the Romantics

Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavours in it, may also become clearer.
Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Times" (1829)

Points of Reflection

1. discuss the tone and purpose of Letitia Barbauld's "The Rights of Woman" (ca.1792-95)

2. are the two depictions of a divine creator in William Blake's "The Lamb" (1789) and "The Tyger" (1790; 1794) complementary or at odds with one another?

3. how does Wordsworth go about redefining the concepts of community and heroism in "The Idiot Boy" (1798)?

4. what do you think Coleridge's infinitely interpretable "Kubla Kahn" (1797-98; 1816) is actually about? Art? The human condition? Politics? Something else?

5. how does Byron's portrayal of his cousin in "She Walks in Beauty . . ." (June 1814; 1815) contribute to the culture's ongoing debate over the proper place of women in British society?

6. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (May 1819; 1819) is a perfect example of art that, whatever its larger applications to the nature of the imagination, art, and/or the human condition, springs from very concrete, personal events experienced by the author. What events in Keat's life determine the sombre tone of much of this ode?

7. in Natural Supernaturalism (1971), M. H. Abrams claims that much British poetry of the Romantic period reflects a secularization of the culture's predominant religious structures and ideas. Look throughout P. B. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (1819; 1820) for instances where the poet appropriates traditionally religious concepts and redeploys them for other purposes.

8. Thomas Carlyle suggests that his age (what we would refer to today as the "late Romantic") has become a "mechanical" one as concerns labor, education, religion, art, and metaphysics. Explain.

"Fishermen at Sea" (1796)
J. M. W. Turner

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu