and
balance, in his own words, judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with
enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. This is to be found in the rhapsodic, if self-
doubting close of Kubla-Khan, with its haunting glimpse (and hearing) of unrecapturable
beauty.
An analysis of Kubla Khan is substantially complicated by its extraordinary preface, as well
as by the way the verse seems to fall into two sections, or separate visions, the body of the
poem (ll. 1-36), and the last 18 lines, we may call the epilogue.
Notice how the preface distances the reader from specific imagery and content of the poem,
while raising a host of subsidiary issues such as: the relation of art to dream and
extraordinary states of consciousness generally, sources of art in the unconscious, the
relation of images seen with the inward eye and the correspondent expressions, the relation
of the resulting poem to the original vision, and the role of memory in imaginative activity.
You may also note the creation of a persona for the preface writer, an alternative authority
responsible for the views presented, which will immediately alert the reader to the
possibility of irony (gesture well familiar with Coleridge from The Ancient Mariner and
Biographia Literaria).
There may be some more profound significance to the statement that the poet fell asleep
while reading the quoted lines from Purchas his Pilgrimage, than merely that it was the
occasion of the dream. See if there might be implied some connection between explicit
sources and original transformation of those sources from other authors into new creations.
And, if the chasm between such sources and the original use of them emphasizes the
mystery surrounding the passage from ordinary consciousness into creative states.
Identify other ways of thinginfying (Kathleen M. Wheeler) and reaching meaning, besides
the role of the preface, we have already mentioned.

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;
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 eer 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,

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 Or chaffy grain beneath the threshers 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 honeydew hath fed.
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

1. Describe how ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive is/are rendered.

2. Identify the symbols in the poem.
3. Speak about peculiarities of form.
4. Describe atmosphere through imagery: provide evidence.
5. Detect possible religious connotations in the poetic discourse.

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English Romantics: George Gordon Byron

1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition.
2. G.G. Byrons own poetics.
3. Byron and the interpreting act.
4. The lure of biography.
5. Byronism and the Byronic hero.
6. Byrons metafictional strategy.
6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality.
7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Don Juan

1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,

Milton appealed to the avenger, Time;
If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs
And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,
He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,
Nor turn his very talent to a crime;
He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,
But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10)

You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,

At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish;(Don Juan, Dedication, St.3)

2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in individual words,
as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish.

3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our own
fallible mental activities.
Byron declared about Don Juan, I have no plan I had no plan but I had or have
materials; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story as
he observed, I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy.

4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my
sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Hours of Idleness (1808)Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816)

5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer.
= a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and
misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong
affection. (Macaulay)

Byronism = the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion; Bertrand Russell, History of

Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron.
I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange
mlange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. (Letter to a friend of his
Lady Blessington)
There are but two sentiments to which I am constant a strong love of liberty and a
detestation of CANT.

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6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose enough to
contain an intermittent ironic commentary on contemporary life and manners as well as
himself.
6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance Luigi Pulgi, Francesco Berni -
> a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence is magnificently
exploited.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the process whereby
literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referential creating those
myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] create the gaps in which
his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

G. G. Byron, Don Juan, from Canto 4 [Juan and Haide]

1. Explore the sources that might have contributed to its being an intertext.
2. Detect intertextual traces within the text.
3. Consider some on-going appeals of the poem.
4. Think of points of similarity and difference between Byrons hero and the original Don
Juan.
5. Express your thoughts on how tone and atmosphere are achieved.
6. Detect the strategies for achieving the comic.

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English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822)s specific poetics.

1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery.
2. P.B. Shelleys creed.
3. P.B. Shelleys works.
4. P.B. Shelleys views on the social part of the poet and poetry.
5. P.B. Shelleys symbolism
6. Exercise of inferring meaning: Epipsychidion

1.1 The pure lyric = a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poets own soul with few or
no attendant circumstances.
Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, The Revolt
of Islam.
Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g. The Triumph of Life
The feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it.

2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwins views: evil is not inherent in the system of
creation but an accident that might be expelled.

3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; The Witch of
Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems.

4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811); A Defence of Poetry (1821).

5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelleys symbolism has an air of rootless fantasy because it has
never lived in the mind of a people.

P.B. Shelley, Mutability

Compare and contrast the two poems in point of structure and imagery.
(see guide to poetic discourse in Seminar Outline)

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English Romantics: John Keats

1. Characteristics of John Keatss (1795-1821) poetics.

1.1 The poet as central concept.
2. J. Keatss thinking system.
3. The Bower principle vs. the Buildung principle.
4. A chronology of J. Keatss work.
4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes
5. Keatss conception of a general and gregarious advance of intellect in cultural history.
6. Keats and the poetic principle of self-development.
7. The allegorical function of self.
8. Keatss principle of vale of soul-making.
9. Keatss sense of the fellowship with essence.
10. Exercise of inferring meaning: Ode to Psyche.

1. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts affections and the truth of
imagination.(Letter to Bailey)
I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.(Letter to
George)
M. Arnold said that No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has in expression
quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.
Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greek mythology
and Middle Ages.
1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Platos theory of the Daimon.

2. Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, not naming
things but suggesting them.
Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts:
Beauty and Truth.
3. Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work:
The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave rather than a decadent state of Oneness
with nature.
The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation and not
quite the principle of the quest.
= it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g. Endymion)
or a poetics of historicity ( e.g. the Two Hyperions).

4. Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion
(1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; Ode On
Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; The Eve of
St. Agnes (1820);
4.1 Leading theme: the theme of transience and permanence.

5. The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the
mind.(Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818)
The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the minds mansion, and all doors open
from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is imperceptibly impelled
to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, by forces which have strangely
awakened, on the lines of Coleridges recognition that at times we should awake and step
forward.

6. I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men seeing how
great a thing it is. (Letter to Hunt)

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7. The selfs function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of Poetry
the thinking principle, motivated by the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty- and the
Memory of Great Men. (Notebooks)

They are very shallow people who take everything literal A Mans life of any worth is a
continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life a life like the
scriptures, figurative. (Shakespeares Criticism)
Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

8. Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man they make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a
Passion. (The Friend) the principle of Vale of Soul- Making.

A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination it can scarcely be conceived how
Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault.
(marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Students Manual, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White,
1972)

Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his own process
of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing or digesting, (frequent
metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids in the Vale of Soul- making,
nerving the spirit.

9. The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essential verse.(in
Keatss sense of a fellowship with essence).

Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing the richness of any
potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a range of complex
sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc.
I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative
of essntial Beauty.

According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on) the
being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) reflects the mystery of being.

J. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

1. Detect mood by identifying means of construing the meaning.

2. Explain the function of rhetorical figures in the economy of the text.
3. Identify the features triggered by the word Ode in the title.
4. Identify the included participants or growth points vs. excluded participants in the
text.
5. Draw a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants.
6. Comment upon the poems symbolism.

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English Essayists on Their Epoch

1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and their Vision
on their Own Epoch.
1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment.
1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy.
Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context.
2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse.
Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation.
20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age.
Characteristics of Victorian Literature.
Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation.
Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry.
Victorian Theories of the Poet.

1. Reformers (Politics + Religion) Conservatives Uncommitted

L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830) Ch. Lamb (1775-1834)

Periodicals practical critic personal essays
l (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality) e.g. Essays of Elia
everyday life) impressionist criticism
e.g. Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating

Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866)

Survivor of the great 18th c. tradition
of satire
e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry Th. De Quincey (1785-1859)
impressionist criticism
e.g. Style; Rhetoric
nightmarish side of human
consciousness
e.g. Confessions of an English
Opium Eater

1.2 Supporters of Personal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848

year of The Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about which The
Queen had to say: Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which makes the
Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different
then let them remain each in their position.
In Mills view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : For the apotheosis of
Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations.
The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History.
The Ages Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: To me the Universe was all void of
Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-Engine,
rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
J. Ruskin: The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and the
mountains.

16
SCIENCE (Darwin) RELIGION
LOSS OF FAITH DOUBT / BELIEF FAITH
Utilitarianism Philosophical Conservatives Tractarianism
(J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill)
EDUCATION
Agnosticism

T.H. Huxley(1825-1895) Th. Carlyle (1795-1881) J.H.Cardinal Newman

controversialist Sartor Resartus (1801-1890)
On the Physical Basis of Life The Everlasting No Oxford Movement
The Everlasting Yea Apologia Pro Vita Sua
(vital spark)

John Stuard Mill Th. Macaulay

(1806-1873) (1800-1859)
On Liberty History of England from
Of Individuality the Accession of James II
What Is Poetry? (Great debater of progress)
(INDIVIDUAL more important
than the State or Church.)

J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : If only the Geologists would let

Modern Painters me alone, I could do very well,
The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! I
The Nature of Gothic hear the clink of them at the
(a prophet) end of every cadence of the
Bible verses. (1851)
W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888)
News from Nowhere The Function of Criticism
(ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy
The Beauty of Life Friendships Garland
(work-pleasure) (CULTURE=a panacea)
(ag. PHILISTINISM)

W. Pater(1839-1894) : the legitimate contention Is, not

Appreciations of one age or school of literary
Aesthetic Poetry art against another, but of all
Romanticism successive schools alike,
(epicurian preacher, against the stupidity which is
impressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the
vulgarity which is dead to form.
3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; Punch and Judy shows
Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky)
for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: the Great Summer of Human Civilization
against: Georgian reaction: Victorian=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain;
Th. Carlyles poet as hero; Sinfields the poet of the margins; J.S. Mills and Lewess the
secular poet of the margins= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is to
aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g. Tennyson)

17
Victorian Poets: Alfred Tennyson

1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular poet of the margins.
2. Alfred Tennysons poetry between solipsism and social involvement.
2.1 Alfred Tennysons self renewing techniques.
3. Signposts in His Evolution.
3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery.
4. Arthur Tennysons Conception of Language.
5. Exercise of inferring meaning: In Memoriam, Section 54

1. Vex not the poets mind

With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poets mind;
For thou canst not fathom it.
Clear and bright it should be ever,
Flowing like a crystal river;
Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poets Mind, 1830 )
2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): it is the distance
that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in
which I move.
Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered Ts relation to modern life: Ts age
was vividly with him as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom; the sad
condition of the poor; the position of women in the onward movement of the world; the
role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; the noble elements of
English character, their long descent and the sacred reverence we owed to them.
3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte dArthur]; Ulysses; The Princess,
A Medley; Idylls of the King (The Coming of ArthurThe Passing of Arthur).
3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) literary sources: Horaces Odes; pastoral elegy; love-sonnets
of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dantes Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae.
4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language <Locke: sensations are the source of all
knowledge and a word is merely a sound that is arbitrarily attached to a sensation.
(b) The idealist perspective, deriving from Kant, current among the Apostles (the Germano-
Coleridgean, Cambridge Society in the 1820s)

T. S. Eliot: A great poet because of abundance, variety and complete competence.

The saddest of the English poets.
Terry Eagleton: Tennyson marks the last point in English life at which poetry was still a public
genre. Yet even here the cracks are beginning to show: In Memoriam rehearses the set themes of
Victorian Society, but it is really an assemblage of lyrical fragments in which private experience
is now running too deep for public articulation. (in T. L. S. /Oct.1992)

Penelope Fitzgerald: He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of
Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the
English language,i.e. the sound of the language talking to itself.
At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does,
in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sounds that he is inexplicably able, as a great
professional, to produce. (in T. L. S. /Oct. 1992, A Hundred Years After)

Isobel Armstrong: He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for a simplicity
which is betrayed by the complexity of its language.

18
Alfred Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters; The Lady of Shalott

1. De-center the poems so as to re-center them in compliance with the poets main
objective.
2. Demonstrate how Tennyson builds his outward imagery.
3. Exemplify how Tennysons language functions in the context of the two early 19th
century theories of language.
4. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of Tennyson.

19
Victorian Poets: Robert Browning

1. Robert Browning (1812-1889)s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennysons method.

2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry.
2.1 The Dramatic Monologue as norm.
2.1.1 Definition; advantages.
3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Brownings poetry.
4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age.
5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician.
6. Exercise of inferring meaning: My Last Duchess

1. Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare
(1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the
temptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I should
judge the conflict in the knights soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson thinks he
should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, and anything but the
soul.
My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worth
study.(Sordello) His poems are described always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.(Preface of 1868)
2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.: to the
great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, Ill tell my state as thought were
none of mine.
2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect
upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or another the
norm. (Poetry and the Age, 1953)
2.2 D.M.= A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience.
= One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address.
(1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of D.M.
provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is brought together as
the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poet.
3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest seems
desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2) language,
versification and poetic texture.
4. In point of characters and style.
Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint
Praxeds Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women.
5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man preference for the conflict
in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God is revealed to
Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ.
Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the greater
the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth.

Brownings imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and the Book;
he dealt more with Facts than Fancies.
General theme: Order Vs Disorder
General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of human happiness,
capable to overcome human suffering.
Diction is denotative to the extreme.

R. Browning, Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi.

1. Name the challenges you feel confronted with, when reading the poem.
2. Identify artistic ways of exposing the minds deviance.

20
 3. Re-construct the compositional elements (theme, form, tropes and tone).
4. Identify features of the dramatic monologue.
5. Identify the included participants or growth points vs. excluded participants in the
text.
6. Explain how a matrix of intra-textual and extra-textual participants can help or not.
7. Build up your own image of the poet.

Victorian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880

One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:
Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.
What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?
Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover:
Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.
Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:
Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.
Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels:
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels.
Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which:
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch
More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:
Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?
One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.
Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks:
Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox.
Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:
You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.
Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock:
Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock.
God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see:
Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

21
Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins

1. Gerard Manley Hopkinss (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeper knowledge.

1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of Poetic
Language.
1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition.
1.3 Hopkinss Concept of Identity.
2. His Theory of Poetry and Language.
2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress.
2.2 Language and the taste of Himself.
2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus.
2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins.
3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse.
4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion.
4.1 The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)
5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language.
6. Hopkins as Critic.
7. Exercise of inferring meaning: Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets.

1. Every true poetmust be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each
poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never
recur. (Hopkins)
1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way of
hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its
interest of meaning.
1.3 I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I
and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more
distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to
another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone
else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness and
selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this,
that other men to themselves have the feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be
explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance:
searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

2.1 Inscape the outward signs by which a creatures inner identity could be grasped.
Instress the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his
consciousness.
Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye.
Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects.
Power of the object to reveal its own inscape.
Secures the unity of the world.
Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything.
Running Instress the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one in the
mind of the observer.
2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being.
2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local and cosmopolitan.
2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality.
3 Religious content: A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection.

4 Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal (1866-1875):
All the world is full of inscape; and he caught inscapes everywhere: in leaves, flowers,
trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls, clouds, sunsets
and stars.

22
 I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking
at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.
The world might be seen as the INSCAPE of GOD.
Duns Scotuss Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory of thisness.

4.1 You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and
resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of
my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces
which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 the Deutschland was wrecked in
the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck laws,
aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my
rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set
to work (letter to Dixon, 1878)
Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained in Preface to
Poems.
5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress.
Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmatic
shifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order.

5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, inscaping the world.
The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artists person.
Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art
- being in earnest with your subject-reality
Beauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of the
Holiness beauty + good
The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character

6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Carrion
Comfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

G.M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night; The Windhover; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

1. Check how LOGOPOEIA fits the poets own theory of verse making.
2. Sprung Rhythm and the wave of anapests in the 19th century.
3. Explain how I.A. Richardss definition of the poem = economy of mental effort holds
true with Hopkins.
4. Swinburne s Nephelidia and MELOPOEIA.
5. Identify how instress informs inscape.
6. Look for Hopkinss stumbling blocks. (Bridges)
7. Suggest ways of overcoming difficulties with Hopkinss poetic discourse.
8. Formulate what you consider is the key to an understanding of G. M. Hopkins.

23
 Bibliography

English Literature and its background, 1780-1900

I. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

1. D. Buchbinder, Literary Theory and the Reading of Poetry, Macmillian, 1991

2. H. Bloom, (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness, 1970
3. D. Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975
4. M. S. Day, History of English Literature, Doubleday & Company, N.Y., 1963
5. B. Ford, (ed.) The Pelican Guide to English Literature
6. E. Gavriliu, Lectures in English Literature from the Rise of the Realistic Novel in the 18th
century to the Crisis of Aestheticism in the 19th century, Galati, 1980
7. D. Lodge, (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, 1988
8. J. Peck, How to Study a Poet, Macmillan, 1988
9. C.Racovita, Lectures in English Literature (The Victorian Novel and the 20th century English
Literature), Galati, 1981
10. J. Stevens & R.Waterhouse, Literature, Language and Change, from Chaucer to the Present,
London and N.Y., 1990
11. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, An Anthology, Blackwell, 1994
12. D. Wu, (ed.), Romanticism, A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1995
13. M. Toolan, Narrative, A Critical Linguistic Introduction, Routledge, 1992
14. G. Leech & M. Short, Style in Fiction, A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose,
Longman, 1994
15. G. Cook, Discourse and Literature, O.U.P. 1994
16. R. Pope, Textual Intervention. Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, Routledge,
London, 1995
17. R. Bontila, Readings from 19th Century English Novel, Alma, Galati, 1999

II. Biblical and Classical

Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey (translated in The World's Classics, Oxford)
The Bible, Genesis; Exodus; The Psalms; The Songs of Songs; Ecclesiastes; The New Testament

III. Individual Authors: 1780-1900

1. W. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads ***; The Prelude ***; Preface to Lyrical Ballads ***;
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ***.
2. S. T. Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner***; Christabel ***; Kubla Khan ***;This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison***; Dejection: an Ode***; Frost at Midnight***; The Aeolian Harp***;
Biographia Literaria***; Lectures on Shakespeare ***.
3. Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers**;The Vision of Judgement**; Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage**; Manfred***; Don Juan***.
4. P. B. Shelley, The Triumph of Life***; Hymn to Intellectual Beauty***; Ode to the West
Wind***;To a Skylark***; Ozymandias***; Mutability***; Prometheus Unbound***
Preface to Prometheus; A Defence of Poetry ***.

