WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH AND ALFRED LORD TENNYSON: LONDON
1802 AND BREAK, BREAK, BREAK.
BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
William
Wordsworth is a British who is into the English Romantic Movement. He was born
on 7 April in 1770 in Cockermouth,
Cumberland, in the Lake District. Place and
family were also important to Wordsworth.
His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's
attorney. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later he lost his
father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and
neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life.
<http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp>
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/>
With the
help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered in a local school and continued his
studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787,
when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. In that same year
he entered St. John's College, Cambridge; here, in Cambridge, he was graduated
in 1791. After his graduation he
travelled to France and Europe.
During his time in France he fell in love with Annette
Vallon and the couple had a daughter, Caroline, in
1792. The political situation in France at the time made it a dangerous place
and Wordsworth was forced to leave his young family behind.
In 1795 he
met Coleridge. Wordsworth's financial situation became better in this year when
he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown,
Dorset, with his sister Dorothy.
Encouraged
by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth
composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, and Wordsworth published
his work with Coleridge.
About 1798
he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed
in 1805, and published in 1850 under the title The Prelude. Wordsworth
spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister, Dorothy, and Coleridge in Germany,
where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic 'Lucy' poems.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/wordsworth.shtml>
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/>
<http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wordswor.htm>
Wordsworth's
second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807.
Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808.
Wordsworth's later works were much criticized and a
later version of the Lyrical Ballads was slammed by the reviewers, but
he still remained a formidable figure in the literary world.
In 1843 he
succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843). He was made Poet Laureate
Wordsworth
died on 23 April in 1850.
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/>
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/wordsworth.shtml>
<http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp>
ROMANTICISM
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual
movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century
in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial
Revolution.
The name "romantic" itself comes from the
term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative
originating in medieval literature and romantic literature.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>
During the
period of the Romanticism there was a broad shift of emphasis in the arts, away
from the structured, intellectual, reasoned approach of the 18th century (which
is often called the ‘Age of Reason’, or the ‘Enlightenment’) towards ways of
looking at the world which recognised the importance
of the emotions and the imagination.
<http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp>
The ideologies and events of the French Revolution
and Industrial Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement.
Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood
heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the
individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from
classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and
natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (two of the
most important poets in this time) were among the first British poets to
explore the new theories and ideas that were sweeping through Europe. Their
poems display many characteristics of Romanticism, including:
An emphasis
on the emotions (a fashionable word at the beginning of the period was
‘sensibility’. This meant having, or cultivating, a sensitive, emotional and
intuitive way of understanding the world).
Exploring the relationship between nature and human
life.
A stress on
the importance of personal experiences and a desire to understand what
influences the human mind.
A belief in the power of the imagination.
An interest in mythological, fantastical, gothic and
supernatural themes.
An emphasis
on the sublime (this word was used to describe a spiritual awareness, which
could be stimulated by a grand and awesome landscape).
Social and political
idealism.
<http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp>
The term of
Romanticism has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers,
musicians and for political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries too.
A precise characterization and specific definition of
Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual
history and literary history
throughout the twentieth century. Arthur Lovejoy
attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article
"On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas
(1948). Furthermore, here there is a definition of the Romanticism that comes
from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism
is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor
exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as
a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of
Enlightenment. Whereas
the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason,
Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination,
and feeling, to a
point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>
THE
POEM OF WORDSWORTH: “LONDON 1802”
I have chosen this poem of William Wordsworth because
the name of it. It’s because I have been in London twice, and I have great
memories because I like a lot the city and because in London I practiced my
English a lot. This is the principal reason of my selection. But next, I read
the poem and I thought that it could be a good poem for a paper and because I
think that I have found information for to do the paper.
This poem belongs to “Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)”. The poem was composed in 1802 and
published for the first time in “Poems,
in Two Volumes (1807)”. In this second volume Wordsworth shows us new
styles, forms, and subject matters found expression in the poems that dominate “Poems, in Two Volumes”. That is because
he, after his first volume, he completed thirty lyrics; and because several
other poems have their roots in 1802.
Press syndicate
of the University of Cambridge, The
Cambridge companion to Wordsworth.
Cambridge, 2006 Edited by Stephen Gill. Ed. Cambridge
University Press.
Wordsworth reveals us with “London 1802” both
Wordsworth's moralism and his growing conservatism.
He urges morality and selflessness, criticizing the English for being stagnant
and selfish. He also refers to "inward
happiness"(line 6) as natural English right, or "dower," (line 5) and asks Milton to bestow
"power" as well as virtue on the English.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_1802>
LONDON 1802
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
William Wordsworth
Commentary
The poem (the speaker) starts crying (The cry is “Milton!”) out to the soul of John Milton
in anger and frustration. In the eight first lines (the octave) the author
articulates his wish that Milton would return to earth, and lists the vices
ruining the current era. Every venerable institution (the altar (representing
religion), the sword (representing the military), the pen (representing
literature), and the fireside (representing the home)) has lost touch with "inward happiness," (line 6)
which the author identifies as a specifically English birthright, just as
Milton is a specifically English poet.
