Sandra Olivares Gonzlez I. THE RETURN TO NATURE: 1790-1830 a. Historical Background.

This is the period of Romanticism that took place from 1789 to 1832. In 1732, the Treaty of Paris was signed, which ended the American Revolutionary War between England and the United States. Then, in 1776, it was signed the Declaration of Independence of the United States. In 1789 the French king Louis XVI decided to combine the Estates because of the crisis. General and ancient assembly consist of three different estates: clergy (First Estate), nobility (Second Estate) and general French public or Commons (Third Estate). As a result, the Third Estate declared itself the sovereign National Assembly. In Paris citizens stormed the Bastille, and then the assembly released the Declaration of the Rights of Man and citizen in 1793. In France the French Revolution broke out, and it had consequences in all parts of the world. The French Revolution began in1789 and lasted to1799. During these years, the government and ideas about how France should be ruled changed many times. Generally, ordinary people wanted more power and more rights. The most famous event that began the Revolution was the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July, 1789. This led to the end of the monarchy and the start of the Reign of Terror, leaded by Robespierre, in which thousands of people including the king of France Louis XVI, were killed because they did not agree with the Revolution. Many thousands more were killed in the Revolutionary Wars between France and countries that did not like the changes in France. In 1795 a new constitution was created. The revolution brought new ideas: liberty, equality and fraternity. The Revolution ended when Napoleon Bonaparte took power in November 1799 and began his dictatorship. He became emperor in 1803, and fought many battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was defeated by Horatio Nelson, an English commander, or the Battle of Nile in Egypt,

where one of the soldiers discovered the Rosetta stone. In 1806 Napoleon's brother was proclaimed king of Spain and in 1812 Napoleon decided to send an army against Russia, but it was a disaster because of the cold and the winter. In 1814 an alliance was created between Prussia, Russia, Britain, Sweden and Austria against Napoleon. Then, he was destroyed and had to exile to Elba. A year later, he returned but he was defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium by the British and he was sent to the island of Saint Helena. After the Napoleonic Wars, there were social problems, lack of jobs and many people had died during the war. The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the socio-economic and cultural conditions of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, and then subsequently spread throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world. The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in human history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Most notably, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. In England, education was improved and it started to be compulsory for children until the age of 12. Two politics groups appeared: the Tories and the Whigs. In 1831 the Lower class created the Trade Unions, in order to participate in Parliament and had better conditions. Another important change was the emancipation of the catholic people, there was more freedom in religion. The Catholic Relief Act of 1829 removed some restrictions on Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom. b. Literary Features. The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the first half of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton and his brother Thomas Warton, professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief

qualities of a poet. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered to be the first Romantic poet in English. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed to be earlier literature that they had discovered or compiled was in fact entirely their own work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (175967) introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English literary public. The literature Romantic writing is mostly poetry. Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammelled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today. It also helped in the emergence of new ideas and positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections of the society. Much of the literature that emerges during the Romantic Period revolved around concepts generally regarded as being too dark or melancholic for cultured tastes, particularly since they were seen as an attack on progress during the Enlightenment. The authors felt industry was killing society, and that a return to nature and an enjoyment of beauty would be the society' salvation. What romantics wanted to say with 'Return to Nature' was that the people should return to the external world of sights and sounds, to primitive simplicity. Unlike the age of Enlightenment, which focused on rationality and intellect, Romanticism

placed human emotions, feelings, instinct and intuition above everything else. While the poets in the era of rationality adhered to the prevalent rules and regulations, selecting a subject and writing about it, the Romantic writers trusted their emotions and feelings to create poetry. This belief can be confirmed from the definition of poetry by William Wordsworth, where he says that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The emphasis on emotions also spread to the music created in that period, and can be observed in the compositions made by musicians like Weber, Beethoven, Schumann, etc. Beethoven played an important role in the transition of Western music from the classical to the Romantic age. As the Romantic period emphasized on human emotions, the position of the artist or the poet also gained supremacy. In the earlier times, the artist was seen as a person who imitated the external world through his art. However, this definition was mooted in the Romantic era and the poet or the painter was seen as a creator of something which reflected his individuality and emotions. The Romantic perception of the artist as the creator is best encapsulated by Caspar David Friedrich, who remarked that "the artist's feeling is his law". It was also the first time that the poems written in the first person were being accepted, as the poetic persona became one with the voice of the poet. The Romantics borrowed heavily from the folklore and the popular local art. During the earlier eras, literature and art were considered to belong to the high-class educated people, and the lower classes were not considered fit to enjoy them. Also, the language used in these works used to be highly lyrical, which was totally different from what was spoken by people. However, Romantic artists took no shame from being influenced by the folklore that had been created by the masses or the common people, and not by the literary works that were popular only among the higher echelons of the society. Apart from poetry, adopting folk tunes and ballads was one of the very important characteristics of Romantic music. As the Romantics became interested and focused upon developing the folklore, culture, language, customs and traditions of their own country, they developed a sense of Nationalism which reflected in their works. Also, the language used in

Romantic poems was simple and easy to understand by the masses. Along with Nationalism, the Romantics developed the love of the exotic. Hence, far off and mysterious locations were depicted in many of the artistic works from that period. Though this was not exactly apposite to the Romantic ideal of Nationalism, separate factions were never formed. Exoticism is also one of the most prominent characteristics in art, along with sentimentality and spirituality. Another characteristic of this movement is the belief in the supernatural. The Romantics were interested in the supernatural and included it in their works. Gothic fiction emerged as a branch of Romanticism after Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. This fascination for the mysterious and the unreal also led to the development of Gothic romance, which became popular during this period. Supernatural elements can also be seen in Coleridge's Kubla Khan', The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. As no Romantic artist followed any strict set of rules or regulations, it is difficult to define the characteristics of this movement accurately. Nevertheless, some of these characteristics are reflected in the works of that period. Though many writers and critics have called this movement "irrational", it cannot be denied that it was an honest attempt to portray the world, especially the intricacies of the human nature, in a paradigm-shifting way. The number of periodicals was greatly augmented and the first daily journals started at this time, like The Times, that was created in 1785 under the name The Daily Universal Register. c. Poetry. The 18th century poetry was characterized because the romantics stood for love of the sights and sounds of Nature. As the Revolution proceeded to unexpected developments, there came in turn disappointment, disillusion and despair and in the case of Wordsworth, the rejection of youthful ideals and the soured adoption of the older reactionary faith. The younger writers, such as Shelley and Keats, still adhered to Revolutionary doctrines. Some authors wrote about social problems or

called for social justice. Others wanted a revolution in poetic language and in themes which contrasted with the Augustan age. The individual spirit rather than an ordered society became important. The poets explored and re-analysed the literature of all previous periods, and there was a lot of German influence in poetry. William Wordsworth. His life. The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born in April 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Northwest of England and died in April 1850. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father passed away. Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, taught him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. He was taught to read by his mother. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life. She was a poet and diarist. Wordsworth entered in a local school and he kept going with his studies at Cambridge University. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife. He made his debut as a writer in 1817, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. He went to France in order to improve his knowledge of the French language. There, he became enthralled with the Republican movement. Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had an illegitimate daughter, Anne Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth's sister for the last 20 years of her life. He was appointed official distributor of stamps of Westmoreland. Then he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. In his later life, Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public man.

His poetry. William Wordsworth was an early leader of Romanticism in English poetry and ranks as one of the greatest lyric poets in the history of English Literature. His central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. Wordsworth's two most important works are his early volume of poems written with Coleridge, The Lyrical Ballads (1798), and his posthumous long semi-autobiographical poem, 'The Prelude' (1850). In The Lyrical Ballads he writes verses flush with emotional vibrancy and natural scenes. The critics considered the language simple and the change violent. This book is the signal of the beginning of the romantic age. In 'The Prelude'(14 books of verse), a much older and disillusioned poet writes exhaustive and ponderous meditations on the nature of life and the poet's connection with it, characterized by the late Wordsworth's didactic, almost instructional style of writing. His sorrows and awareness of humanity's varied sufferings inevitably led to passages where the beauty of nature contrasts with the fate of man as in the poem 'Lines Written in Early Spring'. It is a ballad which is included in the collection Lyrical Ballads. He talked about the affair with Annette Vallon in the poem 'Vaudracour and Julia'. 'The excursion', a 9-books poem, is the middle part of a great philosophical work which he never completed. The famous poem 'Tintern Abbey' is of particular interest in that Wordsworth's descriptions of the banks of the River Wye outline his general philosophies on nature. Its full title is 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey'. It is written in blank verse and it is not rhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. It is written about common things (enjoying nature during a walk around a ruined abbey with his sister). Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote most of the poems in Lyrical Ballads about common people, like shepherds and farmers. Some of the poems are even about mental illness, like 'The Mad Mother', 'The Idiot Boy', and 'The Thorn'. 'We Are Seven' describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a little cottage girl about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her.

