Keats is a personal favorite of mine, but Byron entwines my heart with silvery strings of understanding :)
Printable View
Keats is a personal favorite of mine, but Byron entwines my heart with silvery strings of understanding :)
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.
Shelley is the only one I've read much, of and I love him, one of my favourites.
Byron, for his language often amuses me.
But I like Shelley's thoughts in his defence of poetry.
Keats, Byron, Shelley. Love 'em all, though.
Shelley served as an idol for Lord Byron, as well as to Tennyson, Yeats, and Browning.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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?Quote:
Originally Posted by AshleyEliz
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by AshleyEliz
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 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.").Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
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!!! :(Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
[QUOTE=JBI;659651]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.[/QUOTE]
"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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by wessexgirl
[QUOTE=wessexgirl;659671]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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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.
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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?
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.
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"
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
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.
Jon, I think poetry is never out of touch. Just needs a new coat.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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"
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
Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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?
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.
gone now
Sorry, lukesguild, wrote too long and didnt see your last post.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
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.
(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. ;)
Diogenes of Sinope!Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
I love the camaraderie that these poets seem to share. Byron being at Shelley's funeral, or... funeral pyre, and all that.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Oh absolutely. It's quite evident in their styles, especially Tennyson's early poetry.Quote:
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.
Ah thank you Mr Saladin.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saladin
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror