Personal Experience

Throughout the course, we have read many different kinds of works: journal entries, poems, ballads, criticisms. All of them with different perspectives, and all meant to inspire different things to each individual reader. I think it is safe to say, that all of the writers, have either pulled from their own experiences in life, or have imagined another's experience as their own. In a way, the works that they create are instances of the picturesque. For example, Tintern Abbey, is considered to have this quality. However, it is the unique response of Wordsworth that makes it memorable. Through his voice, the audience can then interpret the lens with which Wordsworth saw the picturesque.

To help relate my point, exam this photograph:

What does it mean to you? What feeling or emotions does it inspire in you? Are you remembering a trip you took with family? How did you get there? Why does it affect you? Does is remind you of Smith's "Beachy Head"? These questions are not about the place, the memories, the people that were there with you, they are about you. What connections you are making with it. It is a very personal response, each person will have a unique experience with this photo. While they may taste of similar notes of thought, they are individual.  For me, this is a place I have never been, and where I would like to be. Even though I have never been there, I can feel the water and the sunshine. I can see the sand between my toes. It evokes a feeling of calm, as well as something that is entirely bigger than myself. Now you may take what I have said and find something more personal in it for you. This, for me, is much like reading the material for the course. Each work initiates a different response. Not only are you in the shoes of the writer and the personal experiences they are bringing to the table, but you are experiencing your own perspective on the work. To add another layer to that even, there are the footnotes with even more to learn about what exactly the authors are writing on.

Let us begin this experience with a work that displaces the unfamiliar reader with a strange situation. In Lord Byron's "The Giaour", the reader encounters a love triangle, not all that strange, but the circumstances with which Hassan is washed of any wrong doing seems barbaric... to someone who does not have the knowledge of this culture readily available. As many readers in the class like Lalababaganoosh and brightstar discover, is that this practice is completely normal in the culture and that a similar tryst happened with Byron. The last footnote in "The Giaour" explains that "the circumstance to which the story relates was not very uncommon in Turkey." In the back of the book that houses the notes, that states that the got it's "basis in Byron's affair with a young Turkish woman." Not only was Byron touring a place he could readily get his hands on the culture, but portions of his tale come from things he experienced. This realization, it seems, has turned the meaning of the poem into something entirely new. Many chalk it up to a good hook to promote his works more, however, I see it as making this fantastical story more rooted in something real, something that is relatable to a wider audience. Everyone can understand love, jealousy, and revenge. It is this relation through the reader's personal experience that then colors the connection with the story.
There were also questions about the narrator of the story. Lucky for us, the notes in the back also set up a scheme: "Byron presents the story... as an assemblage of several voices possessed of different knowledges and interests, incorporated with the poet's own meditations." Byron has attempted to take into account, the personal experiences of each of the characters. It only pushes the reader further to identify and take the position of these characters through what they have seen and experienced.

In William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey", the reading audience had liberties that "The Giaour" could not provide. There are numerous photos that can be viewed in order to see what Wordsworth saw.

Not only are there photos, but paintings. Paintings are just as much an expression of personal experience as any poem. "Tintern Abbey" is not just a description of this picturesque place, it is a revisiting, and remembering, and a renewing. It has been five years since Wordsworth has laid eye on the ruins, and as he views them again he remembers how he viewed the abbey prior and how he has changed. He is also renewing his experience as he views his sister, Dorothy, is exposed for the first time. Wordsworth present this strange circle of seeing, collecting, remembering, and then seeing these steps happen in someone he is close with.  His personal experience and the meaning of his memories of Tintern Abbey will undoubtedly differ from those of Dorothy. In Scott Hess's "William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity", he discusses how Wordsworth work is and is not like a photograph:"The photograph offers the image and only implies the subjectivity of the observer, while Wordsworth’s poetry does the opposite, concentrating on the subjectivity of the observer and only broadly gesturing at the landscape observed, but in both cases the forms and relationships of perception are structured analogously." It is the observer, or reader, in Wordsworth's poetry that make the actual meaning of the poetry. The words to initiate emotional response are there. Like a paint by numbers, Wordsworth has the portions of his poetry lined out, it is up to the reader to interpret and color the portions with the emotions of their own experiences and the experience of reading the poetry itself.