Wordsworth's second verse collection, Poems in Two Volumes, appeared in 1807. In the poem 'My Heart Leaps Up', also known as 'The Rainbow', he uses a concept that becomes a theme throughout his poetry: the importance of childhood. His poem 'London' is a sonnet, a strong advocacy for social change. 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' is one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, with a particularly spare, musical eloquence. Other poems written by Wordsworth are, for example, 'Character of the Happy Warrior', 'On the Banks of a Rocky Stream', 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge', a sonnet that describes London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. He wrote a poem to his sister called 'To my Sister', in 1798. Features of his poetry. His poems mostly dealt with pastoral folk that lived amidst nature. They portray the moral influence exerted by the nature on human thought and feeling. The magnificent of landscapes deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him this love of nature, what is reflected in his whole work. When he separated his wife this left him with a sense of guilty that deepened his poetic inspiration and resulted in an important theme in his works of abandoned women. Nature to Wordsworth was everything. After his disillusionment with the French Revolution, he sought the 'healing power' of Nature. His increased interest in it was thus partly caused by his political frustration. To him, Nature starts with animal and sensuous pleasures and ends on a mystic note. God and Nature became one for him. Most of the rural characters he paints in his poetry are shown to be simple and uncorrupted mainly because of their close communion with Nature. Wordsworth and other Romantics emphasized the vitality of everyday life, the importance of

human emotions and the illuminating power of nature. Romanticism also stressed the power of imagination, which encouraged freedom from classical conventions in art and sometimes provocatively direct phrasings, uncomplicated syntax, and few allusions. From this perspective his work can be seen for what it was in its time: a refreshingly straight-forward style of poetry that harks back to much earlier English poetic style, but unlike, for instance, the poetry of Milton, still manages to remain musically pleasant and prosaically clear. A prominent feature of Wordsworth's poetry is its preoccupation with emotion, and in particular what he called 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility'. This sort of recollection of emotions in a state of tranquility was, for Wordsworth, the very definition of poetry. For him the job of the poet was, in some way, to delve into the self in order to recall the powerful emotions of ones life, and then to recast those emotions (including the events that inspired them, or the thoughts they engendered) into the language of poetry. This is the most noticeable aspect of Wordsworths poetry, resulting in both trite and sentimental verse and stunningly moving poetic meditations. A fine example of the latter is Wordsworths early sonnet, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge in which the narrator of the poem, a sentimental enthusiast of nature like Wordsworth, gazes out over the massive, industrial city of London and sees, of all things, arresting beauty there. In Wordsworth's poetry, childhood is a magical, magnificent time of innocence. He wrote frequently about nature and ordinary people who live against the background of the world of nature. Above all, Wordsworth wanted to show the importance of the human memory, because it is the memory which continues to give life to our major experiences. He was one of the so called the Lake Poets, because he loved the Lake District in northwestern England, where he lived. In his works, he uses the language of the common people so that everyone could read him. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

His life. Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was born in October 1772, and died in July 1834, was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads,(1798) written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement. He was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. He was the elder of 13 sons. His childhood is characterised by his loneliness. After his father's death Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London. He also studied at Jesus College. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey. He moved with Southey to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fiance Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love. The brothers Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood granted Coleridge an annuity of 150 pounds, thus enabling him to pursue his literary career. Disenchanted with political developments in France, Coleridge visited Germany in 1798-99 with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and became interested in the works of Immanuel Kant. He studied philosophy at Gttingen University and mastered the German language. At the end of 1799 Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife. From 1808 to 1818 he gave several lectures, chiefly in London, and was considered the greatest of Shakespearean critics. In 1810 Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth came to a crisis, and the two poets never fully returned to the relationship they had earlier. Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge had become addicted to opium. During the following years he lived in London, on the verge of suicide. He found a permanent shelter in Highgate in the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed an almost legendary reputation among the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left the house. After 1817 Coleridge devoted himself to theological and politic-sociological works. He was elected as fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824 and died ten years later in Highgate.

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His poetry. One of the best known Coleridge's works are 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the longest major poem written by him and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. It relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. After relating the story, the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest returns home, and wakes the next morning as "a sadder and a wiser man". Other of his best works is 'Kubla Khan', published in 1816. According to Coleridge's Preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work which described Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and emperor of China, Kublai Khan. The chant-like, musical incantations of Kubla Khan result from Coleridges masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming pattern, also expanded ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJJ. The third stanza tightens into tetrameter and rhymes ABABCC. The fourth stanza continues the tetrameter of the third and rhymes ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG. One theory says that 'Kubla Khan' is about poetry and the two sections discuss two types of poems. The power of the imagination is an important component to this theme. The poem celebrates creativity and how the poet is able to experience a connection to the universe through inspiration. As a poet, Coleridge places himself in an uncertain position as either master over his creative powers or a slave to it. 'Christabel' is a lengthy poem, in two parts. The first part was written in 1797 and the second in 1800. The story of the poem concerns a central female character of the same name as the book and her encounter with a stranger called Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her

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home by a band of rough men. This long poem was an influence on Edgar Allan Poe, particularly his poem 'The Sleeper'. Biographia Literaria is an autobiography which Coleridge published in 1817. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightforward or linear autobiography. Instead, it is meditative, with numerous essays on philosophy. In particular, it discusses and engages the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Being fluent in German, Coleridge was one of the first major English literary figures to translate and discuss Schelling, in particular. It is also taken as his longer-term reaction and comment on William Wordsworth, earlier (at the time of Lyrical Ballads) his close collaborator. The book contains his celebrated and vexed distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy'. Coleridge's collection Poems on Various Subjects was published in 1796, and in 1797 it appeared Poems. He wrote 'Dejection: An Ode' in 1802. It was devoted to Sara Hutchinson, whose he fell in love and here he discusses his feelings of love for her. The various versions of the poem describe Coleridge's inability to write poetry and living in a state of paralysis, but published editions remove his personal feelings and mention of Hutchinson. 'Frost at Midnight' is a poem written in 1798. Part of the conversation poems, the poem discusses Coleridge's childhood experience in a negative manner and emphasizes the need to be raised in the countryside. The poem expresses hope that Coleridge's son, Hartley, would be able to experience a childhood that he could not and become a true "child of nature". The view of nature within the poem has a strong Christian element in that Coleridge believed that nature represents a physical presence of God's word and that the poem is steeped in Coleridge's understanding of Neoplatonism. In terms of criticism, Frost at Midnight has been well received by critics and seen as the best of the conversation poems.

