(1) Sentimentalism, Exoticism, and Mysticism in Poetry of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century.
(R. Burns, W. Blake, T. Percy, J. Macpherson, and T. Chatterton).
R o b e r t B u r n s ( 1 7 5 9 – 9 6 )
L i f e :
- democratic sympathies: admirer of the republican rev. in Am. and Fr.
- opponent of the strict Calvinism (father of a number of illegitimate children)
W o r k :
= consid. a natural genius, a poet by instinct; styled a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, or a ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ x but: well-read, though largely self-educated
< (a) the oral tradition of Scott. folklore and folk song
< (b) the lit. tradition of poems in the Scots dialect of E
> revived the lyric and the legends of folk culture, and wrote in the language really spoken by the common people > anticipated William Wordsworth
F o l k S o n g s :
- coll., ed., restored, and imitated traditional songs, also wrote new verses to traditional dance tunes
- keen ear for Scots vocabulary, idiom, and rhythm
- author of over 300 songs on love, drink, work, friendship, patriotism, and bawdry
- hearty, generous, and tender in tone, with a sympathy to all humans
The Scots Musical Museum (1787 – 1803): as a co-ed. of James Johnson’s anthology of Scott. songs
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793 – 1811): as a co-ed. of George Thomson’s (1757 – 1821, a collector) coll.
P o e t r y :
(a) in Scots, the northern dialect of E spoken by rural people: his best poetry (“To a Mouse”)
(b) in standard E: poetry in the genteel poetic tradition, with few exceptions (“Afton Water”) conventional
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the Kilmarnock ed. (1786): his 1st publ. vol., an immediate success
Tam o’Shanter: a mock-heroic verse narrative
Also wrote: satire, incl. devastating satires against the rigid relig.; and verse epistles to friends
W i l l i a m B l a k e ( 1 7 5 7 – 1 8 2 7 )
L i f e :
- apprenticed as an engraver x but: followed his ‘divine vision’
=> a life of isolation, misunderstanding, and poverty
W o r k :
- author of paintings, engravings, and illustr. for works of oth. poets & his own
- illustr. for his poems = an integral and mutually enlightening combination of words and design
- ‘illuminated printing’ = his own method of relief etching, used to produce most of his books of poems (hand-coloured, or printed in colour)
P o e t r y :
- subtle, symbolic, and allusive x but: the ambiguous style veils radical relig., moral, and political opinions
Poetical Sketches (1783): his 1st vol., dissatisfied with the reigning poetic tradition => sought new forms and techniques
Songs of Innocence (1789) > Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794):
= visions of the world by ‘two contrary states of the human soul’
(1) Songs of Innocence: a hymn-like simplicity, use of nursery-rhyme
(2) Songs of Experience: compressed metaphor and symbol of multiple references (“The Tyger”, “London”, & oth.)
- interrelates the poems of both vol. as a series of shifting perceptions = (1) a falling away from the Edenic innocence to experience > (2) the possibility of progress twd a Christ-inspired ‘higher’ innocence
(1): challenges the innocent state
> “Holy Thursday”, celebrates the infant joy of the charity-children march x condemns the exploitation of ‘the aged men’
(2): equates the ‘wisdom’ of the old with oppression => satirical, even sarcastic
> “The Sick Rose”, suggests the mental, spiritual, and intellectual distortion by the “invisible worm” destroying the beauty of the rose
> “The Poison Tree” (= orig. “Christian Forbearance”), on the destructive force of repression; the tree = (a) the forbidden tree of knowledge, or (b) a metaphor of repressed emotion > (c) the negative Christian hypocrisy, and/or (d) the positive Christian forgiveness
> “The Garden of Love”, ironically wrecked by the ‘thou shalt nots’ of the priests
(1): introd. by the piper > (2): introd. by the ‘voice of the bard who present, past, and future sees’ = (1): a shift beyond the innocence… > (2): …into an awareness of the Fall
(2): the vol. opens with a daybreak > darkened by the following poems > closes by another morning in the concl. poem, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” = a regeneration, a new age of spiritual liberty