In the last
six lines (the sestet) Wordsworth explains why Milton could improve the English
condition. Milton's soul, Wordsworth says, was as bright and noble as a star,
and it "dwelt apart"(line 9)
from the crowd, felt not the urge to conform. Milton's voice was "like the sea"(line 10), "pure as the naked heavens, majestic,
free"(line 11). He never resented the ordinary nature of his life, but
instead he "travel on life's common
way"(line 12), remaining happy, pure, what is represented by "cheerful godliness"(line 13),
and humble, represented by "lowliest
duties"(line 14) on himself, always.
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/519/>
Form
This poem is
a sonnet, one of the many excellent poems of Wordsworth. A sonnet is composed
about fourteen-line poetic inventions written in iambic pentameter. This sonnet
is a petrarchan sonnet what means, in this case, that
is divides in two parts: the first eight lines of the poem are an octave, and
the final six lines are a sestet.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_1802>
The rhyme
scheme is the next:
Octave: ABBAABBA
Sestet: BCCDBD
STYLE OF WORDSWORTH (WORDSWORTH
POETRY)
Wordsworth's
has composed a large number of important poems, varying in length and weight
from the short, simple lyrics of the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long in its
1808 edition. But the themes of Wordsworth's poetry, and the language and
imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent throughout
the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for
himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical
Ballads.
Wordworth's
style remains plain-spoken and easy to understand even today, though the
rhythms and idioms of common English have changed from those of the early
nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth's poems deal with the subjects of
childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the adult in particular,
childhood's lost connection with nature, which can be preserved only in memory.
Wordsworth's images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious symbolism and
the relics of the poet's rustic childhood (cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other
places where humanity intersects gently and easily with nature).
Wordsworth's
poems initiated the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure
above formality and mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave
expression to inchoate human emotion. Curiously for a poet whose work points so
directly toward the future, many of Wordsworth's important works are
preoccupied with the lost glory of the past, not only of the lost dreams of
childhood but also of the historical past (as we can see above in the poem) in
the powerful sonnet "London,
1802," in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the centuries-dead
poet John Milton to teach the modern world a better way to live.
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/analysis.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>
BIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Alfred Tennyson was born on 6 August in 1809 in
Somersby, Lincolnshire. He was the fourth of twelve children of George and
Elizabeth (Fytche) Tennyson. The contrast of his own
family's circumstances to the great wealth of his aunt Elizabeth Russell and uncle Charles Tennyson (who lived in castles) made Tennyson
feel particularly impoverished and led him to worry about money all his life.
He also had a lifelong fear of mental illness, for
several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy, which was then thought a
shameful disease. His father and brother Arthur made their cases worse by
excessive drinking. His brother Edward had to be confined in a mental
institution after 1833, and he himself spent a few weeks under doctors' care in
1843. In the late twenties his father's physical and mental condition worsened, and he became paranoid, abusive, and
violent.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennybio.html>
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/context.html>
In 1827 Tennyson escaped the troubled atmosphere of
his home when he followed his two older brothers to Trinity College, Cambridge,
where his tutor was William Whewell. In 1827 the
Tennyson brothers became well known at Cambridge because they won university
prizes because they had published Poems by Two Brothers (1827).
In 1829 The Apostles, an undergraduate club, invited Tennyson to join. The group, which met to
discuss major philosophical and other issues, included Arthur Henry Hallam,
James Spedding, Edward Lushington,
and Richard Monckton Milnes — all eventually famous
men who entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Arthur Henry Hallam and Tennyson knew each other only
four years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a
visit to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Emily Tennyson. Hallam's death from illness in 1833 (he was only 22)
shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief lead to most of his best poetry,
including In Memoriam , "The Passing of Arthur", "Ulysses," and "Tithonus."
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennybio.html>
Since Tennyson was always sensitive to criticism, the
mixed reception of his 1832 Poems hurt him greatly.
Late in the 1830s Tennyson grew concerned about his
mental health and visited a sanitarium run by Dr. Matthew Allen, with whom he
later invested his inheritance and some of his family's money.
The success of his 1842 Poems
made Tennyson a popular poet, and in 1845 he received a Civil List pension of
£200 a year (government), which helped relieve his financial difficulties.
The success of "The Princess" and In Memoriam and his appointment in 1850 as Poet Laureate
(succeeding William Wordsworth in this
honor) finally established
him as the most popular poet of the Victorian era.