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'Desire' is a poem about Coleridge's definition of a passionate love. 'Love', written in 1799, is a pretty poem by Coleridge about his affection for Sara Hutchinson. 'Fears in Solitude' is a poem composed while France threatened to invade Great Britain. Although Coleridge was opposed to the British government, the poem sides with the British peolple in a patriotic defense of their homeland. It also emphasizes a desire to protect one's family and to live a simple life in harmony with nature. 'The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem' disputes the traditional idea that nightingales are connected to the idea of melancholy. Instead, the nightingale represents to Coleridge the experience of nature. 'To William Wordsworth' was a response to Wordsworth's reading of 'The Prelude'. 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement' discusses Coleridge's understanding of nature and his married life, which was suffering from problems that developed after the previous poem. Coleridge also wrote a play, Remorse, which was successfully produced at the Drury Lane theatre in 1813. Features of his poetry. Coleridge's attitude to Nature, more particularly in the early phase of his poetic career, was similar to Wordsworth's. Coleridge's Supernaturalism is something that is above and beyond what is natural; events which cannot be directly explained by known laws and observations. Exploration of the occult (supposedly supernatural or magic) and of infinity, mysticism, and numerology (study of the supposed influence of number) are some other manifestation of the intense desire of man to know what exists or lies beyond the finite mind. Imaginative and inventive fiction and poetry have been created upon this appeal. This element of supernaturalism is found in the three major works of Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel. The outstanding quality of Coleridges

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supernaturalism, however, is that his writings do not excite ones senses to a feverish pitch and do not remain remote from human reality. He is capable of creating the still, sad music of humanity. In his supernaturalism we do not find any kind of crudeness as is found in other poets Horace and Monk Lewis. He replaced the crudeness with suggestiveness. He did not portray horror, he suggested it. Both in the cases of the Night-mare Life-in-Death and the serpent woman Geraldine, he resists the temptation of depicting their hideous monstrosity. Coleridge has successfully kept the reality of supernatural phenomena by avoiding the descriptions of details. He deepens his effect by mystery surrounding it. Along with this Coleridges supernaturalism has essentially psychological truth in it. The supernatural touches in Kubla Khan or The Ancient Mariner are so managed that they are in perfect harmony with the mental and emotional molds of the characters as well as the readers. Coleridge's Mysteriousness is that condition in which some character, event or situation remains hidden and is not revealed to the usual vision or common understanding. It is not completely known but makes its presence feel to the people. Coleridge possesses an unusual gift of evoking the mystery of things. But Coleridge uses this faculty most effectively by keeping alive the ordinary natural phenomena intact. Coleridge's Imagination is a mental faculty of framing images of external objects which are not present to the five senses. It is a process of using all the faculties so as to realize with intensity what is not perceived, and to do this in a way that integrates and orders everything present to the mind so that reality is enhanced thereby. We see that Coleridges imagination has all these qualities to a superb order. Coleridge is gifted with the most fertile and vigorous imagination among all the Romantic Poets. It is by this rich and fertile imagination that he is able to create his perplexing mystery. In this respect he goes ahead of Wordsworth who was too conscientious to describe or present those things that were not seen personally by him. Coleridge, on the other hand, was able to describe and present

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those things which he came across during his vast study through his faculty of imagination. He had the faculty of presenting such unseen and inexperienced things so vividly as if those had been literally present before his eyes. Coleridge's Dream quality is a quality of imagining while asleep. It is a process of or a sequence of images that appear involuntarily to the mind of a sleeping person, often a mixture of real and imaginary characters, places and events. The major poems of Coleridge have a strange dream like atmosphere about them. Dreams with him are no shadows. They are the very substance of his life. The dramatic texture (structure) of Coleridges poems gives them a kind of twilight vagueness intensifying their mystery. Coleridge's Medievalism means devotion to the Middle Ages, a devotion to the spirit of beliefs of the Middle Ages. Coleridges love for supernatural led him to the exploration of Middle Ages. He was fascinated by the romance and legends associated with them. The Ancient Mariner Christable and Kubla Khan are all wrought with the glamours of Middle Ages. But it should be kept in mind that Medievalism does not form the substance of his poems. It gives them the much needed sense of remoteness and offers a fit setting for the marvelous which is Coleridges purpose to hint at or openly display. Coleridge's Love of Nature means a physical world including all natural phenomena and living things. It also means a force that is represented before man in the form of beautiful scenes. Wordsworth is stated to be communicating new order of experience for which Nature serves us a point of departure and there was not such an experience in English poetry before his time. Coleridge shows for Nature the same loving devotion as we find in Wordsworth. Whether his descriptions are based on his personal experiences or on what he has read, he never fails to give them a semblance of truth. He can evoke the richness of colour as well as the magical associations of sound much better than any other poet. And he is equally successful both in giving graphic descriptions and in achieving broad generalized effects. In his earlier attitude towards Nature, he had a pantheistic view

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and also accepts it as a moral teacher, but later he comes to believe that it is we who invest Nature with life and it simply reflects our own moods. Coleridge's Meditative thinking is the result of reflective and speculative temper. It is a philosophic bent of mind. Coleridge was amply gifted with this quality. This tendency of mind was present even in his early age which made him to do serious reading. He was especially impressed by the German philosophers Kant and Schiller. Coleridge's Humanitarianism means the love of humanity and a commitment to improving the lives of others. We find humanitarianism in Coleridges poetry. Both he and Wordsworth strongly supported the French Revolution in the hope that it would free the masses from the tyranny of the dictators. But they were miserably disappointed in their hope. When Coleridge discovered that the revolutionists were perverting or violating the very principles they had stood for, he did not hesitate to denounce them in his 'Franch:An Ode'. His love of humanity is expressed in different poems and also in the moral of The Ancient Mariner. Coleridge's Music is the art of arranging sounds, the art of arranging or making sound, usually those of musical instruments or voices, in groups and patterns that create a pleasing or stimulating effect. It can be presented in the written form indicating pitch, duration, rhythm, and tone of notes to be played. Coleridge's Narrative skill is the art of telling a story or giving an account of a sequence of events in the order in which they happened. Coleridge is superb in the art of storytelling. He knows how to create suspense or to evoke interest in the narrative. The above are the characteristics that distinguish Coleridge from other romantic poets and make him the most complete representative of the English Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century. Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday speech in his poetry. Many of his poems openly address a single figure.

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Coleridge's so called conversation poems are short, self-contained and often without a discernible poetic form. Colloquial, spontaneous and friendly, Coleridge's conversation poetry is also highly personal, frequently incorporating events and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen the scope of possible poetic content. Although he sometimes wrote in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, he adapted this metrical form to suit a more colloquial rhythm. He introduces some symbols in his poems such as the sun as a symbol of God (sometimes God is symbolized by the moon). Lord Byron. His life. Lord George Gordon Byron, born in 1788 and died in 1824, was as famous in his lifetime for his personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the son of Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon. He was born with a club-foot and became extreme sensitivity about his lameness. Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship. He became an adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords on liberal themes, and had a hectic-love affair with Lady Caroline Lam, and then he married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815 with whom he had a daughter, but they get separation the next year.

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When the rumors started to rise of his incest and debts were accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return. He settled in Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, who became his mistress. After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a brig, the Hercules, and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords. However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever from which he died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. Memorial services were held all over the land. Byron's body was returned to England but refused by the deans of both Westminster and St Paul's. Finally Byron's coffin was placed in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. He was athletic, being a competent boxer, horse-rider and an excellent swimmer. His poetry. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems 'Don Juan' and 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' and the short lyric 'She Walks in Beauty'. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. 'Don Juan' is a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost. The masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels social, political, literary and ideological. Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry. It is a satiric poem based on the legend of Don Juan, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but as someone easily seduced by women. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire". 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage', written in the Spenserian stanza, is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to

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"Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood. he poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through Portugal, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea. The work provided the first example of the Byronic hero. The poem has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and has rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC. Some others Byron's best-known poems are 'When We Two Parted', about the love and the hate a man feels towards who was his beloved because she left him, or 'So, We'll Go no More a Roving', which describes the fatigue of age conquering the restlessness of youth. 'Poems to Augusta' was dedicated to his sister after he left England. During his years in Italy, Byron wrote 'Laments of Tasso', inspired by his visit in Tasso's cell in Rome. While he was in Ravenna and Pisa, he became deeply interested in drama and wrote among other The Two Foscari, Sardanapalaus, Cain and the unfinished Heaven and Earth. 'Darkness' is a poem written by Lord Byron in 1816. That year was known as the Year Without Summer, because Mount Tambora had erupted in the Dutch East Indies, casting enough ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun and cause abnormal weather across much of north-east America and northern Europe. This pall of darkness inspired Byron to write his poem. 'Love and Death' is considered one of the last poems Byron wrote before his death in 1824 and has published in 1887. 'Epitaph to a Dog' (also sometimes referred to as 'Inscripition on the Monument to a Newfoundland') was written in honour of his Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, who had just died of

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rabies. 'Stanzas for Music' is a brief lyric poem written as an address by the poem to a person with whom he is infatuated. Features of his poetry. The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both Byron's life and writings have been considered in different ways to exemplify the type. The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semiautobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (18121818), and was described by the historian and critic Lord Macaulay as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection". Lord Byron was one of the most influential and typical Romantic poets, and his poetry was influenced by Pope. He was a great influence across Europe in the XIX century. His picture of the romantic hero, and isolated individual who attacks social conventions and challenges the authorities of the age and who searches for, but never finds, peace and happiness, was particularly influential. The so called Byronic hero is one who struggles to find meaning and who fights for justice. Byron lived a dangerous life and shocked many people by his beliefs and actions. He was a poetic hero of his age, a Byronic hero himself, bringing together many concerns of Romanticism since Blake. Byron was different in most aspects from the rest of the romantic poets. He shared their love of nature, though his love is for its own kind. He took a particular delight in envisioning and describing wild and terrifying objects and aspects of Nature which seem to be mocking, as the insignificance of men. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Eastern mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the

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embodiment of Romanticism. Percey Bysshe Shelley. His life. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 in Horsham, Sussex, England. He was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry and his political and social views, fame eluded him during his lifetime, but recognition grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Shelley was the eldest legitimate son of Timothy Shelley a Whig Member of Parliament and his wife, a Sussex landowner. He had four younger sisters and one much younger brother. He received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Evan Edwards of nearby Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby, recounted his early childhood in his "The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley". It was a happy and contented childhood spent largely in country pursuits such as fishing and hunting. In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, Middlesex. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, where he fared poorly, subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates called "Shelley-baits". Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice. On 10 April 1810, he matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but frequently read sixteen hours a day. There, his idealism and controversial philosophies were developing. Shelley's early profession of atheism (in the tract "The Necessity of Atheism") led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalisation and ostracism from the intellectual

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and political circles of his time. His close circle of admirers, however, included some progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition. Shelley did not live to see success and influence, although these reach down to the present day not only in literature, but in major movements in social and political thought. He eloped with Harriet Westbrook to Scotland, and they married in 1811 and had two children. Then, few years later, the marriage fell down. For the next three years, Shelley made several trips to London. Influenced by Wordsworth's poetry, he continue writing. He was also studying the writings of Godwin and embracing his radical philosophy. Godwin had a daughter called Mary, and she was being educated in Scotland when Shelley first became acquainted with the Godwins family. When she returned Shelley fell madly in love with her, repeatedly threatening to commit suicide if she didn't return his affections. In 1814 Shelley abandoned Harriet and he ran away to Switzerland with Mary, then 16. He spent much time with Lord Byron who also led a controversial life or romantic entanglements and political activity. Shelley was passionate about life and very generous to his friends, which often caused him financial hardship. They passed their days sailing on a lake in Switzerland and telling each other ghost stories. In 1815 Shelley and Mary moved back to England and settled near London. The same year Percy's grandfather died leaving him a large sum of money per year. In 1816 Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine River in Hyde Park, and Mary's half sister Fanny committed suicide, but their son William was born and the Shelley's wed. In 1818 they moved to Italy and they had another son. Shelley continued to venture on sailing trips on his schooner 'Don Juan'. In 1822, it sank in a storm and Shelley drowned, at the age of twenty-nine. There were those who believed his death was not accidental. Some said that Shelley was depressed in those days and that he wanted to die; others

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say that he did not know how to navigate; others believed that some pirates mistook the boat for Byron's and attacked him, and others have even more fantastical stories. His body washed ashore and he was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. His ashes are buried in Rome. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. He was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, Karl Marx, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley's non-violence in protest and political action. His wife devoted much of her time after her husband's death to compiling and publishing his works. His poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as 'Ozymandias', 'Ode to the West Wind', 'To a Skylark', 'Music, When Soft Voices Die', 'The Cloud' or ' The Masque of Anarchy', which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included 'Queen Mab' (later renamed as 'The Daemon of the World'), 'Alastor', 'The Revolt of Islam', 'Adonas' and the unfinished work ' The Triumph of Life'. The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. 'Ozymandias' is a sonnet published in 1818 in the 11 January issue of The Examiner in London. It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem. It was written in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who wrote another sonnet entitled 'Ozymandias'. In addition to the power of its themes and imagery, the poem is notable for its virtuosic diction. The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is unusual and creates a sinuous and interwoven effect. The central theme of "Ozymandias" is the inevitable decline of all leaders, and of the empires they build, however mighty in their own time.

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The 'Younger Memnon' statue of Ramesses II in the British Museum thought to have inspired the poem. Ozymandias represents a transliteration into Greek of a part of Ramesses' throne name, User-maatre Setep-en-re. The sonnet paraphrases the inscription on the base of the statue, given by Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca historica, as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Shelley's poem is often said to have been inspired by the 1821 arrival in London of a colossal statue of Ramesses II, acquired for the British Museum by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. Rodenbeck and Chaney, however, point out that the poem was written and published before the statue arrived in Britain, and thus that Shelley could not have seen it. Its repute in Western Europe preceded its actual arrival in Britain (Napoleon had previously made an unsuccessful attempt to acquire it for France, for example), and thus it may have been its repute or news of its imminent arrival rather than seeing the statue itself which provided the inspiration. 'Ode to the West Wind' s an ode written by Shelley in 1819 near Florence, Italy. It was published in 1820. Some have interpreted the poem as the speaker lamenting his inability to directly help those in England owing to his being in Italy. At the same time, the poem expresses the hope that its words will inspire and influence those who read or hear it. Perhaps more than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. Some also believe that the poem is due to the loss of his son, William in 1819 (to Mary Shelley). His son Charles (to Harriet Shelley) died in 1826, after "Ode to the West Wind" was written and published. The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorises the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. At the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. It consists of five cantos written in terza rima. Each canto consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter.

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The poem begins with three cantos describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two cantos are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloud or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far. It is associated with autumn. 'To a Skylark' is included among the verse accompanying Prometheus Unbound published by Charles and James Collier in London. It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon. The poem uses a unique five line stanza with a three beat line except for the fifth line, which doubles the number beats of the other lines, and it has a rhyme scheme that is consistently 'ababb.' 'Music, When Soft Voices Die' was written in 1821 and first published in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1824. The poem is one of the most anthologized, influential, and well-known of Shelley's works. The theme of the poem is the endurance of the memories of events and of sensations. 'The Cloud' was written during late 1819 or early 1820 and submitted for publication in 1820, in the collection Prometheus Unbound. It is a metaphor for the unending cycle of nature. The poem consists of six stanzas in anapestic or antidactylus meter, a foot with two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. 'The Masque of Anarchy' is a political poem written in 1819 by Shelley following the Peterloo Massacre of that year. In his call for freedom, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance. The poem was not published during Shelley's lifetime and did not appear in print until 1832. 1819, Shelley begins his poem with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time "God, and King, and Law" - and he then imagines the stirrings of a

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radically new form of social action. The poem mentions several members of Lord Liverpool's government. 'Queen Mab' was published in 1813 in nine cantos with seventeen notes. This poem was written early in Shelley's career and serves as a foundation to his theory of revolution. It was his first major poem. In this work, he depicts a two-pronged revolt involving necessary changes, brought on by both nature and the virtuousness of humans. Shelley took William Godwin's idea of "necessity" and combined it with his own idea of everchanging nature, to establish the theory that contemporary societal evils would dissolve naturally in time. The poem is written in the form of a fairy tale that presents a future vision of a utopia on earth. 'Alastor' is a poem written in 1815 in London, published the next year. It was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend, Thomas Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. The name comes from Roman mythology. In Alastor the speaker ostensibly recounts the life of a Poet who zealously pursues the most obscure part of nature in search of "strange truths in undiscovered lands", journeying to the Caucasus Mountains ("the ethereal cliffs of Caucasus"), Persia, "Arabie", Cashmire, and "the wild Carmanian waste". 'The Revolt of Islam' The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem in twelve cantos originally published under the title 'Laon and Cythna'. Shelley composed the work in the vicinity of Bisham Wood, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, from April to September. The plot centres on two characters named Laon and Cythna who initiate a revolution against the despotic ruler of the fictional state of Argolis, modeled on the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Despite its title, the poem has nothing to do with Islam in particular, though the general subject of religion is addressed. The work is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution.

