The Later Romantics

hello there must have been something extraordinary about the early 19th century when six of the greatest poets in the English language were all writing William Blake was there and Woodworth and CD had established themselves as the main players in British poetry when the youthful Trio of Byron Shelly and Keats erupted if not straight onto the public stage then at least onto the literary scene the great Chronicle of the age was William Haslet whose romantic Maxim was happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence and see all things in the light of Their Own Minds who walk by faith and hope to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar and into whom the spirit of the world has not yet entered the world has no hand on them how fitting an Epitaph is that for the three great poets who all die tragically young what were the ideals that drove them and how did their unconventional Lifestyles infect The Poetry they left behind with me to discuss the later Romantics of Jonathan bit professor of English literature at the University of Warick Jennifer Wallace and director of studies in English at Peter house College Cambridge and Robert woof director of the words with trust in Grassmere currently housing an exhibition on Haslet Jonathan bate can you set the scene for us describe the era in which this second wave of Romantic Poets are writing well everything really begins with the French Revolution 1789 the period of the 1790s that was when there was a whole new way of thinking about Society about politics and thinking about poetry in a new way became a part of that and the poetic revolution of woodsworth and CID was what really drove that new thinking um as far as people were concerned in in Britain by the time you get towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars things are changing so you remember After the Revolution England and France are at War by the time you get to 1812 1815 the war with France is coming to an end the poetic revolution of wedsworth and kid has begun to stall I'm sure we'll want to talk about that later and then onto the scene come these new figures first of all Lord Byron publishes this this poem Charles Harold's pilgrimage in 1812 and he says I woke and found myself famous then soon after that Keats and shell start writing and their sort of period of of most intense writing is in the immediate aftermath of the battle of waterl in 1815 and one of the things that's that's kind of driving them forward is a feeling that Wordsworth and kid the so-called what we now call the first generation Romantics had somehow gone astray and that something new was needed so they were children of the Revolution and also to a certain extent if one uses children of Wordsworth and CID can you just develop that a little more well that's right they're they're all born in the early 1790s um so that's the big difference from Wordsworth and kid who were born the previous generation born under the old regime almost a classic generation difference in age isn't there absolutely that's that's right um and as they grow up um start reading poetry and um start getting interested in politics um the the model of woodsworth and colid as poetic revolutionaries is tremendously powerful to them um William Haslett who you quoted at at the top there um wrote a wonderful essay um called my first acquaintance with poets about how he first met Wordsworth in cage and had had a sense in 17 98 of a whole new beginning for English literature and maybe English society as well so when you then get to the the Regency period the 1810s where woodsworth has got a job as a tax collector kid is writing editorials for right-wing newspapers and the other late poet Robert salvi has become poet laurate writing sycophantic poets about the king and the prince of Wales um for for these younger poets this was a terrible sellout Haslet never really recovered from it um and so what they what the younger PS wanted to do was find a kind of fresh Way Forward you talk about the Regency before I move on this after uh after let's say the Battle of Baloo 1815 we all know where we are there um what's what were the pressures uh that Young Writers would be under would they be under particular pressure Society was repressive well you you tell us about that what effect did it have on these younger PS yeah it's it's a very interesting period Regency because on the one hand um it is a time of great um sort of sexual Indulgence in in in High Society in particular it is in a sense a time of freedom but also it is a time of of political oppression because after watero there was a terrific swing to the political right all the way across Europe there was a very right-wing government and indeed um the um there were various um sort of attempts sort of revolutionary action um which were violently quelled the most famous example being yes the the so-call peterloo massacre you remember in St Peter's fields in in in Manchester um 1819 there was a a big demonstration and the militia rode into the crowd and um and and there were there were casualties and uh petero for for Shell in particular became an absolute symbol of the violence of the repressive regime at home Robert can we develop the idea of how the ideals of these young poets were nurtured uh let's take Shelly to begin with but Jonathan's mentioned shell writing about the pet L Masa and he seemed in many cases to be a propagandist a radical first and a poet second yeah I think there is in Shell this uh um there is a history where it begins really almost like a pamphleteer if you read Queen Mab which some people think is the sort of red Shelly and that's what's exciting I mean the most exciting