<http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761574603/Tennyson_Alfred_Lord.html>
Tennyson had written some of his greatest poetry, but
he continued to write and to gain in popularity. In 1853, as the Tennysons were moving into their new house on the Isle of
Wight, Prince Albert dropped in unannounced. His admiration for Tennyson's
poetry helped solidify his position as the national poet, and Tennyson returned
the favor by dedicating The Idylls of the King to
his memory. Queen Victoria
later summoned him to court several times, and at her insistence he accepted
his title, having declined it when offered by both Disraeli and
Gladstone.
Tennyson composed much of his poetry in his head,
occasionally working on individual poems for many years. During his
undergraduate days at Cambridge he often did not bother to write down his
compositions.
In
1884, the Royals granted Tennyson a baronetcy; he was now known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Although
Tennyson was the most popular poet in England in his own day,
he was often the target of mockery by his immediate
successors, the Edwardians and Georgians of the early twentieth
century. Today, however, many critics
consider Tennyson to be the
greatest poet of the Victorian Age;
and he stands as one of the
major innovators of lyric and metrical form in all of English poetry.
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/context.html>
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennybio.html>
Alfred, Lord Tennyson died on 6 October in 1892, at
the age of 83.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennybio.html>
Work of Tennyson
Poems,
by Two Brothers
(1827) (discussions)
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) (discussions)
Poems
(1833)
"The Poet"
Two-Volume
Edition of Poems (1842)
The
Princess, a Medley
(1847) (discussion)
In Memoriam (1850)
Maud (1855) (discussion — Musical setting of "Come into the garden, Maud.")
The Idylls of the King (1859)
"Tithonus" (1860)
Enoch Arden (1864)
Lucretius (1868) The Idylls of the King (1869)
The Idylls of
the King (1871)
"The Last Tournament"
The
Idylls of the King
(1872)
Queen Mary (1875) Harold (1876) The Falcon
(1879) Ballads and Other Poems (1880)
The
Cup (1881)
The Promise of May (1882)
Becket (1884)
Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885)
The
Idylls of the King
(1885)
Locksley Hall,
sixty years after
(1886) Demeter, and other poems (1889)
The Death of OEnone, and other Poems (1892) The Foresters (1892)
VICTORIANISM
Victorianism is the name given to the attitudes, art, and culture of the
latter two-thirds of the 19th century,
especially with reference to English-speaking
peoples and the British Empire.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorianism>
For much of
this century the term Victorian conveyed connotations of
"prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." What
is more, the term Victorian literally
describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 – 1901).
Victorianism covers the rise of an industrialized society with a newly urbanized middle class,
the interconnection of the globe with telegraph and railway, the
expansion of trade, the
establishment of the gold standard and other programs meant to make orderly and regular
the path of commerce, manufacturing
and economic growth.
Some
characteristics of the Victorianism are these: In science and technology, the
Victorians invented the modern idea of invention. In religion, the
Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into
question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and
the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon
self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones
upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist. In
ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing innovation
and change: democracy, feminism,
unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism, and other
modern movements took form. So it was the first age that attempted modern
solutions.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorianism>
The
Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified; it was an age of
paradox and power.
A reason why
makes Victorians Victorian is because their sense of social responsibility, a
basic attitude that obviously differentiates them from their immediate
predecessors, the Romantics. An example of this statement is this: Tennyson might go to
Spain to help the insurgents, as Byron had gone to Greece and Wordsworth to
France; but Tennyson also urged the necessity of educating “the poor man before making him our master.”
THE POEM OF ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
I have
chosen this poem of Tennyson because the title, as the poem of Wordsworth. It’s
like that because I wanted to have the same way of election, and the name of
the poem showed me something good; I did not and I do not what was good but I
have like a premonition. Moreover, suddenly I read the poem (as in the
other poem) and I thought that it could be a good poem for a paper and because
I think that I have found information for to do the paper (as in the poem of
Wordsworth too).
This poem, "Break, Break, Break", is a lyric
poem that Alfred Tennyson was believed to have completed in 1834.It belong to
the 1842 volume. The poem has happened during the famous "ten years'
silence" from 1832 to 1842; it is clear that Tennyson was refining his ironic
techniques.
<http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kincaid/ch3a.html>
This is a bitter poem on unrecompensed, pointless
loss, but it achieves its power and makes its point very indirectly, largely
through structural implications. The direct statement is deliberately localized
and simple, making concrete the emotion of the poem without stating its
implications. So the poem is so indirect. The original desire for poetic
utterance ("I would that my tongue
could utter" (line 3) )
is fulfilled, it seems, and the unnamed, unformulated "thoughts" (line 4) crystallize into one final
summarizing thought.
<http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kincaid/ch3a.html>
Tennyson turns ‘an
ordinary sea-shore landscape into means of finding a voice indescribably sweet
for the dumb spirit of human loss’. So, of this
statement, the poem is symbolic.