5. J. Keats, Sleep and Poetry***; The Eve of St.Agnes***; Lamia***; La Belle Dame Sans
Merci***; To Autumn***; Ode to Psyche***; Ode to a Nightingale***; Ode on
Melancholy**; Ode on a Grecian Urn***;Endymion, Book I***; Hyperion;The Fall of
Hyperion***;Letters***.
6. Th. Carlyle, The Hero as Poet **; Carlyle's Portraits of His Contemporaries***.
7. J. S. Mill, What Is Poetry**; Coleridge***; On Liberty***.
8.J. Ruskin, Of the Real Nature Of Greatness of Style**

24
9. A.Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters**; Ulysses**; In Memoriam**; Maud***; The Lady of
Shalott***; Mariana***; The Princess***; Idylls of the King***.
10. R. Browning, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix***; My Last
Duchess***; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church***; Fra Lippo
Lippi**; Andrea del Sarto**; Caliban upon Setebos.
11. M. Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time**; The Study of Poetry**; Culture
and Anarchy, ch.I***; Dover Beach***; Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse***;
Thyrsis***; The Scholar Gypsy***.
12. G. M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night***; Spring***; The Windhover***; Pied Beauty***;
Binsey Poplar***; As Kingfishers Catch Fire***; Carrion Comfort***.

**The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol.II,

***The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol.2

25
Handout Rom. I

1. Why a canon?
2. Textuality and the interpreting act.
3. Elements of Romantic poetics.
4. Defining Romanticism.
5. New elements in the Pre-Romantic Period.
6. Romanticism vs. Classicism.
7. Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics.
8. Recent influential studies on Romanticism.
9. Romantic reconciliations.

1. old writings and habit of venerating them happen not primarily because they are
witnesses to a merely historical state of affairs, but because the state of affairs has
consuming relevance to later times. (F.Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry. Essays in
Literary Interpretation, 1989.)
2.1. Period ENCODING DECODING Period

Paradigm Story
DISCOURSE
Author narrator - narratee Reader

Syntagm Hyper
Signification
Genre Genre
2.2. Writing as textuality undoes logocentricism through its rhetoriocal and troping
figures.
Logocentrism= a form of rationalism that presupposes a presence behind L. and text; (a
presence such as an idea, an intention, a truth, a meaning or a reference for which L.
acts as a subsurvient and convenient vehicle of expression.)
Jacques Derrida - a free floating formalist (Nuttall)
indeterminacy of textual meaning; death of the author
concept of diffrance: difference+deferring
Interpretation will endlessly repeat the interpretative act, never able to reach that final
explanation and understanding of the text, being a continual play of diffrance.
3. the poet; creative power; nature of poetry.
4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of a
society which was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of
production.(R. Williams)
Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itself
for the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness.(G. Hartman)
8. M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition,
OUP, 1953
H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976
Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory,1986; The
Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1986
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,
Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol)
9. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.
Handout Rom. II

1. Romantic: etymology
2. 19th century: cultural milieu
3. The Romantic Periods birth certificate
4. W. Wordsworth (1770 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of
convictions that he presents in his poetry.
4.1 W. Ws influence in literature
4.2 W. Ws philosophical vision: the egotistical sublime(J. Keats)
4.3 W. Ws Pantheism
4.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads
4.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads
5. Text analysis: Expostulation and Reply; A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

1. Romantic
romantic, mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring, charming, enchanting,
idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly.
2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital ] --Syn. romanic, romance, Mediterranean, Italic,
Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh, Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese,
Castilian.
3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital] --Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic, Wordsworthian,
Sturm und Drang (German).
2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution
in France (1790). Reactions for: Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine,
Rights of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791),
Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1791);William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register;
W.Godwin, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and
Happiness,(1793).
3. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of the
Romantic Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of the
growing inner self.
4.1 use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature
4.2 Egotistical Sublime (J. Keats) egotistical<strong autobiographical element;
sublime<permanent indeterminence of his vision of Nature<human nature esp.
simple solitary people.
4.3 Nature, both in her sublime and her most lowly states radiates a power that meets and
inter-operates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man which is given
various names: soul or simply power; the leap of the heart at a rainbow.
4.4 Everyday tragedies in society; sufferings of old age; basic relationships; tales; children
perceiving nature; poet as social missionary; poet as preacher
4.5 S.T. Coleridge would deal with supernatural things insisting upon the dramatic
truth of such emotions that would transfer from our inward nature a human interest
and semblance of truth.
W. Wordsworth would give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and would
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the minds attention from
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the
world before us.
4.6 A slumber did my spirit seal; No motion has she now, no force;
I had no human fears; She neither hears nor sees;
She seemed a thing that could not feel Rolled round in earths diurnal course,
The touch of earthly years. With rocks, and stones, and trees.
(1800)
Handout Rom. III

1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834) s views of poetry and nature.

2. S.T. Coleridges philosophy.
3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest.
4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning.
4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization.
4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion.
5. Coleridges technique.
6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel.
7. Text analyses: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS.

2. Coleridges antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kants
The Critique of Pure Reason).
The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth
is the correlation of being.(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only of
lifeless and sightless notion; reason is a source of actual truth, the soul beholds, it
does not hypothesize.
Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding;
imagination / fancy exemplified on Shakespeares work.
3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight.
Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, in
which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominal
Philosopher without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is
his Stuff- and Verbiage the Stamp& Impression.(Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444)
4. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive,
partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endless
power of semination.'(The Statemans Manual (1817),Lay Sermons)
a Symbol is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in the
Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it
enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the
representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates
with apparitions of matter Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to such
pastures.
4.1 symbolization=the imaginative containment of a living idea.
Verbalization=the manipulation of fixed counters(The Friend)
4.2 It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to
this negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that at
times we should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry &
Religion.(Notebooks, vol.3 no 3632)
5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850) s technique in theSonnets
>viz. the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spacially in
a particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation of auditory powers.
What I call this auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating
far bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking
to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back,
seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without
meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the
current and the new and surprising the most ancient and the most civilised
mentality.(T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry, p.111)
Handout Rom. IV

1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition.
2. G.G. Byrons own poetics.
3. Byron and the interpreting act.
4. The lure of biography.
5. Byronism and the Byronic hero.
6. Byrons metafictional strategy.
6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality.
7. Text analysis: Don Juan

1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,

Milton appealed to the avenger, Time;
If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs
And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,
He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,
Nor turn his very talent to a crime;
He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,
But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10)

You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,

At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish;(Don Juan, Dedication, St.3)

2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in individual
words, as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish.

3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our own
fallible mental activities.
Byron declared about Don Juan, I have no plan I had no plan but I had or have
materials; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story
as he observed, I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy.

4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: To withdraw myself from myself has ever been
my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Hours of Idleness (1808)Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816)

5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant

wanderer.
= a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and
misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep and
strong affection. (Macaulay)

Byronism = the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion; Bertrand Russell, History of

Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron.
I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange
mlange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. (Letter to a friend of his
Lady Blessington)
 There are but two sentiments to which I am constant a strong love of liberty and a
detestation of CANT.

6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose

enough to contain an intermittent ironic commentary on contemporary life and manners
as well as himself.
6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance Luigi Pulgi, Francesco
Berni - > a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence is
magnificently exploited.
6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the process
whereby literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referential
creating those myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] create
the gaps in which his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

Handout Rom. V

1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) s specific poetics.

1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery.
2. P.B. Shelleys creed.
3. P.B. Shelleys works.
4. P.B. Shelleys views on the social part of the poet and poetry.
5. P.B. Shelleys symbolism
6. Text analysis:Epipsychidion

1.1 The pure lyric = a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poets own soul with few
or no attendant circumstances.
Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, The
Revolt of Islam.
Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g. The Triumph of Life
The feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it.

2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwins views: evil is not inherent in the system of
creation but an accident that might be expelled.

3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; The
Witch of Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems.

4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811); A Defence of Poetry (1821).

5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelleys symbolism has an air of rootless fantasy because
it has never lived in the mind of a people.
Handout Rom. VI

1. Characteristics of John Keats (1795-1821) s poetics.

1.1 The poet as central concept.
2. J. Keatss thinking system.
3. The Bower principle vs. The Buildung principle.
4. A chronology of J. Keatss work.
4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes
5. Keatss conception of a general and gregarious advance of intellect in cultural history.
6. Keats and the poetic principle of self-development.
7. The allegorical function of self.
8. Keatss principle of vale of soul-making.
9. Keatss sense of the fellowship with essence.
10. Text analysis: Ode to Psyche.

1. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts affections and the truth of
imagination.(Letter to Bailey)
I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.(Letter
to George)
M. Arnold said that No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has in
expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.
Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greek
mythology and Middle Ages.
1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Platos theory of the Daimon.

2. Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, not

naming things but suggesting them.
Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts:
Beauty and Truth.
3. Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work:
The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave rather than a decadent state of
Oneness with nature.
The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation and
not quite the principle of the quest.
= it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g.
Endymion) or a poetics of historicity ( e.g. the Two Hyperions).

4. Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion
(1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; Ode
On Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; The
Eve of St. Agnes (1820);
4.1 Leading theme: the theme of transience and permanence.

5. The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the mind.
(Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818)
The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the minds mansion, and all
doors open from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is
imperceptibly impelled to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, by
forces which have strangely awakened, on the lines of Coleridges recognition that at
times we should awake and step forward.
6. I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men seeing
how great a thing it is. (Letter to Hunt)

7. The selfs function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of
Poetry the thinking principle, motivated by the eternal Being, the Principle of
Beauty- and the Memory of Great Men. (Notebooks)

They are very shallow people who take everything literal A Mans life of any worth is
a continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life a life like the
scriptures, figurative. (Shakespeares Criticism)
Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

8. Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man they, make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well
as a Passion. (The Friend) the principle of Vale of Soul- Making.

A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination it can scarcely be
conceived how Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a
large gothic vault. (marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Students Manual, Lay
Sermons, ed. R. J. White, 1972)

Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his own
process of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing or
digesting, (frequent metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids in
the Vale of Soul- making, nerving the spirit.

9. The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essential
verse.(in Keatss sense of a fellowship with essence).

Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing the
richness of any potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a range
of complex sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc.
I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime,
creative of essntial Beauty.

According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on)

the being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) reflects the mystery of
being.
Handout Rom. VII

1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and their
Vision on their Own Epoch.
1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment.
1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy.
2. Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context.
2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse.
3. Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation.
4. 20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age.
5. Characteristics of Victorian Literature.
6. Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation.
7. Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry.
8. Victorian Theories of the Poet.

1. Reformers (Politics + Religion) Conservatives Uncommitted

L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830) Ch. Lamb (1775-1834)

Periodicals practical critic personal essays
l (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality) e.g. Essays of Elia
everyday life) impressionist criticism
e.g. Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating

Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866)

Surviver of the great 18th c. tradition
of satire
e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry
Th. De Quincey (1785-1859)
impressionist criticism
e.g. Syle; Rhetoric
nightmarish side of human
consciousness
e.g. Confessions of an English
Opium Eater

1.2 Supporters of Personal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848

year of The Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about which
The Queen had to say: Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which
makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and
women different then let them remain each in their position.
In Mills view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : For the apotheosis
of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which
we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations.
The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship,
and the Heroic in History.
The Ages Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: To me the Universe was all void
of Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-
Engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
J. Ruskin: The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and the
mountains.
 SCIENCE (Darwin) RELIGION
LOSS OF FAITH DOUBT / BELIEF FAITH
Utilitarianism Philosophical Conservatives Tractarianism
(J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill)
EDUCATION
Agnosticism

T.H. Huxley(1825-1895) Th. Carlyle (1795-1881) J.H.Cardinal Newman

controversialist Sartor Resartus (1801-1890)
On the Physical Basis of Life The Everlasting No Oxford Movement
The Everlasting Yea Apologia Pro Vita Sua
(vital spark)

John Stuard Mill Th. Macaulay

(1806-1873) (1800-1859)
On Liberty History of England
from
Of Individuality the Accession of James II
What Is Poetry? (Great debater of progress)
(INDIVIDUAL more important
than the State or Church.)

J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : If only the Geologists would let

Modern Painters me alone, I could do very well,
The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! I
The Nature of Gothic hear the clink of them at the
(a prophet) end of every cadence of the
Bible verses. (1851)
W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888)
News from Nowhere The Function of Criticism
(ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy
The Beauty of Life Friendships Garland
(work-pleasure) (CULTURE=a panacea)
(ag. PHILISTINISM)

W. Pater(1839-1894) : the legitimate contention Is, not

Appreciations of one age or school of literary
Aesthetic Poetry art against another, but of all
Romanticism successive schools alike,
(epicurian preacher, against the stupidity which is
impressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the
vulgarity which is dead to form.
3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; Punch and Judy shows
Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky)
4. for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: the Great Summer of Human Civilization
against: Georgian reaction: Victorian=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain;
9. Th. Carlyles poet as hero; Sinfields the poet of the margins; J.S. Mills and Lewess
the secular poet of the margins= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is
 to aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g.
Tennyson)
Handout Vic. VIII

1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular poet of the margins.
2. Alfred Tennysons poetry between solipsism and social involvement.
2.1Alfred Tennysons self renewing techniques.
3. Signposts in His Evolution.
3.1In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery.
4. Arthur Tennysons Conception of Language.
5. Text Analysis: In Memoriam, Section 54

1. Vex not the poets mind

With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poets mind;
For thou canst not fathom it.
Clear and bright it should be ever,
Flowing like a crystal river;
Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poets Mind, 1830 )
2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): it is the
distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the
immediate today in which I move.
Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered Ts relation to modern life: Ts
age was vividly with him as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom;
the sad condition of the poor; the position of women in the onward movement of the
world; the role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; the
noble elements of English character, their long descent and the sacred reverence we
owed to them.
3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte dArthur]; Ulysses; The
Princess, A Medley; Idylls of the King (The Coming of ArthurThe Passing of Arthur).
3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) literary sources: Horaces Odes; pastoral elegy; love-
sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dantes Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae.
4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language <Locke: sensations are the source of all
knowledge and a word is merely a sound that is arbitrarily attached to a sensation.
(b) The idealist perspective, deriving from Kant, current among the Apostles (the
Germano-Coleridgean, Cambridge Society in the 1820s)

T.S. Eliot: A great poet because of abundance, variety and complete competence.
The saddest of the English poets.
Terry Eagleton: Tennyson marks the last point in English life at which poetry was still a
public genre. Yet even here the cracks are beginning to show: In Memoriam rehearses the
set themes of Victorian Society, but it is really an assemblage of lyrical fragments in which
private experience is now running too deep for public articulation. ( in T. L. S. /Oct.1992)

Penelope Fitzgerald: He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the
opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the
authentic voice of the English language,i.e. the sound of the language talking to itself.
At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti
does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sounds that he is inexplicably
able, as a great professional, to produce. (in T. L. S. /Oct. 1992, A Hundred Years After)
Isobel Armstrong: He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for a
simplicity which is betrayed by the complexity of its language.
Handout Vic. IX

1. Robert Browning(1812-1889)s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennysons method.

2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry.
2.1 The Dramatic Monologue as norm.
2.1.1 Definition; advantages.
3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Brownings poetry.
4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age.
5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician.
6. Text Analysis: My Last Duchess

1. Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare
(1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the
temptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I
should judge the conflict in the knights soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson
thinks he should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, and
anything but the soul.
My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worth
study.(Sordello) His poems are described always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.(Preface of 1868)
2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.:
to the great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, Ill tell my state as
thought were none of mine.
2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its
effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or
another the norm. (Poetry and the Age, 1953)
2.2 D.M. = A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary
audience.
= One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address.
(1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of
D.M. provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is brought
together as the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward the
meaning of the poet.
3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest
seems desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2)
language, versification and poetic texture.
4. In point of characters and style.
Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint
Praxeds Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women.
5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man preference for the
conflict in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God is
revealed to Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ.
Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the
greater the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth.

Brownings imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and the
Book; he dealt more with Facts than Fancies.
General theme: Order Vs Disorder
 General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of human
happiness, capable to overcome human suffering.
Diction is denotative to the extreme.
Handout Vic. X

1. Gerard Manley Hopkinss (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeper

knowledge.
1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of Poetic
Language.
1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition.
1.3 Hopkinss Concept of Identity.
2. His Theory of Poetry and Language.
2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress.
2.2 Language and the taste of Himself.
2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus.
2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins.
3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse.
4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion.
4.1 The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)
5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language.
6. Hopkins as Critic.
7. Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets.

1. Every true poetmust be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that
each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and
can never recur. (Hopkins)
1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way of
hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and
above its interest of meaning.
1.3 I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself,
of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or
alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable
by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it
be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of
pitch, distinctiveness and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or
resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the feeling. But
this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do
resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one
tankard, that of my own being.

2.1 Inscape the outward signs by which a creatures inner identity could be grasped.
Instress the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his
consciousness.
Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye.
Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects.
Power of the object to reveal its own inscape.
Secures the unity of the world.
Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything.
Running Instress the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one in
the mind of the observer.
2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being.
2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local and
cosmopolitan.
2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality.
3 Religious content: A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection.

4 Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal (1866-1875):
All the world is full of inscape; and he caught inscapes everywhere: in leaves,
flowers, trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls,
clouds, sunsets and stars.
I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been
looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.
The world might be seen as the INSCAPE of GOD.
Duns Scotuss Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory of thisness.

4.1 You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit
and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the
wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little
presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 the
Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns,
exiles from Germany by the Falck laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by
the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone
would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work (letter to Dixon, 1878)
Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained in
Preface to Poems.
5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress.
Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmatic
shifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order.

5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, inscaping the world.
The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artists person.
Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art
- being in earnest with your subject-reality
Beauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of the
Holiness beauty + good
The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character

6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Carrion
Comfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
Handout Vic. XI

1. Romance Vs Novel. Romance Vs Realism

1.1 Characteristics of Romances
1.2 Victorian Definitions of the Novel
1.3 Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction
1.4 Realism as Perfect Agreement between Form and Message
2. Characteristics of the Victorian Novel
3. Victorian Novelists as Historians of the Two Englands
4. Functions of the Novel in the Victorian Age
5. Common Victorian Themes
6. Original Audience
7. Famous Representatives
8. Comic Verse, Parody, Nonsense
8.1 Punchs (1841) jokes: a national industry
8.2 Representatives of the Genre

1.2 A Romance originally meant anything in prose or in verse written in any of the Romance languages; a
Novel meant a new tale, a tale of fresh interest now, when we speak of a Romance, we generally
mean a fictitious narrative, in prose or verse, the interest of which turns upon marvellous and
uncommon incidents; and, when we speak of a Novel we generally mean a fictitious narrative differing
from the Romance, inasmuch as the incidents are accommodated to the ordinary train of events and
the modern state of society. (D.Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of
the History of British Prose Fiction, 1859).