thing there are the footnotes it's not poetry uh I mean and the odd thing about Shel is that when he WR writes about the mask of Anarchy you know I met murder on the way he had a face like Castle Ray um that sort of a wonderful vicious attack is done from Italy in a way and at that time he's writing about saying that he's glad he's gone out of active politics there's a kind of curious way in which uh shell the active politician is the young man who goes off to Ireland and goes off into South Wales and gets involved in actual politics but then uh from 1816 onwards there's a kind of meditation which takes place in verse and if you like shell makes no imp what all whatsoever on his own time he belongs to us the 20 21st century but in in his own time it's almost as if it was a private press publishing so there's a kind of curious element that you know we have the history of English poetry but at that that particular moment Shell's impact is almost private and so you're right that he's a kind of pamphleteer but he's he's not making a big impact what where did his ideals come from and he went to he went to Eaton and then he went to O to one term he was sent down to go in that term he published a a pamphlet uh on favor of atheism and promptly send it to all the Bishops and was expelled from ox and so what uh what nurtured his uh his radicalism well clearly I mean um word and courage both have been interested in William Godwin who was the you know rationalist with a little platonic touch to his uh idealism the idea of progress really matters from from hlit wor and Co rich and Shelly takes it up most passionately and the idea that there is going to be perfectability in man is really u a passionate concern and in a kind of way if you do active politics you think you're going to get it now but in a kind of way it then transfers how to said you know he was very well taught in Greek at eeden I mean not many people were taught so well as he was in Greek he was the most one of the most bookish of writers and uh so if you like in this retirement of Italy there was something curiously uh appropriate that he could be I think as W have said the most gifted of all the PO didn't mean he was the best he was the most gifted of all the poets and uh he could actually then um do what poet should do best which is actually um to write if you like through images to write through a language which is actually has its own rules has its own music and uh you know if you start going through uh his treatments of and there's people around the table could tell me more about platonism than I can uh but you know the idea that forance if you do ad anas which is about the death of Keats you have it that for one moment that uh you know this world is has lost Kats and then suddenly he turns it round peace peace he is not dead it's we who are dead and uh that kind of concept of suddenly flipping things over is really it seems to me thinking as a PO that's why in a kind of way though were sticking them in that time they also kind of stay outside that time as well they gathered Shelly and Keat and Fs gathered around Lee Hunt uh a poet and publisher in London was there a sense in which the London school was opposing itself to let's call it the cumbrian school oh um well there are links and there kind of oppositions but I mean if if you think that um Lee Hunt uh represented if you like the radical cause particularly because he'd been imprisoned he was imprisoned for liing the prince Regent in 1812 he was Lee Hunt was you know the editor of the examiner um which was a radical newspaper and it had the uh um it was taking on the government and taking uh so that uh but uh a person like uh who was a friend of several of them Hayden says how much he Lo he he loved Lee Hunt because he' paid for him doing some of his paintings and then he gets to loathe him because he says he represents the person who took up volair who took up atheism and so he Hayden has this wonderful account of meeting shell uh and Shel ass say asked for that detestable religion uh Christianity and uh and then you suddenly realize that that atheistical concern means that when Hayden does a ENT does his Christ entry into Jerusalem he Paints in woodsworth bowing his head in reverence he Paints in U uh Volta and volair is looking arrogantly ahead and he does not put in Lee Hunt who was his old friend you might have expected to be there and uh and then he Hayden says and Keats who was affected by leh hunt and really became atheistical through him would stand in front of uh the picture which was lifesize and bow his head to Volare just like word of bowed His Head to Christ and and you know in where Hayden was willing to permit kei's that transgression but at the same time it was also the source of the opposition between on a religious sort of basis as many as well as the politics Jennifer Wallace can you can you tell us why they were so attracted to Antiquity particularly Greece these poets we've heard that Chell was a great Greek scholar but we know Keats was uh attracted and of course Byron died in Greece yes well uh I think they were partly interested in Greece because of the intrinsic qualities as they saw it of ancient Greek culture particularly Greek democracy Athenian democracy um became for them an inspiration for um their campaign for the um political reform in Britain at the time there was a kind of um model for uh democracy they were interested in um Greek mythology because it represented for them um a kind of paganism um free love a another model of a kind of alternative to Christianity that uh Robert's been talking about um but I think they were also interested in um Antiquity because it represented for them a