1. Keats, Shelley and Byron
Romantic Poetry
Keats, Shelley and Byron

2. The Big Six William Blake (1757-1827) Willliam Wordsworth(1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( )
John Keats ( )
Percy Bysshe Shelley ( )
Lord Byron ( )
Jane Austen

3. Romantic Age First Generation: The emphasis on
Nature and correspondence between Nature and human nature (e.g. US – Whitman, Dickinson)
Feeling (“spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”)
Imagination (e.g. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”) & Vision
Common people (“Infant Joy” “Infant Sorrow”)
Individualism & Quest

4. Romantic Age 2nd Generation: The emphasis on Feeling
Art & Imagination (e.g. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) & Vision
Individualism & Quest for the remote (myth)
Breaking down more boundaries (e.g. the sensual, the moral);
against authority (“Ozymandias”)

5. John Keats
October 31, 1795-February 23, 1821; died at the age of 25 of tuberculosis .
Originally a surgeon and changed his mind in
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

6. Ode on a Grecian Urn
Using apostrophe to speak to the Urn in order to enter its realm (the realm of art and permanence);
The process: question empathy  confirmation  differentiation between the human and the artistic.

7. Percy Bysshe Shelley
eloped with the 16-year old Harriet Westbrook; disinherited because of this marriage.
In 1814, Shelley traveled abroad with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the philosopher and anarchist William Godwin ( ). Harriet committed suicide, and then Shelley married Mary.
Shelley was Drowned in 1822.

8. Ozymandias The use of frames: the traveler’s story
Contradictions used to present the ironies of human ambition:
shatter visage frown and sneer;
Passion on “these lifeless things” survives “the hand” and “the heart” (whose heart?)
“colossal” wreck –boundless sand.

9. Lord Byron See the video Born with a clubfoot
Child Harold – the disparity between Romantic ideals and reality
Involved in affairs with a married woman and his half sister.
portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, c1835 (source)

10. SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
How is “she” described? With what images (of contradictions)? What does beauty means? And “walk”?
How do the sound effects help convey the meanings of the poem?

11. SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;        And all that's best of dark and bright        Meet in her aspect and her eyes;        Thus mellow'd to that tender light        Which heaven to gaudy day denies.  

12. SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
One shade the more, one ray the less,        Had half impair'd the nameless grace,        Which waves in every raven tress,        Or softly lightens o'er her face;        Where thoughts serenely sweet express,        How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.    

13. SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,        So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,        The smiles that win, the tints that glow,        But tell of days in goodness spent,        A mind at peace at all below,        A heart whose love is innocent ! 

14. SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
she
– sheds ‘tender’ light (combines darkness and light//aspect and eyes//appearance, heart and thought.)
-- grace in motion on her dress and her face, and expressive of her pure mind and thought.
-- cheeks and smile glow to reveal her goodness, mind and heart.
rhythm: iambs with one trochee
Sounds: [m] [s] [o] [e]