A good novel should be both [sensational and realistic], and both in the highest degree. (A. Trollope.
Autobiography, 1883)

Between realism and idealism, there is no natural conflict. This completes that. (G. Meredith, 1862)

1.4 Jan Watt states that the first use of the term REALISM occurred in 1835 as an aesthetic
description to denote the vrit humaine of Rembrandt opposed to the idalit potique of neo-
classical painting; it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of
Ralism, a journal edited by Duranty.(Jan Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1970).

The novels realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. (J Watt,
The Rise of the Novel, 1970)

R.Wellek defines the realism of this period as truth of observation and a depiction of commonplace
events, characters and settings.

2. Walter Allen in The English Novel, 1954, remarks that: This sense of identity with their times is of
cardinal importance in any consideration of the early Victorian novelists. It was a source alike of their
strengths and of their weaknesses, and it distinguishes them both from their successors and from their
great European contemporaries.

The English saw themselves as preachers sometimes as preachers and always as reformers, always
as public entertainers. Their conception of themselves was modest, their conscious aim nothing much
more than Wilkie Collinss Makeem laugh, makeem cry, makeem wait. (W.Allen, The English Novel)
7. the 1840s the 1860s the 1880s
the 1850s the 1870s the 1920s
romance + The Bronts
novelistic devices Charlotte (1816- 1855)
Gothic Novel Emily (1818-1848)
W. Scott Ann (1820-1849)
S. Richardson Ch.Dickens(1812- 1870) E.Gaskell(1810-1865)

Th.Hardy (1840- 1928)

Novelistic devices G.Eliot (1818-1880)

Prevail W.Thackeray(1811- 1863)

Picaresque Novel
Jane Austen G. Meredith (1828- 1909)

H.James (1843-1916)

In F.R.Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948):

J.Austen G.Eliot G.Meredith

H.James J.Conrad D.H.Lawrence

8. J.S.Mill said that: Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is
desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.
8.1 Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. (Jabberwocky in L. Carroll, Alice through the Looking-Glass)

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880

One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is:
Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this.
What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?
Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover:
Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.
Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:
Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.
Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels:
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels.
Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which:
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch
More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:
Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?
One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.
Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks:
Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox.
Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:
 You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.
Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock:
Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock.
God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see:
Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.
Handout Vic. XII

1. Charles Dickenss (1812-1870) work: a melting pot of 18th century fictional devices
1.1 The Dickens of Coach Journeys
1.2 Dickens: The Great StageManager Novelist
1.2.1Elements of Macro and Microstructure of his Novels
2. Dickens: One of the Greatest Stylists of 19th Century
3. Distinctive Features of the Dickensian Style
3.1 Sample Analyses
4. Dickens Defends Fantasy

1.1 Journeys are one of the most controlling metaphors in Dickenss early novels: The
Pickwick Papers; Oliver Twist; Nicholas Nickleby; The Old Curiosity Shop; Barnaby
Rudge; American Notes; Martin Chuzzlewit; The Chimes; A Christmas Carol.

1.2.1 Mario Prazs formula for Dickenss Novel is: melodrama + grotesque + humorous
elaboration of characters

2. When confronted with a Dickens text the reader is forced to make some readjustment
of understanding while reading. The readers unsettled experience becomes a principal
means of recognizing meanings and effects associated with a text.
3. Grandiloquence was the besetting linguistic vice of Dickenss era, and it is clear from
many burlesque treatments of it in his novels (notably in the language of Mr.Micawber),
that Dickens himself regarded it as a vice.
The occurrence of this device in Dickenss own narrative is a sign of non-seriousness,
a linguistic game-playing which is a prose counterpart of the mock-heroic style in
poetry.

3.1 Among the good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadnt robbed the pantry,
in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth,
with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I
was not allowed to speak( I didnt want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the
scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of
which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have
minded that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldnt leave me alone.
(Ch. Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 4)

4. It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is truth. The
exact truth must be there; but the merit of art in the narration is the manner of stating the
truth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done.
And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal & catalogue-like to make
the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in that
way I have an idea (really founded on the love of what I profess) that the very holding of
popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful
treatment. (Ch. Dickens, Letter to John Foster, 1859 in J. Foster, The Life of Ch. Dickens
(1874) vol.III)
 Handout Vic. XIII

1. W.M. Thackerays (1811-1863) work: a continuous portrayal of the real

1.1 Sources of Realism
1.2 The novelist on the novel

2. E. Gaskell (1810-1865) and domestic realism

2.1 Th. Carlyles concept of Environment of Circumstances
2.2 Elements of Macro and Microstructure of her Novels

3. Emily Bront (1818-1848) as best representative of That Family of Poets.

3.1 Wuthering Heights (1847) a self reflexive novel
_ a book about spiritual war.

1.1 Realism in Thackeray issues out of Parody.

Thackerays sense of an unheroic 19th century was based on a specifically anti-heroic
reading of history which challenged Carlyles influential views on heroes, great
individual men who provided the driving force of a nations history.

1.2 The Art of Novels Is to Represent Nature

I think Mr.Dickens has in many things quite a divine genius so to speak & certain notes
in his song are so delightful & admirable, that I should never think of trying to imitate
him, only hold my tongue & admire him. I quarrel with his Art in many respects: which I
dont think represents Nature duly . The Act of Novels is to represents Nature; to
convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality _ in a tragedy or a poem or a
lofty drama you aim at producing different emotions; the figures moving, and their
words sounding, heroically: but in a drawing-room drama, a coat is a coat and a poker
a poker, and must be nothing else according to my ethics, not an embroidered tunic
nor a great red-hot instrument like the Pantomime weapon.
(W.M.Thackeray, Letter to David Masson, 6 May 1851, Letters 1945)

...We are for the most part an abominably foolish & selfish people desperately
wicked & all eager after vanities. Everybody is you see in that book [i.e. Vanity Fair]
for instance if I had made Amelia a higher order of woman there would have been no
vanity in Doblins falling in love with her, where as the impression at present is that he
is a fool for his pains, that he has married a sweet little thing & in fact has found out his
error, rather a sweet & tender & however quia multum amavit.
I want to leave everybody dissatisfied & unhappy at the end of the story we ought all
to be with our own & all other stories. Good God, dont see (in that maybe cracked &
warped looking glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses;
wickednesses, lusts, follies, shortcomings? In company let us hope with better
qualities about which permit discourse. We must lift up our voices about these & howl
to a congregation of fools; so much at least has been my misanthropy to task - I wish I
could myself: but take the world by a certain standard (you know what I mean) & who
dares talk of having any virtue at all? (W.M.Thackeray, Letter to Robert Bell, 3
September 1848, Letters 1945 in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel)
2. Th. Carlyle endowed the term environment for the first time when translating Goethe
with a new connotation viz. environment of circumstances: the condition under
which any person or thing lives or is developed; the sum-total of influences which
modify and determine the development of life or character.
2.1 R. Williams considers that there is a deliberately close but limited access to the
writing that was actually being done by the class that Mrs. Gaskell was writing about,
as in her close reliance on Bamford, or in the inclusion of dialect in that deliberately
associating, and yet at the same time outwardly explanatory, way. (Forms of English
Fiction in 1848, 1986)

R.Williams remarks that the relationship of Margaret and Thornton and their eventual
marriage serve as a unification of the practical energy of the Northern manufacturer
with the developed sensibility of the Southern girl which is stated explicitly by E.
Gaskell in her novel. (R.W., 1986)
The device of the legacy which usually solves the insoluble problems in the world of
the Victorian novel is also used by E.Gaskell in North and South, which very well may
come in the category of fiction of special pleading. (R.W., 1986)

3. Emily Bront justifies her belonging to that family of poets. (W.M.Thackeray)

3.1 Wuthering Heights , an I-narration novel, apparently takes the form of a diary which
Mr.Lockwood writes to himself:

1801 I have just returned from a visit to my landlord the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled
with. This is certainly a beautiful country! [Ch I]

This narration also includes long passages reporting Nellie Deans narration of the
events of the story to Lockwood:

About twelve oclock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights: a puny, seven
months child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to
miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar. [Ch 16]

Hence the discourse structure of Nellie Deans narration as presented by G.Leech is:

Addresser I Addressee I
(Emily Bront) (Reader)

Message

Addresser 2 Addressee 2
(Implied author) (Implied reader)

Message

Addresser 3
Addressee 3
(Mr. Lockwood) (Mr. Lockwood)

Message
 Addresser 4 Addressee 4
(Nellie Dean) (Mr. Lockwood)

Message
(Geoffrey N. Leech & Michael Short, Style in Fiction, Fig 8.3, p.2 63, 1981)

Handout Vic. XIV

1. The Trajectory of a Woman Writer: George Eliot (1819 1880)

1.1 Why Mary Ann Evans was not good enough?
1.2 Her Religion: The Humanist Doctrine of Meliorism
1.3 Influences on Her Work
1.4 Arguments for Her Belonging with the Real School
1.5 Central Concepts of her Thinking
1.6 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in Her Novels

2. Thomas Hardy (1840 1928): Between Idealism and Realism

2.1 Th. Hardys World: Men in a Perpetual Flight, Pursuit, Homeless People
2.2 Influences on His Work
2.3 Central Concepts of His Thinking
2.4 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in His Novels

1.2 Meliorism (John Cross) = a belief which affirms that the world may be made better by
human effort.
1.3 Like A. Comtes, G.Eliots religion of humanity grew out of historical perceptions.
free will coexists with determinism(U.L.Knoepflmacher) = moral choice and the idea of
a version which can be acted upon are central to her thinking.
1.4 Her aim: I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles to win your tears for
real sorrows: sorrow such as may live next door to you such as walks neither in rags
nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.
Still there is a strong attachment to exploring the relationship between the real and the
ideal.
1.5 Her novels are novels of crisis = crisis as a mode of historical explanation of this
humanised apocalypse.

Im not denyin the women are foolish: God Almighty made em to match the men.
(Adam Bede, 1859)
1.6 Adam Bede,(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Ramola (1863),
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-1872),
Daniel Deronda (1876).

The dark secret: Tis grievous, that all amplification of travel both by sea and land, a
man can never separate himself from his past history. (motto in Felix Holt)
Our deeds still travel with us from afar; and what we have been makes us what we
are.(motto to Ch. 70 in Middlemarch).

The portrayal of imperfect souls: I wish less of our piety were spent on perfect
goodness and more given to real imperfect goodness.

Intrusive authorial narrator: But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts
are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas whose story we know. (Middlemarch, Finale)
 G.Eliots aim: My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher the
rousing of nobler emotions, which mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing, of
special measures.

2.Hardys idiosyncratic mode of regard justifies his idealistic conception on Art: If I were a
painter, I would paint a picture of a room as viewed by a mouse from a chink under the
skirting.(Florence Emily Hardy, Life of Th.Hardy)

The artists disproportioning = viewing the world in varying lights or from unusual
perspectives: I have been looking for God 50 years and I think that if he had existed I
should have discovered him. staid, worn, weak man at the railway station, whose black
legs, hands, and face were longing to be out of the world, but whose brain was not
because like the brain of most people, it was the last part of his body to realize a
situation.(Life of Th. Hardy, 29 January entry)

2.3 Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists, 1943, identifies 3 masks for fate:
(1) natural force; (2) innate weakness of character; (3) chance, destiny

2.4 Plot: D.Lodge considers Th. Hardy a cinematic novelist = one who deliberately
renounces some of the freedom of representation and report afforded by the verbal
medium, who imagines and presents his materials in primarily visual terms.
Leon Edel observes in Novel and Camera in The Theory of the Novel, 1974, about all
the great 19th century realist novelists: Novelists have sought almost from the first to
become a camera. And not a static instrument but one possessing the movement
through space and time which the motion-picture camera has achieved in our century.
We follow Balzac, moving into his subject, from the city into the street, from the street
into the house, and we tread hard on his heels as he takes us from room to room. We
feel as if that massive realist had a precision of the cinema wherever we turn in the
19th century. We can see novelists cultivating the camera-eye and the camera-
movement.

Setting: stands in a living, cooperative relationship to the character, plot, themes.

Time: analysed in relation to A.Comtes looped orbit = a forward and thus
progressive cyclic movement of history.
Character-drawing: D.H.Lawrence in Study of Hardy (1914) wrote of Hardys people
of Wessex always bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a wild flight into flower,
always shooting suddenly out of a light convention, a tight, hide-bound cabbage stage
into something quite madly personal. They are struggling hard to come into being
and the first and chiefest factor is the struggle into love and the struggle with love.
Focalization: R. Barthes has observed that the discourse of the traditional novel
alternates the personal and the impersonal very rapidly, often in the same sentence,
so as to produce a proprietary consciousness which retains the mastery of what it
states without participating in it. (To Write: An Intransitive Verb, The Structuralist
Controversy, 1972)
J.Hillis Miller refers to Hardys reliance on specified observers due to the writers
unconscious wish to escape from the dangers of direct involvement in life as it is
without being seen and could report on that seeing. (Hillis Miller, TH.Hardy: Distance
and Desire, 1970)
 Atmosphere: The New York Bookman said of Jude the Obscure (1895): It is simply
one of the most objectionable books we have ever read in any language whatsoever.
Pessimistic tone: The doctor examining the corpse of Little Father Time, Judes son
says that the boy represents the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.
(Jude the Obscure, VI 2)
 REVISION FILES

English Romanticism
The first generation of Romantic poets The second generation of Romantic poets
Common traits
Imagination is the highest human faculty and it is the most direct, effective way to achieve truth.
Nature is a source of inspiration and is often seen in a pantheistic way (personal interpretations vary).
Supematural elements can be found in both generations (mostly in Coleridge).
Importance of feelings in both generations, poetry is the expression of personal feelings an d passions.
Revival ofpast traditions and the Middle Ages for all poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats).

Differences
Ali the poets were involved in society and they tried to
find a solution to social injustice and the other
problems of the time.
They believed that poetry should have a didactic
purpose and that the poet's task was to be a guide for
mank.ind and to help people create a better world.
Although they supported the ideals of the French
Revolution, they remained quite conservative
(especially Wordsworth and Coleridge). They ali had
long lives.
Wordsworth stated that language in poetry should be as
similar to the language 'really used by men' as possible.
Blake used simple language and structures and Coleridge
tried to follow this generai rule, though he partially
disagreed on this issue.
They all travelled abroad and died far from England.
They showed an escapist tendency and fought in the
name of their idealistic goals. They refused to give in to
imposed social standards.
Ali of them rejected conventional ethics and disliked the
idea that poetry should have a mora! purpose: they
believed poetry could inspire the reader, but not that it
could really teach a morallesson.
They all led very truly romantic, passionate lives
(especially Byron and Shelley). They all died young, in
t-ragie circumstances.
The works of the 2nd generation are usually much more
complex and refmed than the 1st generation as regards
language and style. There is extensive use of
mythological references from the classics, a growing
interest in Greek culture; the language is more elaborate
and rich. Ali the poets are especially careful in the choice
of elegant structures and words to the effect of musicality
and balance.

Links to other subjects l topics

Italian Literature History Philosophy Art Musi c European
Literatures
Foscolo - Leopardi American Revolution Kant - Fichte - Turner- Beethoven- Hugo -
-Manzoni French Revolution Schelling- Constable- Chopin - Verdi Chateaubriand -
Napoleonic wars Rousseau - Hegel Fiissli - The Pre- Lamartine-
Raphaelites Goethe - Tieck -
Novalis
Main poets and writers
Poets: 1st generation: Blake (dualism - vision)- Wordsworth (nature) - Coleridge (the supernatural)
2nd generation: Byron (rebellion) - Shelley (freedom) - Keats (beauty and art - aesthetic forerunner)
Novelists: Jane Austen: nove! of manners (provinciallife in the country- anti-romantic)
Walter Scott: most important representative of the historical nove! (link to Manzoni)
Mary Shelley: nove! of purpose (gothic influences, the theme of double identity)
American writers: Poe: tales of mystery (inner horror) and ratiocination (forerunner of detective stories) influences on
French Symbolism
Cooper: interest in the local traditions and culture of native American fndians and !ife at the frontier
(= the American Walter Scott)
Whitman: democratic ideals, the American Dream, the poet as a prophet, rejection of stylistic
conventions (free verse)

Photocopiable 2009 Black Cat Publishing 189

 REVISION FILES

The Victorian Age

Early Victorian writers Late Victorian Writers
Generai features
Importance of respectability
Great expansion of the Empire and consequent nationalistic pride Uingoism) tendency to ignore the social problems of
the time while focusing only on the positive aspects a.k.a. the Victorian Compromise philanthropy as an early form of
sensibility to social problems development of socialist ideas; creation of the Fabian Society
Great importance given to the family and to social conventions in generai
Mora! repression of women
Taboo on sexual themes
Features of early Victorian fiction (1830s - 1860s) Features oflate Victorian fiction (1860s- 1900s):
optimism & faith in progress growing pessimism
development of seria! publication harsh social denunciation
identification of writers with common set of values influences of naturalism and decadentism
readership's influence on plot development of novels writers gradually become estranged from society

Early Victorian poetry Late Victorian poetry

continuation of the Romantic tradition (interest in
human feelings, focus on the Middle Ages)
new elements (more attention paid to musicality, more
complex voabulary and syntax, experimentation,
introduction of dramatic inonologue)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
founded in 1848 as a reaction against industrialism and
materialism;
interest in medieval art;
languid sensuality and extensive use of symbolism

Links to other subjects l topics

Literature History Science and Art: Music European
Pellico - Carducci, Potato famine in philosophy: impressionism Debussy Literatures
Nievo, - Verga, Ireland: massive Positivism - (Monet, Manet, Ravel Baudelaire,
D'annunzio, - emigration from Darwin's theories Gauguin, Mahler Verlaine,
Pascoli- Irelant to the US - Schopenauer's Van Gogh) Puccini Mallarm, Hugo,
Fogazzaro Crimean war and ideas - John S. Mussorgski Stendhal, Zola,
BoerWar M ili Maupassant,
American Civil Faubert,
war & abolition Ibsen, Dostoevsky
of slavery

