GUILLERMO
CARNERO GARRIDO
2nd
PAPER.
ENGLISH POETRY IN THE VICTORIAN ERA AND THE
ROMANTICISM. JOHN KEATS, OSCAR WILDE AND LORD BYRON.
AUTO-EVALUATION:
I am very proud of this paper because I actually worked very hard in
doing it. I’m not referring so much to the mark that I will get, but to the
fact that I have devoted a lot of time to get to this final cut, so to speak.
If there’s any more information that I did not get, it is because I ignore too
many things as to avoid them.
ABSTRACT:
This essay attempts to bring together three of the greatest authors of
the Victorian English literature, Lord Byron, John Keats and Oscar Wilde. We
will prove that Wilde was extraordinarily influenced by Byron’s way of living.
Wilde constructs his personality and his image out of Byron’s. They both have
in common some biographical aspects, vital experiences, a nostalgic longing for
childhood. Wilde really admired the Byronic hero. They both share the same
attitude towards the social and political establishment, which they ironically
criticize. Both Wilde and Byron have a passion for the classical world. They
will end up their lives going into exile.
Keat’s background and life was completely different
from Wilde’s, but the former influenced Wilde regarding classical world and
What Wilde really admires about Keats is his ability to assimilate
impressions so perfectly expressed.
(A. SANDERS The
Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford Press, N. Y. 1994, p.
385).
We will see how Keats is actually mentioned several times in Wilde’s
poems.
Something that strucks me as being obvious, is
the fact that with Romanticism the poet, understood as a whole in society,
becomes important, and enters a dimension that had never been studied before.
He is not someone “normal” in the traditional sense of the term, and he
has some unique, inalienable and original features that make him an extravagant
and curious being. Lord Byron was pretty much this way: he was a rebel,
original and theatrical; it was the dandy model for the artists that would
follow.
Romantic poetry tends towards egotism and subjectivity as never before.
Art will develop until the end of Modernism with this individualism
basis coming from the artist himself who considers art as a projection of
himself, and also a projection that’s justifiable by him. It’s the famous
theory of Art for Art’s sake.
In the words of Mr. M. H. Abrams, in fact the subjective nature of the
artist-poet's experience almost guarantees several things. First, the resulting
text or picture will appear to the audience as new, novel, and possibly strange
or even weird. Second, the creator will always be ahead of the audience.
As Wordsworth put
it, truly great art and literature advance so beyond the audience's
expectations that it must create the taste by which it is to be enjoyed. And
fourth, manifestos and prefaces, critics and interpretative criticism, become
centrally important, as does the notion of an avant garde, since someone has to explain and defend art and artist to
audience. http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/abrams1.html
INDEX
I. JOHN KEATS AND
LORD BYRON’S CONTEXT
II. BYRON AND KEATS
POETRY
1. BYRON
2. KEATS
III. WILDE AND HIS
CONTEXT: VICTORIAN ERA
IV. WILDE’S LIFE
AND WORKS
1.
OSCAR WILDE’S BIOGRAPHY
2.
WILDE’S WORKS
V. DECADENCE AND
ROMANTCISM: ART FOR ART’S SAKE
1. THÉOPHILE
GAULTIER
2. RUSKIN AND
MORRIS
A) RUSKIN
B) MORRIS
VI. THE CONCEPT OF
SATANISM
VII. HELLENISM:
ROMANTICS AND VICTORIANS
VIII. COMPARAISON
BETWEEN TWO BIOGRAPHIES: WILDE’S AND
BYRON’S.
IX. POEMS BY KEATS
AND WILDE
A)
KEATS
B)
WILDE
X. WILDE’S POETRY
AND KEATS
XI. COMPARAISON
BETWEEN THE POEMS
XII. BYRON AND
WILDE
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
I. KEATS AND LORD BYRON’S HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
Emerging in
At a time when the concept of nation was defined and identification of national
roots charged emotional resonances, the exploration of the origins in literary
and cultural medieval context assumed a great importance.
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated
around the middle of the XVIIIth century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political
norms of the Enlightenment
period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art
and literature. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as
trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature.
It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which
included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom
and usage.
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.
Typical
manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously
conceived to be a passion for moonlight, red waistcoasts
like Théophile Gautier’s, for Gothic churches,
talking exclusively about oneself, heroship, for
losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature.
The general theme of Joseph Warton’s poem The
lover of Nature is
one which had been a commonplace for several centuries: the superiority of
Nature to art. The Natural in contrast with the artificial meant that which is
not man-made; and within man’s life, it was supposed to consist in those
expressions of human nature which are most spontaneous, unpremeditated,
untouched by inflexion or design and free from the bondage of social
convention.
Consequently, the idea of preferring nature to custom and art usually
carried with it the suggestion of a program of simplification, it implied
primitivism.
The idea of the sublime is a very important one in the Romantics. Is has
been described as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”
the sublime is related to the concepts of vasteness, inifinity, astonishment, when for instance we are
contemplating nature and its elements of natural and supernatural.
https://correo.uv.es/cgi-bin/postman/filebrowser/dump/noop/val/guicarga/postal.uv.es@JhaIvAZlxCcVAGBD9khRn9Dh/0/2/500/0/::web/firstpaper.html
II. BYRON AND KEAT’S POETRY
1. LORD BYRON.
Byron is the writer who expressed the spirit of the Romantic Era. He was
the outsider, vexed and amused by the anomalies of his own time and culture.
His poetry is informed not by nature or by the contemplation of nature, but by
public life and by recent history, by British politics and by the feverish
European nationalisms stirred by the French Revolution. It moves easily from
different modes of telling and feeling, from the self explorative to the
polemic, from the melancholic to the comic, from the mock-heroic to the
passionately amorous, from the song to the epic. Byron the libertarian and
Byron the libertine assumed the public role of a commentator on his times
because he relished his fame and enjoyed the Romantic pose of being at odds
with established society.
His role playing both in his convulsed private life and in his poetry
had a profound impact on his fellow-artists throughout
Childe Harold and Don Juan are Byron’s most famous poems.
