Lord Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Lord Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! George Gordon Byron Life • George Gordon Byron is an unconventional aristocrat and to many of his contemporaries, Byron’s poetry and life embodied the romantic spirit. • Though rich and handsome, he had a handicap that consisted in a deformed foot and because of this he lacked a happy childhood. However, as a student at Cambridge University, he not only drank, gambled and made brilliant conversations but he forces himself to become skilled at physical sports. • In 1807 he published Hours of Idleness, a small volume of lyric poems which was attacked in the pages of the Edinburgh Review; Byron replied with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, where he showed his taste for satire. • In 1809 he set out on his Grand Tour, visiting Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East, where he gathered the experiences that inspired the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he published after his return to England in 1812. The cantos were so successful that he became a literary and social celebrity, even because of his extravagant, fascinating, dissolute, unconventional, nonconformist, brilliant and original personality. He had a great reputation because of his works dealing with exotic settings and foreign customs. • In 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke but it lasted one year due to Byron’s incestuous relationship given that he believed in free love. • Because of this public scandal and because of his debts he decided to self-exile, even because he saw England as a limitation. He then travelled among Europe and strongly believed in nationalistic changes and supported nations for their independence. He first moved to Geneva, where he became close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. He then moved to Venice, where he produced the tragedy Manfred, the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold, the heroic poem Beppo and his epic masterpiece Don Juan. In 1819 he moved to Milan where he participated to patriotic plots against Austrian rule; eventually he moved to Pisa to join Shelley. After Shelley’s death he decided to commit himself to Greek struggle of independence from Turkey. He organised and expedition and devoted himself to training troops in Missolonghi, where he died in 1824 due to a severe fever. • Byron firmly believed in individual liberty and wanted to be himself anywhere and at any time; he also wished all men to be free and so went to fight against tyrants. The general foreground of his works is an isolated man whose feelings are reflected by and identified with exotic and wild natural landscapes. • Byron criticised both Wordsworth and Coleridge because they were narrow-minded and ignored the progress being made during that period in Europe. Though Byron deals with Romantic themes, he makes use of neoclassical style such as archaisms, cantos, conventional rhyme scheme and so on. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage • The poem is structured in four independent parts called cantos. Unity is given by the protagonist who is Harold, called Childe (medieval term) because he is a nobleman awaiting knighthood who travels. Harold’s boredom and disillusionment with life lead him leave England. • The first two cantos evoke a glorious past, the famous monuments and landscape of Spain, Portugal, Albania and Greece. • In the third canto Byron experiments his own ability to become completely absorbed in imaginative creativity and the attraction to the nature world, which both provide a new vitality. Structurally the canto follows Byron’s journey, after he left England in 1816. • In the fourth canto, which is set in Italy, contains several descriptions of nature, especially of the sea, depicted as the image of the sublime and eternity. Thus, nature reflects the poet’s mood and feelings. • Childe Harold can be identified with the Byronic hero because of his mysteriousness, that men cannot understand for he is isolated and is at ease among wild nature. Harold’s Journey Harold’s Journey is a part of the third canto. In the second stanza there is a first person narrator because Byron wants to talk directly to his readers about the moment he left England and his daughter. He is excited for what is new and wonderful about to come. Harold’s journey is described as a pilgrimage because he does not know where he is going, he doesn’t have a set destination. In the other stanza here it appears again the third person narration. Harold is pictured as an outcast and, though in youth he tried to hide his original and quirky nature, he then ignores the others’ opinion and becomes proud to be special despite being isolated. In the thirteenth stanza Byron uses several personifications to implicitly say that nature is a living being and that it speaks a mutual language with him and the protagonist, and this language is clearer than his mother tongue. In the fifteenth stanza Byron describes Harold’s suffering when he is among people and civilisation; he introduces the condition of the poet. Harold has to be in contact with other human beings in order to survive, but when this happens he feels as if he is just a little thing, he is bored and annoyed. He feels like a bird in cage, and as so Harold fights and struggles to do what he wants but finds an obstacle and thus harms himself (such as the bird bleeds on his plumage) and suffers in his soul. In this paragraph the poet’s message is that his ideas, his personality and his values are suppressed by society. Percy Bysshe Shelley Life • Percy Bisshe Shelley was born in 1792 and he was the eldest son of a wealthy and conservative family. He rebelled early against his conventional background and in 1811 he was expelled from Oxford University because he wrote a pamphlet against their religion set and in which he denied the existence of God. • At the age of 19 Percy married a 16 year-old girl and then travelled with her and their two children so that he could express his ideas and make a propaganda against the British government, especially in Ireland. • In that period there was a nationalistic wave in almost all European countries. Shelley, therefore, lived in a time of conservatism which was hostile to any radical ideas and to political moderation. He rebelled against existing religions, laws and customs. He became a Republican, a vegetarian and a supporter of peace, freedom and free love; for this reason he had many relationships with both women and men outside marriage. His complaint for traditional forms of religion was identified by an interest of his in the occult sciences, scientific experiments and alchemy. • Once he came back to England he separated from his wife and married Mary Godwin who was the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin; the couple eloped in Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Though their love at first sight, he was cruel to her and had a lot of affairs but despite this she kept being faithful to him. • In 1818 the couple went to live in Italy, in voluntary exile, during which much of Percy’s best work was composed, including the Ode to the West wind, written in 1819, and the Defence of Poetry (1821), which is an uncompleted essay concerning the importance of poetry. Italy was the right place to rebel against the government and there were secret rebellious groups, but also beautiful landscapes. • In 1822 the poet drowned during