Main novelists Main novelists

Charles Dickens humour, social problems, pathos, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy -+ the influence of social
caricatures, didacticism and natura! environment on the individuai; man can't
William M Thackeray novels of manners describing class change his fate
conflict and Victorian lifestyle Robert L Stevenson -+ new interest in the multiplicity of
the Bronte sisters combination ofRomantic features and human psychology -theme ofthe double Qekyll / Hyde)
Victorian themes (the role of women) Lewis Carroll -+ interest in dreams and irrationality
Rudyard Kipling -+ British India from a Victorian point of
Main poets view; stili supporting the ideas linked to "white man's
Lord Alfred Tennyson Ulysses = represents Victorian burden"
ambitious expansionism and pride Oscar Wilde -+ art has nothing to do with morality as it can
Robert Browning the dramatic monologue (a single speaker only be judged by aesthetic standards; making fun of
talking to a silent listener; the reader infer's speaker' Victorian values
personality from his words; use of informai register and
broken sentences as if the speaker were talking to himself Main poets (preraphaelite Brotherhood)
Dante G Rossetti,
Christina Rossetti,
Charles A Swinburne

190
 REVISION FILES

Modernism
Before WWII AfterWWII
Generai features
rebellion against traditional values
distortion of spacial and chronological features of reality
emphasis on the mutability and uncertainty of our perceptions
need to represent modern urban !ife in art and literature
experimentalism in themes and style
interest in the primitive without the restrictive limitation of our cultura! background
importance of the subconscious in any form
impossibility to give a single and well-defined interpretation of reality
Modernist fiction Post-modernist fiction
experimental techniques (epiphany, interior monologue, etc.) exploration of social phenomena
the city as the world of modern Man dystopian literature
exploration ofhuman psychology politica! involvement of writers
lack of values development of the literature of ex-British colonies
Modemist poetry Post-modernist poetry
rebellion against post-Romantic poetry rebellion against Modernist elitarian, snobbish poetry
impersonlity of the artist chaos of the modern world
experimental techniques (objective correlative, free verse, etc.) beat generation
alienation of Man exploration of contemporary issues
Drama
The Theatre of the Absurd(existential nullity, lck of morallandmarks, lack of communication, Angry Young Men (social
problems and the frustration ofthe working classes, politica! theatre ofthe 1970s and 1980s

Links to other subjects l topics

Literature History Science and Art Music European
Svevo, Pirandello, World Wars philosophy Expressionism Stravinsky Literatures
Ungaretti, Totalitarian regimes Nietzsche, (Munch) Schoenberg Brecht, Kafka,
Montale, (Stalin, Hitler, Bergson, William Dadaism (Tsara) Bartok Sartre, Chekhov,
Martinetti, Franco, Mussolini) James, Freud, Cubism (Picasso, Prokoviev Rilke
Quasimodo, Women's Einstein, Jung, Braque) Jazz
Buzzati, Levi emancipation Popper Surrealism (Dal, Pop & rock music
Vietnam War Magritte)
Cold War American art
GulfCrisis (Warhol, Pollock)
Main noY:elists Main nOY:elists
Henry James -> relationship between Americans and A. Huxley, G. Orwell]. Ballard -> the horrors of totalitarian
Europeans, women's psychology regimes, consequence of scientific progress & technology
E.M. Forster -> relationship between England and India or on society
other cultures (Italy) Ian McEwan -> memory an d ambiguous nature of time
D.H. Lawrence -> relationship between parents and children Angela Carter-> feminist issues
and man and woman Jonathan Coe -> Britain in the1980s
J. Joyce -> experimental nove!, stream of consciousness, the MainPoets
paralysis ofDublin, artist vs society Seamus Heaney -> cultura! roots oflreland
V. Woolf -> women and fiction, subjective perception of Liverpool poets -> following the success of the Beatles,
reality, lack of communication between man and woman reacting against Modernism
Main poets Main 12Ia~wrights
W.B. Yeats -> concept ofhistory as a gyre (cfr Vico), Irish Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter -> alienation of man,
question, symbolism existential void, pessimism, experimentalism
T.S. Eliot -> experimentalism in style, influence ofE. Pound, John Osborne -> Angry Young Men, frustration of working-
alienation of modern man, lack of values and communication class people
American & post-colonial writers
Hemingway (war); Faulkner (interior monologue, cfr Woolf andjoyce); Fitzgerald (exploration of the disillusionment
aroundjazz era); Ginsberg (rebellion against conformity and materialism); Miller (disillusionment in the American Dream).
Main literary movements
Imagism - Futurism & Vorticism -> Ezra Pound and Windham Lewis - Theatre of the Absurd - Dystopian fiction - Beat Generation
Romantic Poetry
AP English Lit
How Romanticism arose
Romanticism was an artistic and philosophical
revolt against the Enlightenment and
Neoclassicism. Writers of the Enlightenment
prized:
emotional restraint
order
balance
dignity and decorum
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a
Lecture on the Orrery. (1763-65)
A Romantic bridge
The Romantic period in British literature (roughly
1780-1832) stands between and connects the
Enlightenments promotion of commerce, reason,
and liberty and the Victorian experience of
industrialization and empire.
Romanticism
Enlightenment Victorian Era
1780s--1832
Major features of Romantic poetry:
the joys and tribulations of day-to-day life
a love of the unspoiled natural world
the sublime and the beautiful
the nature of existence
the value of the individual
imagination, memory, and the importance of
emotions
Major features, cont.
optimistic sense of renewal
interest in the language and lives of common
people
creativity
mystery
synthesis
universality
John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (1817)
 J.M. Turner, 1797. Watercolor of the
ruined chapter House at Kirkshall
Abbey.

J.M. Turner, The Morning after the Deluge (1843)

The sublime
While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the
sublime is majestic, wild, and sometimes savage.
Viewers are moved and often made happy by the
beautiful, but they are overwhelmed, awe-struck,
and sometimes terrified by the sublime.
Often associated with huge, overpowering natural
phenomena like mountains, waterfalls, turbulent
seas, and thunderstorms, the delightful terror
inspired by sublime visions was supposed both to
remind viewers of their own insignificance in the
face of nature and divinity and to inspire them with
a sense of transcendence.
Timeframe
First work of Romantic poetry: Lyrical
Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
William Wordsworth published in 1798
Traditionally ends with death of Sir Walter
Scott in 1832
First generation:
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Together publish Lyrical Ballads in 1798

 Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Wordsworths preface to the Lyrical Ballads is
considered a central work of Romantic literary theory.
He sets forth what he sees as the elements of a new
type of poetry, based on "real language" and which
avoids the poetic diction of much 18th century poetry.
Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry
as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from
emotions recollected in tranquility."
Coleridge (1772-1834)
Though most of the poems in Lyrical Ballads were written
by Wordsworth, Coleridge contributed four poems,
including one of his most famous, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Fig.
engraving by Gustave Dor
In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge present a
liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine
language, experience as filtered through personal
emotion and imagination; the truest experience is to be
found in nature.
balance between poets influence and real language
balance between commonplace and supernatural
The canon of British Romantic poets:
William Blake (1757-1827)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Keats (1795-1821)
useful word of the day! valorize:
to give validity to something; to assign value to
it.
2nd generation: Byron, Shelley, Keats

(1788-1824) (1792-1822) (1795-1821)

Second generation
All have tragically short lives
Byron and Shelley both aristocrats, well educated, leave England
under pressure, see themselves as outcasts
Keats produces poetry at 22, dies at 25. Keats was the son of a
liveryman, and thoroughly working class, not the sort expected to have
poetic aspirations. He was apprenticed in 1811 to an apothecary-
surgeon, and passed his examination in 1816. As one biographer puts
it, he then went on vacation and returned a practicing poet, writing a
tremendous amount over the next three and a half years. He died of
tuberculosis in Rome in 1821.
Meanwhile, whats Will up to?

In 1843, Queen Victoria I crowned

William Wordsworth as the Poet
Laureate of Great Britain, a position he
held until his death in 1850.
Sources
Wilson, Jenny. The Lakeland Poets. Edison
New Jersey: Chartwell Books. 1994

http://www.uh.
edu/engines/romanticism/introduction.html
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-
romanticism
 1

Wesleyan University The Honors College

Visions of Landscape in Romantic and Victorian Poetry

by

Lisa Marie Wong

Class of 2008

A thesis submitted to the

faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Departmental Honors in English

Middletown, Connecticut April, 2008

 2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you, Stephanie Weiner,

for your constant encouragement, support, guidance, and faith.

Thank you, Gertrude Hughes, for introducing me to the works of Rudolph Steiner.

Thank you, Parents, for everything.

Thank you, Michael, for keeping me on track every step of the way.
 3

CONTENTS

1. Introduction: From Esotericism to Scientific Materialism...4

2. Chapter One: A Romantic Vision of Landscape: Active Imagination and the

Metaphysical Conversation.....13

3. Chapter Two: Victorian Representation of Landscape and the Aesthetic of

Particularity.....29

4. Conclusion: Toward a Reconciliation?...65

List of Works Cited..67

 4

Introduction:

From Esotericism to Scientific Materialism

The original inspiration for my project stems from a very simple observation: there is

no single way of looking at a landscape. The driving arguments of this article

proceed under the assumption that the observer of nature, or participant in nature,

operates within a certain epistemological framework that invariably determines, to an

important extent, his artistic representation of landscape. In this way, the

representation reveals as much about the beholder as it does about the landscape

itself. (And in some extreme cases, the representation concerns itself almost

exclusively with the beholder and his orientation to the world and very little about the

landscape in question.) This project is primarily interested in the ontological stance

that the poet takes up in relation to landscape. For example, does the poet approach

the natural world as something profoundly other than himself, so that his

interaction with landscape necessarily constitutes, as Raymond Williams argues, a

process of separation and observation?1 Or does the beholder, as he actively

contemplates the landscape, arrive at a deeper understanding of his inner nature, so

that the landscape ultimately formulates an expression of his soul? I examine the

specific ways in which these different positionalities manifest themselves through the

artists representations of landscape. In doing so, I address, among others, the

following questions: does the artist attempt to create a strictly factual representation

of landscape, so that he provides a random accumulation of botanical descriptions

that cannot be subordinated to a unified aesthetic or moral vision? Or does the artist
1
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 120.
 5

depict natural details in order to enhance the greater gestalt and to highlight the

epistemological processes that facilitate an interaction with landscapeprocesses

such as apprehension, assimilation, memory, and recreation?

The chronological scope of this project is extensive. I examine the primary

materials of two generations of British artists, critics, and poets, beginning with

William Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793) and concluding with

Christina Rossettis Goblin Market (1859). A close consideration of these wide-

ranging texts can illuminate the evolution of the poetic orientation to naturefrom

the Romantics more spiritual conception of landscape as an important instrument of

self-knowledge to the Victorians more scientific interest in landscape as a material

composition of disparate particulars that could be systematically examined.

The French Enlightenment had left behind an important intellectual legacy in

the dualist framework of its Cartesian categories, which identified material

phenomena as discrete, self-contained entities and established a strict separation

between mind and matter, subject and object, and self and other.2 The Romantics,

however, entirely sidestepped a materialistic and fragmented investigation into

nature, which required that the inquirer establish an ontological separation between

himself and the phenomenon at hand, in order to observe, describe, and measure it

with scientific empiricism. The Romantics firmly believed that the beholder cannot

extract himself from the phenomenon that holds his attention: an examination of

nature necessarily includes an examination of the self that examines. In this sense,

their approach to nature, which assigned a primary importance to the experiential

2
Paul Davies, Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition (Hudson: Lindisfarne Books, 1998), 171.
Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 6

aspects of their encounters with landscape, anticipated the phenomenological studies

of twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl. As Martin Buber explains in his

meditations on the primary words, the individual I eventually incorporates within

himself the phenomenon Thou that he examines.3 The Romantic poets practiced a

conscious and feeling participation in the natural world, which involved on the part of

the beholder an outward movement toward the material phenomenon and an inward

identification with its qualities. For the Romantic poets, nature stood as the material

medium through which the divine secrets of the spiritual world formulated

themselves to human intelligence.

In the first chapter, I examine various poems, journals, and treatises of the

major Romantic poets within the larger framework of the esoteric tradition, in order

to illuminate their metaphysical insights into the reciprocal relationship between

nature and the human mind. I argue that British Romanticism is deeply allied to, and

indeed springs from, the spiritual impulses that have informed many of the mystical

and religious traditions of the world. As an integrated movement that prized the

active imagination as the primary means of accessing moral truths and uncovering the

hidden secrets of the poets inner nature, Romanticism directly draws on esoteric

insights into human spirituality and perfectibility, in its careful attention to the

expansion and deepening of consciousness. The research for this chapter is largely

based on Paul Daviess examination of the relationship between Romanticism and the

esoteric tradition. (I also draw on selected writings from the twentieth-century

anthroposophist Rudolph Steiner, in which he recommends to the esoteric student in

search of higher knowledge several concentration exercises that require

3
See Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1958).
 7

contemplative practice in relation to a natural object.) In this chapter, my discussion

of landscape is subsumed under a broader investigation into what these poets

considered to be reliable forms of knowledge.

While the Romantics arrived at knowledge in broad, intuitive leaps, the

Victorians advanced toward knowledge in steady and methodical steps, each planted

firmly on empirical verification. The emergence of important scientific discoveries

and the development of Utilitarian theories of social organization in many ways

prevented the lettered societies from taking the esoteric heart of Romantic poetry in

complete seriousness. Charles Lyells studies in evolutional geology, which

explained the formation of the universe according to rational and mechanistic

principles, presented an aggressive challenge to the creationist models of the earths

formation. In addition, these geological discoveries severely damaged the Romantic

conviction that a sympathetic connection existed between the human mind and the

natural world. Furthermore, Utilitarian theories of social organization were slowly

replacing a divinely inspired morality with one that could be systematically measured

and implemented. The principle of utility, as put forward by Jeremy Bentham, sought

to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and also

encouraged the individual to pursue his personal forms of pleasure. Thus

Utilitarianism, in addition to promoting a strong individualist impulse, also generated

a spirit of social alienation, which created a society composed of separate, atomized,

competing, individual members.4 In this time of rapid industrial, scientific, and

social change, the modern intellect could no longer acknowledge the active

4
Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830-1890, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson
Education Limited, 2001), 5. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 8

imagination as the primary instrument of knowledge. If the esoteric teachings of

Romantic poetry were not being outwardly denounced in the discourse on morality,

they were nonetheless becoming increasingly irrelevant to the modern way of

thinking.

The second chapter examines the changing aesthetics that emerged from this

transitional period, in which the Victorian poets grappled in their representations of

landscape with this movement toward scientific materialism and individualism. In

general, the artists and writers of the period demonstrated a newfound attention to the

incidental particulars of nature. They pursued a gathering of knowledge piecemeal

and launched an investigation into landscape at the microscopic level. In this way,

the Victorian poets engaged what Carol Christ has termed an aesthetic of

particularity, that is, an aesthetic that moves away from ideal categoriessuch as the

beautiful, the picturesque, the sublime, under which the infinite particulars of the

natural world are organized and subsumedand toward the particular and the

incidental. While the Romantics also demonstrated a keen aesthetic interest in natural

particulars, they believed that a sublime presence infused the smallest details of

nature. William Blake, for example, urged humanity to cultivate a spiritual

sensitivity to the minute components of landscape, in order to see a world in a grain

of sand and heaven in a wildflower. In this sense, the Romantics celebrated the

incidental precisely because it brings into existence the absolute. The Victorians,

however, found themselves profoundly uninterested in subordinating the particulars

of the natural world to ideal categories. Instead, they considered the minute details of
 9

nature endlessly interesting in themselves and boldly claimed that these particulars

merited artistic representation in their own right.

Robert Browning, for example, believed that each element of nature, no

matter how miniscule or repugnant, represented an important source of artistic

interest. His microscopic attention to the individual components of landscape

established the particular as a new universal order. Browning objectively examined

the natural world from a removed distancethat is, as an observer of landscape, he

was ontologically removed from nature, not intellectually disengaged from or

unfeeling toward it. Indeed, he approached landscape with the Cartesian mentality

that enforces strict separations between self and other, subject and object,

observer and observed. Other Victorian poets who approached the natural world

according to these dualist categories sometimes developed a more pathological

relation to landscape: either their epistemological interests were firmly entrenched on

the side of extreme materialism, or else they collapsed entirely on the side of extreme

subjectivity. It seemed that once the beholder could no longer sustain a reciprocal

relationship between nature and the human mind, he severely upset the balance

between a healthy outward interest in the natural world and an inward contemplation.

For example, the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets, such as William Hunt and Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, looked at the natural world as a multitude of disparate particulars,

each of which competed for the beholders attention and his artistic representation.

These artists documented the countless details of their natural and domestic

environments with remarkable scientific accuracyeach item crisply outlined,

sharply focused, and carefully rendered in exquisite verisimilitude. However, the

 10

Pre-Raphaelites remained exclusively interested in the pure materiality of nature,

which offered the beholder nothing in the way of philosophical insight or moral

guidance. Tennyson, on the other hand, demonstrated a keen interest in exploring

psychological states of isolation, hallucination, and madness through representations

of landscape. The natural particulars that compose the landscape in Mariana, for

example, exude a dreamy and otherworldly quality that reflects the private grief of

the heroine. In this way, the reader understands that the landscape exists solely

through the distorted perception of the subject, who remains severely estranged from

the reality of the natural world. Other poets, such as Christina Rossetti, expressed

their deep anxieties that such an aesthetic of particularity, which celebrated the

diversity and multiplicity of the natural world, threatened to cast the beholder into a

spiritual state of anomie. Goblin Market urges the beholder to discern signs of the

divine presence in the natural world. The poem documents her religious efforts to

reconcile this materialistic interest in landscape with a spiritual recognition of its

divine origins.

Some final words on the terms and methodology of this project. First, I use

the term landscape loosely, not exclusively to denote a composition of organic

matter, as I examine poetic representations of both natural and domestic landscapes.

Second, a great portion of this article is contained in the form of close readings of

primary materials. Because I examine the works of a wide range of artists, critics,

poets, and thinkers, close analysis becomes a valuable method with which to explore

the differences and interconnections that emerge throughout the these texts.

Furthermore, I believe that the poets ontological stance toward landscape is deeply
 11

embedded in his language. Therefore, close attention to the elemental components of

a textual passage, such as word choice, sounds, rhyme and rhythm, and syntactical

arrangement, enable the reader to make an accurate assessment of the poets

orientation to the world.

