Byron, Shelley or Keats?

[KateXX]

Which is your favourite poet of that generation of the romantic poets who blossomed early and died young? Why?
Thanks :wave:

[Kafka's Crow]

In the order of preference: Keats, Byron and Shelley.

Keats is lyrical and delicate and vivid, Byron is more descriptive and solid, Shelley is ephemeral and "ineffectual". All three can be extremely beautiful. They might not be very influential in our time but their unique beauty will keep them alive whether our generation care for them or not.

[JCamilo]

Keats is my favorite poet, if I have any and regarding Byron and Shelley, I think Shelley was a more mature poet, because Byron had that "compromisse" with himself. If we consider Lord Byron to be Byron's greatest creation...
Anyways, I disagree with the words used to describe Shelley. For once I think ephemeral is something that is better applied to Keat's poetry and since you used ineffectual between "" I have no real clue of what you meant.
Anyways, Shelley was the true intelectual of the trio, the most conected with the philosophical and social changes of his time. His poetry reflects it quite strongly, he is the more idealogical of the trio.

[Kafka's Crow]

"a beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Mathew Arnold on Shelley,

[stlukesguild]

a beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Mathew Arnold on Shelley

Yet Shelley is certainly a far greater poet than Matthew Arnold.

[JBI]

Byron. Shelly was got what he deserved dying young, and Keats uses way too much visual description; his work is way too thick to enjoy on the same scale as Byron..

[stlukesguild]

Shelly got what he deserved? Keats uses too much visual description? Where is the cut-off point?

Personally, I like all three... a lot. I might also add Novalis and Hölderlin (who may not have died at an exceptionally young age... but certainly his career as a poet was cut tragically short. My personal favorite of the generation, however, would have to be William Blake... who still died far too young in spite of his age.

[JCamilo]

Yes that is an odd comment. There is a few names that we could add, Baudelaire didn't die that old either, the two greatest brazilian romantic poets (Castro Alves and Gonçalves Dias) died before the 30's and if we think well, the Bronte sisters (they are a later generation) also died rather young and Rimbaud "died" :D

I am really wondering what Keats have to do with visual description. I think nothing, ,maybe in his hyperion or such, but those are his minor works without doubt.
And Mathew Arnold is just influeced by the early vision of Shelley as a minor romantic poet that didn't considered Shelley's critical capacities (His Defense of Poetry is one of the best texts ever about Poetry) and his philosophical capacity. He is considerable less vain that Arnold supposes him to be.
But I agree, while Wordsworth and Coleridge proposed a new poetic vision, it was Blake that dared to take it to new world of symbolism and imagination and Keats that went most far in pure aesthetical perfection. Those two are the giants of the english romanticism.

[Kafka's Crow]

Shelley being greater than Arnold is highly debatable. Maybe (I repeat 'maybe') greater as a poet but as a critic, Arnold's influence is far more noticeable and effective (thanks to TS Eliot) than Shelley's. What makes Keats great makes Shelley less so. Shelley's 'dying ambers', 'shifting clouds' 'flying leaves' are transient and abstract compared to Keats's concrete 'gleaner' or 'deep delved earth' or all that we find on the Grecian Urn. Byron is great at writing long descriptive poems. Name a great 'long' poem by Shelley while Don Juan sits up there along with the greatest poems written in English language. If that was not enough, couple this achievement with Childe Harold and the poetic play, 'Manfred' (all three 'younger Romantics') tried their hands at poetic plays but 'Manfred' is the only true masterpiece written by any of this lot). Even Keats's Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion etc are great enough long poems. Keats wins hands down as a writer of shorter poems, sonnets and lyrics. Shelley had lyricism but then... (sorry time for the school run!)

[stlukesguild]

Shelley being greater than Arnold is highly debatable.

I suppose that any critical assertion is "debatable". You might argue that the assertion that Shakespeare is greater than Matthew Arnold is debatable. I don't know that many would agree. The fact that Shelley is immediately thought of among the ranks of the 6 great English Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Keats, and Shelley) certainly says much for his recognition as a poet. Whether Keats or Shelley was the greater poet... well THAT is certainly "highly debatable. I'd probably lean toward Keats myself. Arnold... as good as he may be... is certainly not of that rank. Arnold's influence as a critic may certainly have been influential... especially during the era when T.S. Eliot was seen as the last word in literary criticism. Let's face it, Eliot's criticism must always be taken with a very large grain of salt. He repeatedly dismissed and underrated (and even denied having read) Whitman... in spite of the earlier poet's obvious influences. He also dismisses Shelley, and Blake (who is "only a poet of genius?") and Romanticism in general... often, one suspects, out of a fear of direct comparison with those poets most influential upon his own development.

I'm afraid that I'd rather take Yeat's opinions or Harold Bloom's critical appraisal of Shelley's achievements. He is on of the great lyric poets. The fact that Shelley may not have been as successful as that Byron (not to underrate him) or any number of other poets in composing extended or long poems is irrelevant. The scale of a work of art has little to do with its aesthetic value. Baudelaire generally stands as the greatest poet of France (again arguable) and yet he composed no truly "long" poem. The reputation of Chopin and Debussy rests largely upon small... even intimate compositions. The same may be said of Degas and Van Gogh. In spite of this... I question the notion that Shelley was unable to compose a successful long poem, his grand elegy to Keats, Adonais, in which Shelley, as Bloom states, "beautifully sustains his lyric drive through four hundred and ninety-five lines." I suspect that many poets, including certainly Matthew Arnold, would wish only once to have written a lyric as memorable as Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, The Cloud, Mont Blanc, Mutability II, or unquestionably Ozymandias. The fact that he had composed such a body of poetry the age of thirty is further remarkable... especially when one considers that very few of the great epic poets (Dante, Milton, Virgil, Edmund Spencer, etc...) would have survived as anything more than minor poets had they died at such an early age.

[JBI]

By Shelly getting what he deserved, I was commenting on the fact that he abandoned his son and pregnant wife to go chase Marry, eventually leading to her suicide, just days before he went out to finally marry Marry.

[stlukesguild]

Oh I'm sure that Shelley in many ways was a less-than-ideal human being. Indeed... if I were to meet him today I might just think he was a jerk... but then again, a great many artists were jerks (or worse). The problem is that it is quite easy to confuse the artist's biography with the artist. Picasso was a jerk... unquestionably. Beethoven was surly at best... as was Michelangelo. I don't know that I'd like to hang out with either of them in spite of their artistic brilliance. Caravaggio? Well what can you say about a hateful drunkard that peddled homo-erotic imagery of young boys to pedophile Catholic Cardinals and Bishops and killed a man in a duel over a tennis match... but what a painter! J.L Borges once tackled the question "Can an artist create art that is truly greater than he?" (It was in one of his many essays). He came to the conclusion that one cannot create art that is more intelligent or more moral or more sensitive than one is oneself. As a result... in spite of Mozart's social immaturity, Borges would argue that there was a side of him of the true depth and maturity which allowed him to compose a work such as The Marriage of Figaro or the Requiem. I don't know. But I somehow suspect that in spite of certain questionable traits there was something more to Shelley. Something that allowed him... inspired him to produce poems of real depth and feeling... and even compassion for humankind.

[mayneverhave]

I'd say Keats, Byron, Shelley.

I rank Keats so highly because of his sheer talent at writing verse. His longer poems like Enymion (which he, himself, considered terrible), Lamia, Hyperion, etc. all display the depth and sensuality of his use of imagery. His best works are definitely his shorter poems though, when his ideas are more concentrated.

Personally, I think Keats possessed more talent than Byron, but Byron's thematic influences outlasted Keats. The Byronic hero has been used on numerous occassions by both Byron's contemporaries and in the modern times (M. Shelley's Frankenstein, Bronte's Heathcliff, etc.), and Byron's very life embodied romantic sentiments, more so than Keats (although Byron held all the other romantic poets contempuously)

As for Shelley. I personally enjoy everything he's written, from short poems like Ode to the West Wind, to long poems like Adonias. In all actuality though, Shelley had less talent than Keats and less innovation than Byron (a fact he was most likely fully aware of).


**

Also, Matthew Arnold's literary reputation (aside from his criticism) rests entirely on one poem, Dover Beach, while Shelley produced numerous outstanding poems that no one poem characterizes him.

[nebish]

best of each : Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
Byron - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Shelley-Ozymandias

[KateXX]

My personal favorite of the generation, however, would have to be William Blake... who still died far too young in spite of his age.

I meant those three of the second generation of the English romantic poets (W.Blake is sometimes considered pre-romantic, sometimes is incuded in the first generation with Wordsworth and Coleridge) :)

...However I find your discussion also interesting!

[KateXX]

By Shelly getting what he deserved, I was commenting on the fact that he abandoned his son and pregnant wife to go chase Marry, eventually leading to her suicide, just days before he went out to finally marry Marry.

I can't agree with you. He was still 19 whene he get married and he eloped with Mary Godwin because he really loved her :thumbs_up . He did it according to his belief that love can overcame any social constriction. Love and freedom will defeat shortcomings and evils of the society. He was just self-consistent.

[JCamilo]

Obviously, Byron is not paragorn of moral behavior if Shelley gets what he deserved... That makes even less sense, Shelley was the kind of person which "moral" is devoted to social themes, not individuals. That was possible his problem. And yes, if Byron composed great dramatic poems Shelly let us Adonais, which is possible the greatest elegy of english language. Not to mention he more than showed his capacity with sonnets and other minor forms.
Keats works with long poems is being exagerated. The Odes are not exactly long and alongside his sonnets they are his best poetry. It is Keats capacity to produce lines that are ephemeral and yet constant that make us seem him a poem so sublime as Dante or Ovid... those wings...
As criticals? They are all worst than Coleridge, so why the argument.
And Shelley ? One of the first to reckon Keats and his Defense of Poetry outranks anything that Arnold wrote. Its influece ? Goes until Jorge Luis Borges that loved to quote a few ideas inside there and Borges's criticism of literature easily replaced T.S.Elliot criticism.
By the way, the outlasting influence of Keats is today bigger than Byron. Keats poems and verses are today more well know, quoted and his themes repeated. Oscar Wilde and Yeats owns more to Keats than to Byron for example and Yeats is the head of the last great poetic movement of lyric poetric language.

[Silvia]

I love Keats and my favourite poem by him is "Ode on a Grecian Urn".there are aspects of his poetry that reminds me of Giacomo Leopardi, especially the idea that happiness is a consequence of non fulfillment and the great sensibility.
I like Shelley too mainly because of his social commitment and of his strong ideology and Byron's Don Juan struck me as an extremely witty and ironic work...and I was fascinated by "We'll Go No More a-Roving".

[Kafka's Crow]

I will repeat my preference:

Keats
Byron
Shelly

My favourite poems:
Adonais
Lines to an Indian Air (sheer lyricism)
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Still Shelley is not the best of the lot in spite of his two poems being my top two favorites! Shelley was very melodic but produced less memorable works than the other two. As far as the sheer grandeur of achievement is concerned, Keats towers above the rest. Byron's long poems, wit and personality makes him a great contender for the second place. I do not consider 'Adonais' to be a 'long' poem (one poem that I re-read quite often and most of the time in one sitting). If T S Eliot had 'anxiety of influence' then why would he rate his immediate predecessor, Mathew Arnold so high?

As far as Mathew Arnold is concerned, he might not be very big across the Pond but here in the Old Blighty, he is rated quite high. He is counted among the trio of the great Older Victorians: Browning, Tennyson and Arnold. Dover Beach is not the only great poem he wrote (he wrote it during his honey moon!!!). You have to read his Sohrab and Rustum , The Scholar Gypsy and obviously his elegy Thyrsis, written on the death of his poet-friend Arthur Hugh Clough.

I'll paste Shelley's Lines to an Indain Air, published posthumously and one of the least well known of his poems, the lyrical beauty of this short poem has aided me a lot in winning nice, cultured female friends:lol:


Lines to an Indian Air


1.

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee, 5
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!


2.

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream— 10
The Champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart;—
As I must on thine, 15
Oh, beloved as thou art!


3.

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale. 20
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;—
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.

[stlukesguild]

Personally I would probably rank Keats over Byron or Shelley... although I am more than certain that a strong argument could be made for any one of the three. I would never begin to think of placing Arnold within the same rank. Admittedly, he may be more appreciated in Britain than in the US... but I have never imagined him as any more than one of many marvelous second-tier poets of the era. I've never heard of him mentioned as standing on par with Tennyson or Browning... indeed I would be far more likely to give Rossetti the nod for a third of that group... if not Hopkins. As for Eliot's "anxiety of influence" I suspect that he had no problem in acknowledging Arnold because he never felt threatened or overwhelmed by his aesthetic achievements. Eliot clearly knew that Whitman cast a huge shadow... just as a writer like Becket knew that Joyce's influence was so huge and obvious that he could only escape it by abandoning the English language.

[nebish]

Keats appeals to youth - a melodic sensuousness and a wistful nostalgia that engage younger readers..he does however veer from sublimity to bathos more frequently, a pardonable fault at his age.
Knowing his frail physical condition intensifies the tragic fatefulness that underlies the reading of his work. He is terribly aware of mortality. Hyperion is only a fragment, but Keats evokes a sadness in the fall that is as epically grand as Milton's.

[JCamilo]

The Anxiety of influence is just an expression. They are less anxious than one may think.
I think this thing about long poems is a bit irrelevant. Shelley was very good doing what he did and I think he is more consistent than Byron, but that is not important either.
As the great victorians, that group is pushing a little. Unlike the 6 of romantism, that group was not that "great" and the distance between then is a big far. Even Tennyson is a bit secundary when compared with Browning. One could push Oscar Wilde there, this kind of thing.
One thing is however true, Shelley is not vain, ephemeral. That is a huge mistake and misleading because of the kind of popularity Shelley enjoyed at first, focused only in part of his poetry.

[Kafka's Crow]

Personally I would probably rank Keats over Byron or Shelley... although I am more than certain that a strong argument could be made for any one of the three. I would never begin to think of placing Arnold within the same rank. Admittedly, he may be more appreciated in Britain than in the US... but I have never imagined him as any more than one of many marvelous second-tier poets of the era. I've never heard of him mentioned as standing on par with Tennyson or Browning... indeed I would be far more likely to give Rossetti the nod for a third of that group... if not Hopkins. As for Eliot's "anxiety of influence" I suspect that he had no problem in acknowledging Arnold because he never felt threatened or overwhelmed by his aesthetic achievements. Eliot clearly knew that Whitman cast a huge shadow... just as a writer like Becket knew that Joyce's influence was so huge and obvious that he could only escape it by abandoning the English language.

As the reputations stand at this point in literary history, Byron is considered the greatest of ALL three (Keats included), his persona, the Byronic hero "tired of living but not of life" appears again and again in modernist and postmodern literature. Being a student of Jerome McGann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_McGann) I am extremely reluctant to accept the inferiority of Byron's genius. Shelley's reputation is yet to recover from the Victorians and the critics who followed them. Modernism, with its emphasis on concreteness and 'objective co-relative' had little sympathy for his hazy and obscure imagery. Like Keats, Shelley also has this personal thing behind his persona, his prediction concerning his own young death at the end of 'Adonais' and elsewhere:

...my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;...

his women and his great wife, the creator of 'Frankenstein', his aristocratic background and radical views, his financial difficulties and his reluctance to address them etc. He tied his reputation with Keats's in Adonais. The legend of three 'young' romantic poets, who died young and left copious amount of work behind and then there is the question of the literary canon. For us foreigners American Literature is Hemingway, Faulkner and Melville. I remember the shock and horror when Marcus Smith refused to teach us Hemingway and 'forced' Walker Percy's 'The Moviegoer' on us which many of us found boring and inconsequential! Although it led me to many interesting novels by Percy himself and the subsequent discovery of that, the most hilarious of American novels, 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by another writer who died young, Toole, still the question was asked about the exclusion of 'Papa' Hemingway. People look at the canon differently according to their geographical location. In England, Shelley's reputation has not been quite high for a long long time whereas everywhere else the 'canon' is revered more and a 'canonical' figure enjoys more respect. The canon is more dynamic in its native country whereas it is more static and 'canonical' in other places. Joyce Carol Oats or Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Alice Welty are big in America, they are part of the 'current' and dynamic canon, they are not appreciated in the same way elsewhere. The way literary reputation stands at this moment in time, Lord Byron is the most admired of the three in his native country.

About Beckett and Joyce (sorry could not overlook that one). Beckett did not write in French, he wrote in French and English. Beckett achieved greatness by going against the Joycean current, he was Joyce's opposite in literary terms. Nobody can write English language like Beckett did, but then who can write our language quite like James Joyce?

"I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck"
Samuel Beckett Molly

[nebish]

You said a whole lot there Mr K, but opinion ain't fact: the English Lit canon is as happy with Shelley as with Byron..perhaps even more so, as Byron requires greater historical sensibility. And as for the dynamics of canon-development, in Britain the canon is utterly ossified, arrested in evolution just as post-structuralism reared its head above the Parisian barricades.

[Virgil]

My order would be Keats, Shelley, Byron.

As to that other side argument, Shelley is way, way greater poet than Arnold, not even close. And Shelley isn't ineffectual. He's quite intellectual, certainly the most intellectual of the three poets.

[nebish]

which of the three is the only one who can make you LAUGH and can make You CRY..?

[Kafka's Crow]

You said a whole lot there Mr K, but opinion ain't fact: the English Lit canon is as happy with Shelley as with Byron..perhaps even more so, as Byron requires greater historical sensibility. And as for the dynamics of canon-development, in Britain the canon is utterly ossified, arrested in evolution just as post-structuralism reared its head above the Parisian barricades.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6331869.stm

As I said, canon is never ossified in its native country. From here, the American canon seems to be running round the three 'Biggies' I mentioned above. The true dynamics of a culture and its manifestations in art and literature become more and more obvious as you come closer. The TLS does not give the true picture of the English canon, there are old farts who read and admire it and then there are others who read it in British Council libraries and think of it as the last word on English Literature. "Too much water has passed under the butt bridge, in both directions" as Samuel Beckett would put it. Things change. The British may have failed to produce a Derrida or Foucault or Badiou, the influence of these thinkers managed to cross the Chanel and did play havoc with the established notions here and got the things moving in diverse directions. Nothing stays the same.

[Virgil]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6331869.stm

As I said, canon is never ossified in its native country. From here, the American canon seems to be running round the three 'Biggies' I mentioned above. The true dynamics of a culture and its manifestations in art and literature become more and more obvious as you come closer. The TLS does not give the true picture of the English canon, there are old farts who read and admire it and then there are others who read it in British Council libraries and think of it as the last word on English Literature. "Too much water has passed under the butt bridge, in both directions" as Samuel Beckett would put it. Things change. The British may have failed to produce a Derrida or Foucault or Badiou, the influence of these thinkers managed to cross the Chanel and did play havoc with the established notions here and got the things moving in diverse directions. Nothing stays the same.

Well, first of all I dispute that Byron is considered more important than Shelley in the canon. When I went to school, we barely touched Byron while we spent a considerable amount of time on Shelley. Possibly more on Shelley than Keats, since Shelley has so much more work. And this was in a class devoted to the Romantic poets. So I don't know what you're talking about.

[Kafka's Crow]

Well, first of all I dispute that Byron is considered more important than Shelley in the canon. When I went to school, we barely touched Byron while we spent a considerable amount of time on Shelley. Possibly more on Shelley than Keats, since Shelley has so much more work. And this was in a class devoted to the Romantic poets. So I don't know what you're talking about.

I wasn't taught Byron either but then I was not taught Ben Jonson, Dryden, Tennyson (we had Arnold in our syllabus though!) either and I chose never to read Dickens. I strongly believe that all great art is measured by the effect it has on the subsequent works of art. Keats's 'sensuousness' lives, the Byronic hero lives and Byronic wit lives in subsequent works of art. I studied 'Adonais' and 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty' etc as a student. I taught them as well. I don't see their effect on the subsequent works of literature. Yes Yeats wrote on him but his phantasmal imagery is unique to him, too unique. To me Shelley's 'Complete Poetical Works' is a huge book with very little to offer for its size.

