Nostalgia/Reflection

Nostalgia/Reflection

It is interesting to learn that poetry is not all made up of rainbows and butterflies.  Throughout the course of the semester I found quite the opposite. Romantic literature is nostalgic and dwells much on the past. It is about experience, memories; both remember and lost, and it is about reflection and feeling.  As I experienced it, it was quite sad. But that is the purpose of poetry it is supposed to evoke feelings whether happy or nostalgic. I guess that is why it is called “romantic” literature. The feelings of excitement and mystery associated with love as “romantic” holds truth but not necessarily the way we have thought of romance. The authors who left the greatest imprint on my intellectual learning in this course were, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Adam Smith and John Keats. Most significantly to me, Wordsworth’s work represents precisely the themes of nostalgia and reflection. He was heavily influenced by Charlotte Smith, so we’ll begin with her.  Adam Smith can further explain (perhaps) what made Wordsworth's connection with Smith’s work so influential. And John Keats can help us understand how poets reached an age in which reflection of their entire life influenced their work.

Smith's poems are filled with interesting facts and at the same time she is able to describe nature in a sensible manner. It seems as though she used poetry as an escape from suppressed feelings of sadness. In Sonnet XLIV she states, "While I am doom'd--by life's long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest." it indicates to me that she envied the dead because they were freed of the sadness that haunts her. She attempts to liberate herself from sadness by reflecting on a past that was damaging to her and expressing herself through her poetry.  In Beachy Head she states, "I once was happy, when while yet a child,/ I learn'd to love these upland solitudes," but then she says "And evil unforeseen: Early it came,/ And childhood scarcely passed, I compar'd/ With the polluted smoky atmosphere/ And dark and stifling streets." Here Smith is reflecting on her childhood memories and recalls feeling an innocent kind of happiness which she only experienced in her hometown as a child. She no longer feels this happiness as she has grown up and now lives in London. It was a happiness that can only be accessed through memory but can no longer be accessed without a sense of loss and sadness. Wordsworth too writes about childhood memories and self-reflection. University of Warwick's English professor Jacqueline Labbe states, “The psychological depth offered by self-reflexive poetry, usually assumed to come into being in Wordsworth’s work, allowed Smith to transform expressions of woe into statements of worth, artistry, and authority. As my latest research shows, Wordsworth learned from this how to construct his own versions of poetic authority: that is, he learned how to be Wordsworth by reading and emulating Smith.”

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith states, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are [another person’s] sensations... By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” / “But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.” Wordsworth found a connection with Smith in her work because he could relate to her work on common ground. They both felt sad when reflecting on their past and wrote about their feelings that in turn resonated through their work.

Keats works portray a sense of struggle within the idea of mortality and having lived a fulfilled/satisfied life. It appears that he envied the stillness and conservation of sculptures, he described them with high regards. Assuming that in life a sculpture would remain intact for many more years than a man could live, he felt that their life would be perfect even so to future generations. Which leads to the idea that he wasn't necessarily happy with what he had accomplished in life. What was once great to him was no longer that great but what is great in stillness would always be great. This idea of justifying a poets life whether s/he had fulfilled their lifetime goals was seen in the work of most of the poets we studied. It seemed like it was a stage that they passed through as their life came to an end. They began to recollect their accomplishments and in having worked so hard they wrote their last works about the idea of leaving their mark in the literary world. While leaving a mark may have not been the initial thought when they began their writing careers it was certainly a thought as their careers ended. This too suggests that romantic literature is not all about mushy love stories. 

In this course we focused on how items are collected both literary and not, and in The Prelude Wordsworth re-collects his own memories. These were "items" that were already his (collected by means of experience) but through reflection of his former years he was able to revisit his memories and collect them once more (as a conscious re-collection of memories). His former years had passed and he was reflecting on the progression of his work as a poet. As a classmate of mine stated, “Writing the poem looking back on his childhood and the things he often did as a child bring back some sort of nostalgia for all of us, but it is not in that point of view at all.”/” I think it would have been interesting if Wordsworth had done something from his point of view as a child and tried to capture how he actually talked and acted when he was a child.” (Lalababaganoosh) Yes, I agree to this to a certain degree but we remember bits and pieces of experiences. Our interpretation of the past is described in fragmented form. Just like in the Ancient Mariner, there are random thoughts blurred together. Doubts on what really happened and how it really happened. We describe these memories in the best way we can but our memory and our language limit a direct interpretation for ourselves and for others as well. An interpretation of memory is a re-interpretation. We first interpret it for ourselves and then in turn we re-interpret it for our readers. Wordsworth states, "The mind of a man is fashioned and built up even as a strain of music," in other words, the mind is built up of different strands. They contain a rhythm by which we remember things but they are each their own individual fragmentations put together my our ability to recollect. In an article that I found from University of Oxford, Ruth Abbott states, “As both are understood in our century, nostalgia can seem antithetical to critical reading. But time passes during reading, as well as between readings: the very shape of reading, processing from beginning to inevitable end, means something is always being left behind - something of which a poem’s marking of time through rhythm makes us particularly aware.” In the same way when we remember things some things are always left behind.

In the end I learned that romantic literature is much more beautiful, raw, and real than it is given credit for. It carries with it a sappy stigma that is unjust to the work these poets have accomplished. I felt that this course was a survey of Romantic literature and that it is only a gist of what this era produced. Because these poets exposed themselves both internally and externally I can relate to them at a personal level. I wont forget them because I not only learned about their work, their place in the literary world, but also of themselves.  They redefined for me what romantic literature means. Nostalgia and reflection are interweaved like fragmented thoughts. These themes, are for me, some of the many strands of romantic literature. 

Works Cited

Wordsworth, William, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dahlia Porter, and Michael Gamer. Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2008. Print.

Poems. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820.
Keats, John, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other

Smith, Charlotte, and Stuart Curran. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. New York:

Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

http://mss.sagepub.com/content/3/3/204.abstract

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/culture/charlottesmith/