 12

Chapter One

A Romantic Imagination of Landscape:

Active Imagination and the Metaphysical Conversation

In the summer of 1805, Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed in his private journal that

as he contemplated the changing landscape from the interior of his country home, he

found himself confronting something familiar and forgotten about his own inner

nature:

In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon

dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolic language for something
within me that already and forever exists, rather than observing
anything new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always
an obscure feeling as if the new phenomena were the dim awakening
of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature.5

Coleridges informal reflections on the nocturnal landscape neatly summarize the

Romantic relationship with nature, which unfolds as a dialogical process toward self-

realization. For the Romantics, landscape functions as an important medium that

draws the contemplative poet closer to a state of self-knowledge. Coleridge entirely

sidesteps the dualistic categories that determine a more superficial interaction with

landscape, in which the beholder directs his visual attention outward toward the

external regions, in order to gain new information about his surrounding environment.

Instead, he discovers that the landscape illuminates something profoundly within

himself, not distinct and separate from himself. In this way, the symbolic language

of landscape constitutes an unusual system of semiotics: landscape, as the signifier,

5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1895), 115.
 13

points away from itself and toward another signifiedan eternal and unchanging

truth about the poets inner nature. At this point, landscape has pointed back to the

original beholder and therefore formulates an expression of his soul. Thus, in one

sense, the natural world stands as a material script that can be read, studied, and

meditated on for its hidden spiritual significance. In another sense, landscape

becomes the language spokennot only by the poets inner nature, but more

importantly by the divine source from which this inner nature is derived. Indeed, this

presence within [the poet] that already and forever exists issues from the original

source of all metaphysical knowledge and physical phenomenathe great I AM,

whose choral echo is the universe.6

Paul Davies describes the Romantic encounter with nature as a metaphysical

conversation, that is, a meeting of oneself with oneself. The reciprocal relationship

between the poet and landscape does not constitute a closed circuit of reflection, in

which the landscape directly mirrors the thoughts and feelings of the beholder.

Instead, the poet finds himself thoroughly transformed through his participation in

landscape, so that the final beholder is precisely not the original beholder. As he

contemplates the various objects of nature that compose the landscape, Coleridge

becomes intimately (re)connected to a more meaningful truth about his inner nature,

which transcends the surface characteristics and biographical determinants that make

up his finite personality.

The central aim of the esoteric tradition is to develop a correct relationship

with reality (Davies 11). This process necessarily involves confronting the ultimate

metaphysical question, which concerns the origin of the human spirit and also the
6
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Chrissy & Markley, 1853), 373.
 14

sense and purpose of human existence. In rare moments of meditative tranquility, or

perhaps in moments of unanticipated existential crisis, the mental constraints of

habitual thinking fall away, and the individual finds himself free, or forced, to

seriously consider the essence of his human nature. The sincere and earnest seeker

begins to grasp an answer that springs from his inner yearning for knowledgean

answer that does not confine itself to the experiences of his private biography, but

instead unfolds and changes with his expanding awareness. For this reason, the

spiritual realities that the esoteric sciences strive to uncover have also been called

mysteries, not because they are fundamentally unknown or unknowable, but

because they carry infinite meaning and are constantly revealing themselves to human

intelligence.

Human existence, which constitutes a constant state of becoming, presents in

itself an intricate question, one that cannot be satisfied with a single determinate

answer, but instead demands ongoing consideration and research. The question that

surrounds human existence considers the ways in which we can guide the evolution

of our lives, so that it becomes meaningful and directed, rather than a habituated

product of custom. While standard historicism and psychology insist that the

individual look to his past experiences in order to purposefully construct a new future,

the esoteric sciences maintain that the seeker actually receives in the present moment

his creative impulses from the future (Davies 11). That is, esotericism invites the

seeker to adopt a spirit of receptivity to that which is potential, but not yet manifest,

and to actualize this potential through his active imagination (Davies 88). In this

way, the sought is found not in some distant, external region, as the Cartesian
 15

mentality would have it, but rather in ourselves, as seekers, in potentiae (Davies 16).

David Bohm, the twentieth-century quantum physicist, explains that the seeker finds

at the very heart of his question an attraction to what is, as yet, unknown to himan

attraction that, in turn, draws him into a state of creativity and moves him closer to

the sought:

We may feel there is something in us, and we may ask questions to

bring it outThe new idea was already in the question. You can ask,
where does this facility to be aware of the questions come from, and
perhaps thats the nature of awareness.7

The answer, it turns out, is already nascent in the question. The formulation of any

new concept originates from this paradoxical sense of familiarity with the unknown.

Thus, in order to draw out a working response that addresses his inner yearning for

knowledge, the seeker must pose questions about his own presentiments of the

unknown. For example, Coleridge seeks and asks for a symbolic language that can

articulate his obscure feeling about the hidden truth of my inner nature. Indeed,

the poet describes his encounter with landscape in terms of intuitive grasping rather

than firm conviction: he characterizes his metaphysical insights into the mysteries of

his inner nature as a dim awakeningthat is, a partial knowledge that gradually

becomes more complete as he contemplates the landscape. Through this meditative

practice, which involves active questioning, contemplation, and moments of quiet

waiting, the seeker prepares himself to receive an emergent answer.

Davies considers this question of questions to be the best kind of prayer and

meditation, precisely because it necessitates a direct invocation of the active

imagination. A strange yet wonderful fact emerges from a sustained meditation on

7
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: a Weekend Dialogue with David Bohm (London and New York:
Routledge/Ark, 1985), 100.
 16

this ultimate question, and that is, one can never arrive at a definitive answer that

resolves the search, once and for all. Because the question surrounding human

existence is undergoing a constant state of becoming, the answer must necessarily

evolve with the evolving question. The search, then, becomes a meditative exercise

that calls upon the seekers constant contemplation of the unknown, which slowly

reveals itself to his inquiring appeal, but never fully. It is this constant attraction to

the unknown that acts as a mover of time, drawing the Romantic seeker throughout

his biographical journey (Davies 30).

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey8 (1798) describes William

Wordsworth's return to the banks of Wye and to the natural sights he used to roam

about as a young man. The poem is a meditation on the moral influence of nature on

the soul, an evaluation of the poet's intellectual and spiritual maturation from youth to

age, and a formal revision of his view on the relationship between nature and the

human mind. The "few miles above Tintern Abbey" serves as a vantage point from

which the poet contemplates the evolution of his attitude toward nature: from a

passionate, sensuous exhilaration to a more substantial and intellectual pleasure; from

an aesthetic appreciation of nature to a spiritual participation in it. Wordsworth

conceives of landscape not as a projection, or even a reflection of his soul, but as a

direct expression of his soul. Wordsworth's nature is a model of the perfectly ordered

and mature mind in which harmony, spontaneity, creativity, variation, and stability all

8
William Wordsworth, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, in Romanticism: an
Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 265-269.
 17

exist in balance and in tandem. Thus nature contains the eternal forms of goodness

and stands as a representation of humanity's best potential.

The opening stanza contains twenty-three lines of rapturous description of a

sublime landscape that the waterfalls, the mountain crags, the skies, the orchards, the

trees, and the farms. Wordsworth opens the poem with the direct, simple sentence

Five years have past. Immediately he alerts the reader to the great length of time

that has elapsed since he has last encountered his beloved Wye: five appears three

times in the space of two lines, and those five winters are unquestionably long.

These five years are crucial for the spiritual maturation that Wordsworth develops

during this absence. The poet is at last reunited with the natural terrain of his youth,

but this time he brings to it a new vision and a new heart. Wordsworth conceives of

these natural elements not as entities strictly external from and independent of

himself, but rather as inseparable from his consciousness. His new understanding

and experience of the natural world necessarily involve a quiet participation in it: I

hear (2), I behold (5), Ireposeand view (9-10), I see (15). These verbs

denote a calmness and a still observation that characterize the poets relationship to

landscape. He participates in the natural phenomena with such openness and

intensity that he absorbs their physical characteristics into his own consciousness:

I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky (5-8).

A feeling of harmony and variance pervades these linesa harmony between natural

element and natural element, between the natural world and the poets soul. The verb

impress joins together the cliffs and the thoughts of the poets mind, while
 18

connect ties those cliffs with the quietsky. Nothing in the Romantic

conception exists in self-contained, self-sufficient isolation and autonomy; rather,

everything is intimately connected. However, an experience of wholeness and unity

such as Wordsworth describes does not threaten his ability to discern the diversity

and variety of the objects in question. A comparison of the adjectives in the

landscape clause yields a compelling tension among the qualities of the natural

elements: steep, lofty, wild, secluded, and quiet. Freedom, elevation,

unrestraint, calm, and stillness all exist in balance and in tandem. Wordsworth

recognizes that unity does not mean uniformity. Oneness does not reduce

everything to a muddied blur. Instead, approaching phenomena holistically enables

him to experience the multiplicity and variety of the world with greater fullness and

appreciation.

Wordsworth proceeds in the following stanza to discuss the moral realm of

landscape. The Wye holds a regenerative power that saves the poet from the

disconnection and dejection that he experiences in the urban environment. For too

long a time has the poet resided in an unintelligible world (41) in which the fretful

stir / UnprofitableHave hung upon the beatings of my heart (53-55). The long,

heavy, Latinate qualities of unintelligible and unprofitable, together with their

negated prefix un-, express the spiritual weariness that the city induces in the

poetso much of the urban world seems incomprehensible and meaningless. But he

finds in nature an expression of his best selforganic and orderly, creative and

receptive. So carefully lodged in his heart are the lessons of the natural world that

they bring forth an inexhaustible flow of spontaneous joy and goodness that tides him
 19

over the strains of urbanity: feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure (31-32) and

little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love (35-36). Nature is a

boundless resource of spiritual energy that transforms the poet into a more loving,

more joyful, more true person. Acts of kindness spring from him without any

conscious effort on his partthey are natural and spontaneous. Wordsworth insists

that the moral reformation brought about his interaction with landscape is not an

instantaneous, transitory incident, but rather a permanent change of heart, as it

contains enough life and food / For future years (65-66).

The poets mature conception of nature, one that involves an understanding

of its lessons on wholeness and a gratitude for its moral guidance, is above all

imaginative. Mere feeling for nature, passionate and ecstatic though such feeling may

be, ultimately proves unproductive and inadequate when unaccompanied by a more

actively imaginative faculty. He describes the solace that nature provides him as

[f]elt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration (28-30).

Here Wordsworth presents his hierarchy of the different activities of human

consciousness: at the bottom lies the physiological/visceral reaction, in the middle the

emotional response, and above everything else the unaffected and pure imaginative

mind. As a young man, Wordsworth approaches the natural world physiologically

and emotionally. His feelings for the natural world include a mixture of ecstasy and

danger: he roams about the Wye

more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved (71-73).
 20

He has not yet reached the point at which he can recognize the unity and wholeness of

things. He regards nature with fear because he regards it as other: only something

unknowably foreign can conceivably threaten to harm him. While at the beginning of

the poem the mature Wordsworth describes the waterfalls of the Wye as rollinga

sweet inland murmur (3-4), here he perceives those same waterfalls as the sounding

cataract / [that] Haunted me like a passion (87-88). His mature realization of a

beautiful, harmonious landscape that is representative of humanitys best potential is

necessarily preceded by his youthful conception of a sensational and predatory nature.

The landscape of Wye contains for the young Wordsworth all the fascination of a

foreign entity, and it stimulates in him sensations characterized by extremitythe

aching joys (85), dizzy raptures (86), and wild ecstasies (139).

Echoing the principle of universal harmony that Coleridge espouses in The

Aeolian Harp, in which he marvels at the one Life within us and abroad,9

Wordsworth puts forth his own thesis of unity and wholeness as expressed through

nature. In the penultimate stanza, he speaks of

[a] motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things (101-103).

This spirit is the universal consciousness that resides in all things, in both physical

and metaphysical phenomena. The interior soul and the exterior world are, if not

indistinguishable, then profoundly inter-related. Wordsworth the Romantic poet

takes this theory of participation one step further: he acknowledges that we are indeed

9
Coleridge, The Aeolian Harp, in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998).
 21

represented by nature. We are expressed by what we perceive, as much as we

perceive anything.

For the Romantics, the active imagination provides a direct pathway to higher stages

of awareness. They believed that the imagination transforms the inner life of the

individual by infusing his moods with calm purpose, cleansing his perceptions of the

world, and influencing his attitudes toward life. In this way, the imagination can be

understood as active because it facilitates deeper and more expansive stages of

awareness, not because it involves busy or toiling mental activity (Davies 64). The

Romantics saw the imagination as fundamentally opposed to discursive reasoning.

Coleridge explained that the imagination, which he referred to as reason, is

fixedthat is, absolute, fundamental, and immediate.10 The imagination alone can

access authentic knowledge, because it appealsin all its decisionsdirectly to the

ground and substance of their Truth. Intellectual reasoning, or understanding, on

the other hand, is discursivethat is, intrinsically dependent on some other premise

for its own validity. It must refer to some other faculty as its ultimate authorityin

all its judgments. Coleridge felt deeply that as his consciousness progressed from an

intellectual mindset to a more creative one, his spirit became more alive, intimate, and

grounded in nature and reality (Davies 79). He often bemoaned the fact that through

intellectual activity alone he could find so few abiding places for his reason

(Biographia Literaria, 93). Once he consciously engaged his creative spirit,

10
Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (Burlington: C. Goodrich, 1829), 40. Subsequent citations will be
given parenthetically.
 22

however, he found himself able to firmly situate his consciousness in the great present

moment and to open his spiritual eyes to its infinite richness and possibility.

This revelation about the transformative power of imaginative thinking

contains an important esoteric messagethat only through a focused attention on the

present moment can we hope to secure a brighter future and to heal past wrongs

(Davies 103). Percy Bysshe Shelley arrived at the same conclusion through his

contemplation of the subtle, but vital, changes that occur in the inner life of the

individual, when he shifts from one mode of thinking to another. In his metaphysical

poem To a Skylark (1820), Shelley laments the frequent spells of spiritual dryness

that characterize ordinary consciousness, in which the individuals thoughts are

occupied by the tedious cares of daily life.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught (86-90).11

The Romantic poets constantly expressed their deep anxieties over this hurried and

habitual state of mind that unfortunately constitutes the default mode of thinking.

Ordinary consciousness, they feared, has become dominated by the demands of

misplaced priorities, which prevents the individual from cultivating a rich and

authentic inner life, in which his thoughts, feelings, and actions are unified by honest

sincerity and singleness of purpose.

For this reason, the Romantics were determined to lay bare the fact that,

through occupying our mental and physical activities exclusively with the matters of

the immediate, material world, we develop an uncreative relationship with the world

11
Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark, in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 941-943. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 23

around us and with the passage of time. That is, we cling to the past and chase after

the future, while in the meantime, we remain utterly asleep to the flood of rapture so

divinethe spiritual sustenance that, as the esoteric tradition constantly maintains, is

infinitely available to the seeker in the present moment. Although we actively pursue

a high level of material productivity and struggle to piece together some semblance of

spiritual fullness, we are often left with a profound sense of emptiness, despite our

toiling efforts. And while we spend our material and psychic energy striving to

accumulate resources and to accomplish ambitious goals, we can never have or do

enough to appease our insecurities and find ourselves crying out for more. William

Wordsworth had this ache-and-toil lifestyle in mind when he observed that through

getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.12 William Blake, too, spoke sadly

of the mind-forged manacles,13 whose presence he discerned in the desperate cries

of humanity.

The Romantics maintained that the active imagination, which they constantly

engaged in their contemplation of the natural world, provided the single effective

antidote against spiritual dullness and dissatisfaction. They insisted that the outward

problems of daily life cannot be addressed at their own level; instead, engagement

with them must be infused from a higher wisdom. However, the Romantics never

suggested that this metaphysical wisdom should be entirely divorced from the

realities of the material world. In fact, they recognized that knowledge of the

absolute could only be gained through contemplation of the relativethat is,

12
William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us, in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed.
Duncan Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 372.
13
William Blake, London, in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998), 79.
 24

knowledge of the material world. Rudolph Steiner, the leading twentieth-century

anthroposophist, emphasized in his numerous esoteric writings that any knowledge of

higher worlds must be firmly established in a meditative study of the natural world.

He recommends to the esoteric student several initiation exercises that require

contemplative practice in relation to a seed, plant, or flower.14 Such fundamental

contemplation directly summons the active imagination, which enables the esoteric

student to conduct, with a clear mind and an open heart, a rigorous examination of

both the specific qualities of a natural object and his inner responses to the

phenomenon that holds his attention. As he practices these initiation exercises, the

esoteric student begins to experience what can be summarized as a going out of his

immediate self toward the seed, plant, or flower that is positioned before him. This

soul experience involves a direct participation in, and not merely with, the matter at

hand. Steiner insisted that without this basic contact with the concrete phenomena of

the natural world, the esoteric student can only manage to arrive at a higher

knowledge that is, at best, partially or poorly understood and therefore useless or, at

worst, entirely fabricated and therefore dangerous.

In this way, the esoteric tradition constantly cautions the seeker of higher

worlds against indulging in extreme fantasy and establishing his metaphysical

insights on a superficial or non-existent basis in reality. At the same time, it also

warns him against approaching the world with an attitude of extreme materialism, in

which the seeker regards the world of matter as the ultimate and final reality and

thereby denies the presence and influence of the higher, super-sensible worlds. Owen

14
Rudolph Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds, trans. Christopher Bamford (Hudson:
Anthroposophic Press, 1994), 50-51.
 25

Barfield explains that when we experience physical phenomena as separate and

independent from our conscious participation, we assign the material world a false

and immoderate status.15 This type of thinking, which establishes limiting categories

such as mind and matter, subject and object, self and other, presents

itself as a danger to our spiritual lives: for we remain self-satisfied and isolated in our

private spheres when we could integrate our consciousness into a greater spiritual

reality. The esoteric tradition urges the esoteric seeker to adhere to a straight spiritual

path that shuns the polar spiritual dangers of extreme fantasy and extreme

materialismin short, to develop a right relationship with reality.

The Romantics contemplated the landscape with what can be called spiritual vision,

with which they looked beyond the material reality of the natural world, in order to

access higher, metaphysical truths about their inner nature. The theme of discerning,

looking, perceiving, and seeing, and its related theme of listening and hearing, run

throughout the whole of Romantic poetry. The Romantic poets constantly referred in

their poems, letters, and treatises to the act of clearing the vision, in order to see the

world anew, as it really is, unmasked in all its glorious splendor. Seeing is often

thought of as a passive and uncomplicated act that consists of visually absorbing

whatever happens to be placed in front of the gaze. The Romantics insisted, however,

that the act of perception involves a conscious, concentrated effort to eliminate what

Shelley described as the film of familiaritythat is, the mental habits, moral

prejudices, and extreme materialism that obscure the spiritual vision. Blake

proclaimed that if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to
15
See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).
 26

man as it is, infinite. The doors refer, of course, not exclusively to the visual sense

organs, but more directly to the spiritual organs that enable the seeker to discern the

infinite nature of the universe, which is also contained within his human

consciousness. In Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), Blake explains that he

makes use of his sense perceptions in order to facilitate, by means of his active

imagination, a more spiritual and inward vision: I question not my Corporeal or

Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning sight. I look

thro it & not with it. Blake acknowledges that his sense perceptions function as a

window that reveals the final vision but does not stand in itself as the final vision.