John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" pulls the center of reflection of personal experience down to the contemplation of mortality and immortality versus Wordsworth's sublime nature. In the Keats Presentation, the class learned that Keats was pretty much on his last leg of life. He had written the poems in his sick bed, as he was dying of tuberculosis. It is this experience that lends to the pain and yearning that is eclipsed in the "Ode". Michelle brought up a great point of how Keats "compares death and immortality." His own death is looming over his head, and here are these young lovers, forever emblazoned upon this Grecian Urn. This poem is Keats' own reaction with his experiences with death. As the two poems already discussed, "Ode" pulls out the reader's own memories and brushes with mortality. Keats say that the urn's "...silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!" (lines 44-45). Keats is able to grasp and see the immortality that this urn has, and yet it mocks his infirm and dying body. It is cold in it's marble, lifeless yet enduring form, while his body racked with fever, hot with life, is dying. My own personal experience makes this statement extremely powerful. I have watched a loved one being slowly eaten away from cancer, each day a small death. Like a picturesque view, this topic is general enough to touch many lives and have many different views. Mavis Batey in "The Picturesque: An Overview" says that "philosopher Archibald Alison, who in his Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste... sought to establish the 'connexion between Taste and Sensibility'. In the imaginative appreciation of beauty it was the role assigned to the association of ideas derived from personal experiences which introduced subjectivity into Alison's 'emotions of taste'." Keats appreciates the beauty of the urn, but it is his personal experience that gives it meaning and emotion.

In Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head",  like Enargeia says, "her childhood was spent in a town, but she and her family had to move to London to live a better life and so she could be married off. In Beachy Head she says:
  '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...'" This speaks of her personal experience from childhood up to her lackluster marriage to a man who spent any money he could get his hands on.  It is Smith's personal strife and imprisonment that allowed her to write as she did. It is through these hardships that the reader can then relate and experience. While the poem, for most of the class, was not easy to follow or understand, the emotions that came through the text were ones that the reader could relate to based on the levels of their own experience in that particular emotional avenue.

With this last photo of Beachy Head shrouded in mist and clouds, with the sun shining above, all I can say is this: that no matter how wayward, difficult, or ridiculous the poem or work of literature may seem, there is always an emotional response of personal experience that can link you back to the subject. Through the subject you are linked to the poem and the author. It is from the personal experience with the poem that will go with you until your dying breath. It will probably not be your last thought, but time to time, something will remind you, some emotion or idea, and you will once again have an experience that is for you and you alone.


I really enjoyed the course and did not think that these were the types of conclusions and connections that I would be making throughout the material.

Works Cited

"The Giaour" by Lord Byron: Selected Poems

"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads 1978 and 1800
Hess, Scott. "William Wordsworth and Photographic Subjectivity." Nineteenth-Century Literature. 63.3 (2008): 283-320. Web. 11 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.283>.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats: Course Packet 2

Batey, Mavis. "The Picturesque: An Overview." Garden History. 22.2 (1994): 121-132. Web. 11 Dec. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1587022 >.

"Beachy Head" by Charlotte Smith: The Poems of Charlotte Smith

Images
-Florida Sunset
http://katdish.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Florida_Sunrise_099.jpg
-Tintern Abbey
 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Tintern_Abbey-inside-2004.jpg
-Beachy Head
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8559488/Landscape-Photographer-of-the-Year-call-for-entries.html

Relevance of Individual

During our study of Romantic era poetry, the connection between poems and poets was not always evident. But upon further inspection, a collection of significant themes emerges as a unifying element to the course as a whole. Among those themes, one of the things I saw repeatedly worked and reworked was the concept individual relevance: from whence does the individual originate a certain purpose? Several of the poets explored this idea, although all of them explored the concept through uniquely different filters. From William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, John Keats in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” to William Wordsworth in “The Thorn” and in The Prelude, all have comments on where the individual finds—and at times where it does not find—its relevance.

