Written and published on October 4, 1821, “Adonais” memorializes the death of Shelley’s friend and fellow poet John Keats, whom he regarded as being one of the poets of “the highest genius” of the age. Keats died in Rome on… Read More ›
Romanticism
Analysis of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind
Ode to the West Wind I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken… Read More ›
Romantic Poetry
The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that… Read More ›
Analysis of John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes
This is one of John Keats’s best-loved poems, with a wonderfully happy ending. Keats wrote it in late January 1819 (St. Agnes Day is January 21, and Keats seems to have started composition a few days before that). It is… Read More ›
Analysis of Lord Byron’s Don Juan
Don Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem. Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802) Dejection is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poems, and one of the greatest crisis lyrics of English romanticism. It is in a sense Coleridge’s answer to William Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, as well as to Wordsworth’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Christabel
According to the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth agreed to divide their contributions to the joint volume, with Coleridge writing the “supernatural poems” and Wordsworth the natural ones—the scenes of everyday life. Coleridge’s contributions… Read More ›
Romantic Literary Criticism
In 1832, at the end of what is now called the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described “three silent revolutions in England: 1. When the Professions fell off from the Church; 2. When Literature fell off from the Professions; 3…. Read More ›
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Accentual meter: A base meter in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by a stress determines the basic unit, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables. It is one of four base meters used in English (accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic,… Read More ›
A Brief History of English Literature
CHAPTER 1 OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE The Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English. The period is a long one and it is generally considered that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100…. Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Friedrich Schleiermacher
The German philosopher and Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is generally credited with having laid the foundations of modern hermeneutics, or the art of systematic textual interpretation. His most important text in this regard was his Hermeneutics and Criticism, published… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Friedrich von Schiller
Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was a poet, dramatist, and literary theorist whose development of Kant’s aesthetic ideas had a great influence on other German Romantic writers and on Coleridge. He was a Romantic in many senses: writing in the aftermath… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as… Read More ›
Romanticism in America
The French Revolution of 1789 marked a watershed for the future of Europe, a fact keenly discerned by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Irving Babbitt and Matthew Arnold. Not only did that Revolution initiate the political… Read More ›
Romanticism in France
One of the founders of Romanticism, its so-called father, was the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who espoused a return to nature and equated the increasing growth and refinement of civilization with corruption, artificiality, and mechanization. Rousseau’s Social Contract espouses democratic… Read More ›
Romanticism in Germany
During the 1760s and 1770s, Germany witnessed the rise of the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in which writers and critics such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Goethe, and Schiller experimented with new subjective modes of expression… Read More ›
Romanticism in England
In England, the ground for Romanticism was prepared in the latter half of the eighteenth century through the economic, political, and cultural transformations mentioned in the preceding chapters. The system of absolute government crumbled even earlier in Britain than elsewhere;… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge
The genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge extended over many domains. In poetry he is best known for compositions such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, as well as Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he co-authored… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth
It was Wordsworth who wrote the following famous lines about the French Revolution as it first appeared to many of its sympathizers: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! O times,… Read More ›
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