Similarly, in his Defense of Poetry, Shelley argues that poetry functions as a

necessary good for the moral evolution of humanity, precisely because it possesses a

unique ability to purge from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures

from us the wonder of our being. When Shelley speaks of this wonder of our

being, he is not motivated by selfish egoism or an inordinate sense of grandeur.

Instead, he is pointing to the infinite nature of the human mind, which constitutes one

of the eternal mysteries that constantly reveals itself to the esoteric poet in his

contemplation of landscape. These meditations on sight and seeing bring to light an

important esoteric truththat the active imagination does not create dreamy and

insubstantial fantasies. On the contrary, it functions as a direct revealer of truth,

uncovering hidden, higher realities. Blakes insistence that, with purposeful direction

of the soul faculties, we can experience reality as it is demonstrates his conviction

that the imagination accesses already existent truths and does not indulge in make-

believe. Again, the higher knowledge gained by the active imagination does not
 27

stand as a figment of fancy that is divorced from reality, but instead exists in

profound accordance with it.

Blake insisted that when the individual closely examines his human essence

and distinguishes what is transitory from what is eternal, he finds that the imaginative

thinking constitutes the kernel of his most fundamental self: Judge then of thy Own

Self: thy eternal lineaments explore, What is Eternal and what Changeable, and what

annihilable. The Imagination is not a state: it is the Human Existence itself (my

italics). According to Blake, the imagination, which cannot be experienced by

removed observation but only by direct participation, marks us as decidedly human.

Here Coleridge explains that the human spirit, which he understood as free, creative,

authentic, and enduring, resides in the active imagination. Once again, he refers to

the active imagination as reason:

Reason is the faculty of contemplation. Reason indeed is much nearer

to sense than to understanding, for reasonis a direct aspect of Truth,
an inward beholding having a similar relation to the intelligible or
spiritual as sense has to the material or phenomenal (Aids to
Reflection, 40).

Coleridge returns to the theme of sight and seeing. This inward beholding

represents an immediate, direct, and unsurpassed knowledge. It can also be described

as a meeting with ones truer, higher, and forgotten self in the act of contemplation.

Coleridge makes a powerful claim about the infinite capacities of the individualized

human mind, when he describes the primary imagination as the repetition in the

finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The active imagination

connects the seeker, or perhaps more accurately, marks him a part of, the pure,
 28

unadulterated consciousness of the divine sourcethe original and unbroken unity

that informs all things, seen and unseen.

 29

Chapter Two:

Victorian Representation of Landscape

and the Aesthetic of Particularity

As demonstrated in Wordsworths Tintern Abbey, the Romantic relationship with

nature unfolded as a dialogical process toward self-realization. The poet began his

journey into nature with a set of unresolved and pressing questions about the

capacities of the human mind, the influence of nature on human action, and the

evolution of his own youthful emotiveness to his present, thought-centered

understanding. As he allowed the natural world to quietly reveal its answers, the poet

discovered in nature a boundless resource of moral guidance, spiritual sustenance,

and psychic restoration. What he asked for, he received, and what he sought, he

found. Nature guided him toward a moral and spontaneous action that existed in

accordance with his best self. Most importantly, the poet succeeded in locating a

precise analogue for the self in the natural world. Wordsworth proclaimed in his

revelatory state that the waterfalls, the mountain crags, the sky, and the trees

formulated an expression of his soul. For the Romantics, the imagination possessed

an unlimited capacity to apprehend the inseparable oneness between the human mind

and the material world and to rejoice in the one Life within us and abroad.

While the Romantics arrived at knowledge in broad, intuitive leaps, the

Victorians advanced toward knowledge in steady and methodical steps, each planted

firmly on empirical verification. The modern era had ushered in significant industrial

advancements and scientific discoveries that had drastically changed the collective
 30

orientation to the world. A scientific discourse was emerging that described nature as

an indifferent system of pure mechanics. In his Principles of Geology, published in

three volumes from 1830-1833, Charles Lyell proposed a uniformitarian theory of

geological evolution, which hypothesized that the formation of the earths crust

resulted from a continuous course of chemical processes that spanned the duration of

millions of years.16 For many devout geologists and creationists, Lyells text

presented a heretical challenge to the Mosaic account of the formation of the earth,

which insisted that God divinely created the universe approximately six thousand

years ago. As new knowledge of scientific discoveries became widely disseminated

through public lectures and literature, the lettered societies grew increasingly

skeptical that an intellectual connection existed between nature and the human

mind.17 For poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold,

the Romantic conviction that nature provided a sympathetic and important moral

force for humankind could no longer survive unchallenged and undamaged in this

critical era. Literary theory, too, called for an intellectually rigorous representation of

human emotion that functioned without recourse to natural fallacy. In his essay Of

the Pathetic Fallacy, John Ruskin denounces the poetic conflation of psychological

states and natural conditions as false and fantastical anthropomorphism.18 He

advocates instead a factual representation of nature that remains uncontaminated by

excessive human emotion or passion.

16
See J.M.I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: the Effect of Geological Discoveries on
English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859 (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
17
See Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830-1890, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson
Education Limited, 2001). Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
18
John Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 68-81.
 31

The mechanistic and rational principles that guided the development of

science also played a crucial role in shaping theories of social organization. In 1825,

Jeremy Bentham explained his principle of utility in The Rationale of Reward, which

urged the private citizen to pursue activities and courses of action that not only

produced useful outcomes but, more importantly, contributed to the greatest

happiness for the greatest number of people.19 Bentham equated happiness with the

presence of pleasure and the absence of pain, and he insisted that the specific

manifestations of pleasure and pain must be personally determined by each individual

for himself. Utilitarianism thus exemplified an important change in the discourse on

morality: a consequentialist system that prized pleasure as its ultimate moral objective

presented an aggressive challenge to a divinely inspired and humanly accessed

morality. In fact, Bentham maintained that pleasure represented the highest ethical

good and that all systems of morality could be reduced to the principle of sympathy

and antipathy.20 Bentham and the later Utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill and

Herbert Spencer, argued that social policies should be directed toward achieving the

highest moral imperative of pleasure, in order to secure the greatest sum of societal

happiness.21 In this way, the Utilitarians demonstrated an eager willingness to apply

the methodologies of quantitative science to their ethical objectives and expressed

confidence that their visions of social organization could be calculated and

implemented systematically. Furthermore, the movement embodied the burgeoning

individualist impulse of the modern period. Because no single, esoteric moral code

19
See Ross Harrison, Bentham (London: Routledge, 1983).
20
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principals of Morals and Legislations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 25.
21
See Harrison.
 32

existed to govern human conduct, the most sensible course of action was to ensure

that each individual pursue his private interests and secure his personal forms of

pleasure.

Utilitarianism formally stripped poetry of its honored status as an instrument

of divine knowledge and moral guidance and, in the meantime, relegated the art form

to the category of pleasurable pastime. The scientific materialism that informed both

the contemporary scientific discourse and the social sciences served to discredit many

of the esoteric principles that had made up the ethical heart of poetry. Utilitarianism

further solidified the modern disbelief that the natural world was expressly fitted to

the human mind and that the individual possessed the imaginative capacity to

apprehend a divinely inspired morality (Richards 5). Because these intuitive forms of

knowledge could not be empirically confirmed or systematically described, they were

pushed to the margins of rational discourse, or else entirely rejected as unreliable and

impractical theories. This spirit of modern skepticism, which has doggedly persisted

up until the present day, has prevented the common reader from taking poetry in

complete seriousness.

In his chapter on Art and Science, Bentham infamously compares poetry to

[a] game of push-pin:

The value which [the arts and sciences] possess is exactly in

proportion to the pleasure they yield.Prejudice apart, the game of
push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and
poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more
valuable than either (my italics).22

Bentham makes no apology for his grossly reductive evaluation of the arts and

sciences, whose intrinsic worth he reduces to the exact degree of pleasure that they
22
Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Reward (London: John and H. L. Hunt, 1825), 206.
 33

provide. He casually dismisses the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral benefits of the

humanities as fancifulspecies of preeminence that hold value insofar as they

provide pleasure. For this reason, Bentham makes no distinction between the

pleasure that accompanies the improvement of the mind and the pleasure that is

derived from distractive amusements. Aesthetic, intellectual, and religious pleasures

are not, in his mind, intrinsically superior to recreational pleasure. Utilitarianism

rejected the hierarchization of values that had structured the more traditional moral

systems and evenly leveled all forms of pleasure on a horizontal plane. Bentham

clearly believed that the pleasure that a particular activity, discipline, or pursuit

affords, and hence the value that it contains, can be determined with mathematical

precision. This Utilitarian passion for empirical quantification is acutely embedded in

Benthams language, in which he employs commercial diction in such words and

phrases as exactly in proportion, yield, equal value, and more valuable.

It is entirely possible for the cultural historians of this transitional period to

overestimate the importance of Utilitarianism (Richards 5). While Utilitarianism had

managed to cast poetry into the margins of the collective consideration, it succeeded

in doing so not because Bentham made an argument for the case, but because its

visions of social organization, moral systems, and scholarly education cut off the

esoteric life-stream of poetry at its very source (Richards 5). To an important

extent, Utilitarianism contributed in significant ways to a period of change that was

not entirely of its own making: the movement was inevitably shaped by the growing

industrial advancements and scientific discoveries that exerted their own inexorable

force.
 34

The materialistic attitude toward nature and the individualist impulse in theories of

social organization presented important implications for literature and painting.

Scientists, writers, and artists alike pursued a gathering of knowledge piecemeal and

launched an investigation into nature at the microscopic level. The important poets of

the period expressed a sensuous enthusiasm for examining the specific colors,

contours, odors, textures, and movements of a multitude of natural phenomena. This

fascination with the heterogeneous particulars of nature informed such poetic

moments as the rapt meditation on the physical properties of a farmhouse in

Tennysons Mariana (1830); the purely descriptive account of street rubbish in

Brownings Fra Lippo Lippi (1855); and the extensive inventory of market produce

in Christina Rossettis Goblin Market (1859). For these poets, the world was filled

with a thousand points of interest, each of which merited the closest attention and the

most faithfulthat is, scientifically accuraterepresentation. This aesthetic of

particularity, to borrow Carol Christs phrase, explored how each incidental

particular fulfilled the celebratory promise of a pluralistic universe.23

Thus, in directing their poetic attention to the infinite minutiae of a pluralistic

universe, the Victorian poets made a bold claim for the primacy of the particular and

the incidental over the ideal classification. The neo-Platonic principle of art, which

insisted that each manifestation of a common term (for instance, a tulip) closely echo

its eternal and transcendent form, was being rapidly replaced by a new aesthetic that

assigned primary importance to the particular and that located the essence of each

23
Carol Christ, The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1975), 80. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 35

phenomenon in its individual identity. In his preface to Studies in the History of the

Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater turns this neoclassical hierarchy that emphasized

abstraction over particulars neatly on its head, as he urges the true student of

aesthetics to define beauty by its concrete examples and special manifestations, rather

than by abstract ideas and universal formulas. Pater explains that the quality of

beauty that graces an excellent work of music, poetry, or painting is composed of an

aggregate of specific features that can be thoroughly identified and described. For

this reason, any discussion of beauty that proceeds along abstract and relativistic

terms compromises the productivity of an aesthetic analysis. The definition of

[beauty], Pater asserts unapologetically, becomes unmeaning and useless in

proportion to its abstractness.24

The task of the aesthetic critic thus remains to analyze, distinguish, and dissect

the work of art in question, in order to extract with a surgical precision that specific

feature of beauty that illuminates the entire work: His end is reached when he has

disengaged that virtueby which a picture [or] a landscape produces this special

impression of beauty and pleasure, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural

element, for himself and others (Pater 1508). Pater expresses the scientific

materialism of the age when he dismisses the possibility of an absolute standard of

truth and beauty as probably indeterminable and, in any case, irrelevant to

contemporary aesthetic criticism. The aesthetic critic who exercises his

discriminatory and analytical faculties

24
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in The Victorian Age, vol. E of The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, eds. Carole Christ and Catherine Robson, 8th ed., (New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 2005), 1507. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 36

has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty
is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience
metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysics elsewhere. He
may pass them all as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him
(Pater 1507).

For Pater, the most valuable aesthetic criticism involves a reasoned break-down of a

beautiful work of art into its distinct, irreducible features, which can then be

discussed with more or less empirical exactitude.

Brownings poems represent an important example of this movement of

Victorian aesthetics away from abstract ideals and universal formulas and toward the

particular and the incidental. His microscopic and indiscriminate examination of

nature established the particular as the basis for a new universal order (Christ 66).

Browning believed that each element of nature, no matter how miniscule or

repugnant, represented an important source of vitality and exuberance. J. Hillis

Miller points out that Brownings poetic language enacts the sensuous drama that

continuously unfolds in a heterogeneous world of objects: the stuttering alliteration

and syncopated rhythm of his verse embody the friction of active entities pursuing

their individual movements.25 Browning expressed a sensuous fascination with

objects of nature that are dense in substance and rough in texture: the objects that

inhabit his landscape often appear ready to burst forth from their skin and release

their life-force (Miller 510). He describes the exquisite and the disgusting specimens

of nature with an equal degree of detail and scientific exactitude, as he seeks to break

down the boundaries between the beautiful and the ugly.

25
See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers in Robert
Brownings Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 509-514.
Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 37

Browning often provoked criticism from those critics and poets who held

serious reservations about throwing over ideal categories and overarching concepts in

favor of celebrating the infinite particulars of the natural world. For example, in an

informal review of Brownings poetry, Matthew Arnold insisted that poets must

begin with an Idea of the world in order not be prevailed over by the worlds

multitudinousness.26 Whereas Browning approached this multitudinousness in a

spirit of joyful celebration, many of his contemporaries worried that this enthusiastic

embrace of material particulars confirmed a troublesome loss of an organizing moral

center, without which the individual risks entering a state of spiritual distractedness

and purposelessness. Christina Rossetti, whose poem Goblin Market I will discuss

further on in greater depth, believed that the infinite particulars of the natural world,

each of which seems endlessly interesting in itself, threatens to overwhelm the

physical sense and to absorb the beholder into its pure materiality. For this reason,

Arnold and Rossetti insisted that the poet must maintain overarching concepts in his

interactions with the natural world, so that he can differentiate, hierarchize, organize,

and subsume the countless pieces of information that he gathers under ideal

categories.

This central debate concerning the movement of Victorian aesthetics away

from ideal categories and toward the particular gave way to a secondary argument

that addressed the following question: which specimens of nature merits artistic

representation? In general, Browning overlooked for poetic representation those

objects that were informed by a generic ideal of beauty and directed his artistic

26
Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry
(London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 97.
 38

attention instead to those individual objects that stood out by virtue of their

idiosyncrasies. Walter Bagehot, a contemporary literary critic, was the first to

characterize Brownings as purposefully grotesque.27 Bagehot correctly pegged

Browning as an artist working by incongruity [who operates] by showing you the

distorted and imperfect image (465). Indeed, the grotesque captured and stimulated

Brownings imagination, whereas standard beautiful objects often failed to arouse his

artistic interest. Browning recognized that while normally beautiful objects share a

similar structure, each abnormal specimen is clearly differentiated from the others

and, for this reason, deserves to be celebrated for its individuality. Bagehot worried

that an indiscriminate observer of nature, who develops an excessive and unhealthy

attraction to repugnant forms, necessarily surrenders his ability to find a more

wholesome pleasure in beautiful things.

In Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, Browning salvages a pedantic book that he

had tossed into a crevice a month earlier and finds it covered with spotted, streaked,

and multi-colored mold. The title of the poem presents a facetious tongue-twister that

mocks the stuffy Latinate names of plants and, more importantly, mimics the

diversity and multiplicity of nature. Browning extracts an immense delight in

accentuating the unexpected intricacies of language: the reader trips over the multiple

syllables and jarring consonants of the poems title, just as the observer of nature

becomes spontaneously absorbed in the minute and individual particulars of the

natural world.

27
Walter Bagehot, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in
English Poetry in Robert Brownings Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1979), 465. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
 39

Here you have it, dry in the sun,

With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O'er the page so beautifully yellow:
Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
Here's one stuck in his chapter six!

How did he like it when the live creatures

Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover?
When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?28

The scholarly, lifeless text has been transformed into a proliferate breeding ground

for organic matter and a wide assortment of busy insects. Each of these parallel

existences embodies a unique physicality and pursues its essential activities. The

different species of fungi, for example, arrange themselves organically into their

individualized patterns and flaunt bright colors that distinguish them from their

backgrounds. In a moment of striking scientific realism, Browning zooms in with

microscopic focus on the face of an egg-laying beetle and accurately documents its

large, sightless, and unhearing qualities. He presents the natural world as a

composition of competing energies that wink, glister, tickle, touse, and

browse in their self-seeking efforts to convert the book into their own especial

habitat (Christ 68). These active verbs, all of which contain hard consonants and

terse, single or double syllables, evoke the robust motion that propels a dynamic and

heterogeneous universe. The disparate particulars of the natural world fail to

organize themselves into a uniform and harmonious landscape. Instead, they

28
Robert Browning, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 153.
 40

forcefully assert their individual identities and often collide discordantly with their

surrounding environment. The poem, which is heavily saturated with such visual and

tactile impressions, presents natural phenomenon as a self-contained and sharply-

defined object. Even normally passive characteristics, such as color and texture, take

on an assertive and almost aggressive comportment (Christ 67).

The overwhelming particularity and materialism of the Victorian aesthetic was also

symptomatic of darker concerns that troubled many contemporary thinkers: namely,

the loss of a determinate, eternal, and universal order and the individuals

disconnectedness from nature. What remained in the absence of this single, unifying

theory was a multitude of disparate particulars that each seemed to vie for the

beholders artistic focus and representation and that, although endlessly interesting in

themselves, failed to provide him any moral guidance, philosophical insight into the

workings of the universe, or confirmation of a sympathetic connection between nature

and the human mind. In his discussion on W. Holman Hunts The Awakening

Conscience (1851-1853), Ruskin describes how the incidental details of nature

impress themselves violently on the mind of the beholder and threaten to overpower

human intelligence with their pure materiality: The most trivial objects force

themselves upon the attention of [the] mind.They thrust themselves forward with a

ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or

measure, or learn them by heart.29 The Pre-Raphaelite artists relished a surfeit of

natural and domestic objects in their paintings and ensured that each featured item

29
John Ruskin, Letter to The Times, 25 May 1854, Works, XIII, 334.
 41

was precisely outlined, sharply focused, and executed with a high degree of detail and

finish.

Hunts painting (see image reproduced on the following page), which features

a young bourgeois couple lounging in an overstuffed parlor, faithfully replicates the

specific colors, textures, and surface decorations of a varied assortment of Victorian

bric-a-brac.30 The verisimilitude of each detailthe delicate perforations in the linen

dress, the elaborate patterns on the shawl and the tapestries, and the intricate surface

carvings on the piano forteremains intact even under microscopic inspection. But

the accumulation of objects offers the beholder no aesthetic or intellectual

gratification beyond its pure and thoughtless materiality. The discarded glove, the

unread newspaper, the flat cigar tray, and the glass-encased clock each stand forth in

striking detail and scientific exactitude, but they communicate no discernible unity or

intelligible order. Because the beholder cannot approach these distinct objects with

his sympathetic and imaginative powers, he is forced to deal with them systematically

and to register their material properties with empirical precision. The Awakening

Conscience demonstrates that the aesthetic of particularity not only produced

extraordinary mimetic results but also fulfilled an important taxonomical function.

As part of a resolute effort to control an over-determined world of objects that proved

increasingly resistant to the organizing faculties of the human mind, the Victorian

poets and painters resorted to zealously recording, describing, and categorizing the

innumerable phenomena of nature.

30
William Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, oil painting on canvas, 1851-1853, Tate Museum,
London.
42
 43

This obsession with compiling extensive and descriptive lists of objects was

primarily driven by a relentless search for an objective standard of truth. Many

Victorian poets distrusted the distortive powers of subjectivity and were thus

compelled to reject intuitive forms of knowledge. While the Romantics located truth

and reality in the reciprocal relationship between nature and the human mind, the

Victorians often pursued a materialistic knowledge of nature that was founded on

empirical observation and that remained uncontaminated by human feeling. The

scientific materialism of the age could no longer sustain the individuals

interdependent relationship with nature, in which the natural world formulated an

expression of his mind and guided him toward correct moral action. The Romantic

poets recognized the necessary role that the epistemological processes, such as

apprehension, assimilation, memory, and recreation, played in shaping their

understanding of the world. Consequently, they did not fear that a conscious and

feeling participation in the material world threatened to imprison the individual in a

solipsistic frame of mind or to eclipse the identity of the object at hand. For

Victorians, however, any knowledge gained of the outer world or judgment

formulated about its various components, no matter how objectively anchored in

empirical verification, contained value and meaning for the subject and the subject

only. Pater insists in his conclusion to The Renaissance that the individuals

consciousness consists of an indeterminate and contingent stream of sensuous

experiences, which remain circumscribed within the subjects thick wall of

personality through which no voice has ever pierced (1511).

 44

Thus the new aesthetic process of locating, investigating, and documenting the

material properties of natural phenomena became a profoundly separating, rather than

unifying, act. The Victorian artists earnestly followed Ruskins instructions to

approach nature in a spirit of humility and to select nothing [and] reject nothing31 in

their study and representation of nature. However, this aesthetic ethos that

encouraged an indiscriminate embrace of the worlds multitudinousness, to borrow

Arnolds phrase, failed to inspire within the artist an outward expansiveness toward

and an inward identification with the natural phenomenon represented. The

overwhelming multiplicity of nature only informed the individual of his existential

separateness and compelled him to retreat further into his private and insular sphere.

Although the Victorian poets and painters sought to represent nature with empirical

precision, they could not avoid psychologizing their physical environment and thus

risked slipping into the domain of solipsism. Christ points out that the Victorian

treatment of nature corresponds to a curious detachment from any authentic interest in

nature itself. The materialistic culture of the age prevented the artist from interacting

with nature in the spirit of true openness, receptivity, and reverence required for the

natural world to reveal its divine secrets. The more empirical knowledge the

Victorian poets gathered about the outer world, the more keenly aware they became

of the emptiness and indeterminacy within. Nature, it seemed, had become the great

distancer of humankind from the divine.

31
John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, vol. 3,
(London: G. Allen, 1903-1912), 624.
 45

For Alfred Tennyson, this inexorable movement toward extreme subjectivity

presented troubling implications for the moral sensibilities and social commitments of

humanity. Tennyson understood that the scientific materialism and individualist

impulse of the modern period had destroyed much of the sympathetic force that

connected the individual to the outer world and that enabled him to apprehend a

universal order. He took with complete seriousness his role as a social poet who

dedicated himself to the education of his public audience; naturally, he was anxious

about the solipsistic consequences that resulted from the subjects withdrawal into his

self-enclosed consciousness (Christ 36). In many of his early poems, such as

Mariana, The Lady of Shalott (1832), and The Lotos-Eaters (1832), Tennyson

launched an epistemological investigation into what he considered to be the

pathological powers of subjectivity, which distorted human perception and damaged

the possibility of a universally accessible meaning. Tennysons dramatis personae

devote an almost obsessive attention to a random selection of particulars that, when

combined with the dreamlike reality of their representation, produces an intensely

psychological landscape. These poems explore the various ways in which a sustained

and emotionally charged contemplation of the natural world and its mundane

particulars gives way to a state of complete solipsism. In addition, these poems often

depict static images of objects and places that appear to exist outside of time and

space and that lack any indication of a concrete and phenomenal existence (Christ

38). The timeless, changeless, and even bodiless quality that emanates from these

representations of nature suggests, of course, that the landscape exists primarily

 46

through the subjects distortive perception, providing further indication of his

imprisonment within the thick walls of personality.

In Mariana, Tennyson articulates his deep anxieties about the self-enclosed

beholder who forcibly projects his private emotions onto his physical environment

and thereby imposes a severe separation between himself and the reality of the natural

world. The poem creates a haunting presentation of landscape that explores the

solitary fears, obsessive thoughts, and hallucinatory perceptions of the eponymous

heroine. Having been abandoned by her lover in a deserted farmhouse, Mariana

mourns her severe isolation from the human world and retreats further into her private

and insular sphere. She absorbs the various particulars of her environment through an

emotional filter of isolation and melancholy, until eventually the entire landscape

conveys a gloomy homogeneity in its emotional tone. The poem evokes a nostalgic

longing for the Romantic ethos of universal connectedness, which inspired the

individual to approach nature in a spirit of openness and receptivity, in order to

transcend the narrow confines of his personality and to apprehend the divine source

that sustained all things material and spiritual. Tennyson recognized that whenever

the beholder approaches the natural world in a spirit of self-absorption, he necessarily

eclipses the identity of the object at hand and prevents the object from revealing its

divine secrets. In her despondent examination of nature, Mariana gains no

substantive knowledge of its material phenomena and cannot acknowledge the reality

of their independent existences. She discerns in the natural world only a narrow

reflection of her inner melancholy and thus remains trapped within an inescapable

circuit of private emotion. Just as Narcissus becomes single-mindedly obsessed with

 47

his physical beauty and eventually drowns in a shallow pool that reflects his image,

so Mariana develops a pathological addiction to her own brooding sorrow that

anticipates her psychic collapse and disintegration.

Landscape functions as the poems primary conveyor of mood. Tennyson

does not attempt to provide a lifelike depiction of a country farmhouse but aims

instead to explore the various ways in which the psyche shapes landscape and lends it

a distinctly dreamlike reality. Although Mariana does not describe the grange in the

first-person lyric voice, the poem presents the landscape in such uniform intensity

that the reader comes to understand the environment through the heroines eyes

(Christ 19). Here in the opening stanza, Tennyson introduces the dreamy house

(61) through a series of sharply focused and disjointed sense impressions:

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable wall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, My life is dreary,
He cometh not, she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead! (1-12)32

What is most striking about this passage is the way in which each imagemoss,

flower-plots, nails, knots, pear, wall, sheds, latch, thatch, grangestands forth in

crystal clearness and distinct precision. For all their startling prominence, however,

these pieces of botanical and domestic clutter seem utterly devoid of any indication of

32
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Mariana, in The Victorian Age, vol. E of The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, eds. Carole Christ and Catherine Robson, 8th ed., (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
2005), 1112-1114.
 48

a concrete and phenomenal existence. Throughout the poem, Tennyson makes

heavily gestural references to the various creatures, furniture, plants, and tools that

compose the landscape. These gestural references consist mostly of noun-adjective

pairs that lack substantial descriptions of their material characteristics, such as the

flower-plots, the rusted nails, the gable wall, the broken sheds, and the

clinking latch. Furthermore, the sweetly assonant and almost precious sound quality

that these references convey draws further attention to the hollowness of their

representation: although bold and clear in outline, these images become strangely

ephemeral in substance.

In the first line, for example, the poet provides the odd but evocative image of

blackest moss. Several puzzling questions come to mind when the reader attempts

to form a mental picture of blackest moss: how has this characteristically green-

colored plant become black? How does the dramatis persona know that the moss is

black as black can be? The answer, of course, to these seemingly pointless questions

is that the blackest moss does not signify any familiar or even existent plant but

stands instead as a morbid and otherworldly image of grass that results from the

beholders distorted perception. Indeed, Marianas psychic pain has brought about a

severe imbalance between her awareness of abundance and her awareness of

deterioration (Christ 25). Her sense impressions uniformly reflect her obsession with

the processes of decay, so that the outer world appears sad and strange to her eyes:

the rusty nails loosen themselves from the wall, while the pathetic sheds are falling to

pieces. The image of the clinking latch [that]was unlifted becomes especially

sinister as the poem dwells on the unfulfilled potential of the apparatus.

 49

The poem is marked by an almost complete absence of dynamic movement

that signals Marianas imprisonment in a world without hope of change (29). Her

feelings of entrapment extend beyond her solitary isolation in the lonely moated

grange to include a captivity of consciousness. Each object mentioned in the fourth

stanza, reproduced below, remains tightly sequestered within its prescribed space and

engages in little to no interaction with the neighboring items.

About a stonecast from the wall

A sluice with blackened waters slept,
And oer it many, round and small,
The clustered marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bar:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounded gray.
She only said, My life is dreary,
He cometh not, she said;
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead! (37-48)

The only words that connect each self-contained image to another are relational

prepositions that denote the spatial arrangement, such as a stonecast from, oer it,

hard by, and for leagues. A short analysis of the active verbs uncovers, not

surprisingly, a notable lack of action: the sluice, or embankment, sle[eps] with

blackened waters to suggest a filthy and unwholesome stagnation; the clustered

marish-mosses cre[ep] above the motionless water with insidious intent; and the

silver-green poplar [that] sh[akes] alway provides a rare instance of dynamic, albeit

isolated, movement. As in the poems opening stanza, a timeless, changeless, and

even bodiless quality emanates from these gestural images (Christ 23), which express

a certain homogeneity in their representation of disintegration and decay. The

gloomy observation that no other tree did mark / The level waste belabors the
 50

unfulfilled potential of the wide expanse of empty land and emphasizes not what is

present, but instead what is absent. The studied stillness of the landscape is further

reinforced by the poems monotonous and trance-like rhythm, which mostly consists

of mono- and duo-syllabic words that fall neatly into a strict iambic meter. The

slightest movement produces a startling effect, so that the reader can almost hear in

the first stanza the rusted nails fall to the ground with a ring of finality, breaking the

meditative silence of the uninhabited grange. Mariana is driven into a state of

irreversible despair by the uniform stasis of her unchanging world. In the poems

morbid refrain, reproduced above in lines 9-12 and 45-48, Mariana repeatedly

articulates her existential fatigue and desire for death. The she only saidshe said

that brackets her lament for her lover and the repetition of dreary and alternatively

aweary mimic the closed and static quality of her existence.

Marianas sense impressions reveal an acute sensitivity to sight, sound, and

movement that far exceeds normal human perception. Her manic attentiveness to the

mundane particulars of the natural world is symptomatic of a pathologically strained

state of mind. Marianas overwrought senses cannot support the normal

epistemological processes that contribute to a wholesome contemplation of landscape.

An individual who possesses healthy faculties of perception, for example, can distill,

organize, and hierarchize a multitude of impressions that he gathers from the

landscapehighlighting, for example, central elements that stand in the forefront

while leaving minor background matter appropriately blurred. Mariana, however,

surveys her entire natural surroundings with a microscopic and indiscriminate eye and

documents each phenomenon with the same degree of extreme detail. In a desperate
 51

endeavor to locate some point of emotional release, her mind seizes upon any object

that lies within her range of perception, until the landscape lacks any discernable

unity or intelligible order.

Faced with the unbroken sameness of her environment, Mariana monitors the

changes of the day with an almost obsessive attention, scanning the skies in a futile

effort to discern a glimmer of future hope and peace. She despises the intrusive

morning sunbeams (77-79) and cannot stand to stare into the heavens at morn or

eventide (15-16). Marianas spiritual insomnia denies her any form of precious

respite, as she prowls the grange at all hours of the night to track the movements of

the moon:

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the nightfowl crow;
The cock sung out an hour ere light;
From the dark fen the oxens low
Came to her; without hope of change,
In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
Upon the lonely moated grange.

The sounds of the nightfowl, crow, and oxen punctuate the stillness of the night and

mark the progress of time. Mariana observes as the entire grange and its natural

inhabitants make their inexorable movements through time, while she alone remains

ever the same: alone, desolate, and desirous of death. Mariana demonstrates the

important ways in which Victorian aesthetic had deviated from the Romantic

principle of universal identification. Tennyson obviously shared with the Romantic

poets an epistemological concern in the central role that human psychology played in

formulating the natural world. However, while the Romantics placed a primary

emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between the human mind and the natural
 52

world, Tennysons interests tended to collapse entirely on the side of subjectivity and

the psychological states of extreme emotion, sensation, obsession, and hallucination

(Christ 25). In Mariana, Tennyson condemns the extreme subjectivity of the self-

enclosed subject, but he never explicitly advocates a conscious and feeling

participation in the natural world.

Throughout Tennysons investigations into the phenomenological processes

of the self-enclosed subject, a fascinating tension constantly unfolds between the

firmness of his ethical reservations and the aesthetic curiosity of his poetic ambition.

On the one hand, Tennyson believed that the solipsistic frame of mind presented

serious threats to the moral sensibilities and social commitments of humanity. His

poems that depict moments of madness, confinement, and hallucination mourn the

loss of a universal order and warn against the spiritual dangers that emerge from

subjects retreat into his private and insular sphere. On the other hand, Tennyson was

keenly aware that an investigation into extreme subjectivity offered certain aesthetic

advantages so rich and unexplored that he felt compelled to pursue them in his poetic

experimentation. Many of his early poems explore the emotional intensities and

sensual richness that become possible when the self-enclosed subject examines the

outer world with an indiscriminate and microscopic eye. In the case of Mariana,

the beholder fastens her attention to a multitude of particulars with an almost

obsessive concentration, until each phenomenal perception becomes charged with an

emotion of unparalleled intensity. Thus, unlike Browning and Gerard Manley

Hopkins, who were able to describe the natural world with a considerable measure of

dispassionate objectivity, Tennyson plunged directly into morbid states of extreme

 53

subjectivity in order to explore these aesthetic and emotional possibilities. In doing

so, Tennyson also convincingly presented the morbid temptations of solipsism that

proved difficult to overcome in the modern period.

Tennysons poetic experiments in extreme subjectivity provided an important source

of thematic and aesthetic inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters. These

artists found themselves immediately drawn to Tennysons treatment of medieval

subject matter, the rich sensuousness of his descriptive passages, and his

preoccupation with the subjective powers of the human mind (Christ 37). However,

while Tennyson sought to expose the spiritual dangers that accompanied the

solipsistic frame of mind, the Pre-Raphaelites embraced extreme subjectivity with an

almost sensationalist enthusiasm. In this way, the Pre-Raphaelites engaged a similar

aesthetic of particularity that examined the natural world with Tennysonian focus, but

their pursuits were motivated by an entirely different philosophical agenda. As they

strove single-mindedly to perfect their super-realistic and highly stylized presentation

of nature, they neglected to cultivate the proper degree of self-reflection that had

enabled Tennyson to assess the moral problematics of his aesthetic choices.

As a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the painter and poet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti shared Tennysons enthusiasm for expressing states of

extreme emotion through a concentrated presentation of landscape. Rossetti clearly

possessed a sharp visual perception and a heightened sensitivity to natural forms,

which served to enrich his meticulous depictions of a wide assortment of natural and

domestic phenomena, such as birds, flowers, furniture, trees, weather, and sounds.
 54

The strikingly realistic images that populate his nature poems provide a stark contrast

against the gestural references that compose Tennysons psychological landscapes.

Tennyson uses an emotionally charged topography to indicate the subjects feelings

of isolation, madness, and hallucination. His dreamlike images, which convey a

significant degree of symbolic depth and emotional effect, seem to lack any

indication of a phenomenal existence. Rossettis poems, on the other hand, are filled

with concrete images of nature that suggest a decidedly more definite location in time

and space: he packs each composition with an abundance naturalistic details, each

rendered in remarkable scientific accuracy. These natural images often develop into a

random accumulation of surface descriptions and botanical facts. For this reason,

they carry minimal symbolic and emotional import and fail to communicate any

meaningful order (Christ 39).

This important distinction between the poets descriptive techniques points to

larger differences in their respective epistemological frameworks. Tennysons

presentation of landscape, which exists primarily through the subjects distortive

perception, collapses entirely on the side of extreme subjectivity. Rossettis aesthetic

interests remain exclusively concerned with a factual representation of the natural

world and thus collapses on the side of extreme materialism. His poems operate

within a strict dualist framework that establishes an ontological separation between

subject and object, so that any amount of information that the beholder gathers

about the outer world can provide no valuable insight into the inner workings of his

psychic life. Rossettis poetic speakers encounter in nature only the presence of pure

and unthinking materiality and remain entirely oblivious to the spiritual sustenance
 55

that their Romantic predecessors found so abundantly in the natural world. Because

the beholder cannot approach these distinct objects with his sympathetic and

imaginative powers, he must deal with them systematically and register their surface

characteristics with empirical precision. In this way, the aesthetic of particularity

reveals a severe upset in the balance between introspection and outward interest:

either the extreme subjectivist becomes so absorbed in his solipsistic frame of mind

that he loses all contact with the reality of the outer world, or else the extreme

materialist becomes exclusively preoccupied with the natural world, to the detriment

of his spiritual life.