Byron departed from
private. (H. Abrams,
The Short Oxford English History of
English Literature, Oxford Press N. Y. 1994)
His style is at times, satirical, pathetic, descriptive or sentimental.
Byron aspired to experiment with a verse form which would allow a variety of
both expression and mood.
Don Juan introduces a new kind of central character who is at once more
passive and more vivacious. His narrator is a dominant one, is relaxed and
speculative, digressive and discursive, cynical and droll. The scheme of Don
Juan allows for colloquy and polyphony.
Elliot in his article about Byron, published in 1937, says that the last
four cantos are the most substantial of the poem. “My point is that Byron’s satire upon society
in the latter part of Don Juan is something for which I can find no parallel in
English literature. He was right in making the hero of his house-party a
Spaniard, for what Byron understands and dislikes about English society is very
much what an intelligent foreigner in the same position would understand and
dislike. […] The dedicatory to Southey seems to me one of the most exhilarating
pieces of abuse in the language:
Bob Southney! You’re a poet- a Laureate Poet
And representative of all the race
Although ‘tis true that you turn’d out a Tory at
Last, yours has lately been a common case
And now, my Epic Renegade, what are ye at? “.
(H. Abrams)
The qualities of narrative verse which are found in Don Juan are not
less remarkable in the early tales (The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara…)
Byron combined exoticism with actuality and developed most effectively
the use of suspense. He has the cardinal virtue of being never dull (T. S.
Elliot)
(H. Abrams, The Short Oxford English History of English Literature, Oxford
Press ,N. Y. 1994, pages 196-209)
2. KEATS
Keat’s background and education denied him both the
social advantages and the ready recourse to classical models shared by those
contemporaries to whose work he most readily turned. Throughout his working
life, Keats had recourse to Lemprière’s Classical
Dictionary and not to a classical memory fostered at school or University. HE
was very well read of Shakespeare, and it is to him that he habitually refers
in his creation
It is very important to remark Keats’ definition on style as a “Negative
Capability”, a concept which meant to him “being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. As well as his
attempt in distinguishing between the wordsworthian
“egoistical sublime” and the “poetical Character” that lives “in gusto”.
His most mature work is collected in 1817. His most famous works are
Poems (1817) and Edymion: A Poetic Romance, (1818).
Keats’
In some ways his development as a poet confirms his self-analysis,
moving as he does from an impulsive attraction to a dedicated absorption and
adaptation of stimuli through a process of intellectualization and poetic
articulation. Finding metaphors in the natural world, in his responses to
architecture, painting and sculpture in his magic reading.
The odes to a Nightingale and on Melancholy: the former takes as its
subject the local presence of a nightingale and the contrast of the
full-throated wase of its singing with the aching numbness
of the human observer, the rapt and meditative poet. The ode progresses through
a series of delicate evocations of opposed moods and ways of seeing some
elated, some repressed, but each serving to return the narrator to his
sole-self and to his awareness of the temporary nature of the release from the
unrelieved contemplation of temporal suffering which the bird’s song has
offered. The Ode on Melancholy opens with a rejection of traditional and gloomy
aids to reflexion and moves to an exploration of the interrelationship to the
sensations of joy and sorrow.
Ode on a Grecian urn: the narrator in the poem observes two scenes which
decorate an Attic vase; one showing bucolic lovers, the other a pagan
sacrifice; both of them are frozen and silent, taken out of time and rendered
eternal in its beauty because of art.
(H. Abrams, The Short Oxford English History of English Literature, N. Y. 1994,
pages 376-385)
III. WILDE AND HIS CONTEXT: THE VICTORIAN ERA
The Victorian Age
was one of conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic
confidence, of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the
inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present.
Like all ages it was an age of paradox.
Religion remained
a powerful source in Victorian life and literature. It was a time of growing
doubts as to the very doctrinal and historical bases of Christianity, which
were fostered and emboldened by the appearance in 1859 of
Mid-Victorian
society was still held together by the cement of Christian moral teaching and
constructed by the triumph of puritan sexual mores. It laid a particular stress
on the virtues of monogamy and family life, but it was also publicly aware of
flagrant anomalies throughout the social system. Many individual Victorians saw
the family as an agent of oppression and as the main vehicle of encompassing
conformity.
The Victorian age
has its revivals, its battles, of style, its continuities in painting and
architecture, as well as in literature. It was an age of experimental
engineering. As the great exhibition of 1851 proudly demonstrated, this was the
age both of applied art and of the application of new technologies to all
aspects of design and production
New urban
prosperity and industrial enterprise gave the middle and working classes a
variety of small domestic comforts and ornaments which were once confined only
to the very rich. The years 1830-1880 were years of British self-confidence and
semi-isolation in terms of European affairs, but the illusion of peace was
broken by the Crimean War (1853–1856).
The domestic
political scene saw the sacredness of the principles of liberty, of conscience
and the freedom of the individual enshrined in law, but these principles most
benefited middle-class men, and were of little relevance to many women who were
still denied proper education and proper rights and to all the women who were
excluded from the franchise. There were those among the poor whose only right
was the right to starve. In society as a whole they were challenged by the
pressures exerted by a moral majority and by the debilitating freedom of
poverty, homelessness and hunger.
If upper and
middle-class
(A. SANDERS, The short History of English Literature,
Oxford Press NY, 1994, pages 398-401)
For much of this century the term Victorian, which
literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen
Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish,"
"repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such
associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the
nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance.
Like Elizabethan England, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and
culture. http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html)
By the closing years of the XIXth century
Mid-Victorian confidence had begun to sound oppressively, even comically
outmoded. Oscar Wilde knocked at the very idea in the title of his “Trivial
Comedy For Serious People”. Although Queen
(, A. SANDERS The Short Oxford English History of English Literature, Oxford Press N.
Y. 1994, page 457)
IV. WILDE’S LIFE AND WORKS
1) OSCAR
WILDE. BIOGRAPHY
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and author of short stories. Known for his
barbed wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of
a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two
years of hard labour after being
convicted of the offence of "gross indecency."
Oscar Wilde was the second son born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21
Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Elgee (her pseudonym being Speranza).
Jane was a successful writer, being a poet for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and a
life-long Irish nationalist. Sir William was
Wilde's sister, Isola,
was born in 1856. Oscar was educated at home up to the age of nine.
Wilde studied classics at Trinity
College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874. He was an outstanding student. He
was granted a scholarship to Magdalen College,
Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878 and where he became a
part of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets
being to make an art of life.
In November 1878, he graduated with a double first in classical moderations and literae humaniores, or 'greats'.
After graduating
from Magdalen, Wilde returned to
In
Publications such as the Springfield
Republican commented on Wilde's behaviour during his visit to
Wilde's mode of dress also came under attack by
critics such as Higginson, who wrote in his paper Unmanly Manhood, of his
general concern that Wilde's effeminacy would influence the behaviour of men
and women, arguing that his poetry "eclipses masculine ideals [..that..] under such influence men
would become effeminate dandies". He also scrutinised the links between
Oscar Wilde's writing, personal image and homosexuality, calling his work and
lifestyle 'Immoral'.
Wilde was deeply impressed by the English
writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater, who argued for
the central importance of art in life. He later commented ironically on this view when
he wrote, in The Picture
of Dorian Gray, "All art is quite useless", a statement
meant to be read literally, as it was in keeping with the doctrine of Art for art's sake, coined by the
philosopher Victor Cousin, promoted by Theophile Gautier and brought into prominence
by James McNeill
Whistler. In 1879 Wilde started to teach Aesthetic values in London.
Though Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been
considered bisexual, homosexual, and paederastic, Wilde himself
felt he belonged to a culture of male love inspired by the Greek paederastic tradition. In describing his own sexual
identity, Wilde used the term Socratic. He may have had significant sexual
relationships with Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd
(Wilde's wife), Robert
Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred
Douglas ("Bosie"). Wilde also had numerous
sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often rent boys.
In the early summer of 1891 he was introduced
by the poet Lionel Johnson to the
twenty-two-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, an undergraduate at
For a few years they lived together more or
less openly in a number of locations. Wilde and some within his upper-class
social group also began to speak about homosexual law reform, and their
commitment to "The Cause" was formalised by the founding of a highly
secretive organisation called the Order of
Chaeronea, of which Wilde was a member. Wilde also periodically contributed to
the Uranian literary journal
The Chameleon.
Lord Alfred’s father,
Queensberry, confronted Wilde and Lord Alfred on several occasions. A trial opened on April 3 amongst scenes of near
hysteria both in the press and the public galleries. After a shaky start, Wilde
regained some ground when defending his art from attacks of perversion. The Picture
of Dorian Gray came under fierce moral criticism, but Wilde fended
it off with his usual charm and confidence on artistic matters.
Events moved quickly and his prosecution opened
on April 26, 1895. Under cross
examination Wilde presented an eloquent defence of same-sex love:
Charles Gill (pros.): What is "the love
that dares not speak its name?"
Wilde: "The love that dares not speak its
name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger
man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very
basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep
spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades
great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two
letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much
misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dares not speak
its name," and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is
beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of
affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it
repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has
intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before
him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at
it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."
On May 25, 1895 Wilde was
convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years'
hard labour. His conviction angered some observers, one of whom demanded, in a
published letter, "Why does not the Crown prosecute every boy at a public
or private school or half the men in the universities?" in reference to
the presumed pederastic proclivities of British upper
class men.
Wilde was imprisoned first in Pentonville and then in Wandsworth prison in London, and finally transferred in
November to Reading
Prison.
Prison was unkind to Wilde's health and after
he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last
three years penniless, in self-imposed exile from society and artistic circles.
Wilde went under the assumed name of
Sebastian Melmoth, after the famously
"penetrated" Saint Sebastian and the devilish central
character of Wilde's great-uncle Charles
Robert Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer.
Nevertheless, Wilde lost no time in returning
to his previous pleasures. According to Douglas, Ross
"dragged [him] back to homosexual practices" during the summer of
1897, which they spent together in Berneval.
After his release, he also wrote the famous poem The Ballad of
Reading Gaol. Wilde spent his last years in the Hôtel d'Alsace, in
Wilde was buried in the Cimetière de
Bagneux outside
Wilde, for much of his life advocated
socialism. He also had a strong libertarian streak, as shown in his poem
“Sonnet to
Wilde lived his life twice: first, in show motion, then faster. During
his first “vital period”, so to speak, he was a scoundrel, in his second he
would become a victim.
His last three years of his live, after he got out of prison, he saw
that people actually despised him, the same people who had helped him before,
hated him; his wife left him, he didn’t know where his children were; he had
terrible encounters with old adversaries. It was a strange feeling Wilde had:
there were those who couldn’t stand him because of his being homosexual, some
others couldn’t stand his constant asking for money. Although he still found
some youngsters with whom to talk, these activities were carried out in a
desolate environment, with the memories of what he had been, and what he was at
that time, all the debts which in the first years of his brilliant career were
just insignificant problems, were actually real ones. The English law had
creased Oscar Wilde
over with a severe punishment, and the English society had given him the coup
de grâce by ostracizing him.
Oscar Wilde actually belongs more to our world than the Victorian’s.
Wilde is the tireless defender of a new aesthetic, dangerously confronted with
a society that was not mature enough to greet him. He carried out a rigorous
dissection of the Victorian English society, as well as a radical
reconsideration of its values. Oscar Wilde knew about all its secrets and he
brought to light all its fictions. The same way Nietzsche and Blake did, Wilde
thought that Good and Evil are not what they seem, that moral branding is
incapable of covering the complexity of human conduct.
(Richard
Ellman, Oscar
Wilde, Edhasa, Barcelona, 1990 p. 663-664,) Free
Translation by Guillermo Carnero Garrido.
. He carried out a rigorous dissection of the Victorian English society,
as well as a radical reconsideration of its values. Oscar Wilde knew about all
its secrets and he brought to light all its fictions. The same way Nietzsche
and Blake did, Wilde thought that Good and Evil are not what they seem, that
moral branding is incapable of covering the complexity of human conduct. (Free Translation by Guillermo Carnero Garrido.)
(ELLMANN,
Richard Oscar Wilde, Edhasa, Barcelona, 1990,
p.14)
The English law had creased Oscar Wilde over with a severe punishment,
and the English society had given him the coup de grâce
by ostracizing him. The puritan elements in the English middle-class showed
great disgust in everything that had to do with Oscar Wilde’s way of living,
his writings, way of thinking and his activities. The English find repellent
everything that relates to sexual excess. In the Anglo-saxon
countries the artist and sexual passion are prohibited.(Free
translation by Guillermo Carnero Garrido) (HARRIS, Frank, Vida y confesiones de Oscar Wilde, Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 1999)
2) WILDE’S WORKS
From the beginning, when Wilde left
The contrived style of much of his prose, the excessive elaboration of
his poetry and the aphoristic and paradoxical wit of his plays are all
subversive. They do more than reject mid-Victorian values in life and art in
the name of aestheticism; they defiantly provoke a response to difference. He
always questions institutions, moral imperatives, and social clichés Wilde’s
delight in provocation and exploration of alternative moral perspectives, mark
his most important work of fiction, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) The novel’s Preface presents a series of aphorisms about art
and literature, which end in the bald statement “All art is useless”.
The narrative that follows is a melodramatic demonstration of the notion
that art and morality are quite divorced. Aetheticism
is both damned and upheld; hedonism both disdained and indulged. Dorian Gray is
self-destructive, darkly, sinning central character is
at once a desperate suicide and a martyr.
Quite the most influential of his tragedies, Salomé, is a play which
draws on the Bible account of the death of John the Baptist. The striking imaginery of
Salomé, and its shocking juxtapositions of repulsion and sexual desire, of
death and orgasm, were particularly powerfully transformed in the German
version which became the libretto of Richard Strauss’s revolutionary opera of
1915.
Wilde’s comedies of 1890s have a far surer place in the theatre. The
importance of being Ernest, Lady’s Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of no importance
are the plays on which Wilde shows his talented wit. At the time of Wilde’s arrest, charged with
illegal homosexual practices, both the carefully plotted An Ideal Husband
(1895) and its successor The Importance of being Ernest were playing to large
theatre audiences. As the scandal developed, Wilde’s name was erased from the
hoards outside the theatres.
The real achievement of these plays lies neither in their temporal
notoriety, nor in their polished and anti-sentimental surfaces, but in their
undercurrents of boredom, disillusion, alienation and real feeling. Despite
their delightful evocations of flippancy and snobbery, and despite their shifts
in attitudes and judgements, Wilde triumphed in capturing a fluid, intensely
funny mood of irresponsibility which challenges all pretension except that of
the artifice of the plays themselves.
Wilde’s central arguments are, however derived from an
awareness that art is far more than a mere imitation of nature.
A. SANDERS, The Short Oxford History of English
Literature, Oxfrod Press N. Y. 1994, pages
475-476)
V. DECADENCE
AND ROMANTICISM: THE ART FOR ART’S SAKE.
1. TÉOPHILE GAULTIER
2. RUSKIN AND MORRIS
A)
RUSKIN
B)
MORRIS
There is a concept that we have to become
acquainted with in order to understand what this is all about, and that concept
is decadence, related to Romanticism.
Nineteenth-century
Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or
reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.
In a sociopolitical vein, the Romantics'
notion of individualism and their revolt against classical form and
conservative morality helped formulate decadence into a self-conscious
lifestyle choice that allowed individuals not only to accept but to celebrate
preferences and tastes that were traditionally seen as deviant, immoral, and
counterproductive.
The
strongest argument for a connection between Romanticism and a literary or
aesthetic form of decadence during the first half of the nineteenth century was
made by Désiré Nisard
(1806-1888), in his antiromantic work Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (1834). Though focusing on late Roman
poetry, the work succeeds in criticizing contemporary Romantic writing for its
artificiality and deceptiveness, thus lending support to the frequent claim
that the Decadent Movement represents the final phase of the Romantic era.
Even though
the terms Decadence and Aestheticism have often been applied
to late nineteenth-century literature interchangeably, not all Decadent
literature is part of Aestheticism, just as not all Aesthetic literature can be
called Decadent. Generally speaking, Aestheticism applies the concept of l'art pour l'art
(art for art's sake) to art, whereas Decadence applies it to life and society.
During the
heyday of the Decadent Movement, the term Decadent was used to refer to both lifestyle and literature.
Comparable tactics can be found in some nineteenth-century art, such as the
paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) and the
drawings of Felicien Rops
(1833-1898) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898).
Most of
the authors associated with the Decadent Movement are known for their writing
rather than their lifestyles, just as a number of the Decadent authors who
wrote about homosexuality or lesbianism were not overtly gay. A Decadent
approach to life and society was theoretically desirable, but it was rarely
actually practiced by the authors.
The
general notion of decadence in the nineteenth century involved the claim that
when a society reached its peak of prosperity, it would no longer have to
concern itself with such things as subsistence or regeneration. Therefore,
attention would shift from the communal to the individual, with individualism
gaining greater import. During a period of social decay, society would be in a
state of regression, but it would be marked by artistic genius.
THÉOPHILE GAULTIER
Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) states that the style of
decadence in literature and art reflects a civilization at the ultimate point
of maturity as it attempts to communicate the most elusive remnants of its
being, even while it pushes itself to neurosis, depravity, and madness. The
nineteenth-century Decadent Movement also reflects the sense of dehumanization
and alienation that contemporary progress fostered primarily among members of
western European society. Ironically, to signify humanity's position above the
secular realm that produced the state of social discord that the Decadent
authors were experiencing, they turned their praise to the artificial, itself
often a product of the same process of mechanization. An appreciation of
artifice, the argument goes, advertises humanity's freedom from, and
superiority over, the secular realm. Since virtue was seen to belong to a
higher realm, a logical correlation existed between the natural and evil, on
the one hand, and the artificial and virtuous, on the other. The cult of the "unnatural"
thus could be justified as a valorization of virtue. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier
In accord
with the tenets of Aestheticism, the proponents of Decadence, disavowing any
relation between art and the natural or secular, claimed that life should be
viewed from an aesthetic perspective and that art need not serve any moral,
political, or utilitarian purpose. Aesthetic strategies of representation that
supported social values of morality, industry, perpetuity, and naturalness were
challenged by an aesthetic valorization of
immorality, indolence, decay, and unnaturalness. The nineteenth-century view of
same-sex physical intercourse as unnatural, or "artificial," was a
central reason for the affiliation of gay sex with the movement. In addition,
the valuation of an ideal, artificial world over conventional lifestyles, as
well as the overt disavowal of moral values, was also a major reason for the
affiliation of male homosexuality and lesbianism with Decadence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadence
Though the Decadent Movement
was not clearly defined until the second half of the nineteenth century,
Gautier, who was not wholly enamored of the term decadence, popularized the associated
concept of l'art pour l'art
and articulated some of the fundamental tenets of Decadence as early as
http://www.glbtq.com/literature/decadence,3.html
Sur la vertu et l’immoralité dans la littérature
Une
des choses les plus burlesques de la joyeuse époque ou nous avons le bonheur de
vivre est incontestablement la réhabilitation de la vertu entreprise par tous
les journaux, de quelque couleur qu’ils soient, rouges, verts ou tricolores. La
vertu est assurément quelque chose de fort respectable, et nous n’avons pas
envie de lui manquer, Dieu nous en préserve ! La bonne et digne
femme ! (...) mais il me semble naturel de lui préférer, surtout quand on
a vingt ans, quelque petite immoralité bien pimpante, bien coquette (...) Les journalistes
les plus monstrueusement vertueux ne sauraient être d’un avis différent, et,
s’ils disent le contraire, il est très probable qu’ils ne le pensent pas.
Penser une chose, en écrire une autre, cela arrive tous les jours, surtout aux
gens vertueux.
Sur les critiques littéraires
Le
critique qui n’a rien produit est un lâche. C’est comme un abbé qui courtise la
femme d’un laïque : celui-ci ne peut lui rendre la pareille.
Sur l’utilité du beau
Rien
de ce qui est beau n’est indispensable à la vie. - On supprimerait les fleurs,
le monde n’en souffrirait pas matériellement ; qui voudrait cependant
qu’il n’y eût plus de fleurs ? Je renoncerais plutôt aux pommes de terre
qu’aux roses, et je crois qu’il n’y a qu’un utilitaire au monde capable
d’arracher une plate-bande de tulipes pour y planter des choux. À quoi sert la
beauté des femmes ? Pourvu qu’une femme soit médicalement bien conformée,
en état de faire des enfants, elle sera toujours assez bonne pour des
économistes. À quoi bon la musique ? à quoi bon la peinture ? Qui
aurait la folie de préférer Mozart à M. Carrel, et Michel-Ange à l’inventeur de
la moutarde blanche ? Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir
à rien ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque
besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et
infirme nature.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier
Mademoiselle de Maupin represents a number of decadent traits, principal
among them being the transvestism and same-sex eroticism instigated through subterfugal cross-dressing, with the desire for a variety
of sexual pleasures forming the principal narrative.
By
implying that his text does not influence social morality but exists for its
own useless sake, Gautier opened a space for Decadent art and for decadent
social transgressions. Gautier's formulation of amoral art was admired by
Walter Pater, himself a central influence on the dominant version of Decadence
that formed in
Another
major element of Decadent writing, in both
English
Decadence, as an aesthetic approach, was less extravagant and less flaunting
than its French counterpart. The term decadent
was used in
2) RUSKIN AND MORRIS
A) Ruskin
John Ruskin
is known for his work as an art critic and social critic, but is remembered as
an author, poet and artist. What particularly interests us is his belief that
art was essentially concerned to communicate an understanding of nature and
that authentic artists should reject inherited conventions. His most famous
dictum was “go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing and
selecting nothing”. He later believed that the pre-raphaelites formed a new and noble school of art
that would provide the basis for a thoghroughgoing
reform of the art world. For Ruskin, art should communicate the truth above all
things. Let’s explain Ruskin’s view: rejection of mechanisation
and standarization also informed Ruskin’s theories of
architecture, emphasising the importance of the
Medieval Gothic Style: its reference to nature and for natural forms. For
Ruskin, the Gothic style expressed the meaning of architecture as a combination
of values of strength, solidarity and aspiration. For Ruskin, Gothic
architecture involved the whole community in its creation and expressed the
full range of human emotions.
Ruskin’s
accounts on art are descriptions of a superior type that conjures images
vividly in the mind’s eye. Certain principles, however, remain consistent
throughout his work: 1. Art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole
man. Whether in making or perceiving a work of art, we bring to bear on it
feeling, intellect, morals, knowledge, memory, and every other human capacity,
all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false
and dehumanizing as economic man.
2. That even
the most superior mind and the most powerful imagination must found itself on
facts, which must be recognized for what they are. The imagination will often
reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this
recreation will be based on facts, not on formulas or illusions.
3. That these
facts must be perceived by the senses, or felt; not learnt.
4. That the
greatest artists and schools of art have believed it their duty to impart vital
truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and the conduct
of life.
5. That
beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly
according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own
words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfillment of function.
6. That this
fulfillment of function depends on all parts of an organism cohering and
cooperating. This was what he called the 'Law of Help,' one of Ruskin's
fundamental beliefs, extending from nature and art to society.
7. That good
art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain
reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas
he is asked to express are true and important.