P r o p h e c i e s :
- insisted he had been granted visions by God which he could transl. and interpret by interfusing picture and word (B.: ‘the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative’)
- yearned for a faith free of dogmatic assertion > a visionary poetry based on a complete mythology of his own
< infl. by the Bible, the Bible-derived epic structures of Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321, [author of the epic poem The Divine Comedy]) and John Milton (1608 – 74, [author of the epic poem Paradise Lost]), and the hymnological tradition in E verse
< the eccentric Swedish visionary and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) > redefined his cosmology > close to the Ger. theosophist Jacob Boehme (1575 – 1624): God the Father = neither good nor evil x but: contains the germs of both > the necessity of merging heaven with the creative energy of hell => celebrated the contraries
> infl. W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
The French Revolution (1791), America: A Prophecy (1793), sequel Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and the prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 – 93):
- wrote while supporting the Fr. Rev.: rev. = a purifying violence leading to the redemption of humanity
x but: his later poetry shifted from an apocalypse by rev. to an apocalypse by imagination (Orc = the fiery spirit of violent rev., gave way to Los)
The First Book of Urizen (1794), and The Book of Los (1795):
= prophetic books
- Urizen = oppressor and the negative God of “thou shalt nots” x embodiment of reason and law
- Los = rebel against Urizen
- Orc = both rebel and oppressor
The Four Zoas (an unfinished manuscript), Milton (1804), and Jerusalem (1820):
= major prophetic books
- conc. with the overall biblical plot interpreted in the ‘spiritual sense’: incl. the Creation, the Fall, the humanity in the fallen world, and redemption and the promise of a New Jerusalem
- written in the persona, or ‘voice’, of ‘the Bard’, going back to Edmund Spenser (c. 1952 – 99, [author of the epic poem Faerie Queene]) > J. Milton > and the prophets of the Bible
- the Four Zoas = Urizen + Tharmas + Luvah + Los = the results of the fall and division of the primeval man = Albion (= orig. an ancient mythological name for the Br. Isles)
- the demonic characters in Jerusalem < the incident of his altercation with a private, haunting his imagination (B. pushed the soldier to the inn where he was quartered after he had refused to leave his garden and answered with threads and curses)
Also wrote: A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810), a prose book
T h o m a s P e r c y ( 1 7 2 9 – 1 8 1 1 )
L i f e :
- a scholarly bishop x but: did not feel pressurised to concentrate his energies on theology only
- educated to appreciate classical principles x but: reflected the shift twd a new and receptive poetic sensibility
W o r k :
- interested in lit. outside narrowly defined canons => pioneered the explorations of alternative lit. traditions
T r a n s l a t i o n s :
- author of transl. of relig. / secular writings: transl. of the “Song of Solomon”, author of a key to the New Testament, & oth.
Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History (1761): a Chinese novel transl. from the Portug.
Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (1763): transl. from the Icelandic and ‘improved’ by the transl., aimed for the market for ‘ancient poetry’ newly opened by James MacPherson’s Ossian
Northern Antiquities (1770): transl. from the French
B a l l a d s :
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765):
= a 3-vol. coll. of ballad poetry
< based on a various 17th c. manuscript coll. now known as ‘The Percy Folio’ (saved it from destruction when he discovered it ‘being used by the maids to light the fire’)
- ed. and ‘improved’ x but: with an alertness to the virtues of a plain mode of expression, in spite of the ‘polished age, like the present’
- also visually pleasing: vignettes on the title pages, and a copperplate engraving in each of the 3 parts of the 3 vol.
> greatly successful x but: did not secure him an adequate living
> foreshadowed the ballad revival in E poetry, characteristic of the Romantic movement: W. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, & oth.
The Hermit of Warkworth (1771):
= his orig. ballad on the Warkworth castle
- combined the vogue for the ‘Churchyard Poets’ + the ballad vogue he himself had set in motion
> Samuel Johnson’s (= Dr. Johnson, 1709 – 84, a poet, essayist, and biographer) 3 satires on the ‘simplicity’ of the ballad verse form: the narrow line btw the beautiful simplicity and simple mindedness
J a m e s M a c p h e r s o n ( 1 7 3 6 – 9 6 )
= a vicarious contrib. to lit.: pretended to have discovered and transl. the works of the early Scott. Gaelic poet ‘Ossian, the son of Fingal’
> a widely received Romantic image of the primitive poet
> depicted parallel to Homer (8th c. BC, [author of epics Iliad and Odyssey]) as the Bard of the North on the proscenium arch of the rebuild Covent Garden Theatre (1858)
‘ O s s i a n i c ’ F a k e s :
Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760): supposedly a transl. of poetry from Scott. Gaelic, based on the manuscripts he claimed to have discovered in the Highlands and Islands
Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books; Together with Several other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language (1762):
= supposedly a transl. of an epic by the 3rd c. bard Ossian
- employed the musical measured prose he had used in his earlier vol.
(−) some Gaelic ballad poetry truly attributed to one ‘Oisean’, son of the warrior Fionn x but: cleverly adapted, re-created, and expanded mere fragments of surviving verse
(−) compounded stories belonging to different cycles to give a Homeric coherence and classical solemnity to the disparate ballad accounts of ancient Scott. feuds
(+) appreciated natural beauty, incl. the emotive associations of wild landscape
(+) treated the ancient legend of primitive heroism with a melancholy tenderness
> the authenticity immediately challenged by Dr. Johnson, claiming M. had found fragments of ancient poems and stories and woven them into a romance of his own composition
> modern critics tend to agree with Johnson
> admired by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 – 1832) who incorporated his transl. of a part of the work into his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Temora: An Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books; Together with Several other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763): another epic
The Works of Ossian (1765): a coll. ed. of Fingal and Temora
Also wrote: Iliad (1763), a stodgy prose version of Homer’s epic
T h o m a s C h a t t e r t o n ( 1 7 5 2 – 7 0 )
L i f e :
- wayward from his earliest y.: uninterested in the games of oth. children, liable to fits of abstraction when sitting for hours as if in trance or crying for no reason > consid. educationally backward
< his uncle held an office in a church > familiar with the altar tombs commemorating the dead knights and ecclesiastics, and with ancient legal documents laying there forgotten
< a voracious reader of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400), T. Percy’s Reliques, J. Macpherson’s Ossian, etc.
- from the age of 11 contrib. relig. poems to a local journal > later political satires to London periodicals: his contrib. accepted x but: paid for little or not at all
- did not have to suffer the dire poverty x but: too proud to accept help
- financial distress + lack of lit. success => suicide (17+ y.) by drinking arsenic dissolved in water after tearing into fragments whatever lit. remains were at hand
> the Romantic image of the suffering of unacknowledged genius
> = the “marvellous Boy” in W. Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807)
> = the dedicatee of John Keats’s Endymion (1818)
> = the subject of Henry Wallis’s (1830 – 1916, pre-Raphaelite painter) painting (1856)
> commemorated in poems by S. T. Coleridge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, & oth.
W o r k :
- fascinated with the Middle Ages > lived in an ideal medieval world of his own creation
=> forged the so-called ‘Rowley Poems’ = mock medieval poems by the imaginary 15th c. priest Thomas Rowley
‘ R o w l e y ’ F a k e s :
“Elinoure and Juga”:
= the only of the ‘Rowley’ poems publ. during his lifetime, an ‘eclogue’
- written before he was 12 > claimed it to be a transcription of Rowley’s work
- incl. obvious borrowings, deliberate use of archaic words picked out of dictionaries, and anachronistic use of Elizabethan verse forms
“An Excelente Balade of Charitie”: another of the “Rowley” poems, rejected for publ. in a periodical
Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777):
= a posthum. coll. of the ‘Rowley’ poems
- ed. by a Chaucerian scholar then believing them genuine medieval works
- the authenticity challenged shortly thereafter > proved to be fakes
“Ode to Liberty”:
= a fragment of a larger unpreserved work = Tragedy of Goddwyn
- may be counted among the finest martial lyrics in E
Ælla, a Tragical Interlude: incl. passages of rare lyrical beauty
Also wrote: prose / verse political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas, and satires
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Other Sources
Jelínková, Ema. Semináře: Britská literatura 1. ZS 2004/05.
Wikipedia. www.en.wikipedia.org