POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN PERIODS.   Term Paper ID:30243 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Compares different ideas of a poet's function in the poems of John Keats and Matthew Arnold.... More...

11 Pages / 2475 Words 10 sources, 37 Citations, MLA Format $44.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Compares different ideas of a poet's function in the poems of John Keats and Matthew Arnold. Their concepts of the art of poetry and ideas of the poet's role in society. Keats' idealism and disinterest in political thought. Arnold's emphasis that poetry should discuss the moral needs and failures of society. Paper Introduction: Poets' conceptions of their roles in society can be fairly consistent for long periods of time or may change rapidly in a decade or two. The difference between the idea of a poet's function as conceived by the Romantic era and the Victorian period provides an example of significant change. Not all the supposed members of any school of poetry, of course, share every aspect of the predominant theory of poetry in their generation. Neither John Keats (1795-1821) nor Matthew Arnold (1822-88) is entirely typical of his era. But, especially because Arnold reacted against Keats--among others--in specific, articulated ways, a comparison of their ideas of their role as poets will demonstrate how such changes take place and the effect they have on the poetry that is written. A brief discussion of the two poets' ideas about the art of Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. For Arnold, who saw poetry as the source ofmeaningful apprehension of existence it was inescapably true that "thestylistic manner should be determined wholly by the matter to be expressed"(Roper 3 ). London: Bloomsbury, 1993.---. Keats did not lay out the terms ofhis understanding of the nature of poetry in systematic descriptions of hisart or criticism of the art of others. The contemplation of this idea, fullyinvested by the emotional expression in the poem, is the subject matter ofKeats' poem. . "Keats." Romantic Literature: From 179 -183 , 154-55. This problem was, it seems, particularly acute for Keats who, as the sonof a livery-stable keeper, was the subject of slurs about his background.He was always aware of the problem of the poet's social role and discussedit in a letter of 1819 in which he made it clear that he drew a sharp linebetween his own practice and that of popular writers. As that statement implies, Arnold believed that poetry thatdoes not convey high moral sentiments or that features rhetoricalflourishes that detract from such sentiments is not worthy of orappropriate to the modern age. H. He argued that for poetry "the idea iseverything [and] poetry attaches it emotion to the idea" (Arnold, SelectedProse 34 ). Although his was not entirely anart-for-art's-sake approach the contemplation of the poet's role receives avery low priority from Keats and is largely implied rather than stated.This forms a striking contrast to its importance to Arnold for whomconsideration of the audience, and the poet's role, became nearlyinseparable from his contemplation of the art of poetry. Unlike other Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley,Keats never took a particularly serious interest in political thought"beyond the general openness to radical and libertarian thought" that wasthe prevailing mode among intellectuals at the time (Ward, "Persistence"16). Keats'thoughts on poetry were not systematically set out. His indifference tothe public was, therefore, largely a matter of small importance. Ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1954.---. But in the course ofhis brief life he was in the habit of discussing poetry in his manyletters. In speaking ofthe simple style as it is to be found in the work of the Thucydides, forexample, Arnold praised the historian's effort "to correct popular errors,to assign their true character to facts, complaining as he [Thucydides]does so, of men's habits of uncritical reception of current stories"(Arnold, Selected Prose 64). Yet, as she continues, they more often"fearfully sought to avoid association with working-class and even middle-class audiences and writers" out of anxiety that they would not be takenseriously, and out of allegiance to traditional notions of poets as thosewho spoke to an elite of intellectuals and wealthy patrons (Cafarelli 222). He favored a "very plain direct and severe" style, as he put it,because any other approach tended to distract from the subject matter andthe meaning of the poem as a whole (Roper 31). Although the creation of hisart was a process that involved hard work and as careful an attention tothe smallest details as any poet, he believed that the finest poetrydeveloped from a "trust in feelings and imagination" and that this was theonly way that one could think about it as well (Stone 13). Hewished to avoid this particular approach and believed that self-expressionof his experience and beliefs should be, if it was a feature of his poetryat all, accomplished indirectly. Yet such an idea possesses a critical power that accounts for thedistance he tried to establish between "the extreme and creative self-abandon" which he cultivated for his art and the "linguistic self-consciousness" and extreme care that he lavished on his works" (Ward,"Persistence" 16). Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry (Arnold, Selected Prose 34 ).These lofty aims led Arnold to a general disregard for the poetry of those,such as Shelley and Keats, who seemed to him to believe that "the object ofpoetry was to produce exquisite bits and images" even while he was willingto acknowledge the extent of Keats' immense talent as a spinner of words(quoted in Roper 17). The principal discussion of the artof poetry derives from the letters where he developed ideas ratherspontaneously--or, at least, gave them expression in a very immediatemanner. In Keats' fleeting discussions of his practice, however, the elementthat is featured least is his audience. Ed. Matthew Arnold: A Selection of His Poems. ButArnold's sense of mission also led him to write poems that are distinctlybelow the average in quality for him and are far below the level of hisfinest works. In this 1819 letter he remarked on Wordsworth's tendencytoward making such expression paramount in his poetry and noted that theworks of the poet, whom he admired deeply, might be said to possess aquality that he called "the egotistical sublime" (quoted in Stone 13). He was not, in other words, a creator of solipsistic verse but aconveyor of an experience that could, if an individual desired, be part ofanyone's life. In this same essay, "On the Modern inLiterature" (1857) Arnold continued by describing the language employed byThucydides to achieve his ends as "modern language . Thisformulation of the relationship between the poet and his works was typicalof Keats' approach to the discussion of the art of poetry. Arnold would not have held that mattertakes precedence over style or vice versa, but that the seamless joining ofthe two was the essential aim of poetry. As he put it, "Ifeel it in my power to become a popular writer--I feel it in my strength torefuse the poisonous suffrage of a public" (quoted in Cafarelli 231).Keats "viewed the public in general as an enemy" but once he had createdthe beautiful objects that were his poems they became available to anyonewho was capable of appreciating them (Cafarelli 245). It was, inshort, a poetry of sensation. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.Stone, Brian. [S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (quoted in Ward, "Persistence" 16). When he says, for example, in a middling poem such as "TheFuture" (1852) that "A wanderer is man from his birth. Despite his claimsfor the wedding of plain style and highly serious content his drivingconcern was the content and this led him to look at poems in a peculiarfashion which he described as the identification of 'touchstones'. One of the principlegrounds on which he favored such a style was the fact that, at its best, itcould not be imitated by other poets. London: Penguin, 1992. As Ward puts it, Keats is the writer who registers with the most lyrical poignancy the discrepancy between a paradise glimpsed, and a paradise attained. There could, of course, be something almost wild andquite immediate about the poems--such as the "feverish and discordantlevity" found in the Ode to a Grecian Urn (Ward, "Persistence" 16). It is, instead, the nature of tragiclove itself that he explores and this subject, while interesting in itself,can hardly be said to lend itself to the high moral purposes for whichArnold believed poetry was destined. "Poetry or Religion? This is certainly a role that poetry is seen to play in many ages--even if the specific means vary from era to era. Text, Tact, and Tactic in Matthew Arnold's Literary Critical Method." Intercollegiate Review 33 (1998): 18-25.Roper, Alan. P. Thedifference between the idea of a poet's function as conceived by theRomantic era and the Victorian period provides an example of significantchange. Neither John Keats (1795-1821) nor Matthew Arnold (1822-88) is entirelytypical of his era. Rather than acting as a scientist who catalogues experience or anovert expressionist who presents her/his feelings in all their immediacyand as an end in themselves, Keats valued the ability to go as deeply aspossible into feeling and then to communicate and transform the experiencewith words that, rather than refining and limiting the experience, conveyedan accurate sense of the ambiguity as well as the nature of the experience. It might seem, as Cafarelli notes, that with their commitment tothe liberty of humanity the Romantic poets would have been eager toformulate a poetics that would "locate the social role of the poet amid ashifting audience" (222). Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. Garrod. Ed. the language of athoughtful philosophic man of our own days" (Selected Prose 65). The expression of his experience in the poems relied, therefore, onthe intelligent apprehension of the beautiful but necessarily avoided theinterference occasioned by philosophical rigor or conventional beliefsystems. "The Common Reader: Social Class in Romantic Poetics." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 (1997): 222-46.Keats, John. One such discussion, in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law,addressed the important question of a poet's emphasis on personalexpression. Oxford: Oxford UP, 197 .Reist, John S. Yet, if Keats did not view poetry as having the didactic or moral-uplift functions described by Arnold, how did he view his poet's role insociety? Such a cryis extraneous to any lesson that Arnold might perceive in the horrific taleas told by Boccaccio. In a comparison of Homer and Milton,for example, Arnold admired Milton's grand severe style but gave the firstplace unhesitatingly to the grand simple style of the ancient Greek becauseno one could copy his effects. J. For Arnold, then, the matter of the poem took precedence overexpression--even if that expression was appropriately simple and suited tothe subject matter. But, for Keats, it expresses the unbearable sadnessof the passing of beauty, love, and life that is, even without thebrothers' intervention, inevitable. Selected Prose. But hewas emphatic about the difference between the utterly personal expressionas subject and the use of feelings and imagination in the creation of apoem. This emphasis was an intrinsic part of his conceptionof the role of poetry in society. His project was, as Armstrong puts it, "torecentre English poetry in a moral tradition" and the actual creation ofpoetry, for which he favored a plain and severe style, became subordinateto the message to a large degree (2 8). Not all the supposed members of any school of poetry, of course,share every aspect of the predominant theory of poetry in their generation. Poetical Works. A brief discussion of the two poets' ideas about the art of poetrymust precede the analysis of their notions of the poet's role. Arnold's Poetic Landscapes. / He was born on aship / On the breast of the river of Time" the reader is tempted to wonderwhether, in his zeal for communicating high seriousness, he has notneglected to make poetry in order to make his idea painfully plain (ArnoldSelection 185). Instead Keats "felt that thedeepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty" and hispoetry draws on his experience of such beauty, of the efforts needed toapprehend it, and the poignance that the individual inevitably feels towardit in this transient world (Ward, "Keats" 155). But, especially because Arnold reacted against Keats--among others--in specific, articulated ways, a comparison of their ideas oftheir role as poets will demonstrate how such changes take place and theeffect they have on the poetry that is written. His most famous formulation of this aspectof his poetic practice came in a letter written to his friend BenjaminBailey in 1817. W. Kenneth Allot. But when, for instance, he dismisses Keats' "Isabella" on thegrounds that, despite its exquisite language it does not tell its story heseems to assume too much about the nature of the poet's subject matter.Arnold says in the 1853 "Preface to the First Edition of Poems" that inthis single short poem there are, "perhaps, a greater number of happysingle expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies ofSophocles" but Keats fails, unlike Boccaccio in his prose version of thestory, to "subordinate expression to that which it is designed to express"(Selected Prose 5 ). And, notincidentally, he concentrates on the intrinsic meaning of all the death andfading away that is the fate of the lovers. The idealistic urge to break through the confining fabric of the everyday to reach a higher or an eternal realm recurs in his poetry at all levels ("Persistence" 16).This was a poetry of sensation that was not limited by its use of thepoet's experience in an egotistical fashion. It was, asStone notes, "an illuminating idea which is not the product of a chain ofreasoning; it is rather the shaped effusion of a mind which shows its trueunderstanding of life and art without logical or philosophical disciplineto control it" (13). The works themselves, rather than aspectsof his personal feelings or life, should be the principal matter consideredby the reader and the critic. Poets' conceptions of their roles in society can be fairly consistentfor long periods of time or may change rapidly in a decade or two. London: Routledge, 1996.Arnold, Matthew. . Keats' idealism, rather than treating the external world, centeredon "the world of the senses, and the degree to which experience may or maynot empathize or give itself over to what is outside itself, and with whatconsequences" (Ward, "Persistence" 16). As he continued in his essay entitled "The Study ofPoetry" (1888), We should conceive of [poetry] as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. Shakespeare, he continued, "led a life ofallegory: his works are the comment on it" (quoted in Stone 13). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969.Ward, Geoff. :The Persistence of Romanticism." Romantic Literature: From 179 -183 , 1-24. The Poetry of Keats. Yet in all of this it was"matters of tone, authorial attitude, and audience reaction" in regard tocontent that was Arnold's principal concern (Roper 32). Thismethod "withdraws lines, or sections, or parts from larger wholes andthereby divests the entire work of these key lines, while at the same time,suggest[ing] that these separate parts may be understood without theircontext in the complete poem" (Reist 2 ). As Stone explains, Keats' "statements dashed off in thecommunicative urgency of letter-writing" directly reflect the way histhinking about poetry was formulated (13). This had important implications for his poetry, which is almostcompletely unconcerned with the state of humanity in political or socialterms. He desired, in other words, a meaningful description of what wasconventionally indescribable while avoiding a vocabulary or style thatwould constrain the sense of feeling he wished to express. Keats andArnold form a particularly interesting contrast because even the forms inwhich they articulated their ideas about poetry and poets are verydifferent from each other and entirely consonant with their ideas. Hefurther combined the notion of high seriousness and the plain simple stylewith a belief that poetry needed to speak to its own time. Theconveying of high seriousness, moral instruction and example was thefunction of all literature in Arnold's view and, especially in poetry, hebelieved that the economy of the densely-packed severe style of Milton orthe "richly exuberant imagery" of the Elizabethans "can easily become amere rhetorical trick" that distracts the reader from the essential matterof the poem (Roper 32). Keating. He ignores many of the "mundanedetails of the intrigue" that preoccupy Boccaccio, thereby, perhaps,leading to Arnold's sense of confusion, and concentrates instead on thebeauty of their love and the cruelty of its passing (Stone 31). The simple style was, in Arnold's opinion,"so wedded to the matter it expresses that any failure in matter isimmediately evident" (Roper 31). In his critical appraisals anddiscussion of poetic practice it became the case that "the requirements ofpoetry and prose" were extremely close simply because "prose is the propermedium of the critical power" and Arnold conceived of poetry as a means ofdiscussing the moral needs and failures of contemporary society (Roper 33). Works CitedArmstrong, Isobel. It was an experience that began in the self--and hisaccount involved the use of his own intellectual, sensational, andspiritual life--but the expression of that internal life was not itself hisend. It is, however far from Keats' aim to convey a mere moral about thetragic love of Lorenzo and Isabella. As Reist says, That poetry has a primary value and function in society is obvious; by its imaginative and mimetic ordering of the spray of contingency called experience, it provides a seizure of life, a representation of life, which at its best provokes reflection about the basic issues and questions of humanity (23).This certainly fits Keats' "Isabella", but Arnold is, as he claims modernreaders must be, distracted by the rhetorical flourishes of Keats richimagery. Arnold based his understanding of poetry's function on Aristotle'sclaim that "poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import thanhistory, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals,whereas those of history are singulars" (Poetics, quoted in Reist 2 ).This did not, as Reist points out, seem to include Aristotle's insistenceon the absolute integrity of the work of art as a whole and Arnold seems tohave taken only the message about moral seriousness from Aristotle. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Isabella "withers like a palm/ Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm" and the poet cries out for the evilbrothers to understand this and to "leave the palm to wither by itself[and] let not quick Winter chill its dying hour" (Keats 193). Indeed, as Reistnotes, Arnold's discussions of the theory of poetry and its criticism werelargely limited to his call for "disinterestedness" on the part of thecritic "rather than the principles of the work, the unity of the poem, thepower of the imitation, or the totality of the parts of a whole" (21).Instead he was concerned--oddly, it might seem, for a critic--withremaining "aloof from practice" and, as he said, allowing the free play ofthe critic's mind to "know the best that is known and thought in the world,and by its turn, making this known, to create a current of true and freshideas" (quoted in Reist 21). He saw the destiny of poets and poetry as avery high one indeed. Keats' response to the subject ofthwarted love "is to identify himself, in all the power of his youthfulromantic sensibility, with the nature of love and its tragic outcome"while, in the intervals, he "explore[s] his own predicament as a poettreating such a subject" (Stone 31). London: Penguin, 1987.Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.