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'Adonas' is a pastoral elegy written for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works. The poem was written immediately after Keat's death. Like Miltons 'Lycidas', it is an English adaptation of the classical form of elegy perfected by poets as early as the classical Greek times of Homer and Virgil. 'Adonais' is written mainly in the classical pattern, though Shelley has adapted and added some of the elements. The setting is dramatic, and the reader feels as if someone just struck by sorrow is frantically running around calling everyone to mourning; but the actions and shifts in time and place are to be guessed form the subtle clues in the poem. This pastoral elegy is written in the pattern of the classical pastoral elegy. 'The Triumph of Life' was the last major work by Shelley before his death. It was left unfinished. He wrote the poem at Casa Magni in Italy in 1822. It is written in terza rima and was first published in Posthumous Poems. The theme of the poem is an exploration of the nature of being and reality. For Shelley, life itself, the painted veil which obscures and disguises the immortal spirit, is a more universal conqueror than love, death, fame, chastity, divinity, or time, and, in a dream vision, he sees this triumphal chariot pass, on the storm of its own rushing splendour, over the captive multitude of men. Ultimately, natural life corrupts and triumphs over the spirit. 'The Cenci' is a verse drama in five acts written in 1819 and inspired in a real Italian family, the Cencis. The play was not considered performable in its day due to its themes of incest and parricide, and was not performed in public in England until 1922. It was included in the Harvard Classics as one of the most important and representative works of the western canon. The theme of the poem is an exploration of the nature of being and reality. Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play published in 1820, concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological figure of Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus. It is inspired by Aeschylu's Prometheus Bound and concerns Prometheus's release from captivity. Unlike Aeschylu's version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus.

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Although he has typically been figured as a 'reluctant dramatist', he was passionate about the theatre. He wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, and the short prose works The Assassins, The Coliseum and Una Favola. In 2008 he was credited as the co-author of the novel Frankestein (1818). After his death, his wife compiled and published his works in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe, in 1824. Features of his poetry. The central thematic concerns of Shelley's poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley's era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley's treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter-which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth-and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelley's intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark," in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes,

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A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art's sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron's pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time. In Shelleys poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem To Wordsworth (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to natures power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheismthe belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the spirit of beauty.

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Shelley simultaneously recognizes that natures power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelleys delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side. Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for natures beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imaginationor our ability to form sensory perceptionsthat allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute natures power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages Shelleys ability to believe that natures beauty comes solely from a divine source. Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn. He is interested on the supernatural repeatedly appears in his work. The ghosts and spirits in his poems suggest the possibility of glimpsing a world beyond the one in which we live. From his days at Oxford, Shelley felt deeply doubtful about organized religion, particularly Christianity. Yet, in his poetry, he often represents the poet as a Christ-like figure and thus sets the poet up as a secular replacement for Christ. Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination and spreads his prophetic visions over the earth. For Shelley, Mont Blancthe highest peak in the Alpsrepresents the eternal power of nature. He uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic. In Shelleys work, the statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, or Ozymandias,

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symbolizes political tyranny. Shelley's ideas were anarchic and dangerous in the eyes of the conservative society of his time. He believed that original sin did not exist and that it was possible to attain human perfection on earth if humans could only free themselves from the chains of a repressive society. John Keats. His life. John Keats was born in 1795 in Moorgate, London, England, the first child born to Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats, an employee of a livery stable. He was the eldest of four surviving children. When John was eight years old, his father was killed in an accident. In the same year his mother married again, but little later separated from her husband and took her family to live with her mother. John attended a good school where he became well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature. In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother. The old lady put them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benifit of the orphans. Under the authority of the guardians, he was taken from school to an be apprentice to a surgeon. In 1814, before completion of his apprenticeship, John left his master after a quarrel, becoming a hospital student in London. Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature. In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life.vHe soon got acquainted with celebrated artists of his time, like Leigh Hunt, Percy B. Shelley and Benjamin Robert Haydon. When Shelley's body was washed ashore after drowning, a volume of Keats's poetry was found in his pocket. In May 1816, Hunt helped him publish his first poem in a magazine. He liked authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. Keats travelled to the Lake District of England and on to Ireland and Scotland on a walking tour with his friend Brown. They visited the grave of Robert burns and reminisced upon John

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Milton's poetry. While he was not aware of the seriousness of it, Keats was suffering from the initial stages of the deadly infectious disease tuberculosis. He cut his trip short and upon return to Hampstead immediately tended to his brother Tom who was then in the last stages of the disease. After Tom's death, Keats lived with Brown. Around this time Keats fell in love and after became engaged to 18-years-old Frances Brawne. While their relationship inspired much spiritual development for Keats, it also proved to be tempestuous, filled with the highs and lows from jealousy and infatuation of first love. But after suffering a haemorrhage he gave Fanny permission to break their engagement. She would hear nothing of it and by her word provided much comfort to Keats in his last days that she was ultimately loyal to him. Although 1819 proved to be his most prolific year of writing, Keats was also in dire financial straits. His earning Fanny's mother's approval to marry depended on his earning as a writer. At the beginning of 1820 Keats started to show more pronounced signs of the deadly tuberculosis that had killed his mother and brother. After a lung haemorrhage, Keats calmly accepted his fate, and he enjoyed several weeks of respite under Brown's watchful eye. As was common belief at the time that bleeding a patient was beneficial to healing, Keats was bled and given opium to relieve his anxiety and pain. He was at times put on a starvation diet, then at other times prescribed to eat meat and drink red wine to gain strength. Despite these ill-advised goodintentions, and suffering increasing weakness and fever, Keats was able to emerge from his fugue and organise the publication of his next volume of poetry. Keats considered his last hope of recovery of a rest cure in the warm climes of Italy. In 1820 he sailed to Rome with his friend and painter Joseph Severn. Keats was terminally ill. They stayed in rooms on the Piazza Navona and enjoyed the lively sights and sounds of the people and culture, but Keats soon fell into a deep depression. By 1821 he was confined to bed, and he resolved not to write to Fanny and would not read a letter from her for fear of the pain it would cause him, although

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he clasped her marble. During bouts of coughing, fever, nightmares, Keats also tried to cheer his friend, who held him till the end. He died in 1821 in Rome, Italy. His poetry. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic Movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death. During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life. In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems in the English language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes, written between March and September 1819astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keatss poetic achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which it ended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode 'To Autumn' in February 1821. Keats's first surviving poem, 'An Imitation of Spenser', was written in 1814, when Keats was 19. Keats published three books of verse in his lifetime. The first volume, Poems, was published in 1917. It was dedicated to Leigh Hunt and contained 31 works, including 'Sleep and Poetry' and 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. His second volume, Endymion, was published in 1818. It was savagely reviewed and sold poorly. His third volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in 1820. It contained thirteen works, including the great odes of 1819 and 'Hyperion'. A main theme of Keat's poetry is the conflict between the everyday world and eternity. His earliest poetry consists mainly of long poems, some of them epic in style and concept.

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Endymion is written in four books and is derived in style and structure from Greek legends and myths. It is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (also known as heroic couplets). Keats based the poem on the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved by the moon goddess Selene. The poem elaborates on the original story and renames Selene "Cynthia" (an alternative name for Artemis). The main theme is the search for and ideal love and happiness beyond earthly possibility. 'The Fall of Hyperion' is heavily influence by John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and was not finished by Keats. It tells the down fall of the old Gods and the rise of the new Gods who are marked by their strength and beauty. 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a poem by John Keats written in May 1819 in either the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, or, as according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats House, Hampstead, London. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near his home in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a personal poem that describes Keats's journey into the state of Negative Capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems, and it explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats. The nightingale described within the poem experiences a type of death but it does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself deadas a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. The presence of weather is noticeable in the poem, as spring came early in 1819, which brought nightingales all

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over the heath. 'To Autumn' is a poem composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of Saint Agnes. 'To Autumn' is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although he had little time throughout 1819 to devote to poetry because of personal problems, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of 'To Autumn', Keats died in Rome. The poem has three eleven-line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists, with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting. The work has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as Keats's response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment. Keats's pursuit of the eternal truths of poetic art and the imagination are powerfully expressed in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. It is a poem written 1819 and published in 1820. It is one of his 'Great Odes of 1819', which include 'Ode on Indolence', 'Ode on Melancholy', 'Ode to a Nightingale', and 'Ode to Psyche'. Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Keats was aware of other works on classical Greek art, and had first-hand exposure to the Elgin Marbles, all of which reinforced his belief that classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem.