The most general exploration of the relevance of individual is William Gilpin’s examination of the picturesque, in which the individual does not find significant meaning; in fact, the general concept of individual is slightly admonished. In the piece, Gilpin mirrors the human individual in elements of Nature, stating that the picturesque should be taken in as something vast and general. A lot of what Gilpin is communicated correlates with Schor article, “Reading in Detail,” where the author claims that “by dividing and dispersing the spectator’s attention…the detail blocks the dynamic rush of the Imagination, fatigues the eye, and in the end induces anxiety rather than the elevating pleasure of the Sublime” (Schor 19). The individual components are not as important as the whole entity they create. This puts Gilpin, as the spectator, in an interesting position. M. pointed out in one of her posts that “people had to appreciate the beauty through an altered form instead of taking it all in as a whole." This in turn can be mirrored on humanity. Gilpin, as the individual, can never find his relevance in Nature because he truly does not belong to it. When comparing Nature to manmade things, Gilpin says that the area is “greatly injured in a picturesque light, by becoming scenes of habitation, and industry” (Gilpin 12). This shows his severe disconnect with things around him and the fact that the individual, human or component in Nature, cannot find significance in the picturesque Nature. I chose the picture above because it shows the clear disconnect between man and Nature. Even though the figure is set in the front, the background is the true focus (indicated by the figure facing it). There is an inherent awesome power of Nature as it extends back into the unknown and all the figure can do is observe. This kind of disconnect feels like Gilpin’s idea of the picturesque and how man, although he is observing and technically set higher than Nature, can neither be greater nor a part of it.

For Keats in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” the individual finds relevance in the face of death. Keats begins the poem with an exploration of the implications of death, and then towards the end, moves to a sort of acceptance. Keats acknowledges that his own “mortality weighs heavily upon [him] like unwilling sleep,” showing his acknowledgement of death’s inevitability as well as his own hesitation (Keats II, lines 1-2). The fact that death is inevitable is something that holds Keats in the mindset that he cannot write poetry because his “spirit is too weak” (Keats II, line 1). Dlacey1127 said in her post that Keats “has lost hope in trying to fight the battles within his heart” and that “he finds luxury in sadness, while dark glories swarm his brain,” a statement that completely embodies Keats in the beginning of the poem. There is something inherently Pyrrhonic about the beginning, how Keats feels the impending presence of death so greatly that it renders him almost useless. But as the poem progresses, Keats shifts and states, “yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep/That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,/fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye” (Keats II, lines 6-8). This shift indications that Keats does not have the illusion of death’s far away presence, which takes the pressure off of Keats because he knows what he can and cannot do in the face or mortality. On the cusp of death, Keats is able to determine the limits of his will and life. Death gives meaning to the living and it is only here that the individual is able to truly know its own relevance as well as its potential. This poem is steeped in biographical influences. Keats’ life is famously littered with death, suffering from early losses of his father, mother, and grandparents, all of which affected him greatly. 1817 marked the year that Keats finally began to focus solely on poetry (finally quitting his medical schooling) and it’s no surprise that after so much death in his life, that his focus for one of his earliest works would be the effect of death on the individual (http://englishhistory.net/keats/life.html). 