complete change from the sort of subject matter that the first generation Romantics talked about so whereas wordworth and colorid were writing about the late district and Britain and um Shepherds and people who were living in in um contemporary times they were looking for an alternative subject that would uh demarcate their their difference from the first generation Romantics and so they look to Antiquity I think also um they were interested in Greece because as a whole they were all more cosmopolitans as writers than the first generation Romantics the first generation Romantics were thinking about britishness they started to think about um uh the the Orient um Europe uh broad uh European traditions of literature and so looking towards classical subject matter was was all part of that and kei's got his classical subject matter by having a preview as it were in a shed of the Elgen marbles which had just been brought over and the British government was deciding whether or not to declare them great and keep them at the time but Keats we speak of the three together as if they were running around hand in hand and but there were we have by Lord Byron and shelle is the son of a baronet uh Keats was known as cognits uh was did his background uh by lumping them together are we are we not doing them Justice I mean are we not being interesting enough yes absolutely I mean what uh to get back to one of the things Robert was saying about how um in fact um the these writers were were um didn't have a very wide readership well actually there was a huge difference between the readership of Byron and the readership of Keats and shell Byron was the biggest selling author of his day um completely um uh out Sean Walter Scott who had been the biggest WR biggest selling writer up until then um his poem The Corsair sold 10,000 copies in the first day of going on sale and um he was um in many ways the pop star of his day um uh and uh Keat when as he was growing up actually modeled himself on Byron somebody uh described him as um when he was a student going around with an open um shirt no necktie all Byron copying the way that Byron dressed so um there was this big difference between Byron and shell and Keat but um Byron and shell were all as you say they were um they came from a different class they were Aristocrats they both went to um well Shel went to Oxford um Byron went to Cambridge um although they didn't last neither of them lasted the full three years of their um degree there um Keats left school at 15 and um was apprenticed to an apothecary and uh which and then two years later went on to train as a surgeon at gu hospital and this was seen as um uh not a um a terribly not an established profession and when um Kit's uh poems were reviewed terribly harshly in the Contemporary magazines um uh John Gibson lockart um uh completely attacked Keat for being in the wrong class not being the sort of person who should write about ancient Greek subject matter and he said you know go back to the pills and plasters of the apothecaries uh Mr Keat it's better to be a starved Apothecary than a starved poet can we differentiate a little more there Jonathan between the three of them before we move on uh Jennifer started that can we just pull pull the three apart yes I mean I think it's very important to remember this this categorization we have the romantics of a young romantic that those terms weren't used at the time these are are later terms that come really from 20th century literary history but the terms that were used at the time um for the group associated with the editor poet and publisher Lee Hunt in which Haslet the essayist participated and Keats in many ways was the leading poet um they they were known as the Cockney school which is obviously a a condescending term from sort of well-to-do well established literary reviewers uh but but a real sort of class kind of political antagonism um in that label Byron and shell were associated with the so-called satanic school they were the satanic school um and again that's a a term of condemnation obviously bound up with the with the atheism the questioning of of of traditional religion um so in that respect you have sort of Byron and shell in in in one group and and Keats in another um but in terms of their their poetic styles there are in fact all sorts of overlaps um not least um because they all three of them use these these very elaborate forms of of of of poetic language very rich poetic language um full full of metaphor and also full full of classical illusion so you can you can sort of see the similarities retrospectively in terms of literary history literary style but at the time um they they were rather two different groups Robert W can you tell tell us why you think uh Byron caused such a sensation when child Harold came out in 1812 can we just go into that a bit more well I I think that he um in a way he was using quite a difficult stanza I mean it was the traditional spencerian stanza which he picked up he say from be uh the Scottish poet and so um any way he said he was going to be full of humor and so on the thing about child Harold is that it's not very humorous actually you know it's almost writing using a style that won't allow him to be what he he was really naturally good at and Don Jun all him to get that full force out but uh what child Harold does is able to give you that sort of sense of travelog give you that sense of slight Melancholy he's really good at bringing ego into it so that you always feel that this is a chap who's rather interesting and rather mysterious when If he if he does it in child Harold he will do it just next in the romances where you know the characters are all mysterious