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Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfillment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. 'Bright Star' is a love sonnet. It was a declaration of love for Fanny. 'Ode to Indolence' was written in 1819. The poem describes the state of indolence, otherwise known as laziness, and was written during a time when he felt that he should devote his efforts to earning an income instead of composing poetry. The poem is an example of Keats's break from the structure of the classical form. It follows the poet's contemplation of a morning spent in idleness. Three figures are presentedAmbition, Love and Poesy dressed in "placid sandals" and "white robes". The narrator examines each using a series of questions and statements on life and art. The poem concludes with the narrator giving up on having all three of the figures as part of his life. 'Ode to Psyche' was written in 1819. 'Ode to Psyche', Keats's 67 line ode, was the first of his major odes of 1819. It is an experiment in the ode genre, and Keats's attempt at an expanded version of the sonnet format that describes a dramatic scene. The poem serves as an important departure from Keats's early poems, which frequently describe an escape into the pleasant realms of one's imagination. Keats uses the imagination to show the narrator's intent to resurrect Psyche and reincarnate himself into Eros(love). Keats attempts this by dedicating an "untrodden region" of his mind to the worship of the neglected goddess. It was specifically inspired by the Roman author, Lucius Apuleius's work The Golden Ass. 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' is a ballad written in 1819. It exists in two versions, with minor differences between them. He used the title of a 15th century poem by Alain Chartier, though the plots of the two poems are different. The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical to other of Keats' works. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations. It describes the

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condition of an unnamed knight who has encountered a mysterious woman who is said to be a faery's child. 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' is a sonnet written in 1816. It tells of the author's astonishment at reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as freely translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman. This poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, or can be known as an Italian sonnet, divided into an octave and a sestet, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a-c-d-c-dc-d. 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is a long poem (42 stanzas) by John Keats, written in 1819 and published in 1820. It is widely considered to be amongst his finest poems and was influential in 19th century literature. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas. The title comes from the day before the feast of Saint Agnes. St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, died a martyr in 4th century Rome. Keats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes. Features of his poetry. Keats's style and writing technique inspired many andcontributed to the new era of romanticism. Although Keats had many unfortunate catastrophes inhis short life, he made the best of it by turning his emotions into poems. He used a wide range of vocabulary and sensual imagery to turn his exact feelings into words. His intricate mind made it possible for him to compose complex, yet simple poems. John Keats was a lively and brilliant old-English poet whose works were often overlooked. Keats is a distinct poet in which his elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize his style of poetry. He found inspiration in the extravagant and sensory word play of the 16 th century and also admired the works of many previous poets (Mongello). He was determined not to be another monotonous poet and make a stand to prove himself. Poems about love and romance were

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not well known in his time and he chose this to establish his uniqueness. Although his choice of vivid imagery and sensual style may not have had a hit with critics in his short lifetime, it certainly influenced many English poets of the era (Pape). John was ahead of his time with his poetry, which brought the dislikes of many. His poems were not fully understood by several and confused others. Keats was a growing poet whose individuality and style brought a new era of romance into the world after his young life ended abruptly. He wrote about the inevitability of death. Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lovers embrace, the images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumnall of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it. In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Another main theme was the conflict between the everyday world and eternity: the everyday world of suffering, death and decay, and the timeless beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination. In his long narrative poems he develop a characteristic feature of his style: lush, sensuous imagery which supports precise descriptive detail. Keats, like Coleridge, was also attracted to exotic settings for his narratives. Keats's admiration for the Middle Ages allows him to make particular use of the ballad form to explore aspects of the irrational, unconscious and super-natural world. Synaesthesia is a feature which recurs frequently in Keats's poetry. It is a use of imagery and language choices which describe sensory impressions in terms of other senses. He shared with both Wordsworth and Coleridge the view that suffering is necessary for an

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understanding of the world and that great poetry grows form deep suffering and tragedy. Keats's language render experience precisely; it captures the rhythm and movement of thoughts and feelings; it registers a full range of sense impressions. He also wrote about the nature of literature, the imaginations and poetry and his Letters are important critical works. He was the Romantic poet par excellence: his continuing dedication to poetry in the knowledge that he was dying made him a symbol for the Romantic Movement. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature. d. General Survey of Poetry. The style of romanticism was not totally at variance with that of the Enlightenment; not only a modified doctrine of progress but also the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century lived on into the nineteenth. Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Scott had appreciative readers in many countries; giants of the age such as Beethoven and Goethe were not merely Austrian or German citizens but citizens of the world Romanticism (or the Romantic Era) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and aweespecially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.

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Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape. The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society. Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm and Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. The Novel Sir Walter Scott. His life. Sir Walter Scott was born on August 15, 1771, in Edinburgh as the son of a solicitor Walter Scott and Anne, a daughter of professor of medicine. Scott survived a childhood bout of polio in 1773 that left him lame. To cure his lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Borders region at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, adjacent to the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned from her the speech patterns

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and many of the tales and legends that characterised much of his work. In January 1775 he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer went with his aunt Jenny to take spa treatment at Bath in England, where they lived at 6 South Parade. In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans during the following summer. Scott's home from the age of 4 to 26 in George Square, Edinburgh. In 1778, Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school, and in October 1779 he began at the Royal High School of Edinburgh. He was now well able to walk and explore the city and the surrounding countryside. His reading included chivalric romances, poems, history and travel books. He was given private tuition by James Mitchell in arithmetic and writing, and learned from him the history of the Church of Scotland with emphasis on the Covenanters. After finishing school he was sent to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny in Kelso, attending the local grammar school where he met James and John Ballantyne who later became his business partners and printed his books. As a boy, youth and young man, Scott was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders. He was an obsessive collector of stories, and developed an innovative method of recording what he heard at the feet of local story-tellers using carvings on twigs, to avoid the disapproval of those who believed that such stories were neither for writing down nor for printing. At the age of 25 he began to write professionally, translating works from German. He married Margaret Charlotte Charpenter and they had five children. In 1806 he became clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. To increase his income, he started a printing and publishing business with his friend James Ballantyne. The enterprise crashed and Scott accepted all debts and tried to pay them off with his writings. In 1820 Scott was created a baronet. A few years later he founded the Bannatyne Club, which published old Scottish documents. Scott visited France later to collect material for his Life of Napoleon, which was published in 9 volumes in 1827. Next year he sailed to Italy and after his

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return to England in 1832, he died under unexplained circumstances. His novels: In 1802-03 Scott's first major work, Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border, a collection of Border ballads, appeared. As a poet Scott rose into fame with the publication of 'The Lay Of The Last Minstrel' (1805), a long narrative poem about an old border country legend. It became a huge success and made him the most popular author of the day and it intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland. It was followed by Marmion (1808), a historical romance in tetrameter. It is an epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field published in 1808. It tells how Lord Marmion, a favourite of Henry VIII of England, lusts for Clara de Clare, a rich woman. 'The Lady In The Lake' is a narrative poem published in 1810. Set in the Trossachs region of Scotland, it is composed of six cantos, each of which concerns the action of a single day. The poem has three main plots: the contest among three men, Roderick Dhu, James Fitz-James, and Malcolm Graeme, to win the love of Ellen Douglas; the feud and reconciliation of King James V of Scotland and James Douglas; and a war between the lowland Scots (led by James V) and the highland clans (led by Roderick Dhu of Clan Alpine). The poem was tremendously influential in the nineteenth century, and inspired the Highland Revival. 'Rokeby' published in 1813, is a long narrative poem that concerns the events following the Battle of Marston Moor. Scott's last major poem, 'The Lord Of The Isles', was published in 1815. It is a rhymed, romantic, narrative-poem of which story begins during the time when Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick has been hunted out of Scotland into exile by the English and their allies. Bruce returns over sea from the Island of Rachrin: but is forced to land close to hostile forces at Artonish Castle on the seacoast of Argylshire. Seeking refuge from tempestuous seas, Bruce begs shelter from Ronald, Lord of the Isles: inadvertently on the day of his marriage feast to the beautiful Edith of Lorn.

