Alexander Pope and literature in england .ppt

The Romantic Poets
Wordsworth was one of the ‘big six’ Romantic Poets (Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Byron. A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to Wordsworth.

It should be noted that life in the late 18th and early 19th Century life during the time of King George III, known — ironically given the terrible social conditions of the time — as the Romantic Era. The Romantics were also Pantheists, that is they believed that God was manifested in nature.

The full title of this early masterpiece is “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798” is usually shortened to the first eight words, or just to “Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth was only 28 when he wrote it.

Tintern Abbey was founded by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow, on 9 May 1131. It is situated in the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye which forms the border between Monmouthshire in Wales and Gloucestershire in England. It was only the second Cistercian foundation in Britain, and the first in Wales.Wordsworth’s Note: “No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it was written down till I reached Bristol.”

The description ‘inland murmur’ is significant in that the river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern. Here, Wordsworth is personifying the river — or maybe anthropomorphising it as the difference between the two is often blurred — , attributing to it human characteristics.

The line beginning ‘Five years have passed …“ breaks in the middle, a caesura that indicates an abrupt stop in thought process as memories flow back.

Note that “With a soft inland murmur” echoes a similar line in Book 4 of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”

Also note how Wordsworth ties his sensation directly to the landscape. He is not just describing the scene around him, but his experience of it.The mixed setting in which the speaker is placed, within a creation of man but surrounded by a natural beauty, inspires him to think of times when he was fully immersed in nature. The quiet moments that inspired these words are soothing, and remind him of times when he was even ‘more deep seclusion’

Seclusion is a very important part of Wordsworthian philosophy, allowing him to enjoy the natural world without disturbance of city life. The connection of the landscape with “the quiet of the sky” brings him nearer to the spiritual world; a Pantheistic philosophy.The speaker visits this place and rests underneath a sycamore (a large maple tree that can reach 20–35m or 66–115 ft high) each time fruits and flowers begin to grow.

2. 
Pope had more emphasis on form than content.
Pope’s work represents the poetic high point of the
first half of the eighteenth century.
Dryden had more melodic smoothness than Pope.
Pope did not have the classical education that
Dryden had.

3. 
“Windsor Forest”: Georgic, Loco-descriptive,
Imperial prophetic verse, political, lyric
Eloisa, lyric

4. 
“Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady”
It has intense emotionality.
An example of genre mixing: satire and elegy
The poem has lyric intensity, representing the poet’s
emotional issues.

5. The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope:
An arrogant gesture.
In the preface, he makes the point that modern writers need to
imitate the ancients in correcting and finishing their works for
posterity.
Pope’s many works were imitations or adaptations of classical texts.
The last fifteen years or so of Pope’s career were devoted mainly to
satire, to social, political, and moral commentary and criticism.

6. An important satirical work: Epistle to
Arbuthnot in which he attacks some other poets.
One of the challenges in satire:
How to balance the pure pleasures of attacking
one’s enemies while claiming a moral
imperative and reformist social purpose.

7. 
An Essay on Man: a philosophical text
 series of thoughtful “epistles,” four verse letters to friends
that treated social, moral, and aesthetic issues.
the couplet form at its best in Pope’s hands mandates
extreme epigrammatic force and balance.

8. The Horatian satire and the Juvenalian satire:
One laughing at the follies, another angrily attacking the
follies
Pope was capable of both of them.

9. 
An epistle to Augustus
Mock heroic panegric

10. 
The Dunciad is a parodic epic.
Pope for many years was planning revenge on his
literary enemies.
A demonic vision of the world turned upside down.
In this poem, he attacks his literary rivals and turns
them into the embodiments of a calamitous reversal
of every conceivable cultural and moral value.

11. 
In The Dunciad, the goddess Dullness presides over
the poem.
Gradually, in this satirical poem, there is a shift from
personal rage and disgust with bad writing to a
political and cultural critique and apocalyptic
prophecy that looks to the end of civilization.