[Virgil]

I wasn't taught Byron either but then I was not taught Ben Jonson, Dryden, Tennyson (we had Arnold in our syllabus though!) either and I chose never to read Dickens. I strongly believe that all great art is measured by the effect it has on the subsequent works of art. Keats's 'sensuousness' lives, the Byronic hero lives and Byronic wit lives in subsequent works of art. I studied 'Adonais' and 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty' etc as a student. I taught them as well. I don't see their effect on the subsequent works of literature. Yes Yeats wrote on him but his phantasmal imagery is unique to him, too unique. To me Shelley's 'Complete Poetical Works' is a huge book with very little to offer for its size.
Fair enough as your opinion. But when you said it was canonical that Byron is more important than Shelley, well that I believe is inaccurate.

As to Shelley's importance to other poets, yes Yeats, but therre is also Wallace Stevens, and I'm sure some others as well. I think Tennyson admired him too.

[nebish]

The Mask of Anarchy is detectable as an influence in every important political poem subsequently..
Shelley bringing intellectualism and philosophy to English Romantic poetry, that is the essence of the Shelley that "lives"

[JCamilo]

If Anything ,Lord Byron reputation diminished considerably while Keats and Shelley only increased with time.
As nebish pointed, Shelley added to literature because he is the romantic poet that was attuned with the socio-politic ideals of his time. We do not even need to go far, Mary Shelley was of course influenced by him. His notion that a literature is a big book writen by many hands can be found in Mallarme and Jorge Luis Borges. His place in the canon is indeed as secure as Byron's.
Keats "in life" managed to have impact over Byron and Shelley. T.S.Eliot considered the Odes among the greatest poems ever writen and that Keats was one of the most perfect sonnet's creators and admired even more Keats aesthetic theories. The most likely greatest poet of british origem after the romantics, Yeats, is influenced by Keats mostly. The Bronte sisters display equalily influence of the trio (and Wordsworth and Colerdige). Oscar Wilde display influences of Keats.
And that was really a matter of opinion,but I am sure american literature started a century before Faulkner or Hemingway and Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson have something to say about it.
The final point is that it is extremelly hard to really measure who is the more popular, influential and this won't be given by personal experiences but the trio is very qualificated and influential.
The only thing we should not allow is the notion that Shelley was ineffective, that is ridiculous.

[Kafka's Crow]

The Mask of Anarchy is detectable as an influence in every important political poem subsequently..
Shelley bringing intellectualism and philosophy to English Romantic poetry, that is the essence of the Shelley that "lives"

Your point about Mask of Anarchy is valid but as far as philosophy is concerned, that has to be Rousseau whose influence both in philosophical and political aspects can not be overlooked. The political unrest in France inspired Romantic Poets and all of them were quite intellectual. Think of Blake when you think of intellectualism, think of Leigh Hunt when you think of political commitment. As far as the influence of friends and immediate acquaintances is concerned, all three were thoroughly influenced by Hunt, specially Shelley.

[Countess]

1) Byron, because he was hot and I'd totally do him.
2) Shelley, because he'd join in.
3) Keats, because he would sit in the other room and listen.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Countess]

I can't agree with you. He was still 19 whene he get married and he eloped with Mary Godwin because he really loved her :thumbs_up . He did it according to his belief that love can overcame any social constriction. Love and freedom will defeat shortcomings and evils of the society. He was just self-consistent.

Shelley was perhaps the first hippie. He believed in free-love and wasn't faithful to Wollstonecraft during the marriage. In fact, he consorted with her cousin, of all people (who, btw, also slept with Byron and had his child) - that's why she wrote Frankenstein. :lol:

If anyone "got what he deserved" it was Byron. Granted, I LOVE the man, because I love Byronic heroes and the tragic beauty of genius married with villany and self-awareness, but Byron was as hedonistic as they come. He was a massive slut who'd sleep with anything - man, woman, boy, transvestite girl, transvestite boy - was a drunk and a drug addict who was violent with his wife.

That said, I haven't read a poet yet who wasn't a slutty alcoholic libertine - except for Plath, and that's because she was horribly depressed and suicidal.

Poetic lives are part of the myth that perpetuates legacy and legend - it makes bards more interesting.

[Countess]

which of the three is the only one who can make you LAUGH and can make You CRY..?

The answer to that question is as transparent as Britney's underwear: Bryon.

Don Juan is witty and gritty satire that brought many a grin to my face. "She Walks in Beauty" made me cry because it touched me so.

If I might sustain ostentatious pedantry for a moment,

Shelley was a lyrical intellectual and every thinking man needs his bard.
Bryon was a histrionic feeler, and every emotional woman needs her troubadour.
Keats was a tedious rhymster, and every form lover needs a poet.

[nebish]

Bryon, m'lady? Would that be Bryon Gysin ?

Keats a slutty alcoholic libertine..? Granted he contracted venereal disease, granted he loved his Fanny, but compared with Lord B - who managed over 200 a year while in Venice - his libido was elfin

[Countess]

Bryon, m'lady? Would that be Bryon Gysin ?


Gysin is a cheap imitation of the authentic, sublime Georgie. :D

[ballb]

Wilde describe Shelley as a boy`s poet whilst Keats was a man`s poet. I prefer the poetry of Keats but revere the politics of Shelley.

[Il Penseroso]

Shelley, Keats, Byron

I think the philosophical merit of Shelley gives his poems more lasting power for me; there's more to consider there. But that's just my opinion.

[JCamilo]

Your point about Mask of Anarchy is valid but as far as philosophy is concerned, that has to be Rousseau whose influence both in philosophical and political aspects can not be overlooked. The political unrest in France inspired Romantic Poets and all of them were quite intellectual. Think of Blake when you think of intellectualism, think of Leigh Hunt when you think of political commitment. As far as the influence of friends and immediate acquaintances is concerned, all three were thoroughly influenced by Hunt, specially Shelley.

Rosseu is a influence of Shelley, but that makes no sense. Rousseau was not poet, he did not wrote anything in poetry that would do the work that Shelley poetic works did.
Blake is a hardly an intelectual, rather a mistic. Shelley is the one linked with enlightment philosophers and thinkers, not Blake that was a hero of anti-reason of all the things. Coleridge would be another true intelectual.
(Of course, all poets are intelectual, but it is used here with reference to academic studies or something similar. Keats totally lacked it for example).
But taking away Shelley influence is like Pointing that they should all bow to Goethe, even Byron and his himself hero.

[lendita]

tthe sick rose is very beautiful,it,s short it's simple and very real.
It describes love as it it .

[mortalterror]

Keats appeals to youth - a melodic sensuousness and a wistful nostalgia that engage younger readers..he does however veer from sublimity to bathos more frequently, a pardonable fault at his age.
Knowing his frail physical condition intensifies the tragic fatefulness that underlies the reading of his work. He is terribly aware of mortality. Hyperion is only a fragment, but Keats evokes a sadness in the fall that is as epically grand as Milton's.

I think that most of what we get from all three poets: Shelley, Byron, and Keats is juvenalia and doesn't stand up to the truly great works of other authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Donne). That's not to say that had they lived they absolutely wouldn't have written poems of greater worth, or that what they achieved wasn't great in itself. I'm just saying that I think their work lacked maturity and life experience. They appeal more to the emotions than they do to the mind. They are erratic, emotional, frequently hystrionic and prone to exaggeration. Nowhere do you find the same range, depth, and discipline which you can find in Yeats, Tennyson, or Frost.

Keats was the most accomplished technically. His individual lines and imagery are better than Shelley's, and a league beyond Byron. But Shelley is the superior poet, because his poems more often than not have better content. Shelley will develop his ideas, whereas Keats tends to scrape the shallow surface of things. Byron may have had more of an influence outside of poetry, but his compositions are a bit simpler than either of his contemporaries. Blake could be simple too, and yet his was a deceptive simplicity, with layers of meaning that I don't think can be found in Byron to the same extent.

I think that good writers age like wine, and most of them create their best work in their thirties and forties. It's a tragedy that these three promising young men never made it that far. For the best Romantic poet bar none I'd have to say it's probably a toss up between Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Leopardi (however I have not read Holderlin or Novalis).

[JBI]

I think that most of what we get from all three poets: Shelley, Byron, and Keats is juvenalia and doesn't stand up to the truly great works of other authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Donne). That's not to say that had they lived they absolutely wouldn't have written poems of greater worth, or that what they achieved wasn't great in itself. I'm just saying that I think their work lacked maturity and life experience. They appeal more to the emotions than they do to the mind. They are erratic, emotional, frequently hystrionic and prone to exaggeration. Nowhere do you find the same range, depth, and discipline which you can find in Yeats, Tennyson, or Frost.

Keats was the most accomplished technically. His individual lines and imagery are better than Shelley's, and a league beyond Byron. But Shelley is the superior poet, because his poems more often than not have better content. Shelley will develop his ideas, whereas Keats tends to scrape the shallow surface of things. Byron may have had more of an influence outside of poetry, but his compositions are a bit simpler than either of his contemporaries. Blake could be simple too, and yet his was a deceptive simplicity, with layers of meaning that I don't think can be found in Byron to the same extent.

I think that good writers age like wine, and most of them create their best work in their thirties and forties. It's a tragedy that these three promising young men never made it that far. For the best Romantic poet bar none I'd have to say it's probably a toss up between Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Leopardi (however I have not read Holderlin or Novalis).
I think that is just silly. All of those poets had huge influences, and still have enduring qualities. Byron outsold almost everyone in his time, and even went as far as to highly influence Pushkin's Eugene Onegin with his Child Roland's Pilgrimage. Shelly is perhaps the least successful, I would argue, of the Romantic poets (besides Coleridge, who I would argue was more successful for prose), yet he had immense influence on writers such as the copycat Poe, who is basically Shelly written by Byron. Keats is the biggest in terms of influence of these, and is one of the central figures of English literature.

To compare any of these guys to Donne, I think is rather silly. Donne was a minor poet (though a good one), and his influence was minimal until T.S. Eliot. Even then however, he doesn't even come close to any of these romantics.

[stlukesguild]

I certainly agree that to underestimate the great Romantics is nonsense. Their work is far from juvenalia. Yes... many artists age and mature like fine wine, but many others (Wordsworth, Rimbaud, etc...) completed their most lasting artistic works while still quite young. Micheangelo had the Pieta, the David, and the Sistine Ceiling under his belt by age 30. Most artists have barely begun at that age. Schubert died at 30 and yet ranks among the greatest composers of all time and as THE single greatest composer of lieder or art songs. Beethoven would have been merely a good or interesting composer had he died at the same age. I certainly agree that Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton produced art of another order... but that was an art of a level that only the absolute pinnacles of any culture can match: Tolstoy, Montaigne, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Proust, Goethe, etc... Shelly, Keats, Wordsworth and Byron are among the great lyric poets (and Coleridge wrote several absolute stunning poems in his truncated career). They all composed at least a single great long poem... if not an equal to Paradise Lost (and what is?), they are at least far more than juvenalia. As for Donne... I fall in between our previous two posters. Although he may have lacked the popularity or recognition (so did Traherne and Dickinson and the painter Vermeer) until last century, he most certainly is NOT a minor poet. On the other hand... I don't see him as clearly outclassing Keats, Shelley, or Wordsworth, either.

[Kafka's Crow]

I think that is just silly. All of those poets had huge influences, and still have enduring qualities. Byron outsold almost everyone in his time, and even went as far as to highly influence Pushkin's Eugene Onegin with his Child Roland's Pilgrimage. Shelly is perhaps the least successful, I would argue, of the Romantic poets (besides Coleridge, who I would argue was more successful for prose), yet he had immense influence on writers such as the copycat Poe, who is basically Shelly written by Byron. Keats is the biggest in terms of influence of these, and is one of the central figures of English literature.

To compare any of these guys to Donne, I think is rather silly. Donne was a minor poet (though a good one), and his influence was minimal until T.S. Eliot. Even then however, he doesn't even come close to any of these romantics.

This is blasphemy, pure and simple. Donne is GOD!

[Kafka's Crow]

I certainly agree that to underestimate the great Romantics is nonsense. Their work is far from juvenalia. Yes... many artists age and mature like fine wine, but many others (Wordsworth, Rimbaud, etc...) completed their most lasting artistic works while still quite young. Micheangelo had the Pieta, the David, and the Sistine Ceiling under his belt by age 30. Most artists have barely begun at that age. Schubert died at 30 and yet ranks among the greatest composers of all time and as THE single greatest composer of lieder or art songs. Beethoven would have been merely a good or interesting composer had he died at the same age. I certainly agree that Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton produced art of another order... but that was an art of a level that only the absolute pinnacles of any culture can match: Tolstoy, Montaigne, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Proust, Goethe, etc... Shelly, Keats, Wordsworth and Byron are among the great lyric poets (and Coleridge wrote several absolute stunning poems in his truncated career). They all composed at least a single great long poem... if not an equal to Paradise Lost (and what is?), they are at least far more than juvenalia. As for Donne... I fall in between our previous two posters. Although he may have lacked the popularity or recognition (so did Traherne and Dickinson and the painter Vermeer) until last century, he most certainly is NOT a minor poet. On the other hand... I don't see him as clearly outclassing Keats, Shelley, or Wordsworth, either.

We are comparing apples and oranges here. How can one compare Dr Donne to mere humans is beyond me. We are comparing 'professional poets' and 'gentlemen poets' with Dr Donne the member of parliament, the full-time priest, the Dean of St Paul's with a huge body of magnificent sermons under his belt along with a small amount of poems most of which he renounced in his later life. He never published any of his poetry in his life-time. Donne is genius, pure genius. The effortlessness of that poetry, the complexity, the wit ("compared to him Shakespeare reads like a Hallmark greeting card.") There is only one Donne, 'Nothing else is!'

[JBI]

The scope of Donne's poetry is hardly as large as any of the great romantics. He wrote great work, but didn't explore nearly as many themes as the other poets. I would argue that further, with quote evidence, but that isn't the purpose of this thread.

The question is, who is greater between the later 3 romantic poets.

[AwayAloneAlast]

Keats is by FAR my favourite of the three (besides Milton he's my favourite poet period), and of the remaining two Shelley trumps Byron. Byron's verse is often pretty tawdry, I find.

[mortalterror]

Nobody else thinks that their poems reflect a juvenile view of the world? Half of their stuff is "A flower, a pretty, pretty flower, la la la la la." They remind me of certain Beatles songs like "All You Need is Love" with their gross oversimplifications. When I hear that I always think, "Really? Just love? You don't need things like sacrifice, discipline, or temperance to make that love work?"

I don't mean that all of their work is of this character. Shelley's Ozymandias is definitely mature. Keats' On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer is also good. But most of their work is not of the same caliber as Frost's The Road Less Traveled, Mending Wall, or Tennyson's Ulysses.

I also believe that some of you are underrating John Donne. It's been said that he could not be a great poet because he has left so little work, but then so did A.E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. If you look at the poems of John Donne, they are some of the most finely structured poems in the English language. If you look at The Flea, it is a perfect argument, with point, counterpoint, reversals, and conclusion. There is a clear narrative thread throughout his poems that can be followed from step to step. The works of John Keats are often a series of grand explosions of color that go off at random until for one reason or another they stop.

[Virgil]

Nobody else thinks that their poems reflect a juvenile view of the world? Half of their stuff is "A flower, a pretty, pretty flower, la la la la la." They remind me of certain Beatles songs like "All You Need is Love" with their gross oversimplifications. When I hear that I always think, "Really? Just love? You don't need things like sacrifice, discipline, or temperance to make that love work?"


I hear where you're coming from. Romanticism is as a philosophy something that appeals to youth. And the philosophic view one gets from rock and roll is derivative from romanticism. I agree some poems are incredibly simple, but I do think some transcend. Keats' Odes are magnificent to me. Shelley's West Wind is great stuff, and Byron in Childe Harold can be profound at times. I do think there is value in Romanticism, and it was highly influential. Like all poets or artistic movements, there is good and banal. I can find a T.S. Eliot poem or two that is trite. These three poets died young and never hit their mature outlooks.

[nebish]

Donne wrote poems for an elite coterie of male gentlemen: The Flea is a clever but quite amoral jest to those men over a sophistical argument persuading a reluctant female to submit to his lusts. Great poetry...?

[stlukesguild]

What doesn't seem to be understood in this questioning of whether a mere ode to flowers or love or a clever argument intended to persuade a reluctant would-be conquest to bed can be considered great art is that great art is not reserved solely for the profoundly deep and high-minded themes or concepts. On the surface Ronsard's Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle..., Robert Herreck's Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..., many of Petrarch's, Sidney's, Spencer's, Donne's and even Shakespeare's poems are efforts at seducation of a reluctant woman... or moaning of how she is so cruel in refusing the seducer. By the same token many of the greatest paintings are nothing more on the surface than a picture of a lovely woman in the nude (or approaching the same), a portrait of some rich aristocratic schmuck that I really couldn't care less about, or even a pile of frickin' apples (Cezanne?) Indeed, Rubens created one of the greatest painting cycles ever illustrating the life of Marie de Medici... who had done virtually nothing outside of almost drive France into bankruptcy ala Imelda Marcos. The profundity or the "greatness" of a work of art lies in what the artist does with his or her materials... not in the subject matter. Certainly a profound theme may suggest more possibilities... yet the same subject matter led to all of these art works:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/lastsuppsmall-1.jpg

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/the_brick_testament_-_the_last_supp.jpg

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/pdtl-48245.jpg

[Petrarch's Love]

Goodness, both Keats and Donne under attack at the same time! Where to start? In response to the OP, I've got to go for Keats as the best of the trio of ill fated romantics. He's one of my favorite poets. There's been so much posted, and I don't have a lot of time just now, but I'll address a few points that have been brought up. As for the youth of the three poets on the thread's title, it is true that none of them ever got a chance to explore their whole range of potential. This is not to say that they didn't still produce some incredible works. The number of great works we would lose if we didn't read anything written by authors in their twenties is staggering: all the plays of Christopher Marlowe, a sizeable chunk of Shakespeare's works, Dickens' Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist...not to mention the works of the three poets in the title of this thread. As for the works of these poets being superficial, I can only think that those who make such claims have not read enough romantic poetry. It is true that all of these poets (like any poet) have lesser works, but all of them have works of incredible depths as well. It seems to me it would be very hard to argue that Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," for example, can be boiled down to "A flower, a pretty, pretty flower, la la la la la."

Also, with regard to both the romantic poets in question and to Donne, it seems to me that a lot of the attacks being made are on the basis of the topics they chose to write about. While content is an important aspect of poetry, really what sets great poets apart is their way with language, and the way they use their skill with language to open their topic up to thought. All of these poets have an amazing ability with words. Keats makes some of the best uses of the caesura since Spenser's smoothly balanced lines. Byron is fantastic at packing wit and complexity into superficially simplistic rhyme. Donne is simply amazing when you really sit down with him. The way he sets up his verse sometimes forces certain words to unpack themselves into layers of different meanings, usually without resorting to the use of puns, which is sometimes a weakness of Shakespeare's. Anyway, I don't have time to go into an in depth discussion of the poetics of each of these writers just now, but I did want to suggest that we look at other ways to judge a poet apart from the topic he/she writes on. There are bad poems written on flowers and there are great poems written on flowers. To say that writing about flowers means the poet is bad doesn't really make sense.


Edit: Just saw St. Luke's post above, which sums up nicely what I was trying to get across regarding style versus content. Also, love the Lego last supper, St. Luke's. Priceless. :lol:

Donne wrote poems for an elite coterie of male gentlemen: The Flea is a clever but quite amoral jest to those men over a sophistical argument persuading a reluctant female to submit to his lusts. Great poetry...?

If the requirement of great poetry was that it had to be moral and egalitarian, then I doubt there would be much of anything left to be recognized as great poetry. :lol:

[stlukesguild]

If the requirement of great poetry was that it had to be moral and egalitarian, then I doubt there would be much of anything left to be recognized as great poetry.:lol:

Or as Oscar Wilde (who was never wrong about anything) stated:

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." :nod:

[Petrarch's Love]

Or as Oscar Wilde (who was never wrong about anything) stated:

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."