8. That great
art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a
common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious
view of human destiny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin
B) Morris
William
Morris (March 24,
1834 – October 3,
1896) was an English
artist, writer, and socialist. He was one of the principal founders of the British
Arts and Crafts movement, a pioneer of the
socialist movement in
These friends
formed an artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They eschewed
the tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative
arts and architecture and favored a return to
hand-craftsmanship, raising artisans to the status of artists. He espoused the philosophy
that art should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy
of artistic mediums.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_morris
VI. THE CONCEPT OF SATANISM .
For
Rousseau, man is good; however society exerts too much pressure on him, and he gets corrupted and suffers a great deal. So,
what Rousseau is claiming for is a modification of society, just so that it
would actually rise to the individual’s occasion and their demands of
happiness, something that could only be obtained through a virtuous situation. Doing
good, as Rousseau put it once, is enjoying oneself. Pleasure was a moral
fundament of life (that is something Diderot and other philosophers defend). In
Diderot’s times the philosopher stands for someone who because of his dissolute
behaviour, stands up to the obligations of the Christian life. Someone could
only be happy if he rejected moral prejudices, feelings. This definition of
“Man of pleasure” did lead to the greatest critique about philosophical
thinking, the so called, libertine theory. Fighting for the
liberation of desire lead to the defending of sexual perversions. This
liberation of desire lead to amoralism
from the aesthetes of evil.
A sadist needs something to infringe, some God he shall profane and
blaspheme, and in doing so, he would get to an endless source voluptuousness which implies the
horror and the division that the former acts would produce in a believer.
That’s why Lacan said that moral theory defending the
liberation of desire was doomed to failure.
At the end of the XVIII century aesthetics changes and that implies the
end of the conception of classical beauty, and the beginning of the romantic
conception, with a tormented concept of beauty, in which pain was to be part of
the voluptuousness. After the French Revolution, aesthetics is not governed by
cannons of beauty but by the cannons of the sublime.
The term Satanism was first used in 1821 referring to Lord Byron. We do
encounter this term in the Byronic heroes-bandits, pirates…-, his stories are
usually about melancholy, desperation, guilt, the indefinable disease called
fin de siècle, an irresistible inclination towards being evil.
The personal experiences of the so called satanic authors, has been
related to wild, dissipated lives, just like Byron’s, but in their works they
show some ironic disgust as to the atrocities with which they fantasize in
their works.
Free
translation by Guillermo Carnero Garrido. http://www.scb-icf.net/nodus/007Felicidad.htm
VII. HELLENISM: ROMANTICS AND
VICTORIANS
Hellenism, as distinct from other Roman or Greco-Roman
forms of neoclassicism emerging after the European Renaissance,
is most often associated with
In
The Victorian period saw new forms of Hellenism,
none more famous than the social theory of Matthew
Arnold in his book, Culture and Anarchy. For
In the early nineteenth century, during the Greek War of Independence, many foreign
parties--including prominent Englishmen such as Lord Byron--offered
zealous support for the Greek cause. This particular brand of Hellenism,
pertaining to modern rather than ancient
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenism_(neoclassicism)
VIII. COMPARAISON BETWEEN TWO
BIOGRAPHIES: BYRON AND WILDE
It’s well known
that some of Byron’s and Wilde’s experiences, thrust upon such tractable young
souls, helped produce a narcissistic self-love in Oscar Wilde and a nostalgic
longing for boyhood in Byron, who would later idealize his school boy years at
Both Byron’s and Wilde’s matriculation proved embarrassing due to culture clash
between school atmosphere and personal background. J.E.C. Bodley,
a one-time friend to Wilde during his
While Oscar’s efforts were predominantly successful - his charming, eccentric
and wittily egocentric disposition earning him numerous speaking opportunities
both within
Although Byron’s reputation portrayed him as an almost mythological, romantic
hero, he usually failed to live up to the romantic standards he set forth in
his verse, perhaps due to the traumatic experience he suffered as a child at
the hands of his nurse, May Gray. Hired to help treat Byron’s lame leg when he
was 9 years old, Gray in fact not only neglected him, but abused him as well:
“She had treated him with cruelty.( p22) When Byron was nine years old, at his
mother’s house, a free girl used to come to bed with him and play tricks with
his person.” But wanton molestation was not all Byron suffered. The combination
of her deceitful, nocturnal activities coupled with her strident hyper-Calvinism
created a rift in Byron’s mind that he was never able to surmount: “The May
Gray episode had important repercussions. Byron’s nurse was ostentatiously
religious, and the coexistence of pious Bible study and lascivious behavior
sharpened his awareness of hypocrisy and cant, deepening his scorn of false
religious religiosity and over-zealous Calvinism in particular.<snip> The
memories of female dominance, the large nurse in the small bed, affected his
later attitudes to sex with women. Byron found a mature woman a complicated
structure, threateningly flabby. He preferred the physique of young teenage
boys, or the girls dressed as boys that became a feature of his early days in
Throughout his college days, Byron’s developing “romantic suitor” persona would
be macerated with rumors of infidelity, coldness and homosexuality, with
alternating patterns of wooing, then scorning beautiful women, seducing his
female servants, and copulating with younger if not socially inferior boys.
Meanwhile, his views on religion, while superficially agnostic - betrayed a
deep-rooted conviction that he was reprobate, or eternally condemned to Hell by
God. Underneath his idealistic, aristocratic mask, an inveterate self-hate brewed, an overweening passion that would eventually send
him head-long into despair and consequently destruction.
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blogs/viewblog.php?userid=8500&entry=40...
IX. POEMS BY KEATS AND WILDE
1. KEATS
ON SEEING THE
My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.
http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/037024.htm
HAPPY IS
Happy is
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/happy-is-england-i-could-be-content/
ODE ON A
GRECIAN URN
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are
sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy
boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these
coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape!
Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
http://www.artofeurope.com/keats/kea3.htm
ODE ON
MELANCHOLY
No, no! go not to
Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy
fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with
Beauty -- Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips;
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous
tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/melancholy.html
ON SITTING DOWN TO READ KING LEAR ONCE AGAIN
O golden-tongued
Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET
The poetry of
earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's--he takes the lead
In summer luxury,--he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/John_Keats/keats_On_Sitting_Down_to_Read_King_Lear_Once_Again.htm
THE FALL OF
HIPERION (FRAGMENT)
Fanatics have
their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage too
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance.
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.
B) OSCAR WILDE.
KEATS GRAVE
Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our
Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/8344/
IMPRESSION DE VOYAGE
The sea was sapphire coloured, and the sky
Burned like a heated opal through the air;
We hoisted sail; the wind was blowing fair
For the blue lands that to the eastward lie.