while they're just with Gothic secrets and so on and they're almost like uh forces of the of the appetites you know they don't act just like human beings they act Darkly and savagely and with uh everything laid out you know more or less for psychiatrist to do I mean what the gothic is good at is actually analyzing before Freud got there he to you can go on these forbidden subjects he can make everything that seems a bit ordinary about a travelogue seem extraordinary by having this sense of mystery about it I mean I I would the first two parts of child Harold um uh were all available Baron can make you understand him at once Shelly will not make you understand him all at once so in a kind of way that he didn't sell at that time makes sort of sense that he wasn't actually easy to understand was the fact that he was Lord uh the fact that he was uh so aristocratic did that have a a pull for the audience were they were they uh um very pleased that he was an ARR did that take them to the to his books well I I I I presume it it was a good thing for for sales but it was actually that he was he had a capacity to be popular and it seemed to be that uh you know he he he does those things and he's extraordinary rapid in the way that he can get out one thing after the other I mean but really if you want really bar to become interesting for me it isn't the first two books of child Harold it is really when you get to the third one because then you've got the separation crisis where he's separated from his wife who he's only married for a year I mean during that time he has a brief period where he's actually saying to people visitors from America actually you know I really rather like word and coage now I wish I'd never done English bars and Scotch reviewers which of course he never really read them he read the Edinburgh review and took that very uh condescending turnone that the Edinburgh review had so what he what he manages to do in child Harold 3 is to say you know I hate my wife she's stolen my daughter um and I I can't tell you how much I lo them which is you know that's the egoo the the scandle out in the front and then he gives the great you know um if you like uh uh lament for the Battle of watero this wonderful account of the battle of watero where you're suddenly aware of I mean it's like a Hollywood film you know where they're all young and dancing and then the next thing they're all dead and but it's it's it's a very adequate account in popular tones in uh Jennifer in uh don Jan the emphasis obviously is on sexual love but he he he takes the don don Joan idea and does a Som assault with it doesn't he really yes can you tell us what that says about Barron and sex because that obviously interested his leadership greatly about himself and about in about his work yes well the joke in uh Jan is it's based on the myth of Don gavani but instead of the great Seducer of the traditional tale this is a a hero who in fact finds himself seduced by one woman after another and really enjoys it so he's this passive rather passive um uh man rather than the active um uh rake that we're used to um the the interesting thing about Don Duran is that in that poem uh Byron basically uh deconstructed the the earlier poem of child Harold child Harold was the the poem which actually made women throw themselves at him masses of women were falling in love with him because they they confused Byron with the hero that he had created in this earlier poem child Harold I think the key thing of why he it was such an impact in 1812 wasn't just the Stan of form or whatever it it was the it was this um image of a romantic hero who was uh mysterious gloomy uh brooding um handsome and and it was that kind of image that people fell in love with and and this Gloomy um reflecting hero of Charles Harold suddenly becomes um the the hero of Don Jan who is um has no kind of um inner life or sense of memory at all in that poem he um he spends the first part of one Kanto um weeping over the love letter that he's received from one of the women who has seduced him um and at the end of the Kanto he's tearing the letter up to use as lots to decide who's going to um be the person who's eaten in there are a whole lot of people um in a in a boat having been Shipwrecked and they're running out of food and they have to decide who's going to be eaten because they they're going to engage in cannibalism and they draw up lots by um Tearing Up the Love Letter and and using that to decide who gets the the equivalent of the Short Straw so it's it's a completely um debunking poem and it completely mystified um Von's readers it's the kind of reason why uh HCK can't stand Lord Byron because he he he has not got high seriousness he takes you up and then he knocks you down whereas in fact what we see is that I mean although it's the character of donjuan is Central the bigger character almost is Byron or the narrator figure himself who is uh he is the knockabout figure who uh who raises you up and knocks you down and uh as it were um is always interfering it's like a trist Shandi you know that anything but straightforward narrative always to be uh at The Bleak angle onto the main subject and that's wonderful I think the of uh of always never been sure where you are it's really modern in that feeling and then one and we te well did set a lot of modern things going one thing is the uh ready confusion between the author and the subject and shell and Barron as we know both of them were interested for instance in incest which was scandalous but of course Very seductive at the time uh to to readers can you develop that a little Jonathan yeah I think this is this is a a crucial thing about Byron's success um that this was a time where um was it was really the first year in in English History where the there were lots and lots of daily newspapers um so it was really the first era where celebrity in our modern sense sort of was possible um and that meant Baron was a very very well-known figure and so inevitably whenever Baron wrote a poem about some figure with a strange dark secret often he he wrote these kind of Oriental Tales um people would think what is this dark secret it must be Baron's own secret maybe it's something to do with his marriage and rumors pretty quickly spread that he was having an affair with his half sister um more or less whilst he was still on his honeymoon um so great deal of Scandal there um getting B binding up the the life and the work then of course the same thing happens with shell I mean as Robert said earlier Shel was by no means well known at the time but in literary circles his lifestyle was was very welln um shell whilst still quite a young man um eloped to the continent um with two teenage girls uh one of whom was the daughter of William Godwin the great radical philosopher of the previous generation and Godwin's wife Mary walcraft the the great feminist writer um and uh sh then sort of set up on famously on the banks of Lake Geneva this uh um this pretty kind of racy lifestyle uh Baron visit visited them there and of course it was there that we had the famous night where they all started telling ghost stories and that became the the origin of of Mary Shell's Frankenstein um the the the fascination with sisters incest um it it runs through a lot of a lot of the poetry uh Shel wrote a a big epic poem called the Revolt of Islam um and at the heart of that is a brother sister incestuous relationship it it must be something to do with casting off the fathers mustn't it being having a sort of obsession with with your own brother and sister it's a way of um sort of detaching yourself from the generation of the father what do you make of it Robert well I think the I mean I think the sexuality of Byron and shell are rather different I mean it's quite clear that Byron was bisexual and that it was it's quite clear that even when he was in uh dunde um his nurse as it were um uh brought sexual experience to him probably before he was 10 so um this seems to have affected him quite seriously and he he he fell in love quite seriously when he is he's very capable of giving you a sense of feeling about being in love that passion exists I I think his own sexuality is runs through it um he uh is very guilty about the marriage breaking up but then when he he then goes through a series of very black poems like writing total depression poems like darkness which some people think you know expresses what the nuclear disaster would be like wonderful poems there but he goes through that pit and then comes out with this really uh quite different feeling when he gets to uh um Venice when he can writes poems like beo where he can be just mocking and uh not taking anything too seriously and not allowing you to take Ser so the sexuality in a way he um you know he finds ways of accommodating he falls in love with many women U but at the end of his life you know he ends up with this kind of marvelous po my 36th year which where he's fallen in love with some Greek boy who does not return his love and he in a way he you know he lets it all out where shell it seems to me when he talks about incest he's really in a way talking about that the that the sister is really the ideal you know she's really you know like like the Pharaohs you know could only marry the sister because they're the only person person of the same wrong it's a kind of moral incest that shell talks about and where does Kei fit into this then Jennifer well Keat uh fell in love with the girl next door um and uh much to the disgust of his uh friends um Fanny Brawn who uh was renting the other half of Wentworth Place um Keats was uh always um uh I mean he died when he was 25 so um you know he was always in some ways an adolescent one could say and he was always um very nervous in the presence as he said of blue stockings of intelligent women he would find himself uh stammering and um so he um uh I think he found the Girl Next Door the easiest person to uh get on with but um he uh believed that uh Fanny brawn's um refusal to um allow him to consumate their love um just when he knew that he was dying um probably exacerbated the um onset of his consumption he there's a description of him um going for a walk with Lee Hunt in Hampstead and sitting on a bench in well walk and telling Lee Hunt that his heart was breaking because Fanny braa wouldn't uh um uh comply with his wishes and and then he left for um Italy uh when when he was told he wouldn't survive another winter in Britain because he was dying of TB and uh Fanny brawn's letters arrived um uh at his house in Rome where he was dying and he couldn't face opening them because the the emotional torment would be too great for him in his condition so when he was finally buried Fanny Braun's letters were uh were left in their unsealed envelopes on on his uh on his heart was sorry JN was we've talked a little bit about sex and just touched on radicalism was sex the central the attitude SE would you say one of the Central Notions Central to these later Romantics or have we over exaggerated it so far in this discussion I think we are in danger of of OV exaggerating it um I one of the things that interests me of going back to the this question of the difference between the lake poets of the earlier generation and this group um is the the point you made a lot earlier about them as London poets and just sort of picking up on Jenny's image there