Poetry in the Romantic Period
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This study will examine three poems by English poets of the Romantic period: William Blake's "The Tyger," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," and William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud." The study will examine the basic principles of Romanticism and show how each poem upholds those principles. Although the three poets demonstrate different levels of intensity and different approaches to reality, all three fall within the Romantic mantle in their emphasis on nature and the imagination as expressions of a deeper reality. The Romantic poets, as Scholes et al. write, tended to be "transcendental in their philosophy, seeing nature as symbolic of the Creator's presence, and natural creation as analogous to the lesser creations of imaginative human beings" (Scholes et al. 606). Cuddon notes these features of Romantic poetry: an increasing interest in Nature, and in the natural, primitive and uncivilized way of life; a growing interest in scenery, especially its more untamed and disorderly manifestations; an association of human moods with the "moods" of Nature; . . . increasing importance attached to . . . the power of the imagination; a tendency to exalt the individual (Cuddon 588). Blake's "The Tyger" clearly qualifies as Romantic poetry, relying on the power and wonder of nature to carry his spiritual message. Blake uses the great orange-and-black striped beast to stand for the mysterious and threatening might of nature in the form of a wild animal. The fir
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athwart a cedarn cover" (12-13). The poet could be describing the subconscious, where life in its most wild forms thrives, as opposed to the "stately" and artificial grounds created by Kubla Khan "with walls and towers . . . girded round" (7). Coleridge suggests with his symbolism that the conventional and conscious mind is like the palace, full of artificial devices to protect itself from the perceived terrors lurking in the subconscious. The poet also did not hide the fact that he was under the influence of a drug at the time he wrote the poem, creating what Drabble calls an "opium-vision" (Drabble 211). This fact certainly must shape any analysis of the poem.
To such an extremely passionate, Romantic poet as Coleridge, the imagination or subconscious offers not terrors at all, but rather sources of greater life: "A savage place! as holy and enchanted/ As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman wailing for her demon lover!" (14-16). The underworld of the vision, sparked by the drug, is full of "ceaseless turmoil seething" and marked by a volcano-like phenomenon (17-22). The poet sees the "Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail" as "dancing rocks" (21; 23), suggesting that even in what appears to be a symbolic hel
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Approximate Word count = 1994
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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