Faith, Myth, DoubtColeridge, Shelley, Keats

Romantic Conflicts

Introduction:

19th C Matters of Faith Intolerance and bigotry of previous ages never completely disappeared.

Neither did the eighteenth-century Deist approach: world set in motion by

God, man had within him God-given reason (Scriptures not necessary)

In Britain, Christianity predominant. Conflicts between Christian

denominations and believers/ non believers

Knowledge of Classics and Plato widespread

E.g. Keats acquired a knowledge of the classical myths from reference books

such as Lemprière's Biblioteca Classica and read Homer in translation.

See Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (sonnet)Romantic Conflicts

The main providers of the teaching of reading were the churches, particularly

the Sunday schools, which used the Bible as their chief text.

Widespread influence of the King James Bible

E,g, cf ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Psalm 23 ‘Green to the very door’

The Old Testament stories and the Greek myths can often embody universal

truths

Romantic Conflicts

Hazlitt on Christ’s

‘sublime humanity’

‘There is something in the character of Christ too (leaving religious faith quite

out of the question) of more sweetness and majesty, and more likely to work a

change in the mind of man, by the contemplation of its idea alone, than any

to be found in history, whether actual or feigned. This character is that of a

sublime humanity, such as was never seen on earth before, or since.’ (Hazlitt,

‘On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth’, 1820, in Burley, Hazlitt

the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics, 1766-1816, Springer 2016)

Desire to return to New Testament

Romantic Conflicts

Coleridge (1772 –1834)

You bid me write you a religious letter. I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit, much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation: but in storms like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have frequent recourse in frequent prayer to ‘his God and your God;’ the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and you mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of sudden horror by the glories of God manifest and the hallelujahs of angels (Letter to Charles Lamb, September 1796)

Romantic Conflicts

Necessitarian. (the doctrine holding that events are inevitably determined by

preceding causes

George Berkeley, (1685 – 1753) philosopher of the early modern period,

famous for defending idealism - the view that reality consists exclusively of

minds and their ideas. Berkeley's contribution for Coleridge was his spiritual

view of the universe, as opposed to the materialists

Coleridge to Lamb, ‘‘You remember I am a Berkeleian’

Romantic Conflicts

David Hartley (1705–57) Observations on Man, his Frame, his

Duty, and his Expectations (1749) — a wide-ranging

synthesis of neurology, moral psychology, and spirituality

Hartley’s “association,” : the physiological process that

generates “ideas,” and then the psychological processes by

which perceptions, thoughts, and emotions either link and

fuse or break apart.

Romantic Conflicts

From ‘This Lime Tree Bower my Prison’

So my Friend

Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood.

Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round

On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

Less gross than bodily; and of such hues

As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes

Spirits perceive his presence.

Romantic Conflicts

In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Hartleian Associationism leads into

Coleridge’s Berkeleian wish for the baby, that he will

see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Romantic Conflicts

My Faith is simply this — that there is an original corruption in our nature, from

which and from the consequences of which, we may be redeemed by Christ —

not as the Sicilians say, by his pure morals or excellent Example merely — but in a

mysterious manner as an effect of his Crucifixion — and this I believe — not

because I understand it; but because I feel, that it is not only suitable to, but needful

for, my nature and because I find it clearly revealed. (Letters, July 1802)

See ‘The Rime of the Ancient Marine’r for more exploration of faith and

guilt, moving away from Necessitarianism.

Romantic Conflicts

Coleridge and the power of

the Imagination 'what Nature gave me at my birth/ My Shaping spirit of Imagination’

(Dejection, an Ode, 1802),

IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or Secondary. The

primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of

all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal

act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of

the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the

primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the

mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-

create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events,

it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects

(as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Biographia Literaria 1917Romantic Conflicts

'The poet, described in ideal

perfection, brings the whole soul of

man into activity, with the

subordination of its faculties to each

other according to their relative worth

and dignity. He diffuses a tone and

spirit of unity that blends, and (as it

were) fuses, each into each, by that

synthetic and magical power, to

which I would exclusively appropriate

the name of imagination.'

Cf ‘Kubla Kahn’

‘Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice.

And close your eyes in holy dread.

For he on honey-dew hath fed.

And drunk the milk of Paradise.’

Poet as prophet, seer.

Romantic Conflicts

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-

1822Defence of Poetry 1821

Poets should ‘unveil the permanent analogy of things by images’, so that poetry ‘purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.’

Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’

Radical, atheist, lyricist

‘Ode to the West Wind’

a desperate appeal to the god of the wind to transform him into its instrument of prophecy.

a plea for rapture – but intricately and tightly organized in structure, imagery, and stanza form

Terza rima sonnet stanzas

Shelley continues to invoke the West Wind – this happens in the first three stanzas, an echo of the threefold evocation of the muses in a Classical Pindaric Ode. The imperative is that the Wind ‘hear(s)’ this speaker. In the second stanza the Wind is a ‘Dirge/ Of the Dying Year’, the element most featured is that of the air, and clouds are presented in strange and memorable forms: a ‘maenad’ is one of the mythical women who danced ecstatically before the Greek god of Wine, Dionysis

Romantic Conflicts

a ‘metaprophecy’, and a poem about poetry

‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ Is Shelley comparing himself to Christ on the Cross? Or is he rather continuing the image of a leaf falling onto thorns?

‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is’

This is a reference to the Aeolian harp, which was a stringed instrument which was ‘played’ by the wind – in fact this image is used in a poem by Coleridge, where he explores the power of nature to play upon the human imagination as though It were an animated force

Romantic Conflicts

John Keats 1795-1821All of Keats’ five ‘Great

Odes’ were written in a single

year – 1819.

‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode

on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to

Psyche’, ‘Ode on

Melancholy’, and ‘To

Autumn’.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Hypercanonical

‘Nearly a twin’ to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Opposites, dialectic: sound and silence, time and eternity, movement and stasis, truth and beauty, and the sensual and the spiritual, even heat and cold (‘warm love’ and ‘cold pastoral’).

Ekphrasis - art inspired by art

Keats scholar Helen Vendler has suggested that ‘beauty is truth’ is an explanation through the eyes of sensation, and that ‘truth, beauty’ is through the eyes of thought.

‘’ the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination… What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’ ; ‘O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’ (Keats Letter, 1817)

‘My role is to tease you out of thought and into imaginative participation. My means of doing so is beauty.’ Ferber, Cambridge Introduction to Romantic Poetry