For Wordsworth in “The Thorn,” the individual finds its relevance in society, and in this case, what happens when that relevance is disregarded. One of my favorite lectures in the entire course was our lecture over “The Thorn.” Professor Porter really shed light on the political implications of the piece. The way we expounded on the unreliability of the narrator and how the text moves from a supernatural piece, to something “illustrating not only a mother's sorrow at losing her child, but also the often unsympathetic nature of society” (http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/wordsworth.html). Throughout the poem, the narrator is enigmatic in nature and does not share the same superstition of Martha Ray as the fellow people of the town. As we explored extensively in lecture, when the narrator comes upon Martha Ray in line 202 of stanza XIX, he see her face and runs; he runs away even though he hears her say, “‘O Misery! O Misery!’” as he does, disregarding her and any chance to turn back to help her. I remember Professor Porter discussing the appalling nature of this act, how human compassion is completely disregarded. Whenever people encounter her, they run; Martha Ray never has the opportunity to speak or explain her situation. The narrator even claims that “there’s none that ever knew” of Martha’s story, and even attributes most of her story to various accounts of the townspeople. There is not a clear connection to Martha Ray and all of the natural elements in the beginning, but as the poem progresses, the end brings enlightenment; Martha is so dehumanized by society as a social pariah that she becomes part of the landscape; she, in essence, is the thorn: “And all had joined in one endeavour/To bury this poor thorn for ever” (Wordsworth, line 103). Calliope said in one of her posts that “perhaps [the thorn] was just the remnants of a rose that had been stuck into the ground” and now it is “just a dead shell of what once was." “The Thorn” becomes a critique of society’s inclination to abandon and outcast an individual that does not properly align with the acceptable standards of humanity. Martha Ray was dark and sad after her love abandoned her and she lost her child and because of this darkness, society shunned her. Like the thorn that was formerly a rose, Martha Ray is only a ghost of her individual self. Her individual relevance in society was stunted and eventually withered. I chose the picture above because it wonderfully embodies Martha Ray and the deeper implications of the poem. The figure is a woman, completely masked by her environment, most likely from the influence of outside intervention. She was made this way. She’s barely a human anymore, so much a part of her background that she is almost gone. The relevance of her individual self, which normally would have flourished in society, was instead shunned; because of this, she is merely a ghost of her former self. 

Almost in an extension of Keats’ goal, but in a less macabre way, is Wordsworth’s exploration of how the individual finds its relevance in retrospect. The Prelude is an exploration of the connection between Nature and memory, one that allows for the narrator of the poem to ultimately remember his own self in conjunction to the past. What is extremely relevant is that for Wordsworth, the individual seems to only obtain this connection from Nature (in contrast with Gilpin, who seems to advocate a blatant disconnect between Man and Nature). Wordworth says that “the passions that build up our human soul” are “not with the mean and vulgar works of man,/ But with high objects, with eternal things,/With life and Nature” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 4, lines 134-7). Nature is the originator of our thoughts and the inspiration behind these memories. For the individual in The Prelude, it is the act of recollecting memories that allows significant retrospect; this act of retrospect ultimately leads to factors that shape self-identity. One of my fellow classmates, C Jane, commented how Wordsworth “allows his adult self to realize the importance of these childhood memories” and that “these memories have shaped who he is as an adult.” Similar to this act of memory as self-identity is a concept that John Locke explored in his philosophy. One relevant difference is that John Locke advocates memory as self-identity, but this act of remembering does not change in retrospect. It is clear that, for Wordsworth, “external objects actively impress not merely the senses (as for Lockeans) but also the intellect (and thus that there is a distinction to be made between sense and intellect)” (Joshua 511). For Wordsworth, the act of remembering is not simply how he is able to prove his own existence, but how he shapes and changes his individual nature; it is where the individual finds its relevance. The relationship between Locke and Wordsworth is explored extensively on http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/wordsandlocke.html.
 
Each author has a view on what gives the individual relevance, a view that varies across historical periods and the course as a whole. I found it extremely significant that a lot of poets address this theme, but each focus their theory through a different lens. Whether it was where the individual does, does not, or what happens when the individual is deprived of its relevance, all of the poets I explored above have vastly different viewpoints of the theme. I believe that this exploration of the individual leads ultimately to the invigoration of society as a whole and sets the stage for later development of such things as Detailism and Realism. Overall, the theme of the relevance of the individual is one of the many themes we explored across the course that really intrigued me about this time period in literature. 

Bibliography

Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. By William Gilpin, 3rd ed. London: Printed for R. Blamire, 1792. Print.

Joshua, Essaka. "Wordsworth Amongst The Aristotelians." Journal Of The History Of Ideas 67.3 (2006): 511-522. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.

Keats, John. The Complete Poems of John Keats. New York: Random House Digital, 1994. Google Books. Web.

Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print.

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

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Gill Abrams and Wordsworth. Norton, 1979. Print. 

http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/wordsworth.html
http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/wordsandlocke.html
http://englishhistory.net/keats/life.html

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/