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In the 1810s Scott published several novels. From this period date such works as Waverley (1814), dealing with the rebellion of 1745, which attempted to restore a Scottish family to the British throne. Scott continued with Guy Mannering, that tells the story of Harry Bertram, the son of the Laird of Ellangowan, who is kidnapped at the age of five by smugglers after witnessing the murder of a customs officer. Tales Of My Landlord (1816) are a series of novels that form a subset of the so called Waverley Novels. Rob Roy (1817) a portrait of one of Scotland's greatest heroes. It tells the story of his adventures as a young man at the beginning of the 18th century, wherein the falls in love with a beautiful young woman. The Heart of Midlothian appeared in 1818. Its title refers to the Old Tollbooth Prison in Edinburgh. The Bride Of Lammermoor (1819) and A Legend Of Montrose (1819) were published together. The first one is a historical novel set in the Scotland in the reign of Queen Anne. It talks about a tragic love affair. Ivanhoe (1819) set in the reign of Richard I is perhaps the best known of Scott's novels today. It is the story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families at time when the English nobility was overwhelmingly Norman. It is set in 1194. The legendary Robin Hood, initially under the name of Locksley, is also a character in the story. It helped shape the modern notion of this figure as a cheery noble outlaw. In the 1820s appeared Kenilwort (1821), The Fortunes Of Nigel (1822), Peveril Of The Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823), The Talisman (1825), Woodstock (1826), The Surgeon's Daughter (1827), and Anne Of Geierstein(1829). Features of his novel: Sir Walter Scott He was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout

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much of the world during his time. We must admire his power of description. His characters, especially the unusual ones, are well drawn. His historical studies were long and deep, and his stories have the force of careful detail. He has left so much that few people can read all of it. Scotts work reflects the influence of the 18th century enlightenment. He believed every human was basically decent regardless of class, religion, politics, or ancestry. Tolerance is a major theme in his historical works. The Waverley Novels express his belief in the need for social progress that does not reject the traditions of the past. He was the first novelist to portray peasant characters sympathetically and realistically, and was equally just to merchants, soldiers, and even kings. Scott is rather difficult to read, especially in those places where his characters speak a dialect. The love interest in the stories often lacks depth, and his heroes and heroines especially the heroines- are weak when compared with the violent scenes in which they live. Scott's style is sometimes heavy and much influenced by the old and flowery ways of speech. Although Scott had attained celebrity through his poetry, he soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction, stories and novels, at the time still considered aesthetically inferior to poetry (above all to such classical genres as the epic or poetic tragedy) as a mimetic vehicle 19 for portraying historical events. Central themes of many of Scotts novels are about conflicts between opposing cultures. Scott opened up the novel to the full panorama of revolution, dissent, rebellion, and social change. Having written verse romances with great success for several years, the settings of his novels are in the past rather than the immediate and highly troubled present. Scott does, however, use the historical framework of his novels to give a detailed portrait of turmoil. He started writing historical verse, but turned away from it after some years, for he discovered that he did not have a poets gift. However, as a historical novelist, he has no rival. He writes about revolution, history and social change, and about characters from all levels of society.

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Scott rewrote history, recreating for the nineteenth century the real historical figures and bringing them to life in the turmoil of their times, fictionalising history and historicising fiction until the two became almost inextricably linked in the minds of his readers. He moves from the medieval ethos of chivalry into an accommodation with the historically mercantile ethos of modern times. Before he turned to the novel, Scott was a hugely successful poet, writing highly original narrative poems. He was also important as a collector of songs and ballads of the Borders. Sir Walter Scott published all his novels anonymously until 1827, perhaps an indication of the low consideration the novel still had until his own worldwide success. He was the first hugely popular, international best-selling author, reaching vast numbers of readers in many languages, paying off huge debts in his final years through the success of his writing. As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately linked to Shakespeare's; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian and later fiction; his antiquarian researches and collections were a major contribution to the culture of Scotland. The novels of Scott gave the 19th century world, and especially 19th century Britain, its sense of historical identity. The novels seemed to affirm a chivalric ethos, the constant value of humanity, despite the turmoil of the world. Yet Scott did not affirm static values: his novels are all about movement, the fluctuations of fortune, the rise and fall of families and nations, the ambivalence of good and evil. The Victorian age perhaps read into Scott an affirmation of the clear-cut values they wanted to affirm in their own society. In many was the Victorians wished to put times of crisis behind them; but almost all Scott's novels are set in times of crisis, and his characters inevitably have to take sides, and make moral decisions. The description of landscape and ruins with which books abound helped to shape Romanticism. Above all, his use of history confirmed the aster for medievalism which lasted throughout the 19 th

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century, and the conduct of his historical figures served as the model of the chivalric code by which Victorian gentlemen attempted to live. Jane Austen Her life: Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. She was born in 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was born to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Austen. She was to t be their seventh child and only the second daughter to the couple. Her siblings were made up largely of brothers, which in some ways forced a close relationship with her elder sister. Growing up, the Austen children lived in an environment of open learning, creativity and dialogue. Mr. Austen worked away in the rectory and also tried his hand at farming on the side to earn more money for the growing family. Additionally, he would take on teaching roles within the home to outside children for additional funds. The Austen children would all grow within this close-knit family with Jane herself forming an exceptional bond with her father. At the age of 8, Jane and her sister were sent off to boarding school for their formal education. Education would consist of the appropriate teachings of the time, which included foreign language, mainly French, music and danging. Returning home, the rest of Jane's education centred mainly

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around what her father and brothers could teach her and, of course, what she could learn from her own reading. As Mr. Austen was part of the church, he kept a large collection of literature in his home library. This library was open to Jane and she made extensive use of it in both reading and writing endeavors. Mr. Austen fed Jane's interest in writing by supplying his books, paper and writing tools to allow her to explore her creative side. By all accounts, life inside the Austen homestead was a casual environment where many and attempt at humour was made with some very good debating going on the side. It became quite common for the family to invest time and energy into making home-based productions of existing plays or writing and acting out their own creations. 1787 rolled along in time to see Jane start taking more of an interest in generating her own works and keeping them in notebooks for future reference. These collections consisted of stories and poems that allowed jane to touch upon topics of interest and reflect the times. Collectively, these works became the Juvenilia and made up three whole notebooks. As Austen grew into adulthood, she continued to live at her parents' home, carrying out those activities normal for women of her age and social standing: she practised the fortepiano, assisted her sister and mother with supervising servants, and attended female relatives during childbirth and older relatives on their deathbeds. She sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth. Austen was particularly proud of her accomplishments as a seamstress. She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbours, and read novels often of her own composition aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. In 1795 a nephew of nearby neighbours began placing several visits to Steventon. His name was Tom Lefroy, and he began spending much time with Jane and it was noticed by both families. This marks the one documented instance of Jane Austen admitting to falling in love and spent a great

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deal of energy in writing to her sister about their relationship. Unfortunately, Lefroy's family intervenes and set Tom away. Jane was never to see her love again for the rest of her life. With her formal educations completed Jane return home and Jane sets out to pen the work First Impressions. Little did she know at the time that this single work would become her most popular and enduring piece, becoming the story we know as Pride and Prejudice. The first draft was completed sometime in 1799. In December 1800 Jane's father George announced that he was retiring from the clergy, which took the Austen family by complete surprise. Now at the age 27, Jane and her family moved to the town of Bathn for the Austen parent's retirement life. In 1802 Jane received her one and only known proposal of marriage from Mr. Bigg-Wither, a childhood friend of the family. Sensing the practical measure of both their situations, Janes agreed to the marriage. She expressed no true love for him, no affection whatsoever, but the convenience of being provided for her and her family's future as well seemed to have dictated her acceptance of the proposal. In a letter to her niece some years later, Jane makes a pivotal comment in her writing that is a summary of many of her stories. In 1805 her beloved father already falling quickly ill died to the sock of the family. This period of time forced Jane to put off work on The Watsons indefinitely as the Austen family is thrown into a kind of crisis. Around early 1809, Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life the use of a large cottage in Chawton village that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. In Chawton, life was quieter than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with the neighbouring gentry and entertained only when family visited. During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen successfully published four novels, which were generally well-received.