In The Day Dream, Rossetti displays the same studied realism that

characterizes Hunts painting. The speaker describes with factual dexterity a tightly

packed summer garden that contains, among other things, [a] shadowy sycamore,

young leaflets, and the leaves[]spiral tongues:

The embowered throstles urgent clangours gore

The summer silence. Still the leaves come new
Yet never rose-sheathed as those which drew
Their spiral tongues from spring-buds heretofore (5-8).33

The richness and precision of Rossettis natural descriptions might compel the reader

to consult an encyclopedia in an effort to determine whether or not spring-buds

indeed display spiral tongues. However, the poem ultimately remains a glorified

collection of botanical facts that conveys only a minimal degree of symbolic effect.

Rossetti succeeds in evoking a particular mood that infuses much of Pre-Raphaelite

artan atmosphere of lush sumptuousness that results from a beautiful and careful

representation of the particulars of an over-determined world. But his poems resist

33
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Day Dream, in A Series of Holograph MSS: 1849-1880,
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/redvolume.lcms.rad.html (accessed January 1, 2008).
 56

any attempt on the part of the reader to apply a symbolic interpretation or to extract

any intellectual gratification beyond an appreciation for its extraordinary surface

realism.

Occasionally Rossetti displayed a keen awareness of the spiritual emptiness

that results from this materialistic approach to the natural world. In The

Woodspurge, the best solace that the grieving speaker can extract from his

concentrated examination of nature is a piece of scientifically accurate and

existentially meaningless information: the woodspurge has a cup of three.

My eyes, wide open, had the run

Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flower'd, three cups in one.

From perfect grief there need not

Wisdom or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me,
The woodspurge has a cup of three (9-16).34

The speakers microscopic eye, which demonstrates a powerful capacity for optical

magnification, zooms rapidly from a gathering of ten weeds, to a single woodspurge,

and finally to the flowers individual cups. His precise count of the plants and their

individual components further uncovers the hyper-sensitivity of his visual attention

and reveals his compulsive tendency to consider each particular as a distinct entity

that stands in complete separation from its neighboring particulars. Richards

observes that these disparate particulars of the natural world offer the speaker no

spiritual consolation, insights into the workings of nature, or even salutary distraction

(157). Like Tennysons grief-obsessed Mariana, the speaker fixes his attention

34
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Woodspurge, in A Victorian Anthology, ed. Edmund Clarence
Stedman (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895), 732.
 57

obsessively uponsome ten weeds, in a futile effort to extract some measure of

spiritual solace. While The Woodspurge communicates the existential despair of

the extreme materialist, the speaker nonetheless manages to locate a moment of

hollow satisfaction: he realizes that the spiritual emptiness that he encounters in

nature relieves him of the burden of the search for meaning, in a world in which the

possibility of a universal order remains unclear.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, the younger sister and artistic contemporary of Dante

Gabriel, positioned herself firmly against this form of extreme materialism. She

believed that the aesthetic of particularity compelled the beholder to indulge his

senses in the remarkable variety of the natural world and to deny, in the meantime,

the divine presence in nature. Her most famous poem, Goblin Market, presents an

implicit rejection of the shallow yearning for natural realism that had inspired much

of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. The poem opens with a prolonged and remarkable

list of delicious, forbidden market produce: a sinister gang of goblin merchants shout

forth the names of countless varieties of apples, berries, citrus, and other fruits that

are available for the beholders consumption. The list communicates Rossettis deep

anxieties that naturein its infinite colors, flavors, forms, movements, and scents

threatens to absorb the beholder into its pure materiality and to dampen his spiritual

awareness of a higher, divine presence. The poem sustains her religious conviction

that the beholder who immerses himself exclusively in the sensuous richness of

nature eventually becomes lost in a spiritual state of anomie. Only an unshakable

 58

moral center, Rossetti maintained, can guide him toward making sense of the

multiplicity of the natural world.

Christina Rossetti was by no means an reclusive ascetic who isolated herself

from the outside world, untouched by the sensuous pleasures of nature. In fact,

Rossetti considered herself an avid participant in and passionate lover of nature. She

often spent her family holidays exploring the English countryside with her siblings,35

and her early letters reveal that she frequently visited the Regents Park Zoological

Gardens in her adolescence and young adulthood.36 After one such visit in August

1858, she wrote enthusiastically to her older brother, William Michael, about the

lizards, tortoises, alligators, armadillos, wombats, and porcupines that she observed.37

However, Rossetti was convinced that when the beholder approaches the natural

world for the sole purpose of indulging its sensuous pleasures, he necessarily risks

assigning the natural world a false and immoderate status. The Tractarian writings of

John Keble and John Newman profoundly influenced her sacramental attitude toward

nature. These prominent theologians declared that the material elements of the

natural world stand as symbols the invisible divinity (Grass 360), and that the devout

Christian must make a concentrated effort to locate in nature the signs of the

Creator.38 For this reason, Rossetti tempered her instinctive desire to celebrate the

sensuous splendors of the natural world and faithfully examined nature for its moral

and sacred meanings (Grass 360).

35
See Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical Study, 4th ed. (New York:
Haskell House, 1971).
36
Sean Grass, Natures Perilous Variety in Rossettis Goblin Market, Nineteenth-Century
Literature 51, no. 3 (December 1996) 356-376. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically.
37
Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Brown,
Langham, and Company, 1908), 25-26.
38
G.B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: the Tractarian Mode (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), 21.
 59

Goblin Market explores the intimate relationship that evolves between two

young sisters: the beautiful and carefree Laura, who finds herself overcome by the

infinite particulars of the natural world, and the morally steadfast Lizzie, who

redeems the transgression of her wayward sister through the strength of her sisterly

love. The narrative traces the initial temptations, painful consequences, and eventual

redemption of Lauras moral transgression, which centers around her consumption of

the delicious, forbidden fruit peddled by a sinister gang of goblin merchants, who

function in the poem as agents of temptation and spiritual destruction. During a

covert visit to the goblin market, Laura offers the goblin merchants coveted parts of

her bodya precious golden lock (126) and a tear more rare than pearl (127)in

exchange for fruits that bring her unfathomable pleasure, sweeter than honey from

the rock (129) and stronger than man-rejoicing wine (130). Laura soon suffers

from the deleterious effects of the addictive fruit and, trapped in a state of

unendurable withdrawal, rapidly wastes away in body and spirit. Through her sisterly

love and devotion, however, Lizzie manages to recover the disintegrating Laura and

to redeem her sisters moment of moral weakness. Lizzie approaches the goblin

merchants and offers them a silver penny in exchange for pieces of fruit, which she

intends to feed to her sister, but refuses to hand over what they truly desireher

company and her body. The enraged goblin merchants attack the intractable Lizzie,

who stood / Like a lily in a flood / [] Lashed by tides obstreperously (408-409,

411). Having resisted their attempts to force-feed her pieces of fruit, Lizzie returns

home to feed her sister the leftover fruit juice that has stained her body. This selfless
 60

act of sisterly sacrifice results in Lauras salvation and brings about her physical and

spiritual renewala life out of death (524).

For the analytic purposes of an investigation into the poetic representation of

landscape, perhaps the most fascinating passage of the poem can be found in its

opening stanza, which consists mostly of the extensive list of market produce.

Indeed, this list stands out from the countless descriptions of landscape that permeate

Victorian nature poems, by virtue of its sheer length, colorful descriptive power, rapid

rhythm, and the rapt attention it pays to identifying the different types of a wide

assortment of fruit. The reader might expect to find such a thirty-line compilation of

the names of twenty-six different types of fruits technical and monotonous. But

instead, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the market scene by the irresistible

appeal of the poems descriptive power. I have provided the entire first stanza in full,

in order to present an example of the aesthetic of particularity at its most detailed,

elaborate, and exhaustive:

Morning and evening

Maids heard the Goblins cry:
Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;
All ripe together
In summer weather,
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
 61

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.39

The poets moral objection to a materialistic approach to nature can hardly be

detected in this celebration of natural specimens that prove sweet to tongue and

sound to eye. One of the poems greatest achievements lies in the brightness and

vitality of its descriptive language, which convincingly enacts the extreme temptation

that nature presents to the fascinated beholder. Laura becomes quickly absorbed in

this parade of beautiful and delicious fruit, each of which she finds endlessly

interesting in itself. The stanzas melodic sounds, rapid rhythms, and proliferation of

similes exemplify the feelings of excitement and joyousness that the beholder extracts

from the natural world. The market scene captivates passers-by not only because it

features an extraordinary array of fruit, or because the fruits promise a delicious

sensory experience, but most importantly because each fruit is distinctly different

from the others: the softness of the bloom-down cheeked peaches stands in sharp

contrast against the rough texture of the swart-headed mulberries, which in turn

distinguishes itself from full volume of the plump unpecked cherries and the vivid

color of the bright-fire-like barberries. While the goblin merchants first shout the

39
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, in The Victorian Age, vol. E of The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, eds. Carole Christ and Catherine Robson, 8th ed., (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2005), 1466-1478.
 62

names of more commonplace fruits, such as apples, lemons, and oranges, they

soon advertise the names of more exotic fruits, such as quinces and rare pears.

The market-goer rapidly learns that any species fruit might yield a number of sub-

species: for example, the poem individually identifies three different varieties of

plumsbullaces, greengages, and damsonsand nine different varieties of

berries, including the lesser-known mulberries, bilberries and barberries.

Again, such an elongated enumeration of fruit names does not fatigue the reader with

its repetition and sameness, but instead forces the beholder to marvel, as Laura so

eagerly does, at the incredible diversity of the natural world.

Grass notes that these multifarious fruits have assembled together in order to

form what he describes as natures perilous variety (361). The format of the list,

which Rossetti uses to introduce the names of the fruits, serves to enact the sensuous

temptations that the natural world presents to the undiscerning beholder. The goblin

merchants advertise each fruit horizontally: that is, while each fruit is distinctly

different from the others, no one fruit is characterized as more important or more

appealing than another. This sheer variety of fruits intoxicates Lauras physical

senses and confuses her moral discernment (Grass 362). Consequently, her

indiscriminate consumption of market fruits contributes directly to her bodily and

psychic collapse. As Laura succumbs to the harmful effects of the addictive fruit, the

narrative finds her entirely drained of her youthful energy and prematurely aged: Her

hair grew thin and grey; / She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift

decay and burn / Her fire away (277-280). What had once served as her primary
 63

source of bliss has now become a wearisome burden for the fallen heroine (Grass

371).

Goblin Market actively addresses several important concerns that engaged

an entire generation of painters, poets, and critics, many of whom felt compelled to

claim an artistic and moral position vis--vis the aesthetic of particularity. On the

most superficial level, the poem acknowledges the wondrous pleasures that the

natural world offers to the sensory perceptions of the beholder. Rossetti shared with

Browning and her brother Dante Gabriel a fascination with the diverse and infinite

particulars of the natural world and demonstrated an eager readiness to capture the

specific characteristics of material phenomena with microscopic accuracy. On a more

moral level, the poem warns against the spiritual dangers of idolatry that arise when

the beholder regards the material world as the ultimate reality. Goblin Market

communicates Rossettis anxieties that the multiplicity of the natural world threatens

to cast the beholder into a state of spiritual distractedness, when he finds each

particular to be endlessly interesting in itself. Like Tennyson, Rossetti exploited the

aesthetic of particularity for the purposes of her own artistic experimentation but

remained, at the same time, aware of the troublesome moral implications that

surrounded such an aesthetic.

Obviously, Rossetti did not mean to suggest that the individual who derives a

sensuous enjoyment from nature necessarily lacks a firm spiritual grounding, or that

the dedicated and reverent beholder must close himself off to the pleasures of the

natural world. Instead, she advocated what she considered to be the proper manner in

which to approach nature and to appreciate the diversity of its infinite particulars: the
 64

beholder must discern signs of the creator in natures smallest details. Mary

Arseneau, as she discusses Goblin Market in the context of Rossettis involvement

with the Oxford Movement, explains that according to Tractarian belief, the devout

Christian, in an effort to secure his spiritual salvation, must make a concentrated and

sustained effort to consider the natural world as a material indication of Christs

enduring presence and incarnation on earth.40 In a similar observation, Sean Grass

points out that Goblin Market emphasizes the necessity of cultivating a singleness

of mind and purpose, in order to overcome the sensory overload of the natural world

(363). In this way, Rossettis religious message reinforces Arnolds statement that

poets must have an Idea of the world in order not to be prevailed over by the worlds

multitudinousness. While Arnold may not have been referring specifically to a

Christian Idea of the world, he nonetheless insisted on the necessity of sustaining

overarching concepts, under which the poet can organize, and indeed subordinate, the

infinite pieces of information that he gathers about the natural world.

40
See Mary Arseneau, Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and
Goblin Market, Victorian Poetry 31 (1993), 81.
 65

Conclusion:

Toward a Reconciliation?

As the modern era entered a transitional period of rapid industrial, scientific, and

intellectual change, the epistemological terms surrounding a poetic investigation into

nature changed accordingly. Because the Victorian thinkers firmly established their

pursuit of knowledge on empirical verification, they could not easily accept

Wordsworths insistence that the natural world was expressly fitted to the human

mind.41 In general, the Victorian poets who concerned themselves with landscape no

longer approached the natural world in an effort to arrive at metaphysical truths about

human nature. Instead, they launched an investigation into landscape at the

microscopic level, in order to systematically categorize, describe, and organize its

infinite particulars. While poets such as Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti

condemned this absence of a universal order, which characterized most poetic

representations of landscape, they found themselves unable to fully support the

Romantic conviction that landscape functions as a direct expression of the poets

inner nature. Rossetti might have implored the beholder of nature to discern signs of

the divine presence in the natural world, but she could not conclude that the human

mind is directly derived from the divine source, as a repetition in the finite mind of

the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. Tennyson also attempted to preserve

a spiritual faith that cannot be sustained by the intellectual reason alone:

We have but faith: we cannot know,

41
See Wordsworth, The Excursion in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998): and how exquisitely, too / Theme this but little heard among men / The
external World is fitted to the Mind (66-68).
 66

For knowledge is of things we see;

And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow (21-24).42

Tennysons In Memoriam examines, among other themes, the hopeless despair of the

poets private grief, the failure of his poetic language, and the possibility of

preserving a spiritual conviction in the age of scientific skepticism. These lines show

the desperate efforts of a modern poet to convince himself of the correctness and

necessity of faith, despite that he regards faith as fundamentally incompatible with

knowledge, as light is incompatible with darkness. Because he cannot intellectually

know that which he believes, his faith essentially amounts to an act of blind trust.

While the Victorian poet must see with his intellectual reason, the Romantics

spiritual vision was facilitated by the active imagination. The Romantics, who prized

the active imagination as a direct aspect of Truth, found no disconnect between

faith and knowledge. Tennysons comments summarize the modern poets

continuous struggle to reconcile his spiritual impulses with the increasing skepticism

of modernity.

42
Tennyson, In Memoriam, in The Victorian Age, vol. E of The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, eds. Carole Christ and Catherine Robson, 8th ed., (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
2005), 1138-1189.
 67

LIST OF WORKS CITED

Primary Materials:

Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. Edited by
Howard Foster Lowry. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.

Bagehot, Walter. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and
Grotesque Art in English Poetry. In Robert Brownings Poetry. Edited by
James F. Loucks. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principals of Morals and Legislations.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Bentham, Jeremy. Rationale of Reward. London: John and H. L. Hunt, 1825.

Blake, William. London. In Romanticism: an Anthology. Edited by Duncan Wu.

2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Aeolian Harp. In Romanticism: an Anthology.

Edited Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

________. Aids to Reflection. Burlington: C. Goodrich, 1829.

________. Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
and Co., 1895.

________. Biographia Literaria. London: Chrissy & Markley, 1853.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. In The Victorian Age. Vol.
E. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Carole Christ and
Catherine Robson. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market. In The Victorian Age. Vol. E. The Norton
Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Carole Christ and Catherine
Robson. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Woodspurge. In A Victorian Anthology. Edited by

Edmund Clarence Stedman. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895.

Rossetti, William Michael, ed. Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti.

London: Brown, Langham, and Company, 1908.
 68

Ruskin, John. Selected Writings. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004.

________. The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander

Wedderburn. Vol. 3. London: G. Allen, 1903-1912.

Steiner, Rudolph. How to Know Higher Worlds. Translated by Christopher Bamford.

Hudson: Anthroposophic Press, 1994.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. In Memoriam. In The Victorian Age. Vol. E. The Norton
Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Carole Christ and Catherine
Robson. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

________. Mariana. In The Victorian Age. Vol. E. The Norton Anthology of

English Literature. Edited by Carole Christ and Catherine Robson. 8th ed.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Wordsworth, William. The Excursion. In Romanticism: an Anthology. Edited

Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

________. Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. In Romanticism: an

Anthology. Edited Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

________. The World is Too Much With Us. In Romanticism: an Anthology.

Edited Duncan Wu. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Secondary materials:

Arseneau, Mary. Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford

Movement, and Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry 31, 1993.

Bell, Mackenzie. Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical Study. 4th Ed. New
York: Haskell House, 1971.

Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry. London: Faber and
Faber, 1957.

Bohm, David. Unfolding Meaning: a Weekend Dialogue with David Bohm. London
and New York: Routledge/Ark, 1985.

Christ, Carol. The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Davies, Paul. Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition: Studies in Imagination. Hudson:

Lindisfarne Books, 1998.
 69

Grass, Sean. Natures Perilous Variety in Rossettis Goblin Market. Nineteenth-

Century Literature 51, 1996.

Harrison, Ross. Bentham. London: Routledge, 1983.

Klaver, J.M.I. Geology and Religious Sentiment: the Effect of Geological

Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859.
Leiden: Brill, 1997.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers in

Robert Brownings Poetry. Edited by James F. Loucks. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1979.

Richards, Bernard. English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830-1890. London:

Pearson Education Limited, 2001.

Tennyson, G.B. Victorian Devotional Poetry: the Tractarian Mode. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1981.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.