From the steep prow I marked with quickening eye
Zakynthos, every olive grove and creek,
And all the flower-strewn hills of
The flapping of the sail against the mast,
The ripple of the water on the side,
The ripple of girls’ laughter at the stern,
The only sounds:—when ‘gan the West to burn,
And a red sun upon the seas to ride,
I stood upon the soil of
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/8298/
SONNET ON APROACHING
I reached the
Italia, my Italia, at thy name:
And when from out the mountain’s heart I came
And saw the land for which my life had yearned,
I laughed as one who some great prize had earned:
And musing on the marvel of thy fame
I watched the day, till marked with wounds of flame
The turquoise sky to burnished gold was turned.
The pine-trees waved as waves a woman’s hair,
And in the orchards every twining spray
Was breaking into flakes of blossoming foam:
But when I knew that far away at
In evil bonds a second Peter lay,
I wept to see the land so very fair.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/8335/
TAEDIUM VITAE
To stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear
This paltry age’s gaudy livery,
To let each base hand filch my treasury,
To mesh my soul within a woman’s hair,
And be mere Fortune’s lackeyed groom,—I swear
I love it not! these things are less to me
Than the thin foam that frets upon the sea,
Less than the thistledown of summer air
Which hath no seed:
better to stand aloof
Far from these slanderous fools who mock my life
Knowing me not, better the lowliest roof
Fit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,
Than to go back to that hoarse cave of strife
Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/8339/
FLOWER OF LOVE
Sweet, I blame you
not, for mine the fault was,
Had I not been made
of common clay
I had climbed the
higher heights unclimbed yet,
Seen
the fuller air, the larger day.
From the wildness
of my wasted passion I had
Struck a better, clearer song,
Lit some lighter
light of freer freedom, battled
With
some Hydra-headed wrong.
Had my lips been
smitten into music by the
Kisses that but
made them bleed,
You had walked with
Bice and the angels on
That
verdant and enamelled mead.
I had trod the road
which Dante treading saw
The suns of seven
circles shine,
Ay! perchance had seen the heavens opening, as
They opened to the
Florentine.
And the mighty
nations would have crowned me,
Who am crownless now and without name,
And some orient
dawn had found me kneeling
On the threshold of
the House of Fame
I had sat within
that marble circle where the
Oldest bard is as
the young,
And the pipe is
ever dropping honey, and the
Lyre's strings are
ever strung.
Keats had lifted up
his hymeneal curls from out
The poppy-seeded
wine,
With ambrosial
mouth had kissed my forehead,
Clasped
the hand of noble love in mine.
And at springtime,
when the apple-blossoms
Brush the burnished
bosom of the dove,
Two young lovers
lying in an orchard would
Have
read the story of our love.
Would have read the
legend of my passion,
Known the bitter
secret of my heart,
Kissed as we have
kissed, but never parted as
We two are fated
now to part.
For the crimson
flower of our life is eaten by
The canker-worm of
truth,
And no hand can
gather up the fallen withered
Petals
of the rose of youth.
Yet I am not sorry
that I loved you- ah! what
Else had I a boy to
do,-
For the hungry
teeth of time devour, and the
Silent-footed years
pursue.
Rudderless, we
drift athwart a tempest, and
When once the storm
of youth is past,
Without lyre,
without lute or chorus, Death a
Silent pilot comes
at last.
And within the
grave there is no pleasure, for
The blind-worm
battens on the root,
And Desire shudders
into ashes, and the tree of
Passion bears no
fruit.
Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God's
Own mother was less
dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheraean rising like an
Argent
lily from the sea.
I have made my
choice, have lived my poems,
And, though youth
is gone in wasted days,
I have found the
lover's crown of myrtle
Better than the
poet's crown of bays.
http://infomotions.com/etexts/literature/english/1800-1899/wilde-flower-603.htm APOLOGIA (FRAGMENT)
Is it thy will that
I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?
Is it thy will---Love
that I love so well---
That my Soul's House should be a tortured spot
Wherein, like evil paramours, must dwell
The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?
Nay, if it be thy will I
shall endure,
And sell ambition at the common mart,
And let dull failure be my vestiture,
And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.
Perchance it may be
better so---at least
I have not made my heart a heart of stone,
Nor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,
Nor walked where Beauty is a thing
unknown.http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Apologia_%28Wilde%29
SONNETS: WRITTEN AT THE
LICEUM THEATRE: PORTIA
I marvel not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead,
Or that proud
Or that
For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold
Which is more golden than the golden sun,
No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.
Yet fairer when
with wisdom as your shield
The sober-suited lawyer's gown you donned
And would not let the laws of Venice yield
Antonio's heart to that accursed Jew---
O Portia! take my heart: it is thy due:
I think I will not quarrel with the Bond.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sonnets:_Written_at_the_Lyceum_Theatre:_Portia
X.
WILDE’S POETRY AND KEATS’
Oscar Wilde shared John Keats’s views and feelings on
the aesthetic role of poetry. Although they stand at the temporal extremes of
the nineteenth century, there is no division, intra Keats and Wilde, but
continuity; they have much more in common than either of them has with the
intervening Victorian versifiers. M. H. Abrams, The
Mirror and the Lamp, examines
the four, main
critical-theoretical currents prevailing in the early
XIXth
century. He writes that poetry, within the “objective” school (where he places
Keats), was thought to be a self-sufficient entity, independent of external
factors; its aim was not to instruct or give delight but, simply, “to be”,
existing in its own “perfect” sphere of reference.
Abrams selects Keats as
its leading exponent because of the poet’s belief in the power of the Imagination
which, free from all social and moral constraints, can grasp the ultimate Truth
and reach a superior Reality. This makes him a precursor of what the later
Victorians were to call “art for art’s sake”.