As always, Maestro Wilde said it first and said it best. :nod:

[Kafka's Crow]

I once worshiped Keats and loved Shelley. Then I grew out of all that. They achieved a lot for their short lives but most of what they composed was juvenilia to be honest and that comprises large chunks and long poems which came to nothing and miserably failed the test of time. Given the huge bodies of their work, they have a lot which can be rated as ineffectual at the best. The effect on Victorians and Yeats etc is all well and good but you do grow out of this sort of poetry. They appeal to the youth in us who does not know the limits of his own world-view. With the passage of youth we realize that there is more to life than mere life or colour or flowers or the past or even the future. Great poets like Shakespeare, Donne, Ghalib (India), Saadi (Iran) show us what it means to be alive and what it means to stop being alive, to go beyond life, not only the meaning of life but they take us to the final frontiers of life, language and expression. Romanticism has problems, it is unrealistic, it is neurotic, adolescent and immature. Classicism goes beyond all these limitations and truly great literature bears the great lyricism of the romantic poetry and timelessness of classicism because it deals with the timeless, the eternal and the universal as well as asks new questions, provides thought-provoking answers while maintaining the grandeur and sublimity which differentiate it from both romanticism and classicism. Proust's fiction, Donne's poetry and Shakespeare's plays fall into the category of truly great literature.

[stlukesguild]

I once worshiped Keats and loved Shelley. Then I grew out of all that. They achieved a lot for their short lives but most of what they composed was juvenilia to be honest and that comprises large chunks and long poems which came to nothing and miserably failed the test of time. Given the huge bodies of their work, they have a lot which can be rated as ineffectual at the best. The effect on Victorians and Yeats etc is all well and good but you do grow out of this sort of poetry. They appeal to the youth in us who does not know the limits of his own world-view. With the passage of youth we realize that there is more to life than mere life or colour or flowers or the past or even the future. Great poets like Shakespeare, Donne, Ghalib (India), Saadi (Iran) show us what it means to be alive and what it means to stop being alive, to go beyond life, not only the meaning of life but they take us to the final frontiers of life, language and expression. Romanticism has problems, it is unrealistic, it is neurotic, adolescent and immature. Classicism goes beyond all these limitations and truly great literature bears the great lyricism of the romantic poetry and timelessness of classicism because it deals with the timeless, the eternal and the universal as well as asks new questions, provides thought-provoking answers while maintaining the grandeur and sublimity which differentiate it from both romanticism and classicism. Proust's fiction, Donne's poetry and Shakespeare's plays fall into the category of truly great literature.

Absolute nonsense! Because you personally grew out of your infatuation with Romanticism you assume that it is Romanticism which is failed and you that have moved to higher more rarefied delights? Certainly that is one interpretation... that assumes that your personal preferences are proof of an artist's worth. I no longer look much at Raphael or Leonardo as I did when I was a younger art student. Must be proof that I have moved beyond them and as such they are immature artists at best. It couldn't be that my own personal interests have changed which may or may not have anything to do with the quality of the art. I must congratulate your achievement. Your critical acumen has clearly surpassed that of such inferior judges of literary merit as Yeats, Rossetti, Walter Pater, Baudelaire, Proust, Harold Bloom, and any number of others who clearly appreciated the achievements of the great Romantics. Classicism vs Romanticism? I thought that argument... the notion that the two presented an "either-or" dichotomy had died out by the end of the 19th century... or at least with T.S. Eliot. Certainly there were weak poems by the Romantics and surely a degree of juvenalia, to say nothing of some of the crap influenced by Romanticism (the Beats?)... but the Classicists had their juvenalia and their poor poems as well, and certainly inspired any number of empty academic imitators. The best works of the great Romantics can stand up to comparison with the works of almost any poet in spite of the in youth.

[mortalterror]

With all due respect to Petrarch's Love and StLukesGuild I believe you are both mistaken. The subject of a work of art is the most important thing about it, which is not to say that a great theme cannot be fumbled by inexperienced hands, or that a mediocre one cannot be improved upon. I believe that just as a book or an author can be greater than another, so too can a theme, or a subject. Take that as you will. When push comes to shove, mankind only cares about two things: Love, and Death. These are the fundamentals and appeal universally to all audiences. Individually, they are the matter of great art, but when wedded they become the subject matter for the greatest of art. For examples, I propose Romeo and Juliet and The Divine Comedy. As subject matter strays farther and farther from these sources, the effect is diluted. It becomes abstract and superficial.

I once read a novel of the kind you propose, the type which handles trivia expertly. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine deals at great length with the proper way to tie one's shoe laces, the importance of brown paper bags at the grocery store, and the various uses of chewing gum. While I thought it was a novel literary experiment in minutia, it did not strike me as great and lasting literature. Similarly, I have grave misgivings when adults become enamored of magical schoolboys who play air soccer on brooms while solving mysteries and fighting giant spiders. Perhaps, I'm wrong and Quidditch is a profound metaphor for apartheid. If so, then I beg your pardon, but I stand by my conviction that the subjectmatter is the most important part of any text. I would rather read a book of substance that was poorly written, than a skillfully crafted piece of fluff.

A really good poem about flowers is often not a poem about flowers at all. Rather it is frequently a poem about a person looking at a flower, their reactions, and that person could properly be called the subject of the poem. The person's reaction can be either complex or simplistic, profound, or maudlin. In the rare case when a poem really is about a flower, a good poem I mean, it is often not just about a simple flower. It is about a flower plus something, in relation to something. The flower reminds the poet of something else, or stands in for that missing thing. Dante Gabriel Rosetti's poem The Woodspurge is not solely a poem about a flower. It is a poem about grief and loss. Perhaps, this is what you meant, and we are not even in disagreement?

I would like to thank Virgil for his insightful post above. It helped me to clarify to myself just what it was about these writers which I found most off-putting. That thing was their philosophy, their outlook on life. You see, I've long considered their influence on modern letters to be a negative one. These poets: Keats, Shelley, Byron, and others like them are responsible for setting up a persistent image of the artist as a rebel, as an iconoclast outside of society, a dashing bohemian who is above conventional morality and "plays by his own rules." Stlukesguild, I know you've mentioned this falacy elsewhere. I know you've mentioned how it annoyed you that some people thought that all they had to do was dress in black and drink a lot to be great artists.To my mind, these men make bad role models and their conceit is nothing but an affected attitude along with a series of empty platitudes generations of young people have used to justify their bad manners. From the romantics we get ill conceived notions about the proper way for an artist to create. Notions of inspiration replace the doctrine of hard work and study. Individual originality is placed on a pedestal and no one worries about perfecting a style, or working in a tradition. The classics are neglected, because when art is supposed to be about an original self-expression from within the artist, what can some dead white males have to teach anybody?

More specifically, they're hippies, with their free love and their "Don't oppress me man" philosophy. They spout a laughable nature ideal, where everything would be cool if we just cast off our city life and lived as God intended. Animals don't prey upon human's in their nature. People don't freeze from cold, or poison themselves with bad drinking water. The mosquito and malaria do not exist for them. The very mechanism that sustains human life, civilization is regarded as a corrupting influence. I'm not saying he was on their level, but Carl Sandburg was onto something when he sung the praises of cities. They talk quite a bit about love, but it's always passionate love. Young love, nearly indistinguishable from lust. You don't get the kind of love a man has for his wife after twenty years from these poets. You don't often get the paternal love, of a parent for a child. To be sure you get disappointed love, love with reservations, love which defies societal conventions, and these can be complex in themselves. But I think that socially acceptable forms of love were too much for them, and they had not the courage to conform.

Often, I regard the romantics as reactionary. They throw themselves into this exaggerated emotional rhetoric in response to the over disciplined, over thought, over structured verse of the previous era. For me, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson have as many errors at the opposite pole. One is too wet and the other too dry. One type of writing appeals to old men, and the other to young men. Or women if you prefer. I will posit that Pope has mastered his style, and has a greater control of his verses than any of the three romantics we are discussing. Line for line, he stands up to any of them. "A little learning is a dangerous thing" might just as easily have been written by the man who wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

I agree with much of what Kafka's Crow said, with one or two exceptions. I don't think we necessarily grow out of literature. It's just that the emphasis changes. The romantic poets appeal strongly to youths and that's what youths should be reading. It's the best kind of literature for people at their age when they would possibly be less receptive to other types of poetry or fiction. In the same way, I think we have great children's literature, which can be read with renewed pleasure many years later. Also, the best literature is not simply an either or affair, romantic or classic, but a happy median in between the two types of writing.

[Petrarch's Love]

With all due respect to Petrarch's Love and StLukesGuild I believe you are both mistaken. The subject of a work of art is the most important thing about it, which is not to say that a great theme cannot be fumbled by inexperienced hands, or that a mediocre one cannot be improved upon. I believe that just as a book or an author can be greater than another, so too can a theme, or a subject. Take that as you will. When push comes to shove, mankind only cares about two things: Love, and Death. These are the fundamentals and appeal universally to all audiences. Individually, they are the matter of great art, but when wedded they become the subject matter for the greatest of art. For examples, I propose Romeo and Juliet and The Divine Comedy. As subject matter strays farther and farther from these sources, the effect is diluted. It becomes abstract and superficial.

O.K., I can see that I didn't get across what I was trying to say clearly enough before. You absolutely cannot judge a work of art solely on it's topic. If you say that writing on Love and Death makes something great, then every 16 year old on the planet is a great poet. I didn't say that the subject of the poem doesn't matter at all. I agree that a part of the poem is its content, and if you don't start with a good idea it's going to be harder (though not impossible) to write a good poem. The best poetry will indeed have some sort of great idea as its seed. However, the idea, no matter how good, is not going to carry the poem on its own. The subject isn't going to be the thing that sets it apart from all the other poems on that same subject. Since you suggested it, let's just start with Romeo and Juliet. Here's the prologue:



There is beyond the Alps, a town of ancient fame,
Whose bright renown yet shineth clear: Verona men it name;
Built in a happy time, built on a fertile soil
Maintained by the heavenly fates, and by the townish toil
The fruitful hills above, the pleasant vales below,
The silver stream with channel deep, that thro' the town doth flow,
The store of springs that serve for use, and eke for ease,
And other more commodities, which profit may and please,--
Eke many certain signs of things betid of old,
10
To fill the hungry eyes of those that curiously behold,
Do make this town to be preferred above the rest
Of Lombard towns, or at the least, compared with the best.
In which while Escalus as prince alone did reign,
To reach reward unto the good, to pay the lewd with pain,
Alas, I rue to think, an heavy hap befell:
Which Boccace scant, not my rude tongue, were able forth to tell.
Within my trembling hand, my pen doth shake for fear,
And, on my cold amazéd head, upright doth stand my hair.
But sith she doth command, whose hest I must obey,
20
In mourning verse, a woeful chance to tell I will assay.
Help, learnéd Pallas, help, ye Muses with your art,
Help, all ye damnéd fiends to tell of joys returned to smart.
Help eke, ye sisters three, my skilless pen t'indite:
For you it caused which I, alas, unable am to write.
There were two ancient stocks, which Fortune high did place
Above the rest, indued with wealth, and nobler of their race,
Loved of the common sort, loved of the prince alike,
And like unhappy were they both, when Fortune list to strike;
Whose praise, with equal blast, Fame in her trumpet blew;
30
The one was clepéd Capulet, and th'other Montague.
A wonted use it is, that men of likely sort,
(I wot not by what fury forced) envy each other's port.
So these, whose egall state bred envy pale of hue,
And then, of grudging envy's root, black hate and rancour grew
As, of a little spark, oft riseth mighty fire,
So of a kindled spark of grudge, in flames flash out their ire:
And then their deadly food, first hatched of trifling strife,
Did bathe in blood of smarting wounds; it reavéd breath and life,
No legend lie I tell, scarce yet their eyes be dry,
40
That did behold the grisly sight, with wet and weeping eye
But when the prudent prince, who there the sceptre held,
So great a new disorder in his commonweal beheld;
By gentle mean he sought, their choler to assuage;
And by persuasion to appease, their blameful furious rage.
But both his words and time, the prince hath spent in vain:
So rooted was the inward hate, he lost his busy pain.
When friendly sage advice, ne gentle words avail,
By thund'ring threats, and princely power their courage 'gan he quail
In hope that when he had the wasting flame supprest,
50
In time he should quite quench the sparks that burned within their breast.


Here's a different version:


Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Most people greatly prefer the second version, even though both of them are talking about a tragic story they are about to tell involving two feuding families in Verona and the subject of love and death. The thing that makes Shakespeare's opening to Romeo and Juliet different--and most would say better--than the opening to his source, Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, is not what he is saying but how he is saying it. You could point to any number of things Shakespeare is doing with his language that carry his work into greatness. He has carefully selected his words in a way that enables him to convey the same ideas Brooke tried to convey, but with greater pith in the condensed sonnet form. He has replaced the slightly jarring, perhaps even occasionally silly sounding meter of Brooke's fourteeners with a more smoothly flowing iambic pentameter. He uses rhetorical tricks, like the parallel "civil blood" and "civil hands," which makes the line more memorable and conveys both the concept and the emotion of what he is trying to put across more succinctly and more effectively than Brooke's more expository rhyme.

Well, I could spend a year or so going through an analysis of what Shakespeare does differently, but I think you'll see my point by now. You are absolutely right, of course, that one thing that seperates a good poem on a flower from a great one is that the great poem isn't really just about the flower. What you are getting at there is the multiple levels of meaning that make a poem interesting for us to read. What allows for these multiple levels of meaning, however, is not just that the poet is thinking on multiple levels, but that he is able to convey these multiple levels to the reader by means of language. It is the way language is deployed on the page that gives any writer, but the poet especially, the kind of control he or she needs to convey such thought.

[Petrarch's Love]

I once worshiped Keats and loved Shelley. Then I grew out of all that. They achieved a lot for their short lives but most of what they composed was juvenilia to be honest and that comprises large chunks and long poems which came to nothing and miserably failed the test of time. Given the huge bodies of their work, they have a lot which can be rated as ineffectual at the best. The effect on Victorians and Yeats etc is all well and good but you do grow out of this sort of poetry. They appeal to the youth in us who does not know the limits of his own world-view. With the passage of youth we realize that there is more to life than mere life or colour or flowers or the past or even the future. Great poets like Shakespeare, Donne, Ghalib (India), Saadi (Iran) show us what it means to be alive and what it means to stop being alive, to go beyond life, not only the meaning of life but they take us to the final frontiers of life, language and expression. Romanticism has problems, it is unrealistic, it is neurotic, adolescent and immature. Classicism goes beyond all these limitations and truly great literature bears the great lyricism of the romantic poetry and timelessness of classicism because it deals with the timeless, the eternal and the universal as well as asks new questions, provides thought-provoking answers while maintaining the grandeur and sublimity which differentiate it from both romanticism and classicism. Proust's fiction, Donne's poetry and Shakespeare's plays fall into the category of truly great literature.

Both Romanticism and Classicism have their pros and cons as philosophies, and Romanticism, at its best, deals with the timeless and the universal just as much as Classicism. Frankly, though, I don't see much value in making this into a dichotomy between the two. Both are highly influential modes that produced their fair share of both good and bad poetry. I won't deny that there is an element of Romanticism that appeals particularly to the adolescent mind, and that many adolescents become enamored with those aspects of Romanticism. That doesn't mean it does not offer other things beyond that sort of adolescent thinking as well. In some ways I've always thought it unfortunate that the Romantic poets are so popular among the very young, because they become associated with adolescence. A similar thing happens oftentimes with Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream which, because of its fairies is often seen as a friendly play to have put on by school children, leading many to dismiss it as something with nothing to offer older people. You may associate the Romantic poets with your own immature past, but I know plenty of well read, mature and thoughtful people--people up into their 80's and 90's--who continue to get a great deal out of the works of these poets even after their own youth is long past.

[stlukesguild]

I have long been of the belief that love (or sex) and death (or mortality) are perhaps the two central themes of nearly all art. Undoubtedly there is much more to most good poems on a flower than merely the poet musing on a flower. Another of the Romantics, my personal favorite, put it well:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Certainly there is more to Cezanne's apples or Mark Rothko's fuzzy squares of color than simple a recreation of a bunch of fruit or lovely arrangement of colors. Surely there's more to Beethoven's 9th Symphony or Bach's Well Tempered Clavier or Mozart's piano concertos than merely a lovely arrangement of sounds. On the other hand... I don't know that I would credit the subject-matter as being the most important aspect of a work of art in any way, shape, or form. A subject matter laden with the greatest "meaning" and "depth" and degree of possibilities can be fumbled by the inexperienced or the amateur... but it can also result in mediocrity in the hands of the most knowledgeable. There are just as many works of academic garbage as there are of laughable amateurishness. Yes, I agree there is trite and fluffy literature. Harry Potter, as you point out is certainly an example... but is it the magic and the fantasy that makes it so? What then do we make of Beowulf or Boccaccio or the Arthurian legends or A Midsummers Night Dream or the Biblical narratives or even Kafka, Calvino, and Borges?

There are any number of works of real artistic resonance that have been produced by artists lacking a real formal education, training, or experience. There are also any number of artistic works of great depth that began in the most humble... even laughable of circumstances. In Die Winterreise Franz Schubert composed perhaps the most moving cycle of leider ever, based upon a collection of mediocre poems. Mussorgsky structured his masterful Pictures at an Exhibition around the less than mediocre paintings of a friend. Spencer's great mock-epic, Muiopotmos is virtually about nothing more profound than the war between the spider and the fly. Baker's Mezzanine may be criticized for its experimentation with minutia... but perhaps he simply did not do it as well as Proust? As such, I am firmly of the belief that it is the art... what the artist does with his or her artistic language to convey the theme at hand... and not the subject matter that is central to a work of art. If this were not so then every school-trained academic with the knowledge of the great themes of art and literature would be churning out endless works of poetic genius. Of course you state you would rather read a poorly written work of substance than a well-written piece of "fluff". I am clearly not of the same mind. A badly painted painting of some grandiose subject matter is ends up being pretentious... and just plain bad while any number of marvelously rendered paintings of nothing more "profound" than the artist's lover have resulted in masterpieces that have stood the test of time. Indeed... I would most certainly prefer to read a bit of "fluff" such as Spencer's Muiopotmos than any number of stiffly rendered expressions of something far more "serious".

I further need to question your equation of the mastery of the abstract form with something superficial. All art forms are a form of language. Some of what the artist has to say is of great seriousness and some is not. To measure the success or failure of the work of art, however, we must look at how well the artist has utilized his or her chosen language not at how well he or she has chosen a theme. I may disagree with much that an artist has to say, and yet admit to his or her artistic achievement. I don't seek out art as a means to reinforce my own prejudices and beliefs. Much that I find in Dante, Plato, the Bible, the Qu'ran, etc... goes against my own beliefs... and yet in no way would I question the artistic merit of the same. At the same time... what do we make of art that clearly is "abstract"? Do we suggest it is but superficial? Where does than place the artistic efforts of Beethoven or Mozart? Or perhaps music, as Walter Pater noted, suggests the perfect ideal for any great work of art: a seamless merger of form and content to the point that they become one. Such a merger surely exists in many of the finest works of the Romantics as in many of the finest works of any artist.

I certainly agree that Romanticism had its excesses... as did any artistic movement. It certainly could be unrealistic... but so too could Classicism, albeit in another manner. Yes, Romanticism in part led to the notion of the artist as the inspired rebel... but then can we blame the artist for the abuses his or her work was put to by others? Do we blame Goethe for all those impressionable men committing suicide in imitation of Werther? Do we Blame Walt Whitman for Ginsberg and the rest of the beats? Surely that would be one hell of a strike against him. But then we also must credit him for Pessoa, Neruda, and even T.S. Eliot. Personally, I am able to draw a distinction between the artist and the the art. I don't think I would find Michelangelo, Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Picasso, Milton or T.S. Eliot to have been all that personable... but that does not lead me to undervalue their art. Yes, Shelley was probably a jerk... but I couldn't care less. It in no way lessens To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias or the magnificent Adonais.

Romanticism is "reactionary"? Well surely a great deal of art is born in a reaction against or in continuation of the world they inherited. Undoubtedly the Romantic may have idealized nature... but this was in reaction to a culture prior that idealized artifice as well as to a world that was slipping into the industrial age. Perhaps Blake's "dark and Satanic mills" seem laughable? Or perhaps he was more prescient than many who embraced the cities and "progress" and "modernism" and "better living through technology". Yes, progress and technology brought us antibiotics and the internet... but it also brought the over-crowded, crime and poverty-laden modern cities, modern warfare, and many other problems. I don't think that the Romantic's idealization of nature was any less naive than the Modernist's and Classicist's embrace of "progress", technology, or "civilization."

I do agree that Romanticism has a far greater appeal to the young... or perhaps that Classicism can seem too... "aloof"... "cold"... when one is younger. Wagner and Tchaikovsky and Rubens and Keats can stir the emotions while Bach and Milton and Pope and Ingres seem too distant... even cold when one is young. However, because I now love Bach and Milton and Ingres and Pope... and because they are artistically far removed from Tchaikovsky and Keats does not mean that I may no longer appreciate their achievements... nor that one is inherently better than the other. Shakespeare, who is undoubtedly a giant by any standard clearly combines the best of both worlds which most certainly may be the best route.

[Kafka's Crow]

Some posts here really remind me of the concluding words of my thesis on Samuel Beckett. Though written in 2001, I never felt the urge to go back to it repeatedly and read the final paragraph again and again as I have done in last couple of days:

"...Beckett wrote about that which could not be named in our economy of name-giving, name-calling and name-dropping."

The best literature is about love and sex, now that's a good one. Time to change 'long-held' perceptions. Best literature is about expression, its limits and its limitations.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

Proust and Beckett very aptly fit this description, both occupying the opposite poles. While Proust shows the minor details of life and their deeper meanings, Beckett empties these deeper concerns of their meanings.

Coming back to Romanticism, Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (I will keep harping on this one book, the original version is highly recommended but Alexis Lykiard's prose translation is good as well). It shows the true horrors at the heart of the decadence, individualism and disregard for tradition. Maldoror is the true face of the so-called romantic tendencies. We blame the 'swinging sixties' for the bad things that happen in our societies but don't take the time to contemplate where those 'swinging sixties' came from.

[stlukesguild]

Coming back to Romanticism, Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (I will keep harping on this one book, the original version is highly recommended but Alexis Lykiard's prose translation is good as well). It shows the true horrors at the heart of the decadence, individualism and disregard for tradition. Maldoror is the true face of the so-called romantic tendencies. We blame the 'swinging sixties' for the bad things that happen in our societies but don't take the time to contemplate where those 'swinging sixties' came from.

I've yet to get around to reading Lautreamont... in spite of having had Lykiard's translation for some time now. A real gap considering my admiration of much of the French literature of the era. The horrors of decadence and disregard for tradition (I can't add individualism into that mix as I'm not convinced that the voice of the individual isn't a central value of art) don't need Lautreamont to be pointed out. We can see their excess everywhere in our current culture where everyone is an artist and everything is art. Certainly we can discern aspects of Romanticism that point in this direction, but you don't honestly imagine, for all the lip-service that might have been given to the notion of "inspiration," that the Romantics were not well versed in and well cognizant and respectful of tradition. Most of them were well read in the Latin if not the Greek "classics" as well. William Blake was not only well-versed in the Bible, Milton, Chaucer, and Dante, but also in various Eastern literatures including the Qu'ran and quite probably the Mahabharata. We are not speaking of the "indolence" to use Thomas Disch's term, of those poetic neophytes who follow the rants of Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats and are the literary equivalent of 50-Cent or Metalica: mere ranting. To blame Romanticism for the current disagreeable elements of our culture is as pointless as laying the blame upon the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or the Roman Empire.

[stlukesguild]

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

Indeed!

[JCamilo]

Obviously both Classicism and Romantism are not real. They are just a matter of perception. That is why some, like Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Beethoveen, Delacroix, etc,etc,etc seems to live in both worlds. The classification just can not fit them because they provoke perceptions that suits both sides.
Anyways, since we use language and our language allow us to make both Classicism and Romantism as real, it is usually good to ask what exactly do you mean by it. Otherwise they are gross generalizations.
This make me think about Borges (who said he was Baroque and turned be classicist by Bioy Casares, as strange it seems coming from a cetic guy) talking about Poe and Coleridge.
Borges said how funny it was to think that a Romantic guy like Poe when explained the process of creation of The Raven used a classic rational approach while a guy like Coleridge, that for borges is a classicist not a romantic, when explaning the process of creation appealed to romantic images and dreams.
Of course, Coleridge ideas are one of the main influences to build up the "character" of Romanticism (he didn't needed to be one, as Goethe never needed to be one or Rousseau) while Poe's are behind the very realism (and even the symbolism) that happened after him.
So, dad, son, fight.

[blazeofglory]

Shelly is more appealing to me., for he wrote very emotionally not running after a boundary.

[nacreous]

I think its Byron, Shelley, Keats, just like the title of the thread. Byron was the finest romantic poet. I really like and respect Shelley, especially for his works of horror poetry, but still he was not as gifted as Byron. Keats was the least favorite of the three. I have read little of his work, other than the grecian urn bit.
cool thread. Something I dislike about the romantics is their focus on religious ideals and struggles. I feel that this tendency detracted from the deep emotional impact of these works. I tend towards the horror works, such as Shelley's "Ghasta." For those of you interested in horror in the classics, please read that epic poem. You will find it thrilling.
Please carry on with your conversation now.

[chasestalling]

Lord George Gordon Byron, because of his irreverence of none other than The Swan of Avon.

[wessexgirl]

Great thread. I go Keats, Byron, Shelley as a personal preference. I think Keats is the greatest "natural", by which I mean less educated or intellectual poet, and I don't mean that disparagingly. Byron is the greatest wit, and Shelley is the greatest on philosophy, ideals, and ideas. I love all of them dearly. I have to say though Kafka, through my studies of them, Shelley is usually regarded higher than Byron, who we could perhaps say is underrated as a poet, and is regarded more for his personality and lifestyle. If we look at the poets themselves, both Byron and Shelley regarded Keats as the best. I love them all, and as influential poets, I would never put Arnold above them, although he is, I know, very highly rated over here in good old blighty.

[antonia1990]

Great thread. I go Keats, Byron, Shelley as a personal preference. I think Keats is the greatest "natural", by which I mean less educated or intellectual poet, and I don't mean that disparagingly. Byron is the greatest wit, and Shelley is the greatest on philosophy, ideals, and ideas. I love all of them dearly. I have to say though Kafka, through my studies of them, Shelley is usually regarded higher than Byron, who we could perhaps say is underrated as a poet, and is regarded more for his personality and lifestyle. If we look at the poets themselves, both Byron and Shelley regarded Keats as the best. I love them all, and as influential poets, I would never put Arnold above them, although he is, I know, very highly rated over here in good old blighty.


Hey! I'm new here so go easy on me, I'm just expressing my opinion.

Personally my favourite poet is Byron, followed by Keats and then Shelley, but I am more familiar with Byron's works rather than the others.

Shelley I think is a bit too intense (I'll probably like him more when I gain more insight on his work), but from what I've read so far he cannot surpass Byron in my book.

Keats is a great poet, but after having so many poets from my country describe nature in a million different forms, I kind of preffer authors who don't focus on it so much. However, Keats is responsible for my favourite quote: "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Now, in response to the previous post. By less-educated, do you mean that he hadn't had as much schooling as Byron and Shelley? If the answer is yes, I have to disagree. Keats was well-educated. He had been trained to become a doctor, but gave up on that career when faced with the horrors of having to operate on patients without anesthetic (which had not been invented). This experience altered his manner of thinking; he believed that he could heal people through his writing instead of medicine (or whatever doctors back then used).

Now, as to both Shelley and Byron regarding Keats as the best. Shelley certainly did (he did write "Adonais", and when his body was found after his boat had sank, he had a volume of Keats' poems in his pocket), but Byron didn't seem to be a fan of Keats. I am currently in the process of writing a research paper on Byron and according to what I have found, he didn't like Keats' work that well, and he didn't seem inclined to like him in terms of character.

However, overall I think that all three poets are great. Otherwise, people would not remember them today. Their legacy is a sign of just how influential they were both in their writings and in the way they lived their lives.

You are right about Arnold. He doesn't hold a candle to them.

This is a really good thread. Thank you!

I'm now trying to learn more about Shelley's work. Any recomandations?

[JCamilo]

Keats education as a doctor is nowhere the kind of Educatin that member of nobility like Byron or Shelley, who had university curse and was linked with a group of intelectuals since young age was. I guess that he wanted to mean that, not that Keats was not educated (Some may point for example Keats did mistakes that an intelectual would not do in some of his poems, quoting wrong information, but that is irrelevant to follow Keats poetry and even critical sense, which was suberb).
Byron started as a critic of Keats but later he considered it even attacking harsher critics of Keats - overall, Keats reputation as poet is more steady than Byron and his early death increased the reception of the poems that are published later.

[antonia1990]

Keats education as a doctor is nowhere the kind of Educatin that member of nobility like Byron or Shelley, who had university curse and was linked with a group of intelectuals since young age was. I guess that he wanted to mean that, not that Keats was not educated (Some may point for example Keats did mistakes that an intelectual would not do in some of his poems, quoting wrong information, but that is irrelevant to follow Keats poetry and even critical sense, which was suberb).
Byron started as a critic of Keats but later he considered it even attacking harsher critics of Keats - overall, Keats reputation as poet is more steady than Byron and his early death increased the reception of the poems that are published later.

Yes, he must have meant something different, but I interpreted it in another way. I am impressed that Keats managed to impose himself despite being poorer, but Byron is still #1 for me because of that wit of his. Don't get me wrong, I like Keats too and I agree that his early death made him more popular than he was in his lifetime. However, it saddens me that he could have published more had he not died so young.

I haven't found any info about Byron reconsidering his opinions on Keats, but I should check that out. Thanks for the tip.

[JCamilo]

He coined a famous vision about Keats being fragile and all and having died with a sickness caused by negative critics of Hyperion (critics a bit too harsh because the links Keats had with a group of poets) and in Byronic style attacked back the critics. The thing is, Hyperion - as Keats reckonized is flawed and the rest of the world would have to wait a little to see the whole body of Keats work where we can see his real genius, so it is natural that the first visions of Keats were more negative than the later.
But to say that Byron considered his the best is a bit too much, not Byron, maybe Shelley who had a more "all around vision" could see something like this (because Keats at least had contact with Shelley). The thing is, since this trio is a bit of mythological trio of romantic poet (early deaths, egoistical, passionate, political, impulsive, etc) and lived about the same age, people like to link one with the other, but except the death chain and Shelley -Byron, they had too little contact with each other and are very different individuals.
The "What if" of Keats helps him to be seen as greater (altough I consider him superior notheless) but Byron was the one that dominated the attentions during their lifes and Shelley was the kind of poet which full scope of work was only understood with time.

[kelby_lake]

recite it over a hip-hop beat...

(the poets are mentioned exactly like your question in a song called 'Unwritten' :)! )ha ha!

[Shya]

I love Shelley; he uses such great imagery. I just can't get over how great his imagery is. Keats definitely had a lot of talent, since he died so young but was able to produce works that lasted so long. I haven't read enough of Byron to comment on him... but I'll try to read some soon... any suggestions?

[antonia1990]

I love Shelley; he uses such great imagery. I just can't get over how great his imagery is. Keats definitely had a lot of talent, since he died so young but was able to produce works that lasted so long. I haven't read enough of Byron to comment on him... but I'll try to read some soon... any suggestions?

From Byron I recommend "She walks in beauty", "Don Juan", "Darkness" and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage". He has many but these are the first that come to my mind.

[Pecksie]

I love Shelley -and I agree with a fellow member who mentioned his great imagery- but I must confess that sometimes it's hard to separate his poetry from the fascination exerted by his life... ;)

[blazeofglory]

I like William Wordsworth and of course he was words-worth, and of course he composed so many poems and he looked to postural and rural settings, and he thought man can be closer to the maker of him through being in touch with nature.

In fact I like all romantic poets and their poems were written so beautifully as if they have streamed from the well of their hearts.

I do not tag them with a label of romanticism, for they are really much deeper and intenser poe

They chose folks or rustics and simplicity is what they really tried to present through their beautiful verses.

[mercymyqueen]

Keats I love, but mustn't forget Coleridge! The dear drunk... =]

[Furbla]

Keats is a personal favorite of mine, but Byron entwines my heart with silvery strings of understanding :)

[LitNetIsGreat]

Keats, Shelley then Byron.

Keats for me was the better poet, not by far over Shelley, but his poems are more controlled in a sense that I can't really explain, Shelley is sometimes too rhetorically overblown in comparison. Byron blows hot and cold and for me stands a little further back from Shelley, though is still strong of course.

I like Wordsworth too, I like his simple pastoral pieces, I don't think he had the same power as Keats or Shelley though.

[NikolaiI]

Shelley is the only one I've read much, of and I love him, one of my favourites.

[white camellia]

Byron, for his language often amuses me.

[white camellia]

But I like Shelley's thoughts in his defence of poetry.

[Sepulchrave]

Keats, Byron, Shelley. Love 'em all, though.

[AshleyEliz]

Byron. Shelly was got what he deserved dying young, and Keats uses way too much visual description; his work is way too thick to enjoy on the same scale as Byron..

Shelley served as an idol for Lord Byron, as well as to Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning.

Though I agree, Byron is also my favorite, I don't think that Shelley "got what he deserved dying young." And I still have a deep love for the works he produced.

[Pecksie]

Shelley served as an idol for Lord Byron, as well as to Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning.

Though I agree, Byron is also my favorite, I don't think that Shelley "got what he deserved dying young." And I still have a deep love for the works he produced.

I agree with you. I think that is an incredibly brutal and gratuitous comment to make --- and remarkably lacking in perception. Shelley may have been deeply flawed (who isn't?), but his generosity and sincerity are well-documented. Besides, even if he had been a monster, that would not and should not detract from the enjoyment of his works. All people, even writers whose works we love and admire, have flaws --- sometimes serious ones. Tolstoy (who, BTW, lived into his eighties) sexually exploited his female serfs, producing at least one illegitimate child whom he never acknowledged. Byron was perhaps the archetypal sexual exploiter --- servants, preteens, young boys, prostitutes, his own half-sister, he went for them all. O. Henry was a swindler. Ben Jonson murdered a man. Does that mean they should have died younger, or ---just think about it--- that we shouldn't read their works?

I often think about all the poets who died young (not just the Romantics, but the murdered Federico García Lorca, or Miguel Hernández, who died in a Falangist prison) and the wonderful work they could have produced had they lived to a ripe age. Even those who lived into their forties, like Oscar Wilde, had achieved a level of quality that should make us regret that they didn't enjoy longer lives.

[JBI]

Shelley served as an idol for Lord Byron, as well as to Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning.

Though I agree, Byron is also my favorite, I don't think that Shelley "got what he deserved dying young." And I still have a deep love for the works he produced.

Ironically enough, looking back on it, I keep thinking to myself what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that out. Keats to me now is the best of them, and Byron the worst of them. Seriously, what possessed me then to value Byron of the three the highest. Now I see myself not really liking Shelley still, besides one or two poems, and not liking Byron at all, even Don Juan, which before I thought great.

Goes to show what this "rating of stuff" really means.


In general though I have stopped liking, for the most part, English Romantic Poetry. It doesn't quite do it for me anymore, the same way modernists, and post-modernists do. Perhaps then it may have been a lack of exposure, or perhaps a lack of range, but even so, how the hell could I have rated Byron over Keats?

Oh, and P.S., Keats was far more influential on Tennyson than Byron. Tennyson admitted it himself more than once, especially in agreeing in his friend A. H. Hallam's assessment of he as a Keatsian poet.

[JCamilo]

I wonder this thread will remain dead until you have a change or heart again ? :D

[JBI]

I wonder this thread will remain dead until you have a change or heart again ? :D

Yeah, eventually I'll just abandon English Romantic Poetry in general - I'm such a modernist in that regard. Either way though, each poet only has a handful of good poems each. The amount of doggerel written by Keats and Byron, and even Shelley is enormous, rendering really only a "selected works" somewhat readable. I think Keats is the most enduring of these, given that he at least wrote the perfect poem once in a while, but with Byron he seems to have wrote a million popular junk poems, that attract of a little bit, and then are forgotten. Shelley I still have problems with - for some reason I find him unnatural, as if his philosophy were a little out of place, and he seems to not really fit in anywhere. Also his poems flop more often than not, even some of the beloved ones. I think the form of Adonias is unsuitable, and the poem suffers greatly for it (the only poet I have ever seen to handle the Spenserian well other than Spenser was Keats), and experiments like the prized "To a Skylark" to me feel like metrical flops as well (which lead one of my professors once to exclaim, "Oh, I wish the Skylark had pooped on his head, then he would realize it is actually a bird.").

I don't know - in many ways I think English Romantic poetry is a childish, a sort of naive poetry. Wordsworth more so than the others (come on, how naive is "We Are Seven"! the girl's siblings are clearly dead), and requires a sort of naivety in order to work.

I much prefer at this point symbolism and modernism, and my specialized post-modernism.

[wessexgirl]

Yeah, eventually I'll just abandon English Romantic Poetry in general - I'm such a modernist in that regard. Either way though, each poet only has a handful of good poems each. The amount of doggerel written by Keats and Byron, and even Shelley is enormous, rendering really only a "selected works" somewhat readable. I think Keats is the most enduring of these, given that he at least wrote the perfect poem once in a while, but with Byron he seems to have wrote a million popular junk poems, that attract of a little bit, and then are forgotten. Shelley I still have problems with - for some reason I find him unnatural, as if his philosophy were a little out of place, and he seems to not really fit in anywhere. Also his poems flop more often than not, even some of the beloved ones. I think the form of Adonias is unsuitable, and the poem suffers greatly for it (the only poet I have ever seen to handle the Spenserian well other than Spenser was Keats), and experiments like the prized "To a Skylark" to me feel like metrical flops as well (which lead one of my professors once to exclaim, "Oh, I wish the Skylark had pooped on his head, then he would realize it is actually a bird.").

I don't know - in many ways I think English Romantic poetry is a childish, a sort of naive poetry. Wordsworth more so than the others (come on, how naive is "We Are Seven"! the girl's siblings are clearly dead), and requires a sort of naivety in order to work.

I much prefer at this point symbolism and modernism, and my specialized post-modernism.

I can't believe you are being so dismissive of these greats. Perhaps you will have another change of heart. Only a handful of great poems!!! :(

[JCamilo]

maybe he is more bitter than not, but seriously, great poems in the sense that answer for their status (the trio, plus wordsworth, blake and colerIdge were supposed to be on pair with shakespeare or milton) are no more than a handful. Blake was probally the more consistent of them, but since they did not left a great epic poem like Paradise Lost, it is hard to not consider that a lot of their poems could be done by any good english poet, and not those who are supposed to be masters.
But the thing is that they have done, even in flawed long poems like Hyperion there is stanzas that would make any sonnet great. I would say those guys are also far more inteligent than many, with a keen sense of criticism... we have biographia literaria, defense of poetry, keats letters, wordsworth preface for lyricall ballads... without them romanticism would probally be empty of soul and a political experiment for the germans.

[JBI]

maybe he is more bitter than not, but seriously, great poems in the sense that answer for their status (the trio, plus wordsworth, blake and colerIdge were supposed to be on pair with shakespeare or milton) are no more than a handful. Blake was probally the more consistent of them, but since they did not left a great epic poem like Paradise Lost, it is hard to not consider that a lot of their poems could be done by any good english poet, and not those who are supposed to be masters.
But the thing is that they have done, even in flawed long poems like Hyperion there is stanzas that would make any sonnet great. I would say those guys are also far more inteligent than many, with a keen sense of criticism... we have biographia literaria, defense of poetry, keats letters, wordsworth preface for lyricall ballads... without them romanticism would probally be empty of soul and a political experiment for the germans.

