The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is often read in conjunction with “Mont Blanc,” written at about the same time in summer 1816, when Percy Shelley was in Switzerland. The two poems have many things in common, but “The Hymn to… Read More ›
Literature
Analysis of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. In many ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English romanticism’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Ulysses
Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name. However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s The Tyger
The Tyger is the terrifying pendant to The Lamb in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as its climactic rhetorical question makes clear: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Like “The Lamb,” it takes the form of… Read More ›
Analysis of Keats’s To Autumn
The last of the great series of odes that John Keats wrote in 1819, this one was composed on September 19 and therefore on the cusp of autumn rather than early summer, like the others. Although it is like the… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
More properly called Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798, this is one of William Wordsworth’s greatest poems, second perhaps only to the Intimations Ode in its… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khan is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most famous and most-quoted-from poems. Originally written in either 1797 or 1798, it was not published until 1816 (along with Christabel). The long… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is one of William Wordsworth’s most famous poems. Like many of Wordsworth’s shorter poems, it is far more complex than it seems at first. Wordsworth was particularly good at interweaving several different temporal perspectives… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s The Intimations Ode
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (The Intimations Ode as it is almost always called) is the single central work of British romantic poetry and widely regarded as one of the greatest English poems of any age…. Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s In Memoriam
In Memoriam A.H.H. is one of the great elegies in English; rivaled perhaps only by John Milton’s Lycidas, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, possibly Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and some short poems by Milton and William Wordsworth…. Read More ›
Analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti claimed that Goblin Market was extemporized in a single day. She also called it a children’s poem, and for her it probably was since, like her romantic antecedents, she saw childhood as a time of unparalleled intensity and experience…. Read More ›
Analysis of Browning’s Aurora Leigh
Aurora Leigh is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work. Both its very high poetic quality, when the poem is at its best, and its sometimes turgid moralizing, when it is at its worst, were noted by contemporary reviewers like George… Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s Adonais
Percy Bysshe Shelley invited John Keats to come to live in Pisa’s more salubrious climate after Keats had been struck with consumption (tuberculosis). Keats only got as far as Rome, where he died on February 23, 1821. Although Shelley did… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience contain William Blake’s best-known and most widely read works, including what is perhaps his most famous poem, The Tyger. The book, beautifully and delicately illustrated by Blake, has been vastly influential, determining, for example,… Read More ›
Analysis of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this wildly popular sonnet sequence, most famous for its penultimate sonnet— “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (sonnet 43)—during Robert Browning’s courtship of her in 1845 and 1846. She only showed him… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears
This is one of the most famous songs from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long narrative poem The Princess. In the poem’s context, the song is sung in public at the Princess’s command to pass a brief interval in the arduous studies… Read More ›
The Sublime
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas… Read More ›
Sprung Rhythm
This is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for his most characteristic and idiosyncratic poetic mode. Hopkins seemed to define it as organizing lines around stressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, the poetic foot always starts on a stressed syllable and may be… Read More ›
Analysis of Hopkins’s The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins regarded The Windhover as his best poem. It combines all his characteristic and idiosyncratic intensities with extraordinary verve and power. Hopkins focuses simultaneously on poetic form and on what that form itself represents—what its physical power may be… Read More ›
Victorian Poetry
“Victorian poetry” is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on… Read More ›
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