Keats himself had declared, in a famous letter to
Benjamin Bailey, that “what the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth for
I have the same idea of all our passions as of love; they are all, in their
sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” It is precisely this aspect of Keats’s
poetry that appealed to Wilde
Keats was the one poet to whom Wilde constantly
referred while he travelled up and down the northern half of the American
continent in 1882,
lecturing on what he called
“The English Renaissance”, whose spirit, he said, “in Keats it seemed to have been
incarnate, and in his lovely ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. In a letter written
while he was still in the United States (in Omaha, Nebraska, dated 21 March
1882), he expressed his most sincere gratitude to Emma Speed for having given
him the manuscript of Keats’s “Sonnet on Blue” (“Blue! ’Tis
the life of heaven ...”). Emma Speed was the daughter of George Keats, the
poet’s younger brother. Wilde had mentioned that particular sonnet in the
course of a lecture held at
“It is a sonnet I have loved always”, Wilde wrote,
with typical
exuberance, “and indeed who
but the supreme poet and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a
motive so full of marvel.
M.H. Abrams, again in his The
Mirror and the Lamp, states that
Keats’s overwrought (“tortured”) manuscripts not only
reveal the fact that poetic vision often lies in revision, but also show a kind
of donnée which can be of an
involuntary and unexpected nature. The bard and the playwright shared a
predilection for dandysm, Greek ideals and dangerous
liaisons. Perhaps the greatest commonality shared between these two lies in
their fundamental philosophy, the unique combination of neo-Hedonism, religion
and gothic elements that pervade their lives and consequently, work. http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blogs/viewblog.php?userid=8500&entry=40...
XI. COMPARAISON
BETWEEN THE POEMS
The scent of Keats
poetry in the Romantic Era is present everywhere in Wilde’s poetic works.
(Apologia Is it thy will---Love that I love
so well---
That my Soul's House should be a tortured spot/ Wherein, like evil paramours,
must dwell / The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth
not? ; Perchance it may be better so---at least/ I have not made my heart a
heart of stone, / Nor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,/ Nor walked where
Beauty is a thing unknown)these verses could be considered a synthesis of
Romanticism and Oscar Wilde’s idea of the aesthetic.
Flower of love is a romantic lamentation (I had climbed the
higher heights unclimbed yet) moreover, he makes some interesting references to
the classic poets, and to Dante (I had trod the road which Dante treading saw…)
and, of course, to his “mentor” Keats ( Keats had lifted up
his hymeneal curls from out. The poet is also referring to the fact that he
is actually prouder of being a lover rather than a poet, for loving is the most
important thing in Romantic poetry (I
have made my choice, have lived my poems, /And, though youth is gone in wasted
days,/ I have
found the lover's crown of myrtle/Better than the poet's crown of bays... In
this poem he also talks about
death and (Rudderless, we
drift athwart a tempest, and/ When once the storm of youth is past,/ Without
lyre, without lute or chorus, Death a/
Silent pilot comes at last); and the rapid passing of time when we are
young (For the crimson flower of our life
is eaten by/ The canker-worm of
truth,/ And no hand can gather up the
fallen withered/ Petals of the rose of youth).
The whole poem by
Wilde referring to Keats Grave, obviously is showing
us the great admiration that Wilde felt for Keats.
The so usual vital
tiredness, the spleen
the tedium of life, the “malditism” do
appear in Wilde’s Taedium Vitae.
Both Wilde and
Keats have Hellenism as a present element (for instance we have got the On seeing the
Now we are going to
talk about Keats’ poems. All the romantic sorrow is mixed with the “Grecian grandeur” from the poem On seeing the
Marbles for the first time. The Fall of Hyperion is a poem about the poet
and his role; it is furthermore a characteristic poem from a decadent, inspired
on Romanticism, and that was the case in Keats.as we
can see in the following example For
Poesy alone can tell her dreams,/With the fine spell
of words alone can save / Imagination from the sable charm/ And dumb
enchantment. Who alive can say/ 'Thou art no Poet may'st
not tell thy dreams?
We can actually get
an idea of how much Wilde liked the Urn
to a Grecian urn, because Wilde’s conception of art, what was beautiful,
and what was true wwere the same as Keats’. As Keats mentions in the
latter poem, "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." We have the feeling that Wilde may have
also liked the poem Ode to melancholy,
for it mixes the classical and the romantic; it explains how beauty, sadness and
pleasure are mixed together hoplessly in life.
XII. BYRON AND
WILDE
Byron’s Manfred is the poem primarily responsible for producing the
legacy of the Byronic hero, whose characteristics are the following: having great talent;
exhibiting great passion; having a distaste for society and social
institutions; expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege; thwarted in
love by social constraint or death ; rebelling;
suffering exile; hiding an unsavory past; arrogance, overconfidence or lack of
foresight; ultimately, acting in a self-destructive manner. http://in.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gordon_Byron%2C_6th_Baron_Byron
For Byron, the epoch of sensation was the feeling produced through observation
of an union with the beautiful and the sublime, both
in nature, as demonstrated in his panegyric to the
The tyrannical forces of beauty and sensation re-emerged in the Aesthetic
and Decadent movements, albeit in a different form, of which Wilde was the
predominant figure. Forsaking the sense of guilt that characterized beauty and
sensation to the exclusion of any moral conscience,as exemplified in his Faustian gothic novel, “The
Picture of Dorian Gray”, a book that has been recognised
as being the Picture of a Narcissist personality.
Although Wilde proposed that “no artist has ethical sympatihes”
Dorian’s downfall clearly signifies Wilde’s awareness that a neo-hedonism
devoid of morality destroys, the exact sentiment reflected in Byron’s Manfred.
What Byron laid bare in a single protagonist, Wilde had concealed in allegory,
transforming contradictory impulses into characters, and demonstrating that
Dorian’s narcissistic pathology, his inability to sympathize and his apathy
towards his own state, did not mitigate his condition nor thwart his fate.
Manfred and Dorian Gray both idolize beauty and sensation at the expense of
their souls, resulting in Faustian-like destruction and both works juxtapose
such gothic elements as supernaturalism and terror with religious sentiments,
predestined reprobation (Byron) and Catholic damnation (Wilde). If the poet’s
legacy is the bipolar Byronic hero then certainly the playwright’s could be
called the narcissistic Wildean protagonist. Though
these two literary authors are separated by time and different disorders, they
lived similar lives and produced similar legacies: mythological characters
reflecting their own personalities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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ELLMANN,
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