Sinfield,
Alan. Rereading literature Alfred Tennyson.Oxford,
1986. Basic Blackwell, Ltd.
BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
Break,
break, break,
On thy cold
gray stones, O sea!
And I would
that my tongue could utter
The thoughts
that arise in me.
O, well for
the fisherman’s boy,
That he
shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for
the sailor lad,
That he
sings in his boat on the bay!
And the
stately ships go on
To their
haven under the hill;
But O for
the touch of a vanished hand,
And the
sound of a voice that is still!
Break,
break, break,
At the foot
of thy crags, O sea!
But the
tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never
come back to me.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Commentary
The main theme of this poem is bereavement, heartache,
emptiness. Apart these main themes we find: preciousness of youth and
indifference of nature.
The narrator grieves the loss of his friend, Arthur
Henry Hallam. Hallam died of a stroke in 1833 when he was only 22.
Nature, of course, does not stop to mourn the loss of
anyone (in this case, Hallam). Cold and indifferent carries on the waves of the
ocean breaking against rocks along the seashore without pausing even for a
moment. The rest of the world carries on: the fisherman’s boy happily playing
with his sister, the sailor merrily singing, the ship busily plying the waters
of commerce.
The third stanza adds an image and then offers an
explanation of the feeling which can not be uttered, of the lack in the
descriptions. Tennyson isolated by his grief, yearns to touch the hand (“for the touch of a vanished hand” line 11) of his friend once more, to hear the sound of his
voice.
Sinfield, Alan. Rereading literature
Alfred Tennyson.Oxford, 1986. Basic Blackwell, Ltd.
But no, Hallam
is gone forever; his “tender grace” (line
15) will never again return.
<http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kincaid/ch3a.html>
In each stanza,
there is rhyme in lines 2 and 4. But the rhyme (meter) in the rest of the poem
varies as we can see in the next diagram.
ABCB DEFE
GBFB ABHB
Apostrophe: lines 1 and 2, the narrator
addresses the sea.
Personification and metaphor also occur in lines 1 and 2, for
the poet regards the sea as a human being.
Alliteration: line 8, boat
on the bay
lines 9-12, stanza 3 uses this figure of speech as follows:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Alliteration: line 15, day
that is dead
Repetend:
line 13 repeats line 1; line 7 repeats the first two words of line 5.
Paradox: Touch of a vanished hand (line 11), sound
of a voice that is still (line 12).
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides4/Tennyson.html
Alan Sinfield has a
theoretical position about the poetry of Tennyson:
“Poetry
is more densely structured than ordinary language; simply to follow the
sequence of the argument is not exhaust the meaning of the lines. The elements
of poetic language are so presented as to invite us to perceive further
relationships between them such that the whole poem becomes a complex web of
inter-connecting meanings working almost simultaneously”.
Sinfield,
Alan. Rereading literature Alfred Tennyson.Oxford,
1986. Basic Blackwell, Ltd.
The idea that poetry is densely structured language derives
from the Romantics, and was consolidated during the Victorian period.
Consequently we may assume that Tennyson composed whit this in mind, and
therefore that many of his short poems may indeed manifest it. Alan Sinfield says in his book: “Every short poem”, he remarked, “should have a definite shape, like
the curve, sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a severed
tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor” (Memoir, p. 871)(Alfred
Tennyson, p. 79).
The kind of structural density which Tennyson deploys
is one of several features of his writing which invites attention.
The dominant twentieth-century ideas about Literature
would lead us to suppose that Tennyson poetry would have relatively little to
do with imperial expansion or electoral reform.
In Tennyson’s writing any particular word has, o
appears to have, many reasons for being appropriate: it is linked to other
words through effects of sound and rhythm, syntactical parallelism, and
figurative associations which may extend through a network of images across
hundreds of lines; and passages which seem ornate rather than organic also seem
to make the word more substantial in itself. Thus the arbitrariness of language
seems to be controlled.
Tennyson is important to the reader because the
enduring profundity of his writing. Universal truth is identified with the
wisdom of particular social arrangements.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennyov.html>
Sinfield, Alan. Rereading literature
Alfred Tennyson.Oxford, 1986. Basic Blackwell, Ltd.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
<http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp>
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/>
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/wordsworth.shtml>
<http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wordswor.htm>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_1802>
<http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/519/>
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/wordsworth/analysis.html>
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/tennybio.html>
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/context.html>
<http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761574603/Tennyson_Alfred_Lord.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorianism>
<http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kincaid/ch3a.html>
<http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides4/Tennyson.html>
-
Sinfield, Alan. Rereading literature Alfred Tennyson.Oxford,
1986. Basic Blackwell, Ltd.
-
Press
syndicate of the University of Cambridge, The
Cambridge companion to Wordsworth.
Cambridge, 2006 Edited by Stephen Gill. Ed. Cambridge University Press.