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SECOND GENERATION
The second generation includes Lord Byron (extravagant personality), Percy B. Shelley (a rebel expelled by university), John Keats (a rebel but he anticipated Aestheticism (Oscar Wild) with the insistence on beauty) ➔ They had a rebellious attitude towards social, religious and political conventions. ➔ There’s a sense of disillusionment due to the failure of democratic ideals, that brought to rebellion and to the struggle between real and ideal. There was no more optimism as the first generation.
LORD BYRON
Byron believed in liberty, infact he wanted every man to be free, and hated every imposition. So he fought against tyranny. He didn’t consider himself a Romantic poet infact he criticised Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats; He was against Romanticism because:
- R. didn’t support the idea of Nature as a source of consolation and its idealisation and deification, but it was seen as a reflection of poet’s feelings, and also as the background of the hero’s adventures; - He rejected the importance of imagination (his works are based on descriptions of reality as it is, not how it is imagined, like in romanticism); - Use of satirical realism. Even if he didn’t consider himself a Romantic poet he was seen as an exponent of Romantic movement, and he had an influence on European writers, an example was Goethe; He wrote poems, especially lyrical poems , and satires , through which he denounced the evils of society. The style of his works was that of the 18th century, as we can understand from the satirical aim of his works. He was an unconventional aristocrat : - He had the reputation of a rebellious student - Despite his handicap, a deformed foot, he forced himself to become good at sports;
He did the Grand Tour of Europe , where he lived experiences that gave life to the first 2 cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he published after his return in England…and he got success thanks to this 2 cantos. So in all his life he had a good reputation , thanks to his stories in verse and their success. In England he had a incestuous relationship with his halfsister, and so, due to scandal and debts, he moved to Switzerland (where he met Shelley, and where he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold) and Italy (Venice, where he produced Manfred and the fourth
canto of Childe Harold, and started his masterpiece: Don Juan. Then he went to Milan, Pisa, to join Shelley); After the death of Shelley he decided to fight for the Greek Independence from Turkey, infact he organised an expedition and he died in Missolonghi, his heart is buried in Greece, where he is considered a national hero, but his body in England. His Main works are:
- Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) - The poem contains many autobiographical elements - Inspiration came from his travels in southern Europe - It created the Romantic archetype known as the “Byronic hero” ; in this work the main character is a young nobleman awaiting knighthood (Childe indicates this) who travels due to boredom and disillusionment with life; - It is divided into 4 cantos , that are independent sections: 1 and 2 - set in Portugal, Spain, Albania and Greece, talk about the past and the monuments and landscapes of these places; 3 – set in Belgium, on the Alps, and talk about the human capacity to forget, through immagination; 4 - set in Italy, and there is the description of nature, in particular of the sea, that is described as image of sublime and eternity. - Manfred (1817) – dramatic poem, with supernatural and gothic atmosphere; - Don Juan – social satire with irreverent tone, and aggressive language that shocked the reading public.
The Byronic hero , that Byron talk about, is:
- Passionate, melancholy, moody, restless, mysterious and seductive man; - He rejects standard social conventions, and so moral rules; - Outsider (alienated from society); - Noble birth but rough in behaviour; - A man with a great sensibility; - A men with a sense of individualism.
PERCY B. SHELLEY
Even if he was from a rich family, he had a restless spirit , like Byron, and he rejected social conventions, so he rebelled against authority and against each kind of institutions, like religions, laws and customs. We can find all these features in almost all his works. He believed in liberty and love , because he saw them as remedies for society's evils. He had a friendship with Byron and marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Frankenstein’s author);
He was a source of inspiration for many 19th-century poets; He wrote different works , including:
- The Eve of St Agnes : characterised by Romantic features. Here the atmosphere is the one of the Middle Ages, where there are superstition, art, ritual, perfect love and luxury.
- The Great Odes (To Autumn): where there are relationships between pleasure and pain, happiness and melancholy, art and life, reality and imagination. These works contain personal experiences, but they are the background.
- A ballad, where there is again an interest in the Middle Ages
- Hyperion: unfinished work, that shows the influence of Milton in verse.
He used the pronoun “i”, that reppresent the universal “i”. And his poetry rarely identifies scenes and landscapes with subjective moods and emotions. He considered beauty the central theme of his poetry, which made him the anticipator of Aestheticism. In this Keats takes inspiration from the classical Greek world. He sees beauty as a source of joy and consolation, and as the only types of knowledge, together with truth. Beauty is divided into:
- SPIRITUAL BEAUTY (love, poetry, friendship): • is immortal and eternal.
- PHYSICAL BEAUTY (nature, woman, paintings):
- is perceived through senses.
- inspired by classical Greek world
- expression of spiritual beauty
- subject to time, life, decay and death. Keats had also Romantic ideas :
- He sees imagination as the power to recognise beauty in things and so he sees beauty as the creative force of beauty; And also his poetry comes from imagination.
- He feels love for the Middle Ages (Romantic taste) and the Greek civilisation (Neoclassical taste);
- He sees Nature as one of the greatest source of inspiration, consolation and joy;
- He introduced the idea of “ negative capability ”: by this he meant the poet’s capability to deny his certainties and personality in order to identify with the object that he sees as the source of his inspiration and the place where truth lives. If the poet follows this negative capacity he will be able to arrive at sensations that are the basis of the knowledge that leads to beauty and truth. This allows him to write poetry.