a storm while sailing near Livorno. Shelley’s grave is in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Shelley’s Concepts • Poetry: Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry” is where his belief in nature and the function of poetry is expressed most fully. It presents a lively defence of poetry as the expression of imagination which should be understood as revolutionary creativity, capable of changing the reality of an increasingly material world. • Poets’ Duty: Shelley’s task, as for the other poets, is thus to make people achieve an ideal world (full of love, freedom and peace). In his view, the poet is both a prophet and a titan at the same time, the latter challenging the universe and which is in charge of helping people reaching a perfect world. Shelley has therefore hope for a better place of living, but he also has a positive view of life and has faith in humanity. • Nature: Shelley believed that Nature could express crucial concepts and that it had many strong symbols (wind = freedom). Nature is a veil that hides the eternal truth of divine spirit, but also a shelter where to hide from the disappointment and injustice of the ordinary world and it frees from the boundaries of society and civilisation. • Values: Shelley firmly stated that love and freedom were the remedies to the faults and evils of society, thus through love men could overcome any political, mortal and social conventions. then, has the power to bury his consciousness, his certainties, his personality and rationality in order to identify with the object of contemplation through all kinds of experiences (sensitive and imaginative). Nature • Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration, and he described the natural world with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to create and describe extended meditations and thoughtful odes about aspects of the human condition. • Unlike Wordsworth, Keats did not see an immanent God in nature, thus he hadn’t a Pantheistic view of reality. He simply saw another form of Beauty, which he could transform into poetry and could enrich it with his Imagination. • While Wordsworth thought that “sweet melodies are made sweeter by distance in time”, Keats believed that “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, id est: imaginary beauty is superior to the one perceived, since the senses are more limited than the Imagination and its creative power. The ancient world • Keats was strongly inspired by the classical and ancient world because he believed that classical authors had analysed every field of knowledge and reality, thus they offered him a shelter from the misery, pain and economic travels of his physical life. • His longer poems, such as “The Fall of Hyperion” or “Lamia”, often take place in a mythical world like that of classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to populate his poems, such as “Ode to Psyche” and “To Homer” (1818). • For Keats, ancient myths and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn, have a permanence and solidity that contrasts the fleeting and temporary characteristic of life. Keats saw in ancient cultures the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still speaks to someone several centuries after its creation, there is hope that a poem or artistic object from Keats’s time might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator. La Belle Dame sans Merci The ballad takes place in late autumn. A knight is wandering in a desolate wasteland where the plant life withered and no birds sing; this is a sign of danger. He is also ill, as he is about to faint and he is pale. This sick condition of his is probably caused by the “fairy’s child” he encounters, a magical lady who speaks a weird language and sings fairy songs. She pretends to love him and brings him in her elfish cave with this excuse. Here she lulls him, thus she made he dream for the last time on that cold hill side. He dreams for the last time dead and pale kings, princes and warriors that tell him la Belle Dame fooled the knight as well. The author makes us understand that the lady killed the knight. In fact, he then wakes up and starts wandering around with his pale cheeks without destination, on the same cold hill side where no birds sing. Ode on a Grecian urn • This poem is about the theme of immortality of art. Keats describes a classical work in a Romantic way. The description is not realistic and has a melancholic mood. The poem is divided in five stanza, each one is composed of quatrains and sestets; the rhyme scheme is ABABCDADCE. • The first stanza is based on the sight. This stanza opens with an invocation and with personifications. In the first line he uses a metaphor to describe the urn as pure, thus he associates it to a virgin bride (“unravish’d bride”). In the second line he uses the metaphor to describe the urn as child of Gold but then it is adopted by the museum (“foster-child”). In the third line through the metaphor “sylvan historian” the author wants to say that the urn is a sylvan historian: thanks to its shapes and colours it is able to tell a story better than a poem. The urn is not still but is described as dynamic by the author as it tells a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to represent a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”. The urn is mysterious as it has to be discovered by the author through the negative capability. The stanza ends with the question “What wild ecstasy?” which means that the poetic journey is about to begin (through the negative capability to leave the rational world for an imaginative one). • The second stanza contains the sense of hearing. This stanza begins with a paradox: “heard melodies are sweet, but unheard melodies are sweeter”. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. This is linked to the concept of fulfilment (heard melodies) and expectation (unheard and imagined melodies). In the first part the poet encourages the musician to continue playing and producing music. There is a frozen scene on the urn, which pictures a boy and a girl in the moment right before kissing, therefore they will never kiss, because art is imperfect, lifeless and still. The urn is the symbol of immortality. • The third stanza contains the sense of touch. The poet addresses to the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. The author is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” • In the fourth stanza the poet moves around the urn and sees a group of people committing an animal sacrifice. The poet wonders where they are going and where they come from. In the sestet the author imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and says that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. The poet seems to express a regret and there is a sadder tone; the scene is frozen. The empty town anticipates the end of the wild ecstasy (mystical journey) and the poet comes back to reality. • In the fifth stanza the poet addresses directly to the urn with four metaphors. “O Attic Shape” important shape; “Fair attitude” the art is a normal art work and no more a sylvan historian, in fact the urn is now described as silent; “Cold Pastoral” the imagine of the urn as frozen; “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” the urn teaches us that aesthetical value of beauty and ethic value of beauty are connected. At the end of the journey the urn comes back to be an ordinary object. The urn will forever remain for future generations.