Romantic poets, part 2

• Romantic Poets
• The Second Generation
• First Generation
• William Wordsworth – beauty and power of Nature
– “Tintern Abbey”
– “The World Is Too Much With Us”
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – supernatural and the source of poetic creativity
– “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
– “Kubla Khan”
• Second Generation
• Byron – the Byronic Hero
• Shelley – social and political idealist; spiritual power of Nature
– O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud;
– I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed!
• Keats
• John Keats
1795-1821
• Working class
• Apprenticed to a surgeon
• Fanny Brawne – “Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.”
• Death of brother Tom
• Consumption (tuberculosis)
• “Femme Fatale”
• “La Bell Dame Sans Merci”
• “The Lorelei” (p. 761)
• Platonic Ideal
• Goodness = Truth = Beauty
• “Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all
• Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
• Cf. Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” (p. 718)
• Odes
• Ode on A Grecian Urn
– Permanence of art
• Ode to a Nightingale
– Transcendence of the spirit into the realm of Beauty