And Italians, and French, we seem to forget that it probably would have happened anyway, it simply wouldn't conform to this Rousseauian concept of the English Peasantry as noble savages, or to a reestablishment of the silly British Pastoral, the Merry ol' England myth which still corsets their literature.

Of all of these, I think Keats the strongest today, or perhaps the most enduring (my professors probably would disagree) and the one who seems to have had the greatest vision. But we must keep in mind he actually was reacting against the older generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge - he found fault heavily in many of their works.

AS a movement, I can think of about 20 poems + the prelude worth remembering of Wordsworth's, which are truly fantastic. A little more than a half dozen for Coleridge, about the same for Shelley, and actually quite a few for Keats, especially the stuff he wrote right at the end of his life, like the Odes, the long poems, and both Hyperion poems. Byron is trickier, because his influence has been for some reason so profound, but even so, he is so silly to me today, so unartist like, that I can't help but think him a bit of a joke. But even so, a few of his poems, and some of his long poems seem to be going strong.


But even so, when you compare that to what was going on in Germany, it is almost silly. English romanticism these days is given so much credit, and perhaps why so many students don't like poetry, or simply cannot read poetry. Really, people aught to have more exposure to more contemporary trends, but as it is, merry ol' England persists, wandering lonely as a cloud.

[wessexgirl]

maybe he is more bitter than not, but seriously, great poems in the sense that answer for their status (the trio, plus wordsworth, blake and colerIdge were supposed to be on pair with shakespeare or milton) are no more than a handful. Blake was probally the more consistent of them, but since they did not left a great epic poem like Paradise Lost, it is hard to not consider that a lot of their poems could be done by any good english poet, and not those who are supposed to be masters.
But the thing is that they have done, even in flawed long poems like Hyperion there is stanzas that would make any sonnet great. I would say those guys are also far more inteligent than many, with a keen sense of criticism... we have biographia literaria, defense of poetry, keats letters, wordsworth preface for lyricall ballads... without them romanticism would probally be empty of soul and a political experiment for the germans.

They were poetic pioneers, particularly the 3 older ones, Wordsworth, Coleriidge and Blake. You have shown in your last sentence how important they were. They can't be dismissed so easily. Blake was an original, a one-off, very much an individual, so in one sense he was possibly the most consistent, ploughing his own furrow, and going his own sweet (and odd) way. The 3 younger ones all died early, so we don't know how well they would have continued to create. So every poem they wrote is not considered great. That can be said of the majority of writers. Whether they are personally liked, (or not, as is the case with JBI), they shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

[wessexgirl]

And Italians, and French, we seem to forget that it probably would have happened anyway, it simply wouldn't conform to this Rousseauian concept of the English Peasantry as noble savages, or to a reestablishment of the silly British Pastoral, the Merry ol' England myth which still corsets their literature.

Of all of these, I think Keats the strongest today, or perhaps the most enduring (my professors probably would disagree) and the one who seems to have had the greatest vision. But we must keep in mind he actually was reacting against the older generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge - he found fault heavily in many of their works.

AS a movement, I can think of about 20 poems + the prelude worth remembering of Wordsworth's, which are truly fantastic. A little more than a half dozen for Coleridge, about the same for Shelley, and actually quite a few for Keats, especially the stuff he wrote right at the end of his life, like the Odes, the long poems, and both Hyperion poems. Byron is trickier, because his influence has been for some reason so profound, but even so, he is so silly to me today, so unartist like, that I can't help but think him a bit of a joke. But even so, a few of his poems, and some of his long poems seem to be going strong.


But even so, when you compare that to what was going on in Germany, it is almost silly. English romanticism these days is given so much credit, and perhaps why so many students don't like poetry, or simply cannot read poetry. Really, people aught to have more exposure to more contemporary trends, but as it is, merry ol' England persists, wandering lonely as a cloud.


"Merry old England" as you put it is far from what the English Romantics were about. That phrase summons up an image of "ye olde worlde England" of times gone by. The English Romantics were revolutionary in outlook, at least to start with, Wordsworth grew more reactionary as he got older. But they most certainly were not backward-looking. They were innovative pioneers, both in language and poetry, and in their political outlook.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...."

Remember the era they were living in. Revolution was in the air. Agitation for political reform was important to them. Look at Shelley's angry riposte to the Peterloo Massacre in The Mask of Anarchy. Silly comments about "ye merry old England", conjuring up images of ruddy-faced peasants dancing around a village maypole is the very antithesis to their meaning. I think they've been given just credit for their achievements. I can't see why you blame them for students not liking poetry. That's another silly statement. I love poetry, and I can say that I was turned on to it pretty much by the English Romantic Poets.

[JBI]

They were poetic pioneers, particularly the 3 older ones, Wordsworth, Coleriidge and Blake. You have shown in your last sentence how important they were. They can't be dismissed so easily. Blake was an original, a one-off, very much an individual, so in one sense he was possibly the most consistent, ploughing his own furrow, and going his own sweet (and odd) way. The 3 younger ones all died early, so we don't know how well they would have continued to create. So every poem they wrote is not considered great. That can be said of the majority of writers. Whether they are personally liked, (or not, as is the case with JBI), they shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

You would know that the vast majority of good Wordsworth poems were published before 1808, and in fact the only really great poem after that date, by a general critical consensus, seems to be The Prelude. Coleridge too exhausted himself early, but even still he seems remembered for less than a half dozen poems, and mainly 3.

[JBI]

And Italians, and French, we seem to forget that it probably would have happened anyway, it simply wouldn't conform to this Rousseauian concept of the English Peasantry as noble savages, or to a reestablishment of the silly British Pastoral, the Merry ol' England myth which still corsets their literature.

Of all of these, I think Keats the strongest today, or perhaps the most enduring (my professors probably would disagree) and the one who seems to have had the greatest vision. But we must keep in mind he actually was reacting against the older generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge - he found fault heavily in many of their works.

AS a movement, I can think of about 20 poems + the prelude worth remembering of Wordsworth's, which are truly fantastic. A little more than a half dozen for Coleridge, about the same for Shelley, and actually quite a few for Keats, especially the stuff he wrote right at the end of his life, like the Odes, the long poems, and both Hyperion poems. Byron is trickier, because his influence has been for some reason so profound, but even so, he is so silly to me today, so unartist like, that I can't help but think him a bit of a joke. But even so, a few of his poems, and some of his long poems seem to be going strong.


But even so, when you compare that to what was going on in Germany, it is almost silly. English romanticism these days is given so much credit, and perhaps why so many students don't like poetry, or simply cannot read poetry. Really, people aught to have more exposure to more contemporary trends, but as it is, merry ol' England persists, wandering lonely as a cloud.


"Merry old England" as you put it is far from what the English Romantics were about. That phrase summons up an image of "ye olde worlde England" of times gone by. The English Romantics were revolutionary in outlook, at least to start with, Wordsworth grew more reactionary as he got older. But they most certainly were not backward-looking. They were innovative pioneers, both in language and poetry, and in their political outlook.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...."

Remember the era they were living in. Revolution was in the air. Agitation for political reform was important to them. Look at Shelley's angry riposte to the Peterloo Massacre in The Mask of Anarchy. Silly comments about "ye merry old England", conjuring up images of ruddy-faced peasants dancing around a village maypole is the very antithesis to their meaning. I think they've been given just credit for their achievements. I can't see why you blame them for students not liking poetry. That's another silly statement. I love poetry, and I can say that I was turned on to it pretty much by the English Romantic Poets.

Again, you romanticize the past yourself, retreating back into that moment of nostalgia. Wordsworth's poetry is rooted in him reflecting on the past. Coleridge's is rooted in accident more than anything else. Read Westminster Bridge, and tell me there is no nostalgia in those words. What the hell do you think Smokeless skies is said to mean? That they are clear, and blue? Yes, then why not cloudless? There is a clear rejection of the future, and a retreat into the pastoral past, and into the simple, which is just quite childish.

One doesn't need to wonder why Wordsworth stopped writing good poetry - he merely realized that his vision was unrealistic, a losing one, and failed to break away from it like Yeats would later do, and merely churned out the same old same old, same old nostalgia this time.

[stlukesguild]

Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge... and we could throw John Clare and Robert Burns (among others) into the mix. In no way are these minor figures that can be dismissed as naive or childish. Certainly... with few exceptions... they only produced a limited number or works that could be considered unquestionable masterworks... but few, outside of the very greatest, can be thought to have produced a large oeuvre of consistent masterworks. I somewhat suspect, JBI, that your admiration of Modernism (T.S. Eliot would probably concur with your judgments) and your disgust with the Anglo-centrism of many literary curricula... ignoring the contributions of the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Italians (including your beloved Leopardi)... to say nothing of non-Western literature, has turned you against the English Romantics.

I remember sharing a similar feeling with regard to my education in art history... sensing a prejudice in favor of the Italian Renaissance and later the French Modernists over the artists of the medieval period and the Northern Renaissance... and later the Austro-German Modernists... I found myself rejecting Piero della Francesca and Bellini and Monet and Degas and Matisse in favor of the artists of the Book of Kells, Bosch and Breughel, Albrecht Durer, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and Egon Schiele. With time, I came around and realized that my own personal preference of the moment was just as prejudiced as the preferences I was rebelling against... and that (more importantly) they hurt no one but myself... keeping me from appreciating both... rather than either/or.

You have spoken in the past of the constant desire to seek out the new artistic experience. Of course, we all relish new discoveries. There is nothing like uncovering a master poet or artist or composer that was heretofore unknown to us. Perhaps... such sparks in us an excitement not unlike that of a new love. But I cannot agree with your notion... previously expressed... of growing bored with Mozart or Puccini or Shakespeare, etc... Certainly I enjoy a broad array of artistic diversions... but returning to the love analogy, I find that with time the relationship grows ever deeper and more profound. I also find that the adage, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," also applies. Returning to a favorite artist such as Monet or Degas after not having seriously looked at him for some time... or turning again to a writer such as Spenser, Blake, Keats, Baudelaire, etc... I find myself recognizing aspects of brilliance I never appreciated before.

Certainly there are great Romantics outside England: Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Holderlin, Moricke, Heine, and more in Germany... Hugo in France... Leopardi and Foscolo in Italy... and perhaps we may even include Pushkin in Russia. Indeed... I'm somewhat surprised at your sudden dismissal of Byron considering your recent championing of Pushkin... who was undeniably deeply influenced by Byron.

I'm still waiting for your shift over to the 18th century poets: Swift, Johnson, Gay, Poe, etc...:D Actually, I quite like Christopher Smart, myself... and I must concur with Mortal Terror, that Pope is quite marvelous... taken in small doses.

[Virgil]

One doesn't need to wonder why Wordsworth stopped writing good poetry - he merely realized that his vision was unrealistic, a losing one, and failed to break away from it like Yeats would later do, and merely churned out the same old same old, same old nostalgia this time.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Wordsworth wrote poems way into his life with basically the same ideas as when he was on the top of his skills. The poems just came out hackneyed. And on top of that, he continued to revise The Prelude, his epic masterpiece all the way to his death. And philosophically it didn't change. I haven't read a good biography but I don't get the sense he lost faith in his vision at all. What poem is a loss of faith in Romanticism? What he does later in life is try to integrate Romanticism and Christianity, though not successfully. The Romantic ideal was prevelant throughout the 19th century and even into the 20th. In fact it still hasn't left us. If you ask me all this environmental worship is still at its heart Romanticism as well as a belief that spontaneous emotions superceed rationality.

[stlukesguild]

Read Westminster Bridge, and tell me there is no nostalgia in those words. What the hell do you think Smokeless skies is said to mean? That they are clear, and blue? Yes, then why not cloudless? There is a clear rejection of the future, and a retreat into the pastoral past, and into the simple, which is just quite childish.

Certainly, a great deal of Romanticism is owed to the worship of nature as opposed to culture... or civilization. This takes many forms. Much is owed to a rejection of the artifice that preceded it in art and society. Much echoes Rousseau's notion of "natural" man... as opposed...? Much also owes to a rejection of what "civilization" had wrought: war, political oppression... and the industrial revolution. Personally, I find the Modernist's embrace of all that is Modern... the faith in the future... in "better living through technology"... the mad rush toward a brave new mechanized world to be just as... if not far more naive... especially considering all that the progress delivered by the Modern world: two world wars with the wholesale destruction of cities and slaughter of civilians, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, Mao and the Cultural Revolution that led to the virtual destruction of one of the greatest cultures in the whole of history, the atom bomb, etc... But do we expect artists not to mirror the tenor of the time?

[JBI]

Still though, I think after Elegiac stanzas, and the realization of the bitterness of the world, not to mention he having achieved household status, and becoming a "name" seem to have created a lack of spirit in Wordsworth, that for some reason choked his poetry after 1807. The death of his daughter and brother I am certain helped fuel this, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there wasn't the sense of avant gaurde about him - he simply settled for routine, and wrote mediocre sonnets, and crappy lyrics for the now accepting upper classes - he became what he rebelled against in Lyrical Ballads.

[jon1jt]

I think much of what the Romantic triumvirute wrote is out of touch with literature and poetry today. Let's say they wrote some nice poems and take down their books from that inviolable academic pedestal and return them to the basements of college libraries where old literature professors dress as corn dogs and wear big buttons and hood ornaments (out of their ars) that say, "Save the Classics"

[JBI]

Read Westminster Bridge, and tell me there is no nostalgia in those words. What the hell do you think Smokeless skies is said to mean? That they are clear, and blue? Yes, then why not cloudless? There is a clear rejection of the future, and a retreat into the pastoral past, and into the simple, which is just quite childish.

Certainly, a great deal of Romanticism is owed to the worship of nature as opposed to culture... or civilization. This takes many forms. Much is owed to a rejection of the artifice that preceded it in art and society. Much echoes Rousseau's notion of "natural" man... as opposed...? Much also owes to a rejection of what "civilization" had wrought: war, political oppression... and the industrial revolution. Personally, I find the Modernist's embrace of all that is Modern... the faith in the future... in "better living through technology"... the mad rush toward a brave new mechanized world to be just as... if not far more naive... especially considering all that the progress delivered by the Modern world: two world wars with the wholesale destruction of cities and slaughter of civilians, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, Mao and the Cultural Revolution that led to the virtual destruction of one of the greatest cultures in the whole of history, the atom bomb, etc... But do we expect artists not to mirror the tenor of the time?

It eventually will come down to Yeats's notion of himself and his contemporaries as the last romantics. In truth, the realization was from Yeats, and the rest, that this vision, this romantic ideal, this past - which had been fading for some time, though perhaps not in Ireland like it had in England, and certainly not until the symbolist movement in France, they being a little slower, and it wasn't reclaimable, one couldn't go back - the vision failed - nature failed, - and this obsession with nature as the imagination failed with it, as poetry can exist without natural images, or outside of the Lake district of England.

After World War One I think it became impossible to be a romantic of that sort - who could want to be one? The Four Quartets offer a greater insight into the spiritual, into the "Overwhelming question" as Prufrock put it, or quite simply, "What does it mean to be human, and to have these human emotions - to be imaginative, to be creative, to be living, to be slowly dying, to be part of this universe," than anything Wordsworth seemed to touch on. Wordsworth had moments, and had some insights, but I think he failed when Merry Ol' England failed, when the empire disintegrated, when European "reason" essentially was put to the test.

If artists are to mirror the tenor of the time, than readers are supposed to as well. So rather than blatantly praise without reading, or read naively as this board is so fond of, let us actually question the place of this vision - those daffodils - in today's society. Let us ask what every poet means a) to the tradition, as is fitting, and b) to our time period, and our audience.

The tradition itself seems to be crumbling and being reborn, and though I doubt any of the six will ever fall, I think a severe reassessment is at hand, again, after the structuralists reestablished them in our classrooms from the Modernist reading.



As for Pushkin and Byron - I don't know - Pushkin has character, whereas all Byron's heroes all happen to be Byron himself, just recast as some other wandering seducer, or melodramatic misfit. I can see why Pushkin liked him, but as such, I don't think he has the same spirit as Pushkin did when he wrote Onegin - that same distinctly Russian feel for society - that same bitterness. Byron's hero, mind you, would have accepted Tatyana, then killed Lenski, then, run away, and then come back to seduce her again - I think Pushkin, though higly influenced by Byron, broke well away from there, by letting himself become absorbed into other works. The book reads more as a commentary on German Romanticism, and French Novels than it does as a Byronic text.

[Silas Thorne]

Jon, I think poetry is never out of touch. Just needs a new coat.

[JBI]

I think much of what the Romantic triumvirute wrote is out of touch with literature and poetry today. Let's say they wrote some nice poems and take down their books from that inviolable academic pedestal and return them to the basements of college libraries where old literature professors dress as corn dogs and wear big buttons and hood ornaments (out of their ars) that say, "Save the Classics"

I say save the classics, but one must realize what they are saving. I think some parts of these boards don't feel comfortable with critiquing anymore, and simply gush over anything Harold Bloom, or some other catalogue tells them to. People seem afraid to admit, or to criticize, to truly read. I post these things not to destroy the romantics, but to engage in a discussion that will actually contextualize them, and read them better than the simple - "Who is better" or "Which is your favorite" thread. I don't by any means hate these poets, I merely just feel that they need to be taken down a significant notch, and, though still studied, stop being gushed upon, as they are simply six poets within a longer tradition, which seem to get more attention than any other group besides Shakespeare - even Shakespeare's contemporaries are virtually ignored.

[stlukesguild]

I think much of what the Romantic triumvirute wrote is out of touch with literature and poetry today. Let's say they wrote some nice poems and take down their books from that inviolable academic pedestal and return them to the basements of college libraries where old literature professors dress as corn dogs and wear big buttons and hood ornaments (out of their ars) that say, "Save the Classics"

Such intellectual acumen. Such depth of thought. The art of a given period of the past is out of touch with the art of today... so let's return it to the basement where it might find a proper moldering resting place. Let's get rid of Mozart and Beethoven because they have nothing in common with Britney Spears and Flavor Flav. Let us rid ourselves of the Bard and rush to the embrace of Bukowski! What has Michelangelo to say that can improve upon American Idol or Grand Theft Auto.

"Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another.
...Why poison ourselves? ...But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists! So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!... Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!"
-F.T. Marinetti

:brickwall

[jon1jt]

I say save the classics, but one must realize what they are saving. I think some parts of these boards don't feel comfortable with critiquing anymore, and simply gush over anything Harold Bloom, or some other catalogue tells them to. People seem afraid to admit, or to criticize, to truly read. I post these things not to destroy the romantics, but to engage in a discussion that will actually contextualize them, and read them better than the simple - "Who is better" or "Which is your favorite" thread. I don't by any means hate these poets, I merely just feel that they need to be taken down a significant notch, and, though still studied, stop being gushed upon, as they are simply six poets within a longer tradition, which seem to get more attention than any other group besides Shakespeare - even Shakespeare's contemporaries are virtually ignored.


Well said, JBI, makes sense. Well, how do you contextualize them, then? If you consider the trite rhyme schemes and meter in which they gushed about nature ad nauseum, how seriously should we take them?

[stlukesguild]

I don't by any means hate these poets, I merely just feel that they need to be taken down a significant notch, and, though still studied, stop being gushed upon, as they are simply six poets within a longer tradition, which seem to get more attention than any other group besides Shakespeare - even Shakespeare's contemporaries are virtually ignored.

I agree with you in the sense that they ARE but six poets... not inherently better than a great many others that are far less recognized. Of course I think William Blake is quite a bit more... both as a poet and an artist... but that may arguably be but a personal preference... no different from your love of Leopardi. Still there are endless poets of equal merit that are far less well-known: Leopardi, Holderlin, Heine, Schiller, Novalis, Hugo, Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Valery, Eluard, Trakl, Tu Fu, Li Po, Rumi, etc... to say nothing of greater poets: Spenser, Goethe, Baudelaire, Firdowsi, etc... In many ways I imagine that they maintain their position in no small part due to the fact that they are seen by a great many as something of the epitome of what lyric poetry is. In this way they are not unlike the Impressionists in the visual arts. The popularity, however, is understandable. How many readers upon first coming to poetry can begin to fathom let alone appreciate Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, etc..? I imagine that the Romantic poets open the door for many to serious poetry... and as such there will remain a fondness for them... that may be greater than the merit of their work... but neither is the work itself without merit.