of um Keats in Hampstead falling in love with the girl next door and Wentworth Place walking on Hamstead Heath it seems to me the the way in which Keats in particular writes about nature is very different from how Wordsworth and CID wrote about nature you know for Wordsworth it's all high mountains whereas for Keats it's Hamstead Heath the famous OD to a Nightingale that's in his garden in Hampstead um one of the other Poets of this period was was John CLA the the northamptonshire agricultural poet um and there's a there's a lovely moment uh that he and Keith Shar shared a publisher and there's a lovely moment where there um CLA is writing to the shared publisher about Keats and says the problem with keats's poetry is that its poetry as written by a tow keats's Nightingale it's not about real Nightingales it's about the sort of poetic image of a nightingale it's full of Illusions to the classical figure of filel you know the mythical Nightingale in in in in ancient Greek mythology um and it it does seem to me that that CLA is is a London poet perhaps even a Suburban poet places like Hampstead um and uh and indeed where where Shel lived Marlo on the temps um the these kind of Landscapes that in informed their work they they're they're kind of on the verge between the town and the country we're a very very long way from wordsworth's high mountains here yes they all died young uh in uh in southern Europe Rob wol is it is it because they died young that we that we can find so many traces of uh as it were half in love with easeful death in their works well do you think it was there uh should we say uh when Keats knew that he was had TB which he kind of knew when he got to Ben Nevis and spit spit blood um there's a a wonderfully black son that he writes um he's had got in his pocket uh I mean Kei is the the most redo uh self-taught person he had D the translation of Dante in his pocket and all that kind of uh dark sense of hell opening below him in in Ben NE comes then it seems to me that uh that sense of knowing about death makes all his work powerful it seems to me although Jonathan said we exaggerate the sex too much but I mean if you're going to go take the evil sagus you're going to take lamea in a way uh sex is one of those things which he writes about very well imaginatively and that it is about consummation and he doesn't want it to be anything other but it at the same time he's also writing for instance uh uh in his second Hyperion which actually describes himself as a young poet trying to come to terms with this goddess figure who's mana and it it is that he has to struggle up to know what suffering is I mean it is really that contemporary feeling is can I actually be a poet can I really write these romances and be a serious person and Keats does take you through that sense in the beginning of uh Hyperion that that it is to be a responsible person doing good for other people through writing about you should say what the condition of the world is and it does seem to me that you know um even when he's in going to the lake district and his in a place called IA he looks around he sees these young people he says I will write poetry to do some good for these young people and it does seem to me that that's a real moral Force which is made all the stronger because he knows that he's you know he's only got so long those last poems are just terrific and although it isn't the Nightingale of John Clair it is a a nightingale which you know the great sonneteer of Keats he was the fastest Sonet writer there was he could do it in you know about 2 minutes faster than Lee Hunt they used to have competitions Shelly would join in the competitions too but when they got to if you look at the son the ODS it's just one sonnet after the other short sonnets just taking up a new idea each time you know uh to uh to thy high requ and become a s then thou was not born for death Immortal bird in other words uh if they're talking about death they're also talking about triumphing of a death do you find sorry Jen I think that the crucial difference uh or why they talk about sex and death so much the the younger Romantics is basically as with the first generation Romantics they're they're all interested in the imagination uh but they describe the process of the imagination and how it works in different ways so the first generation particularly Wordsworth thinks about imagination in terms of memory it's all about thinking about the the memory of past Joys which have now been lost it's that kind of rather elic sense of the way the imagination Works a kind of mature much more mature way in some ways of writing whereas particularly Shelly and Keat think of the imagination as being instantaneous in its and absolute in its um uh subject matter in its process or it doesn't come at all it has to be something which you you is an All or Nothing um experience and so the um so the ways in which they describe it the kind of metaphors they describe for that complete immersion in the world of the imagination tend to be either sexual climate Max or death and sometimes the two come simultaneously so the end of Shell's poem epis pidion where he imagines um uh uniting with the the ideal woman um uh Amelia is actually a moment of um of both sexual Climax and death and complete imaginative um creativity finishes with the Lin one immortality and one Annihilation um a kind of simultaneous death and sex yeah when Shel and and uh Byron went to southern Europe Italy and but Italy then gree are they rejecting this country as it were or had this country did they feel that this country was rejecting them Jonathan I think they felt this country was was rejecting them um there's well in a sense