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Early in 1816, Jane Austen began to feel unwell. She ignored her illness at first and continued to work and to participate in the usual round of family activities. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable to Austen and to her family, and Austen's physical condition began a long, slow, and irregular deterioration culminating in her death the following year. Some list her cause of death as Addison's disease. However, her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin's lymphoma. Recent studies suggests that Austen probably died of bovine tuberculosis,a disease (now) commonly associated with drinking unpasteurized milk. At that time it had no cure. Austen died in Winchester in1817, at the age of 41. The epitaph praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation, mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer. Her novels Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen's first major novel, written in 1798-99, when she was in her early twenties. It is a comic love story set in Bath about a young reader who must learn how to separate fantasy from reality. Miss Austen sold the novel (then entitled Susan) to a publisher in 1803, and the work was advertised but never published. She bought it back many years later, and her brother Henry Austen published the novel as Northanger Abbey after her death in 1817. Sense and Sensibility was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be published. She began to write it sometime around 1797, and she worked on it for many years before its publication in 1811. The title page said that it was written "By a Lady", and only her immediate family knew that Jane Austen was the author. Impetuous Marianne Dashwood tumbles into a fairytale romance that goes sour, and her practical older sister Elinor copes with the family's financial problems while hiding her own frustrated romantic hopes. Pride and Prejudice was first written in the late 1700's, then rewritten in 1811-1812 and finally published in early 1813. It is probably the most-read of all of Jane Austen's novels and is a popular favorite among many. Originally entitled First Impressions, the novel deals with the

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misjudgements that often occur at the beginning of an acquaintance and how those misjudgements can change as individuals learn more about each other. Mansfield Park was written between 1811 and 1813. During her lifetime, it was attributed only to "The author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice", and the author's identity was unknown beyond her family and friends. It is Jane Austen's most complex novel and deals with many different themes, from the education of children, to the differences between appearances and reality. Emma was written in 1814-1815, and while Jane Austen was writing it, it was suggested to her by a member of the Prince Regents' household that she dedicate it to His Royal Highness. Austen took the suggestion as it was intended--as a commandand Emma was thus dedicated, but the dedication itself is rather slyly worded. Emma deals with a young woman's maturation into adulthood and the trouble she gets herself into along the way. Persuasion was written in 1815-1816, while Jane Austen was suffering from her fatal illness. She was still working on some revisions at the time of her death in 1817. The novel was published posthumously by her brother, Henry Austen. Persuasion is a novel of second chances, expectations of society, and the constancy of love. Juvenilia are Jane Austen's works from her childhood. They are full of enthusiasm, humour, and very creative spelling. Features of her novels: Jane Austen's (17751817) distinctive literary style relies on a combination of parody, burlesque, irony, free indirect speech, and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for comic effect and to critique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and Gothic novels. Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony; she often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator. The degree to which critics believe Austen's characters have psychological depth

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informs their views regarding her realism. While some scholars argue that Austen falls into a tradition of realism because of her finely executed portrayal of individual characters and her emphasis on "the everyday", others contend that her characters lack a depth of feeling compared with earlier works, and that this, combined with Austen's polemical tone, places her outside the realist tradition. Austen's novels have often been characterized as "country house novels" or as "comedies of manners", however they also include fairy tale elements. Compared to other early 19th-century novels, Austen's have little narrative or scenic descriptionthey contain much more dialogue. Austen shapes a distinctive and subtlety-constructed voice for each character. Austen's plots are fundamentally about education; her heroines come to see themselves and their conduct more clearly, and become better, more moral people. While Austen steers clear of the formal moralizing which was common in early 19th-century literature, moralitycharacterized by manners, duty to society, and religious seriousnessis a central theme of her works. Throughout her novels, serious reading is associated with intellectual and moral development. The extent to which Austen's novels reflect feminist themes has been extensively debated by scholars; however, most critics agree that her novels highlight how some female characters take charge of their own worlds while others are confined, physically and spiritually. Almost all of her works explore the precarious economic situation in which women of the late 18th and early 19th centuries found themselves. Austen's novels have variously been described as politically conservative and progressive. For example, one strand of criticism claims that Austen's heroines support the existing social structure through their dedication to duty and sacrifice of their personal desires. Another strand, however, argues that she is sceptical of the paternalistic ruling other, evidenced by her ironic tone. Within her exploration of the political issues surrounding the gentry, Austen addresses issues relating money and property, particularly the arbitrariness of property inheritance and the precarious economic

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position of women. Throughout Austen's work there is a tension between the claims of society and the claims of the individual. Austen is often considered one of the originators of the modern, interiorized novel character. Austen's juvenile writings are parodies and burlesques of popular 18th-century genres, such as the sentimental novel. She humorously demonstrates that the reversals of social convention common in sentimental novels, such as contempt for parental guidance, are ridiculously impractical; her characters "are dead to all common sense". Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan and David Garrick] continued less overtly throughout her professional career. Irony is one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary techniques. She contrasts the plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody, and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy. In particular, Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market. Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice. Austen is most renowned for her development of free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by 18th-century novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney. In free indirect speech, the thoughts and speech of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator. Austen uses it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or ironically, a character's speech and thoughts. Compared to other early 19th-century novels, Austen's have little narrative or scenic descriptionthey contain much more dialogue, whether spoken between characters, written as free indirect speech, or represented through letters. The extent to which Austen's novels are realistic is vigorously debated by scholars. The lack of physical description in her novels lends them an air of unreality. Austen's plots are fundamentally about education; her heroines undergo a "process through

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which they come to see clearly themselves and their conduct" and thereby "become better people". Austen's narratives move towards these moments of self-realization, which are the most dramatic and memorable in her novels. Austen is also attempting to educate readers, particularly their emotions. Morality, characterized by manners, duty to society, and religious seriousness, is a central theme of Austen's works. Drawing on the Johnsonian tradition, Austen uses words such as "duty" and "manners" consistently throughout her fiction as signifier of her ethical system. Manners for Austen are not just etiquette, but also a moral code. According to one important interpretation, Austen can be considered a "conservative Christian moralist" whose view of society was "ultimately founded in religious principle". However, Austen's works are unique among her contemporaries in containing few, if any, references to the Bible. Since the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, the question of to what extent Austen was a feminist writer has been at the forefront of Austen criticism. Scholars have identified two major strains of 18th-century feminism: "Tory feminism" and "Enlightenment feminism". Austen has been associated with both. Jane Austen's pictures are detailed, often ironic, and always about a small number of people. She does not write about the Napoleonic Wars or the social and political issues and crises of her age, but her observations of people apply to human nature in general. She gives her main characters choices and then shows how and why they make their choices f) General Survey of Novel Romanticism did have a decided style of its own: imaginative, emotional, and haunted by the supernatural, by the terrific (in the sense of inspiring awe and even terror), and by history. History was an organic process of growth and development, which was indebted to the Middle Ages for magnificent Gothic buildings, religious enthusiasm, folk ballads, and heroic epics. In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers,

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musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some like Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism a 'Counter-Enlightenment' to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. Still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling. Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the CounterEnlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism. Romanticism focuses on Nature: a place free from society's judgement and restrictions. Romanticism blossomed after the age of Rationalism, a time that focused on handwork and scientific reasoning. The Romantic movement developed the idea of the absolute originality and artistic inspiration by the individual genius, which performs a "creation from nothingness;" this is the so-called Romantic ideology of literary authorship, which created the notion of plagiarism and the guilt of a derivativeness. This idea is often called "romantic originality. The romantic poets' turned their

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beliefs on originality into "the institution of originality. The English poet John Milton, which lived in the 17 century, was part of the origin of the concept. This idea was in contrast with the preceding artistic tradition, in which copying has been seen a fundamental practice of the creative process; and has been especially challenged since the beginning of the 20th century, with the boom of the modernist and postmodern movements.

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