[Silas Thorne]

gone now

[Silas Thorne]

Sorry, lukesguild, wrote too long and didnt see your last post.

[mortalterror]

Certainly there are great Romantics outside England: Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Holderlin, Moricke, Heine, and more in Germany... Hugo in France... Leopardi and Foscolo in Italy... and perhaps we may even include Pushkin in Russia. Indeed... I'm somewhat surprised at your sudden dismissal of Byron considering your recent championing of Pushkin... who was undeniably deeply influenced by Byron.

While we are considering Russian Romantics let us not forget Lermontov. I dearly love A Hero of Our Time, and his poems are said to be an enormous influence on Pasternak.


I'm still waiting for your shift over to the 18th century poets: Swift, Johnson, Gay, Poe, etc...:D Actually, I quite like Christopher Smart, myself... and I must concur with Mortal Terror, that Pope is quite marvelous... taken in small doses.

Indeed, the view from the bridge is different at 26 than it was at 18. Gay, Dryden, and Pope always seemed so dull before, but now... I find that every couple of years my entire world view needs an overhaul and I have to re-assess everything I knew or thought I knew. There is a definite trend toward softer stances, greater inclusion, and increased uncertainty.


I haven't read a good biography but I don't get the sense he lost faith in his vision at all.

I haven't read any good ones either. Whenever I try to read up on Wordsworth his biographies all begin the same way, "William Wordsworth was born on 7 April, 1770 in Cockermouth..." I just start laughing and I can't get any further. I have a juvenile sense of humor that precludes me from reading that and just about any Charles Dickens novel.


It eventually will come down to Yeats's notion of himself and his contemporaries as the last romantics. In truth, the realization was from Yeats, and the rest, that this vision, this romantic ideal, this past - which had been fading for some time, though perhaps not in Ireland like it had in England, and certainly not until the symbolist movement in France, they being a little slower, and it wasn't reclaimable, one couldn't go back - the vision failed - nature failed, - and this obsession with nature as the imagination failed with it, as poetry can exist without natural images, or outside of the Lake district of England.

In many ways, I think Hemingway comes out of that tradition. There is a love of the land and wild natural things that permeates his work. It's what makes his work breathe in a way, makes it vital, and alive. His landscapes are complex characters, though his people are simple.


As for Pushkin and Byron - I don't know - Pushkin has character, whereas all Byron's heroes all happen to be Byron himself, just recast as some other wandering seducer, or melodramatic misfit. I can see why Pushkin liked him, but as such, I don't think he has the same spirit as Pushkin did when he wrote Onegin - that same distinctly Russian feel for society - that same bitterness. Byron's hero, mind you, would have accepted Tatyana, then killed Lenski, then, run away, and then come back to seduce her again - I think Pushkin, though higly influenced by Byron, broke well away from there, by letting himself become absorbed into other works. The book reads more as a commentary on German Romanticism, and French Novels than it does as a Byronic text.

Are you thinking of Goethe's Werther? Weren't Pushkin's prose ventures also influenced by Sir. Walter Scott? I think it's worth noting that prose works can have as decisive an influence on poetry as other poets.


What has Michelangelo to say that can improve upon American Idol or Grand Theft Auto.

I was with you up to that point, but as a person who's actually played the games in the Grand Theft Auto series, I firmly believe that the latest one will be in a museum some day. It is art, and a milestone in a new form of interactive media.

[wessexgirl]

So rather than blatantly praise without reading, or read naively as this board is so fond of, let us actually question the place of this vision - those daffodils - in today's society. Let us ask what every poet means a) to the tradition, as is fitting, and b) to our time period, and our audience.

That is very patronising JBI.

Are you suggesting that people on here who do not agree with you are not as well read as you? (The Romantics were a major part of my degree). Or that they may read but do not understand? (I can't convince you to feel the same as me, so I'll belittle you).

You are persisting in trying to downgrade Wordsworth's achievements by questioning the place of "daffodils" in todays society!!!! You also extracted the urine earlier about "wandering lonely as a cloud". If you know so much of his poetry, you must surely know that he himself would not have considered that one of his major poems. It is probably one of his best known (and loved) by the general public, but it is not what he is known by literary critics for, as you should well know. The fact that it is so well loved by many can draw people in to poetry, as opposed to putting people off as you suggest. Wordsworth is not my favourite of the Romantics, but I would not underestimate his place in literary history, or his worth. But you seem to know better. Incidentally, I am not following Bloom's canon. I can think for myself, and if he deems the English Romantics amongst the most important poets, I can only say good on him, I agree. And if we followed your logic, with reference to the last sentence, we would have lost centuries of priceless art, as philistines of today would say, it's not relevant to me now, instead of looking at things in context.

[LitNetIsGreat]

(b) to our time period, and our audience)

Well, how do you contextualize them, then? If you consider the trite rhyme schemes and meter in which they gushed about nature ad nauseum, how seriously should we take them?

I would like to state the claim that Wordsworth is more relevant today than he ever has been. Whereas I agree that he has his faults, even Byron at the time attacks his work as “namby pamby” though that may be a non-critical approach I think we can understand Byron’s argument in that phrase. He is not a perfect poet by any degree and I would even support JBI’s idea that he was taken down a notch in estimation if only to widen the ground to examine other poets. However, I would still argue that his simple pastoral pieces offer something in today’s hectic and celebrity-obsessed world. I would not dismiss Wordsworth lightly.

The “trite rhyme schemes and meter” or simple meter is of course the sole objective of pastoral poetry isn’t it? To reflect the simplicity of the pastoral? Surely a complex, ambiguous meter defeats its very purpose?

What Wordsworth offers the reader of today is a space in which to reflect peacefully, a mediation even, rejecting the fast-paced stress society that we are increasingly forced to live in. Reading Wordsworth helps to remind us that that the simplicity of nature can help to "repair" us from the stresses of daily life. Take the last stanza of “To The Same Flower” (daisy):

Bright Flower! For by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
Sweet silent creature!
That breath’st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!

I would argue that it is a wise person that is able to seek comfort in the small things in life, the sun and air, nature, life, and with it our very time on earth itself. It is a reflective person that is able to attempt to stand outside of the madness of everyday life and reflect upon these things. To worship the daisy in this sense of the word is not “namby pamby” at all, to criticise it in this sense is to totally miss the point of Wordsworth’s objective (or my interpretation of it). No, to wish to “share” in the simple nature of these things around us, to mediate and reflect with a calm mind is to allow us to appreciate the simple pleasures of the world. Or something like that.

I can’t recall which philosopher replied to Alexander the Great’s offer of “anything you want in the world is yours” with a simple request for him to move out of the way of the sun, but he obviously shared the same thoughts as expressed in the poem above. He would also share some of the thoughts of Ruskin who encouraged the working classes to paint and vigorously taught them to do so. Not of course that he expected to produce great artists out of everyone, but that he wanted to encourage people simply to see.

I am not suggesting that we all immediately embrace the love of the daisy and sit under a tree by some shady brook, for to do so would spoil the drive to force-sell car insurance to old people and generally interfere with office politics.(Sorry) No, occasionally reflecting in this way wouldn't hurt though. What I am suggesting is that we don’t just dismiss Wordsworth’s ad nauseum references to nature out of hand, and that if we allow them to, Wordsworth’s works can still offer something for our time, and for our lives. ;)

[Saladin]

I can’t recall which philosopher replied to Alexander the Great’s offer of “anything you want in the world is yours” with a simple request for him to move out of the way of the sun, but he obviously shared the same thoughts as expressed in the poem above.

Diogenes of Sinope!

[AshleyEliz]

Ironically enough, looking back on it, I keep thinking to myself what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that out. Keats to me now is the best of them, and Byron the worst of them. Seriously, what possessed me then to value Byron of the three the highest. Now I see myself not really liking Shelley still, besides one or two poems, and not liking Byron at all, even Don Juan, which before I thought great.

Goes to show what this "rating of stuff" really means.


In general though I have stopped liking, for the most part, English Romantic Poetry. It doesn't quite do it for me anymore, the same way modernists, and post-modernists do. Perhaps then it may have been a lack of exposure, or perhaps a lack of range, but even so, how the hell could I have rated Byron over Keats?

Oh, and P.S., Keats was far more influential on Tennyson than Byron. Tennyson admitted it himself more than once, especially in agreeing in his friend A. H. Hallam's assessment of he as a Keatsian poet.

I love the camaraderie that these poets seem to share. Byron being at Shelley's funeral, or... funeral pyre, and all that.

I personally don't know all that much about Tennyson, though I enjoy the work I've read. I was just simply putting the 'role model' factor out there.

[Virgil]

In general though I have stopped liking, for the most part, English Romantic Poetry. It doesn't quite do it for me anymore, the same way modernists, and post-modernists do. Perhaps then it may have been a lack of exposure, or perhaps a lack of range, but even so, how the hell could I have rated Byron over Keats?

Hehe, I rememeber you saying you liked Byron over Keats and thought it odd. Yes i agree about the lack of range. But then they were breaking ground and really didn't have (at least to their perception) much of a tradition to fall back on.


Oh, and P.S., Keats was far more influential on Tennyson than Byron. Tennyson admitted it himself more than once, especially in agreeing in his friend A. H. Hallam's assessment of he as a Keatsian poet.
Oh absolutely. It's quite evident in their styles, especially Tennyson's early poetry.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Diogenes of Sinope!

Ah thank you Mr Saladin.

[mortalterror]

I can’t recall which philosopher replied to Alexander the Great’s offer of “anything you want in the world is yours” with a simple request for him to move out of the way of the sun, but he obviously shared the same thoughts as expressed in the poem above.

Diogenes of Sinope, also known as Diogenes "the Cynic" or Diogenes "the Dog" would not have expressed the sentiments which Wordsworth gives voice to in that poem. That is a gross misreading of his philosophy. He was an extreme ascetic who preached the vanity of human nature and the fruitlessness of desire. He walked around naked, begged for a living, and slept in a tub. The people of Athens would make fun of him, would throw bones at him and call him "dog" to which he would raise his leg and urinate on them. He walked around in the daytime with a lantern looking for an honest man. He publicly mocked Plato in his academy and hurled a featherless chicken at him saying "Behold Plato's man." He was not a pretty nature lover as you would portray him. He was something else. When you mention a philosopher, please get their philosophy right. I have a great deal of respect for Diogenes, almost as much as I have for Silenus, and it bothers me when I see his ideas misrepresented.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Diogenes of Sinope, also known as Diogenes "the Cynic" or Diogenes "the Dog" would not have expressed the sentiments which Wordsworth gives voice to in that poem. That is a gross misreading of his philosophy. He was an extreme ascetic who preached the vanity of human nature and the fruitlessness of desire. He walked around naked, begged for a living, and slept in a tub. The people of Athens would make fun of him, would throw bones at him and call him "dog" to which he would raise his leg and urinate on them. He walked around in the daytime with a lantern looking for an honest man. He publicly mocked Plato in his academy and hurled a featherless chicken at him saying "Behold Plato's man." He was not a pretty nature lover as you would portray him. He was something else. When you mention a philosopher, please get their philosophy right. I have a great deal of respect for Diogenes, almost as much as I have for Silenus, and it bothers me when I see his ideas misrepresented.

I didn't say that he would make an ideal walking companion with Wordsworth, or that Diogenes was a nature lover as such, but you cannot fail to see the similarities in rejecting the "commercial" world (for a want for a better word) and embracing life's simplicities, such as the rays of the sun, as is evident with the example I laid out.

[JBI]

I didn't say that he would make an ideal walking companion with Wordsworth, or that Diogenes was a nature lover as such, but you cannot fail to see the similarities in rejecting the "commercial" world (for a want for a better word) and embracing life's simplicities, such as the rays of the sun, as is evident with the example I laid out.

If Wordsworth was such a rejector of the commercial world, a) why did he keep trying to sell his poetry to make money, and b) why did he accept the cash and titles thrown at him by the monarchy? People forget to realize that in 1843 he essentially sided with institution over his beloved noble-savages, peasant-folk.

[JCamilo]

JBI

And Italians, and French, we seem to forget that it probably would have happened anyway, it simply wouldn't conform to this Rousseauian concept of the English Peasantry as noble savages, or to a reestablishment of the silly British Pastoral, the Merry ol' England myth which still corsets their literature.[/quote
Yeah, I "forgot", Brazil, NorthAmerica and Spain also had strong romantic poets, it was a very strong "movement", anyways much of what we define of Romanticism is German, somehow translated by the the english poets.

[QUOTE]Of all of these, I think Keats the strongest today, or perhaps the most enduring (my professors probably would disagree) and the one who seems to have had the greatest vision. But we must keep in mind he actually was reacting against the older generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge - he found fault heavily in many of their works.


Keats had a strong reaction against Byron than Coleridge, who he respected for the critical writings. They even had similar ideas. But I also agree with Keats being the strongest, much because I think he is the one who didnt need a wordsworthianian change of subject searching for a new language, and looked for something higher, which indeed, gave us his odes and nice collection of good sonnets.
Byron indeed have a lot to do with his attitude, perhaps Lord Byron is his greatest creation. He can hit the jackpot when he was not talking about himself, just like Shelley when was thinking about politics and philosophy.



Wessexgirl

I would never dismiss those sextet. I think their fault is basically being inferior to Dante, which means, they are most likely among the greatest poets ever. Keats is my favorite poet, alongside with with Blake. I am also fascinated for out of poetry life, such as Coleridge dreams while compared with Poe. Also, I think the romantic poets are the last great generation of poets writing when poetry was still reggarded as superior to prose (considering the poets of first half of XIX Century, maybe Poe, Baudelaire, Dickinson too. Just too much variety). Now, they also wrote when mass comunnication was being born, the idolatry of personality and superior forms of recording writings, so even the crap stuff they wrote still around.

[LitNetIsGreat]

If Wordsworth was such a rejector of the commercial world, a) why did he keep trying to sell his poetry to make money, and b) why did he accept the cash and titles thrown at him by the monarchy? People forget to realize that in 1843 he essentially sided with institution over his beloved noble-savages, peasant-folk.

Ah, the old Wordsworth turning back on his youth debate.

I often think that much of his ideology rises above the man himself. Of course that is something which is not exclusive to Wordsworth either. He, the man is very flawed, like all of us, and as such he never managed to live up to the philosophy that his poetry suggested. I don't for one second think however that we should reject totally and utterly the words on the page for that reason alone though do you JBI?

I for one, never forgot for one second, his acceptance of the poet laureateship in '43, aged 73. Such an acceptance is conservative in the extreme for one who at one stage sympathised with much of the French revolution. Again, however, I don't reject his poetry because of this.

Wordsworth may be a prime example to all to seek the words on the page and not the person behind them.

[JBI]

Ah, the old Wordsworth turning back on his youth debate.

I often think that much of his ideology rises above the man himself. Of course that is something which is not exclusive to Wordsworth either. He, the man is very flawed, like all of us, and as such he never managed to live up to the philosophy that his poetry suggested. I don't for one second think however that we should reject totally and utterly the words on the page for that reason alone though do you JBI?

I for one, never forgot for one second, his acceptance of the poet laureateship in '43, aged 73. Such an acceptance is conservative in the extreme for one who at one stage sympathised with much of the French revolution. Again, however, I don't reject his poetry because of this.

Wordsworth may be a prime example to all to seek the words on the page and not the person behind them.

I personally don't think much of biography when valuing texts, however, I'm of the mind that since the focus here seems to be to idealize his life, one must hit hard with the facts, providing the necessary evidence to the contrary, as fitting.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I personally don't think much of biography when valuing texts, however, I'm of the mind that since the focus here seems to be to idealize his life, one must hit hard with the facts, providing the necessary evidence to the contrary, as fitting.

But I'm not idealising his life at all, I'm merely reading the words on the page and what I gain from them. I have already said that Wordsworth the man is flawed. Of course I am coming at this as one who has walked and breathed the lakes for myself, but even so, the words are all that really matter.

[mortalterror]

I would never dismiss those sextet. I think their fault is basically being inferior to Dante, which means, they are most likely among the greatest poets ever.

Really? Dante is the only poet you'd put above them? How about Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Camoes, Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Eliot, Homer, Firdawsi, Lucan, Statius, and Apollonius? You know, I think that along with the rise of the prose novel, the demise of the epic poem is due largely to the Romantics seeming inability, or their preference for lyrics. With the exception of Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, and Blake's Milton it doesn't seem to be their thing. It's not what they are known and regarded for, and does anyone think that their epics stand up to the epics of the past? Nowadays, an ambitious poet is one who experiments with style and not with length. I don't think it's a stretch to lay the blame for our pygmy poetry at the feet of these men.

[Virgil]

God, you guys argue about the silliest fo things. ;) [Yes, I know, I've been known to do so too. :p]

[JCamilo]

Really? Dante is the only poet you'd put above them? How about Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Camoes, Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Eliot, Homer, Firdawsi, Lucan, Statius, and Apollonius? You know, I think that along with the rise of the prose novel, the demise of the epic poem is due largely to the Romantics seeming inability, or their preference for lyrics. With the exception of Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, and Blake's Milton it doesn't seem to be their thing. It's not what they are known and regarded for, and does anyone think that their epics stand up to the epics of the past? Nowadays, an ambitious poet is one who experiments with style and not with length. I don't think it's a stretch to lay the blame for our pygmy poetry at the feet of these men.

Dante is above everyone else, so all of them are guilty of the same sin. It is not like I am bothering to list everyone (Horace, Yeats, Browning, Pessoa, Drummond, Neruda, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman,etc, etc) who are among the best poets ever. I am not up to settle for an arbitrary number and say "Only those 10 are the best poets ever, the rest are out"....

No, they are better with Lyrics and I think it is a matter of sensiblity besides preference. Coleridge and Wordsworth explained quite well the reasons for the style of their poems.
Also, the epic tradition was already fading, much before the romantics. Why would they bother if one of their models, Shakespeare, even being able to deal with length, favored the sonnet form while writing poems? If they are at faulty, it is the faulty of dealing with the length of great romances where they could be notable, using short poetry. Blame them as you wish, but this seems to be like playing the devil's advocate.

[JBI]

Really? Dante is the only poet you'd put above them? How about Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Camoes, Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Eliot, Homer, Firdawsi, Lucan, Statius, and Apollonius? You know, I think that along with the rise of the prose novel, the demise of the epic poem is due largely to the Romantics seeming inability, or their preference for lyrics. With the exception of Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, and Blake's Milton it doesn't seem to be their thing. It's not what they are known and regarded for, and does anyone think that their epics stand up to the epics of the past? Nowadays, an ambitious poet is one who experiments with style and not with length. I don't think it's a stretch to lay the blame for our pygmy poetry at the feet of these men.

I agree to some extent, but I think the anthology itself has replaced the notion of epic.

What I mean by this is, now do to contemporary publishing methods, cheap printing, poets put out anthologies, rather than a few poems circulating. What that means is, the poems within the anthology are able to speak to each other, to be related.

The first example of this in English, I would think, is probably Lyrical Ballads, where the preface seems to indicate the connectivity of the poems - chosen in that order, for that reason. The poems are expressing thoughts within a linear form, each one building on the next one.

A more powerful example though is Stevens's In Harmonium, where the poems can be read as individual, or as one long poem. The poems express related ideas, different concepts, build, argue, and focus on one idea. The anthology allows for a connection between shorter poems to create a long poem.

Now you can get anthologies like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Wang-Wei-Roo-Borson/dp/1894078098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232250418&sr=8-1

Where the poems are a) composed by 3 poets writing under the name Brick not Bread, b) all comparative in subject and focus, and c) all thematically, and topically related.

The anthology allows for short works to be part of a longer work, it allows for Yeats's Wild Swans at Coole to be both anthology and poem, for the poem to sit with the rest, be read against the rest, as well as be read alone. The contemporary anthology is even more focused. You get poems written from certain places, such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Country-Steve-Noyes/dp/1894078497/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232250596&sr=1-1

which deals with the experiences of an outsider, an Anglo Canadian, living in China, and his reactions, as well as reactions from natives, to him and country. You also get ones written in certain perspectives, or written in certain styles, or with certain focuses. You get ones that have leitmotifs running through the entire volume (I think of Anne Hebert especially, who is so interested on the reoccurrance of symbols and images in her poems) and also books with reoccurring styles, such as the later work of P.K. Page, which explores different forms and shapes within one anthology.