I mean bar Barron in a sense did have to leave because of a scandal surrounding his marriage um but I I think this business about southern Europe is is is really interesting and in a way it it helps us with our our distinction between the two generations of of the romantics because if we think back to the older Romantics one of the driving forces for their originality was the discovery of German philosophy Cid's theory of the imagination and all that it all comes from Germanic northern European philosophy whereas these younger Romantics from a very early stage they're constantly looking to the Mediterranean they're looking to the history of the South um the memory of ancient Greece as as a kind of model of democracy is part of that and I think the weather is really important as well for them you know they they they are um poets who who enjoy and in some senses require warm weather I mean think of you know Keats in the ODS talking about dance and provinal song um full of the warm south be full of the warm south exactly um and uh it's it seems to me although you know it was sort of chance and coincidence that led to the fact that all all three died in the Mediterranean it is supremely fitting would you agree with that uh that South North distinction Rob youit at Grassmere well uh I mean of grass yeah I mean I think they're all there you know even the first generation are all kind of European Consciousness really you say with the Germanic stuff but um I suppose that um uh even when Kats has never been there uh you you talk about the beak full of the warm south but you know at the end of Eve St Agnes he says I have a southern home for you and you know they magically Escape he's actually the hero in that poem poo is said to have Elfin qualities they actually Escape step over dragons as they leave the house but they're going south so there is uh this peculiar I think it's really isn't it that you know money power has come to England in 1814 they can all travel South Europe is open to the English in the way that it wasn't before you you didn't need him passports at that time so there a kind of way where um that money power does actually have this kind of impact that you know even Naval power Naval power got uh Byron round the Mediterranean before he wrote the first child Harold parts so there was that kind of a curious bit there on the crest of a wave uh which is uh not just uh the same for um wers and kich who anyway was crammed into England because of the war Jennifer Byron of course died in Greece um in the Greek war of independence which um started in 18 21 at the very end of the period we're talking about he died in um 1824 on the 19th of April which is uh four days time is his 180th anniversary of his death um and he was out there uh at the behest of the London Greek committee which was raising money to fund the um fenic uh Army and various other um Greek uh faction armies in their fight against the the Ottoman Empire and um and Byron um uh being out in Greece was this was really in some ways the the climax of a of um an over 10year interest that he'd had in um in in Greece um and in the Greek cause and it was his poem child Harold of course which really inspired all sorts of people to come from across Europe to go and help in the uh Greek cause rather the equivalent in um 1821 of the Spanish war in the 1930s all sorts of idealistic people went to to Greece to go and help fight to save Greece for an for for the west and um Byron um died there um of uh fever in mesolongi um and excessive um uh leeching to try and get rid of the the fever so in some ways there was the the reason that he died in Greece there was a sort of intellectual reason it was all part of his um poetic Earth finally very brief ly because unfortunately be coming to the end of this Jonathan but Haslet sat in Cruel judgment over cdge what did he make very briefly of these three parts um he he was very fond of Keats um he didn't quite know what to make of shell Baron though was the most interesting one um he wrote uh in his Spirit of the age his collection of pen portraits of the the great figures of the age he he he he wrote a a tremendous attack on Baron but then he heard the news of Baron's death and it this was just before the book went to press so he added a postcript an apology in which he recognized Baron's Baron's greatness the sense that um Baron as a as as a writer on behalf of Freedom was a figure like no other Robert if you want to add to that well it's kind of curious that when uh HL it finishes um the one person the only one point he can rescue in the spirit of the age is actually Wordsworth who is abused for eight years before that and in in and the odd thing is that even he never really had the words with that we have because he never had the Prelude which is really the great work so an awful lot of postponed works from these Romantics which we know about and they didn't any father um well has it I think probably uh resented sh Shel and Byron because again he was of a different class and uh talks about Byron um being an aristocrat of his imagination and um shell um having a fever in his blood and a maggot in his brain um but uh as I say I think it was probably a sort of resentment on his part um well thank you all very much thanks to Jonathan bate uh Jennifer Wallace and Robert wolf next week we'll be talking about hysteria thank you very much for the

Channel: Icarus Fallen

Views: 30,169

Keywords: British Romanticism, Romantics, Poetry, Poet, Lord Byron, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley, John Keats, Keats, Poem, documentary

Id: Z_bOp8av2Qw

Length: 41min 48sec (2508 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 14 2012