I think though, that the epic cannot possibly work, because it cannot possibly take into account all the perspectives being hurled at us today. An epic, by definition I would think, is rather impersonal, is supposed to be rather detached from the author, and focus more on a larger picture, and I think the diversity of perspectives makes that more problematic than anything else. Either way though, epics are rather boring when attempted now. Merrill did one which was O.K., and Walcott did a couple, which were alright, but I think the closest anyone has come to a lasting one in the past 100 years in English, and I mean a strong epic, not just a long poem, has to be Eliot, but he didn't write an epic, he just modernized certain aspects of epic. I know personally of one established poet who is currently in the process of writing an epic, which will no doubt, if he finishes it, be published soon after (I have heard him read a sample at a book reading on campus, that is how I can verify it) but even that will be a gimmick, and not a true epic in the Virgilian sense.

I think the Anthology is a better form than the epic anyway, in terms of ability to work for our culture. The Anthology offers many different perspectives to function within one longer work, which is quite helpful, regardless of their conflict, whereas the epic must maintain far more connectivity.


I don't doubt that we may see an emergence of more verse novels. I can think of two that have come out and been really successful in the past 20 years (Wyllah Falls by George Elliott Clarke and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson) and one rather mediocre, though still highly successful one The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, and I bet more will be out shortly.


Even so though, it makes no difference. Japan's tradition is built on for the most part very, very short poems, and I don't think that hampers them at all. I think both traditions suit the cultures they work for, in context, and that is that. If the poets don't want to write epics, there is probably a reason. If one comes along and writes a successful one, there is probably a reason behind that, but as it is, I can't see how one would work in the traditional sense. It would need to radically redefine the genre if it were to work at all.

[JBI]

God, you guys argue about the silliest fo things. ;) [Yes, I know, I've been known to do so too. :p]

Far better than the "Who do you like more" preoccupation on these boards though, you must admit, it is far more constructive, and far more entertaining.

[xsteff1991x]

I really like Keats, I think some of the imagery in his poems is stunning. I find his writing very sensative too, when I read Keats I feel he potrays alot of emotion through his words, when he writes;

''Then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.''

It evoked emotion in me, because it's as though you can imagine feeling how he does, it's such a lonely image. That's why I like Keats. Lol. :)

[JCamilo]

Well, while I think the question was raised for the sake of bringing up some discussion only, I would add that Epic Poetry, since it is mostly narrative, was damaged before lyrical poetry by the raising of the prose. Cervantes, Rabelais, etc showed capacity to produce without verses and when the XIX prose was even more developed.
Also, with philosophical change and anti-religiousity, the themes that could be suited for epics are less "appealing"...
Quickly thinking, Camões was as good with Lusiadas as with his sonnets, in spain Quevedo and Lope de Vega are dealing with short texts, Villon and La Fontaine in france, Petrarch himself was famous for the sonnets... so it cannt be the romantics
Meanwhile, Ovid Metamorphosis, written today could be called a collection of short stories, rather than a novel or romance... New forms were developed to suit for the different needs.

[mortalterror]

I agree to some extent, but I think the anthology itself has replaced the notion of epic.

How could it have replaced the epic when it co-existed with the epic for thousands of years? You see similar patterns of interrelated poems in Virgil's Georgics, Statius' Silvae, Petrarch's Canzoniere, and Spenser's Amoretti. These same gentlemen would go on to write The Aeneid, The Thebaid, Africa, and The Faerie Queene. I see no contradiction. That's like how Faulkner claims that his collection of short stories Go Down, Moses is a novel because of the structure and thematic unity. Groups of short stories are still groups of short stories any way you slice them, just as groups of poems are still groups of poems, and they haven't replaced the novel have they?

You say that Japan has a good tradition of short poetry. I'm going to make a judgement call and say that there are some things you cannot say in 17 syllables, or in a commercial, a sound bite, a campaign slogan, or a quip. Some ideas are too big to be handled in a sentence, or a single hour television program. Furthermore, there are things you can do with a long form which you cannot do in the short form. There is a certain range of human experience that short works cannot hope to speak to and that is the proper subject matter of epic literature. An epic is not a long lyric or an overgrown sonnet. It is not the thematic unity or structure which makes the poem epic. An epic is a fully developed, completely adult, complex idea considered from all sides and brought to it's natural conclusion in the goodness of time. I do not think that intelligent ideas ever go out of fashion. Society has an appetite for them, and right now I believe it's starving.

[stlukesguild]

Really? Dante is the only poet you'd put above them? How about Ovid, Virgil, Goethe, Milton, Camoes, Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Eliot, Homer, Firdawsi, Lucan, Statius, and Apollonius?

Actually, I would put quite a few poets ahead of the English Romantics, many more on par with them, and admit that there are probably quite a few others worthy of equal status of whom I am not aware... or of whom I am limited to mediocre or non-existent translations.

You know, I think that along with the rise of the prose novel, the demise of the epic poem is due largely to the Romantics seeming inability, or their preference for lyrics. With the exception of Wordsworth's Prelude, Byron's Don Juan, and Blake's Milton it doesn't seem to be their thing. It's not what they are known and regarded for, and does anyone think that their epics stand up to the epics of the past? Nowadays, an ambitious poet is one who experiments with style and not with length. I don't think it's a stretch to lay the blame for our pygmy poetry at the feet of these men.

This argument may have some valid points... but one might also point out that the rise of the novel... under the noses of the 18th century poets... did far more to end the reign of the epic poem. I can't think of a single epic poem by Pope, Swift, Gay, Johnson, etc... that can come near the achievements of the 18th century novel: Richardson, Fielding, DeFoe, Smollett, Sterne, Hogg, etc... to say nothing of Swift's own efforts in prose narrative. I might also note that there are any number of poets of great merit who never mastered or even attempted epic poetry: Petrarch, Cavalcanti, Donne, Traherne, Rilke, Heine, Garcia-Lorca, Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Verlaine... to say nothing of Japanese and Chinese poets, etc... I agree with JBI that the anthology or the collection (Leaves of Grass, Flowers of Evil, Rilke's New Poems, etc...) may have replaced the epic. Then again... considering something like Petrarch Canzoniere and many other poet's collections, the anthology (look especially to the volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry... or the Divan's of many Middle-Eastern poets) has long been capable of standing as an aesthetic rival to the epic.

I would also note that any attack upon the Romantics for their failure to achieve a great unified epic poetry is also unfair when one considers the circumstances of the poets. Milton was in his 60s when he completed Paradise Lost. Dante began the Comedia in his mid-40s and continued until his death. Virgil was well into his 40s when he began the Aeneid. Byron was dead at 36. Shelley is dead at 29; Keats at 26. How well remembered would Dante, Milton, or Virgil have been had they died at such an early age? Would they be able to rival or surpass Keats and Byron? Certainly Coleridge has no one to blame but himself and quite probably his drug abuse for his early aesthetic "death"... excepting his critical writings. And Wordsworth burns out early... but his earlier work is laden with some marvelous stuff... and with the Prelude he may just come closest to a "modern" successful epic (not to forget Byron's Don Juan).

Blake? Well as I have repeatedly admitted, I find him to be something different altogether. In a way he attempted something akin to what Wagner achieved with his Ring cycle: a Gesamtkunstwerk... yet in Blake's instance... it was an attempt to merge the visual with the written work. It must always be remembered that Blake was first and foremost a visual artist: trained as a print-maker/engraver, his goal was to create a visual epic set to his own narratives to rival the fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance... and the illuminated manuscripts of the middle-ages. Blake's sights were set so high... he was essentially attempting to create a new Sistine set to his own visionary religious/mythological narrative. No one could be expected to succeed at such a goal... and especially one whose artistic efforts were continually hampered by abject poverty... and yet he came close. His failures are absolutely brilliant.

[stlukesguild]

You say that Japan has a good tradition of short poetry. I'm going to make a judgement call and say that there are some things you cannot say in 17 syllables, or in a commercial, a sound bite, a campaign slogan, or a quip. Some ideas are too big to be handled in a sentence, or a single hour television program. Furthermore, there are things you can do with a long form which you cannot do in the short form. There is a certain range of human experience that short works cannot hope to speak to and that is the proper subject matter of epic literature. An epic is not a long lyric or an overgrown sonnet. It is not the thematic unity or structure which makes the poem epic. An epic is a fully developed, completely adult, complex idea considered from all sides and brought to it's natural conclusion in the goodness of time. I do not think that intelligent ideas ever go out of fashion. Society has an appetite for them, and right now I believe it's starving.

I agree that the notion of the "Epic" work of art has not gone out of fashion... and certainly there are novels that are "epic" in scope, scale, and seriousness of content. I'm not going to argue JBI's contracted interpretation of an "Epic" as limited to a culture with a single unified mythological/religious foundation. I have no allusions that the Rome of Virgil's time, the Greece of Homer, the Portugal of Camões, the Persia of Firdowsi, or the London of Milton were in any way lacking an influx of outside influences and a turmoil of conflicting world views. Indeed, I see no reason why an "epic" work might not deal with such a diversity. But do we imagine that the "epic" must be limited to "poetic" form only? And speaking of such... has anyone read Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel?

[mortalterror]

I might also note that there are any number of poets of great merit who never mastered or even attempted epic poetry: Petrarch, Cavalcanti, Donne, Traherne, Rilke, Heine, Garcia-Lorca, Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Verlaine... to say nothing of Japanese and Chinese poets, etc...

Yes, but as I've already pointed out, Petrarch composed Africa. While I do believe that all of the poets you name with the possible exceptions of Cavalcanti and Traherne, whom I'm less familiar with, deserve to be ranked at least as highly as any of the Romantics, I'm not sure that they all surpass them. I would also like to float the hypothesis that no truly great artist succeeds to canonical greatness without attempting that one really big venture, the one that a minor talent could not even attempt, or if they did their mediocrity would show in every brushstroke.

Rilke is very accomplished at what he does, but every poem of his leaves me wanting something more. He is like a beautiful flightless bird. Everything is there which is required, except for one thing. He has rhythm, and diction, a capacity for depth and aphorism which never attains to real development. Each of his poems is like, "Here's an interesting thought I had." To which I'm like, "Yes, that is interesting. Would you maybe like to develop that thought further and see where it goes?" He's the premature ejaculator of modern poetry. As curious and visionary as his style is, it stops where Blake would just be beginning. His little bon mots are the sorts of things a really great poet would use as a point of departure and a way of springing into something altogether different. They should be gateways and he's using them as ends in themselves.


I would also note that any attack upon the Romantics for their failure to achieve a great unified epic poetry is also unfair when one considers the circumstances of the poets. Milton was in his 60s when he completed Paradise Lost. Dante began the Comedia in his mid-40s and continued until his death. Virgil was well into his 40s when he began the Aeneid. Byron was dead at 36. Shelley is dead at 29; Keats at 26. How well remembered would Dante, Milton, or Virgil have been had they died at such an early age? Would they be able to rival or surpass Keats and Byron? Certainly Coleridge has no one to blame but himself and quite probably his drug abuse for his early aesthetic "death"... excepting his critical writings. And Wordsworth burns out early... but his earlier work is laden with some marvelous stuff... and with the Prelude he may just come closest to a "modern" successful epic (not to forget Byron's Don Juan).

I'm not particularly interested in who the best writer was aged 25-30. I'm interested in their results. You can't know what they would have gone on to do, and I don't think we should calculate their promise in with the actual accomplishments which they did achieve. Buchner might have been the next Goethe if he'd lived past the age of 24. So what? He didn't. Personally, I believe Rimbaud's reputation would have suffered if he'd continued to write, but I can't know that for sure. Lot's of people's nephews write very well for a five year old. That is not what is at issue here.

By the time they were my age Moliere was a failed actor, Thomas Dekker was in prison, and Keats had been dead a year. Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great both croaked at 33. I'd better get cracking! This sort of age specific intelligence is perhaps useful as a guideline to the living, but not terribly helpful when it comes to judging art and ability.

[stlukesguild]

I would also like to float the hypothesis that no truly great artist succeeds to canonical greatness without attempting that one really big venture, the one that a minor talent could not even attempt...

On one hand, I question the concept. Petrarch is largely known for his Canzoniere... certainly not for his unfinished epic, Africa. I would argue that Dickinson is unquestionably one of the most brilliant poets... but she never even attempts anything that extends beyond a page. Checkov... Borges... Kafka... and even your beloved Hemingway are largely recognized for their short stories. What epic work did Donne produce? Tu Fu, Li Po and Wang Wei... generally accepted as the greatest poets of China... and to most Chinese... generally accepted as the greatest aesthetic achievements of Chinese art... are all known for rather brief, lyrical poetry. And in the visual arts? Well we might accept the notion that Monet's suites or series of paintings (Rouen Cathedral, Haystacks, etc...) amount to something of a single grand or epic work of art... but what of Van Gogh? Degas? or many others among the giants?

At the same time... I question what exactly amounts to a "big" work? Are we speaking only of the single large unified work? I would argue that Whiman's Leaves of Grass or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal are "big works" in almost every sense of the word. Schubert's song (or lieder) cycles such as Die Winterreise or Schwanengesang can hold their own against the strongest of symphonies or operas. On the other hand... I do agree that it takes more than a few perfect short poems to gain one canonical status.

Borges had a short story (or essay... one can never remember... genres being so fluid in Borges) in which he looked at the question of the Spanish poet who composed the one never-to-be-forgotten perfect sonnet... the poem in which every last syllable is wrought with the perfection of a master jeweler... in which the entire poem would be diminished were a single word to be displaced. This he looks at in in comparison with Cervantes. Borges admits that Cervantes masterwork, Don Quixote is greatly flawed. He notes the author's prolonged fawning toward patrons... certain passages... even narrative developments which exhibit unquestionable clumsiness... and most damaging... the inclusion of Cervantes' own horrible poetry. In spite of this, Borges comes to the conclusion that Don Quixote is indisputably the greater work of art... its failings owing much to the fact that its aim is so high... it attempts so much more... and in most instances it succeeds.

I'm not particularly interested in who the best writer was aged 25-30. I'm interested in their results. You can't know what they would have gone on to do, and I don't think we should calculate their promise in with the actual accomplishments which they did achieve.

Certainly... we can only judge the work that exists... not what "might have been". What does exist is still pretty damn good. One might easily point out that Keats and Shelley and Byron (etc...) have produced a body of literature that has surpassed many other poets who long outlived them. They can't compare with Goethe, Dante, Homer, Virgil, Milton, Chaucer, Ovid, Firdowsi? Not too many... including a great many who had far more time to do so... can come close to that. Again, I have never been one to suggest that the Romantics might in any way rival Dante or Shakespeare... nor am I one not to recognize that there are many others of equal merit who are under-appreciated or under-recognized. Rather than needing to knock the Romantics down a few notches, I would prefer rather to suggest a few others whose works might be raised up in recognition.

[mortalterror]

On one hand, I question the concept. Petrarch is largely known for his Canzoniere... certainly not for his unfinished epic, Africa.

Yes, but how many of Milton's Latin poems spring to mind either? Why is the name Maffeo Vegio so rarely in anyone's mouth? Didn't Eliot write some poems in French? I think that the estimation of many works by artists who wrote in multiple languages often suffer from the language barrier. The regular political incentives are not there for either the French or English establishments to get a hold on Eliot's orphans and enshrine them as they may deserve. I don't think it's to far a stretch to suppose that The Canzoniere has remained Petrarch's most enduring monument because it was one of the few works he wrote in Italian.


I would argue that Dickinson is unquestionably one of the most brilliant poets... but she never even attempts anything that extends beyond a page. Checkov... Borges... Kafka... and even your beloved Hemingway are largely recognized for their short stories.

Most assuredly, the talent is there; but the ambition is lacking. Dickinson is as good at what she does as anybody. She piles up a mountain of little gems. Who has more? Still, even collectively, they cannot do what Pharsalia does. I'm a big believer in compression, in "less is more", but sometimes "more is more" too.

A few years ago I tried to place each of Shakespeare's plays into seven categories of quality. Then I made another ranking Hemingway's. I have to admit that Hemingway only reached the third tier of my Shakespeare ranks. He was the best writer of his time but he did not write the best books. He never goes for it, like say Tolstoy would. I do not like Tolstoy much but I appreciate what he was trying to do. Hemingway himself understood this fact. He wrote "If only Turgenev had written War and Peace." The best writers so rarely meet with the best subjects, styles, and themes. Fitzgerald is not as good a writer as Hemingway but he wrote the better book. I am not questioning the potential, or the talent of these writers. I am questioning how far they fulfilled that potential.

Artistically, I believe that the novel, the epic, the feature, the full length play, are the longest forms in their genres and the hardest to do well. Any author of any worth should recognize the potential of these forms, understand that they provide the greatest challenges and scope to show off his ability, and should compose in them.


Borges had a short story (or essay... one can never remember... genres being so fluid in Borges) in which he looked at the question of the Spanish poet who composed the one perfect sonnet... the poem in which every last syllable is wrought with the perfection of a master jeweler... in which the entire poem would be diminished were a single word to be displaced... in comparison with Cervantes. Borges admits that even Cervantes masterwork, Don Quixote is greatly flawed. He notes the author's fawning toward prolonged patrons, certain passages... even narrative developments which exhibit unquestionable clumsiness... and most damaging... the inclusion of Cervantes own horrible poetry. In spite of this, Borges comes to the conclusion that Don Quixote is indisputably the greater work of art... its failings owing to the fact that its aim is so high... it attempts so much more... and in most instances it succeeds.

Yes, I think that's something like what I had in mind.

[wessexgirl]

Writing virtual essays on other poets may be quite illuminating, but I think the thread is concerned with Byron, Shelley and Keats.

[JCamilo]

Well, I suppose, but isn’t about who is the favorite poet? To some, to determine the favorite poet, we must see the entire history of poetry….

Mortalterror:


How could it have replaced the epic when it co-existed with the epic for thousands of years? You see similar patterns of interrelated poems in Virgil's Georgics, Statius' Silvae, Petrarch's Canzoniere, and Spenser's Amoretti. These same gentlemen would go on to write The Aeneid, The Thebaid, Africa, and The Faerie Queene. I see no contradiction. That's like how Faulkner claims that his collection of short stories Go Down, Moses is a novel because of the structure and thematic unity. Groups of short stories are still groups of short stories any way you slice them, just as groups of poems are still groups of poems, and they haven't replaced the novel have they?

While I agree with you that the notion is not replaced, just no longer valued... I would not go as futher as the group of short stories turning in novel. That is editing… Homer books are put together by others, Decameron can certainly be split in short stories, isn’t Satyricon also put together by other and not the Petronius?
I think the point is that epic is being replaced by the notion of long length poems. I would argue that after the XIX prose writers have finally developed the language of the prose that Baudelaire claim “do poetry even in prose” was followed by many. Joyce was doing it, Borges also (although not in long poems), Guimarães Rosa also… If other ways of expression were developed, could we in any sense blame anyone for preferring this other way, especially if they managed to succeed?
Also, there is things that cannot be said in short poems and need length, that is true. But the reversal is also correct. If a good writer job is picking the perfect word, in the perfect time, then those who do it in short ways are mastering perfection.
I think my reference to Dante may have been misunderstood. I have no interest on rankings. I used Dante because to me he is a symbol of perfect poet – anything I read (even obviously outdated works like Monarchy) have a great quality, what we should call genius - he is the guy who can come to Shakespeare and frown. He wrote the Divine Comedy, which is arguably (arguably, because at some point literary criticism have no mathematical precision) the best work ever written. I only suggest that great poets are those who can almost go up to Dante level once or while. I do not think they are in a line, where number 3 eliminated 8, I can and I think anyone in this world who likes great poetry must know Ode to a Nightingale as much it must know Lusidadas. How close are them from perfection? Too close, so we better have them all.
I also agree the age that x, y died is irrelevant. Of course, when seeing Keats there is a sensation of loss because his development is amazing. What he could be is a great source of inspiration. The aforementioned Wordsworth, Dickinson were not, when they grew old, some spark of their originality and energy was lost or never translated to verse again.
As ambition, I somehow agree. I think the Divine Comedy was only possible because the ambition of Dante, Finnegans Wake also… They risk a lot with a great capacity. But Borges aesthetical ambition was immense also when he proposed to risk Dom Quixote and wrote Pierre Menard. Lyrical Ballads as a whole was very ambitious. And even those kings of “I am nobody” like Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa are ambitious in risking with oblivion and memory, hiding themselves in every little poem or personality they created. I do not think we should equate ambition with size.
And I think you are unfair comparing Hemingway with Shakespeare. It is Shakespeare, Milton would not be able to rank as high as him either, neither Goethe. Forget ranks.

Stlukesguild


Indeed, I see no reason why an "epic" work might not deal with such a diversity. But do we imagine that the "epic" must be limited to "poetic" form only? And speaking of such... has anyone read Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel?

Nope, I haven’t .Ok, epic narrative has rules and to our world it needs change, so anything is possible. I see no reason to call it Epic or not. I would argue that a considerable trait of Homer and other epic writers is the richness of images with the flow of action. I would say we have visual arts today too competitive to allow epic poetry freedom or exposition. (
As Blake, I agree with you. And while he had the kind of mind that could give us an epic, why would he. The form of his poems were suited, worked, almost perfectly. I do not believe in unnecessary need to accommodate to systems or styles, rather a harmony of form and content. Or Emily Dickinson. How strange would see her bumblebee turned in a Smiurg…
That bring Borges back, possible because Borges had the sensibility and capacity to analyze the past of literature and express it like few… it is like one of his other favorite appropriations, Liebniz heavenly library… it would have only several volumes of the perfect book (Eneid) or several books, those minor with flaws?
That is part of Borges go against Cervantes, he got a lot of abuse for suggesting that Quevedo should have been the writer. Lately, he give up this position and said Quixote had the Writer that made it possible… Could you imagine the satire of Quixote in alexandrine verses?
Greatness does not lies on Size, Tchekhov is certainly as big as Tolstoy or Dostoievisky.

[mortalterror]

As ambition, I somehow agree. I think the Divine Comedy was only possible because the ambition of Dante, Finnegans Wake also… They risk a lot with a great capacity. But Borges aesthetical ambition was immense also when he proposed to risk Dom Quixote and wrote Pierre Menard. Lyrical Ballads as a whole was very ambitious. And even those kings of “I am nobody” like Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa are ambitious in risking with oblivion and memory, hiding themselves in every little poem or personality they created. I do not think we should equate ambition with size.

No, of course not. But size is a challenge. It is one of the best tests we can put our poets through, and I think there is a passage to greatness, a series of escalating trials, which modern poets don't deign to traverse anymore. I think it is only natural that a prose stylist, if he is any good, should start with short stories and move up to the novel. I think Virgil is the perfect model for poetry. He set himself increasingly difficult artistic tasks. First he wrote the Eclogues in imitation of Theocritus. Then he wrote the Georgics, a more ambitious work in imitation of a greater poet: Hesiod. For his coup de grace he writes the Aeneid in imitation of Homer himself. In doing so he shows himself a master to be reckoned with, and an equal to those he invites comparison to.

Muhammad Ali was not always Muhammad Ali, and I don't mean that he was once known as Cassius Clay. Cassius was an excellent boxer but not a great boxer, if you catch my meaning. All of the ingredients were there for him to make the transformation into what we now consider his natural form, but something external, something he couldn't create for himself was missing: an opponent. A worthy opponent is the vital ingredient in making any superb athlete into a great icon. You can say that Muhammad Ali owes his entire reputation to the stature of Joe Frazier and George Foreman, the obstacles he overcame to become a champion. He isn't great for the way he walloped Chuvalo or Quarry. The best need to fight the best, in boxing as in the arts. It is only in this heightened competition that we force ourselves to dig deep and find what is superlative. A championship boxer fights ten and twelve round fights (used to be 15) whereas a contender can get away with less. These are the ways that the men distinguish themselves from the pretenders.

If Shelley had wanted to distinguish himself from Dickinson, or if any of the three we are discussing had wanted to distinguish themselves from each other, then they need those championship rounds. They need to challenge a champion for a title. I see inklings of this in Keat's Hyperion, and in Shelley's verse play Prometheus Unbound. Although, as they stand they are incomplete, not quite worthy of their antecedents.

[JBI]

I disagree. Poetry is short in length today, because there is generally no point of it being longer.

Homer came out of the oral tradition, and because of that, he wrote in a metre, in verse, out of cognitive necessity - it is easier to memorize rhythm than prose.

Virgil started short poems, but in truth, his epic was a counter-Homer, as you know - he was rivaling Homer. That can be traced down to Beowulf, which has the same Homeric necessity, and to The Song Of Roland. But after that, somehow the tradition seems to return to written ones.

You have, essentially, the Virgilian imitators, and nationalist icons. The Cid, the Nibelungenlied, dozens of Latin Epics - all following the lead of Virgil. Dante too comes out as a follower of Virgil, quite literally, but takes his subject in a different direction - he deals with contemporary issues - he deals with contemporary thought, and not about nationalist thought, as seen in Cantar de Mio Cid. Dante, since I guess he could not play the nationalist card, he belonging to Florence, essentially a city state, instead turned to the thought of his day, the Dolce Stil Novo for his core, meanwhile following a vague classical model. The difference is though, Dante radically changed it - made it radically "Italian", and in result, redefined the epic entirely.

The epic tradition though, is a tradition. As stated before, the Japanese tradition works with shorter poems, building on each other with allusion, and to an extent, the classical Chinese tradition worked on short poems, building on each other by making slight changes to classical texts, by altering things, by "honoring the masters". The epic wasn't the core - the lyric was.

In a world where Virgil isn't taught in schools, where he isn't the central text, what place could the epic have? The epic depends upon the epic tradition, as the Japanese and Chinese traditions suggest. If no one cares really about the epic tradition, and people are more interested in the lyric tradition, why bother with an epic.

The only point of writing an epic in verse today, besides your showing off bit, would seem to be that one can have freedom of language - could write in poetic style.

But quite frankly, what is the point? Wouldn't prose offer the same thing, and now I think of Moby Dick. Wouldn't it offer one the same room for narrative, and I think of James Joyce, or even The Old Man and The Sea. The point is, there is no point in writing an epic - the metre isn't really of interest anymore. Metric poetry and formalism in general seem to have been beaten for more freedom, despite some poets reluctance to move on. There is no purpose to imitate the classics anymore. There is no point in making poetry that can be memorized more easily, since we have cheap publishing, and would just rely on the text. There is no point in writing an epic.


That being said, the best example of long poetry surviving would have to be T.S. Eliot in English these past 100 years. Two long works, The Wasteland (called by Pound the longest poem ever written) and The Four Quartets, show that one doesn't really need to be in the epic vein in order to write long poetry. The Anthology and the verse novel too allow for experimentation with longer forms. But the Epic itself is a dated concept - the structure cannot work, and the imitation of classical examples will be laughed at.


The insistence on long poetry being better than short I find is also problematic. It's so western, and datedly western, in perspective, that it fails to realize that people have been challenging that very notion for hundreds of years.

It's like saying Dan Brown is a better writer than Alice Munro, because Alice Munro only writes short stories. Short stories are a legitimate form, away from novels. Flannery O'Connor proved that to an extent, as did Italo Calvino, and Borges - it is the Anthology which creates the long work - the short story anthology eventually functions as a link between the stories, and creates a long form, the same way the poetry anthology works to create a longer poem out of short lyrics.

I think the best example would be The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris, where 4 novellas are really one connected story. But there are looser forms in general. I think the give away though, is that anthologies all have names, and aren't simply called "new stories from x year to y year". Any critical reading of an anthology naturally takes into account the anthology as a whole, thereby rendering the little pieces aspects of a larger piece.


Either way though, who really cares about epics. There is a reason they all have failed pretty much since Milton, (whose poem by the way I would argue fails to "justify the ways of God to men", and succeeds for the "wrong" reasons).

Long poetry works - epics for the most part do not, and will not. We don't need them anymore, we don't seem to want them anymore, and there doesn't seem to be a point to them anymore. We have adopted new forms, and those forms will be challenged and judged.

And that is why one should not read "selected poems" but rather not reread selections from collected poems.

[JCamilo]

No, of course not. But size is a challenge. It is one of the best tests we can put our poets through, and I think there is a passage to greatness, a series of escalating trials, which modern poets don't deign to traverse anymore. I think it is only natural that a prose stylist, if he is any good, should start with short stories and move up to the novel. I think Virgil is the perfect model for poetry. He set himself increasingly difficult artistic tasks. First he wrote the Eclogues in imitation of Theocritus. Then he wrote the Georgics, a more ambitious work in imitation of a greater poet: Hesiod. For his coup de grace he writes the Aeneid in imitation of Homer himself. In doing so he shows himself a master to be reckoned with, and an equal to those he invites comparison to.

I agree that size is a challenge, but only a challenge if your desire (Or aesthical sensibility) wants you to move foward into this direction. If I want to write anything epical I must add something to Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, otherwise I would be just a meaningless repetition.
However, if the needs and style are other, my model can be Sapho and those who followed her with lyrical poetry. I take (at least nothing I read of her suggested otherwise) she was not unto long poems, but ok Sapho is hard.
Shakespeare, who did not moved towards the long epic tradition, wrote dramas. To be notable he certaily had to master Sopholes, Aeschilus and Euripedes (and those after them, or close to him like Marlowe). He didnt, altough the influence, outmasted Dante. Same with Cervantes, who tried to be superior to Lope de Vega and Quevedo (not exactly a chronology here) but he was superior in prose, and there is ambition here.
I understand we may reggard the epic poems - at least some of them - as the top of human literature, I almost said it when I said Dante is perfect. But I refrain myself to think Shakespeare would not be in the top as well. Societies change, technology changes, it is almost like blamming Cezane and Monet for allowed fotography to happen.
I understand the analogy with Ali, but in this case, it is not a competition, everytime Virgil was writing to counter/praise homer he is helping Homer to be memorized.




If Shelley had wanted to distinguish himself from Dickinson, or if any of the three we are discussing had wanted to distinguish themselves from each other, then they need those championship rounds. They need to challenge a champion for a title. I see inklings of this in Keat's Hyperion, and in Shelley's verse play Prometheus Unbound. Although, as they stand they are incomplete, not quite worthy of their antecedents.

Ok, I agree, Hyperion is flawed. As dramatic long narrative is failure. But Keats put Milton in the pocket, His Nightingale is the Nightingale of poetry, not Milton and anyone else. Keats is "defeated" by Milton while the length is concerned, but when writing an ode, he wins. Only if you assume, you must write long poems to be good, you will say one "victory" is more relevant than other. Different forms of expression, I can not tell which one is better.
It is like those self-help books. You know why they suck, because while writing this kind of literature, axioms and philosophical small pieces... Cicero, Seneca, etc have done better. I think - it was you, not sure - that said Marcus Aurelius was disapoiting when compared with them. Ok, he had the ambition, measured and lost, but would you say those before him have no validity because the style they choose to express?

[mortalterror]

JBI- I have thought a great deal about it and our differences pertaining to the epic are manifold. I do not think we have disagreed at so many points even pertaining to Joyce. Since poor advocate that I am, and no specialist in the subject myself, the best I can do is to direct you to a far worthier barrister. John Dryden gives a very spirited defense of the epic tradition in his dedicatory letter to the Aeneid, which I believe will be far superior to anything I could say to sway you. http://www.bartleby.com/13/1002.html If searching therein you do not discover either a new found respect for the man's prose, an appreciation for his skill at analysis, or a liking for his manner of conducting an argument I will be much surprised. He shows here a great vigor, a warmth, intelligence, and character that is as instructive as it is appealing. His charm often lies in little literary outliers like his prefaces and after reading them, I think you can understand why Pope would say, "Such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be." As I say, he makes a very stirring case for the eternal importance of the epic, and it's central role in our society. Give it a look if you are not too busy.

[JBI]

I tried reading it - got about 3 inches down, and got bored.

I have read Dryden's Aeneid in full, but I guess when I did I skipped over the intro. It seemed to be making some points, but really I think he is clouded by the classical obsession of his time period.

I think in our time period, we are more nuanced in our approach, and treat the classics as some of many world literature texts, rather than the models and foundation for current texts, and as such, we lose the epic zealous that seems to be infused in Dryden, and later Pope and the rest of them, not to mention Racine et. al. But the point is, what point would there be writing an epic in today's society? How does the epic function, and to what extent can it function in a society like ours? I doubt it can, I know it surely cannot in Canada, as Canada seems to be a country of mutually accepted differing opinions, where no one can really agree on anything. You would need a strong regional voice, perhaps Quebec could do it, but I doubt they would want to, or need to - prose, especially non-fiction seems to be their medium for sovereigntist sentiment.

Even so though, I can hardly see the point. The major work, or ambitious achievement isn't cause to write a book length epic poem, which, if you write at Virgil pace, would take years to write. The anthology seems to be a stronger form, as it allows a few good lyrics to go noticed, rather than risk a flop of an epic (might I mention the unknown Booniad: http://books.google.ca/books?id=qgoUAAAAIAAJ&dq=the+mountain+muse&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=WqoZTxA3ti&sig=HIO0amXOBfydaNmDo9NWQNKEQ9c&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA15,M1). But beyond that, do people even want an epic - is there a spirit of the age which warrants a culturally accepted epic to raise to Miltonic, or Virgillian status? I doubt it. People want poetry to roughly follow a development started with, in English, Wordsworth - they want lyric poetry - poetry that makes you feel - that makes you react - that makes you decode it, study it, examine it, think about, debate it. That's what the audiences seem to want, not nationalist sentiments, or "[justifications] of the ways of God to men."


Long poems can function though, and now I think back to modernists experiments, like Eliot's late works, and to H. D., a poet somewhat ignored on these boards, and her Homeric reworkings written in the second world war. But those are a different kind of poem, not epics. There are long poems still written, or cycles of sonnets, or cycles of thoughts.

You'd probably make a better case for the verse drama than for the epic, as a verse drama can perhaps still work, but I doubt an epic really will be Virgillian successful, if successful at all, and that is primarily the reason. Poets don't take risks that are likely to cost them years, knowing that the fruit may not be worth it, even if the poem succeeds to an extent. The epic would need to come from an established poet, such as Walcott who has written a couple, and have something that prose novels could not. I doubt you could make a case for a return to Homeric forms, epic similies, evocations, 24 book structure et. al.

[stlukesguild]

The best writers so rarely meet with the best subjects, styles, and themes. Fitzgerald is not as good a writer as Hemingway but he wrote the better book. I am not questioning the potential, or the talent of these writers. I am questioning how far they fulfilled that potential.

Artistically, I believe that the novel, the epic, the feature, the full length play, are the longest forms in their genres and the hardest to do well. Any author of any worth should recognize the potential of these forms, understand that they provide the greatest challenges and scope to show off his ability, and should compose in them.

I understand what you are suggesting... but I have some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, what you are suggesting is something of an outdated idea... the concept that certain subject matter... certain content is inherently superior to others. In the visual arts we once had a heirarchy of painting. At the highest level were those artists who had mastered the multi-figure paintings of mythological/historical/religious narratives: the histoire. Immediately beneath them were painters of genre scenes with people, and portraitists. Down further were the landscape painters and finally the still life artist. Modernism shattered all these conventions. The Impressionists placed the landscape at the center of their oeuvre, while cubism focused upon the still-life. Of course it might be argued that subject and content are not one and the same... that Monet could say more with a painting of his back yard that most other artists could say with the most grandiose subject. On the other hand... I often find myself acknowledging that as good of an artist as Cezanne is, he can never stand comparison with Michelangelo, Rubens, or Giotto. A bunch of f***ing fruit just isn't going to earn you a place among that echelon.

I somewhat agree that scale or grandeur present a challenge... and that if one wishes to stand along side the greatest one must step up to the challenge. On the other hand, as JCamillo suggests, size "is only a challenge if your desire (Or aesthical sensibility) wants you to move forward into this direction." For better or worse the shift wrought by the Romantics was a move away from larger, heroic external themes (God, fate, heroism, death, etc...) toward an expression of the internal. At its worst this has led us to our current situation in which every poet, writer, painter, etc... defends the most gushing and inane crap as "self expression". A return to an epic art will demand a shift away from such self-indulgence.

Again... I am not one to suggest that Shelley, Keats, etc... are on the same level with Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Milton, etc... On the other hand... the are still poets of great merit and achievement.

[JBI]

I'd be willing to challenge that Stevens's In Harmonium stands as somewhat a rival to Milton's Paradise Lost. Certainly it is more authentic.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I'd be willing to challenge that Stevens's In Harmonium stands as somewhat a rival to Milton's Paradise Lost. Certainly it is more authentic.


That's what the audiences seem to want, not nationalist sentiments, or "[justifications] of the ways of God to men."

Just to make a comment about Milton’s “justifying the ways of god to men.”

Although this is clearly written by Milton as his intended reason for writing Paradise Lost how much can we be sure that this was his real intention? Of courses this also leads us directly to the ambiguity of authorial intention and all the problems that Barthes highlighted. With this in mind I don’t think that it is so clear cut that we can criticise Paradise Lost for not living-up to this initial “intention”. Of course people are open to if they so wish, as there is no way of knowing either way, but the “intention” certainly allows Milton to comment on god in ways that he couldn’t have done without it. Just a thought.

[JCamilo]

I imagine Fernando Pessoa, when talking about ambition. He not only created several poems but also different personalities to write those poems. Not only their biographia, but different writing styles. It is a work of large scope, several small poems done by several individuals - The personality Fernando Pessoa wrote a few also. I doubt there is any work with such level of complexity, demanding more from him than would demand from any poet. No one challenged him there, I think no one will ever...
In other hand, Tolkien have a work that is a mature work, demanding a lot of technique and knowledge, a lifetime to create languages and history that would be logical, in a scope that is enough to allow the use of epic (either it is not, another discussion), would that classify as ambitions, as putting himself to the challenge? And yet, nothing of his fictions suggests that he could be superior to any of the small universes that Borges created, in fact, any could see that Borges is considerable superior. The execution is flawed, or in the case of Borges, there is more inside that artist than modesty...

[stlukesguild]

I imagine Fernando Pessoa, when talking about ambition. He not only created several poems but also different personalities to write those poems. Not only their biographia, but different writing styles. It is a work of large scope, several small poems done by several individuals - The personality Fernando Pessoa wrote a few also. I doubt there is any work with such level of complexity, demanding more from him than would demand from any poet. No one challenged him there, I think no one will ever...

Among the Modernists Pessoa is certainly a writer I suspect to be more than worthy of canonical status... and from all I've read on his biography, his oeuvre is only partially published... a large body of manuscripts found in that famous trunk after his death have yet to be deciphered, edited, or published. I imagine Pessoa as directly challenging the Romantic notion of the poet's single unique "voice". In a manner he builds upon Whitman's declaration that he contains multitudes. Of course... his approach is not completely without precedent. In a manner he has merged the advantage of the dramatist or novelist (or even the epic poet) in the invention of multiple characters... each with his or her own unique "voice"... each of whom may or may not represent some aspect of the poet. Which character, for example, if any, may be thought of as the true voice of Shakespeare?

[JCamilo]

Not any, if we are not careful we are going to conclude the great ambition is disapearing in a big bang of poliphony...
Yeah, I think Pessoa is a major poet, the great of XX and of Portuguese language. Good point for this argument, since the other Major portuguese Poet is Camões, which greatest work is one of the last true epic poems... Pessoa sensiblity and ambition lead him to a serie of small poems, to surpass Walt Whitman and even Homer (one of his personalities is adept to pastoral poetry) and some lesser know portuguese poets. (There is more, I see not how to say he knew Dickinson, but there is some similarity between both, he knew and admired Poe, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Milton and much more) but he did not in the form of Epic. But how this difference is relevant and not the result...