Oh... I'm Living in the Future: Fanny Kemble and the Steam Engine

The transition between the natural settings of the Romantic period to the industrial scraps of the Victorian era was not very subtle. With new inventions coming out all the time and the power of steam being used to power trains, people were getting excited and ready for the future. I first assumed that with the sudden growth in the cities and new technologies being discovered, poets and artists of this new industrial Victorian era would lose their beauty and elegance. I was, in fact, wrong! There was still plenty of imagination to go around and keep the writers busy. In Fanny Kemble’s chronicles of her first steam engine ride, contained in her Record of a Girlhood, she describes the beautiful little engine with great imagination and detail (So much that she would need a “foolscap extra” to write about it (490)).

Kemble begins with describing the little engine as a she, “for they make all these curious little fire-horses all mares,” to help personify the steam engine (490). Kemble refers to the engine as a she in order to help solidify the readily available remnants of the Romantic Movement and keep the readers interest. She next lists several of the key components of the engine, including a “barrel containing enough water to prevent her being thirsty for fifteen miles” (490). Again, Kemble gives the steam engine the living quality of thirst. While this is not a new idea, it contains so much importance. With the invention of all these machines, it would make sense that people would lose the pastoral and natural feeling of life and descriptions and soon turn into machines themselves. Thanks to Kemble though, the imaginative tradition is continued and there is no end in site. She does not stop for a second in her description, continuing with the wheels, “which are her feet” (490). In the end, she has constructed not a steam engine, but a horse, including its “upper extremities (the hip-joints, I suppose)”,”[t]he reins, bit, and bridle of this wonderful beast—a small steal handle,” and even “[t]he coals, which are its oats” (490-91). By the end of this, Kemble has constructed for the reader something entirely different than what the title implied. The next step, however, is the best.

Kemble says “I felt as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful as what I saw” (491). Here is the fusion, it would seem, between the new and the old. The quaint, magical elements of the Romantic Movement combined with the powerful and growing industrial era. Kemble sees this new, real life experience, as something much more magical than anything that Blake or Coleridge could ever write about, it would seem. The non-fiction of the 19^th century takes on the fiction of the past and wins.

This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco...I Ain't Got Time for that Now: John Keats Explores Death In His Last Few Years of Life

John Keats met an untimely death at the age of 26, cutting his life extremely short and stealing away one of the Romantic Movement’s greatest poets. It is no wonder that Keats, diagnosed with tuberculosis and suffering from other health issues, would write Ode on Melancholy. Our book includes the original opening stanza for the ode, which, although much darker, is in no way as beautifully written as the revision. He starts off, in the original, with “[t]hough you should build a bark of dead men’s bone, / And rear a phantom gibbet with a mast” (1-2). While not as beautiful as the revision, this is still quite the intro to a poem. The imagination (ding ding ding!) taken to write something like this is astronomical. He uses this stanza to open up the ode as if he were on a quest to find the goddess Melancholy (442). The switch to the revision, however, is much more Keatsian. He uses several allusions to Greek mythology with the inclusion of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and Proserpine. Keats enjoyed using Greek mythology in his writings because they could greatly support his ideas brought though his poetry. His readers were aware of what these allusions meant, so they were not lost when these poems were first published. For today’s current readers, these anthologies must include side notes in order for us to understand what exactly is going on. The texts are so rich with these mythical allusions that it can be difficult to get a grip on what Keats is saying now-a-days. Keats continues to make these mythical allusions in the first stanza in order to set up his stance on Melancholy.

The revised first stanza is full of images of death and sadness. Keats would seem to be writing to postpone death, yet the ode is to one of deaths major friends, melancholy. The first half of the stanza seems to deal with death coming out for him, fearing his “pale forehead to be kiss’d, / by nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine” (3-4). These lines continue to describe various ways that life can be taken, until he eventually comes to the conclusion that “shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul” (9-10). It does not matter how much you ask death not to come after you, whether it a kiss from nightshades poisoned lips or by being taken to Lethe, in the end, death is eventual and will come, albeit “drowsily.” Perhaps his melancholy is brought on due to the insights made through his poetry. Or maybe these insights he as made have brought on these bouts of melancholy. It could just be his current health just makes him look towards the end. Keats moves on in his next stanza to talk about how and when these melancholies fall.

Keats next stanza pleads with whatever higher power there may be out there to help compose him “when the melancholy fit shall fall, / Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud” (11-12). When it rains, Keats can feel the sadness of the earth. The flowers droop from the weight of the rain, and the green hills are all shrouded by the April showers. The “weeping cloud,” which too, is sad, acts as another element meant to bring sadness to the world. He asks that he may “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose” (15). His sorrow will overbear the beautiful things in the world like the roses, peonies, and rainbows. He describes the power that melancholy has over his body whenever it strikes or falls on him. But there is nothing that can stop him, for if his mistress rises up with anger because of his beating of beauty, then she will be restrained and her anger cannot affect him as he feeds “upon her peerless eyes” (20).

Keats ends the poem with the goddess of Melancholy eventually taking his life and joining “her cloudy trophies” (30). His look on sadness and the eventual demise of the human body are not very pleasant or uplifting, which lead to this ode on Melancholy. The fear and uncertainty that Keats was feeling around this time due to his illness contributed a lot to this poem. The transition between the stanzas are fascinating. Keats logical journey through melancholy and death serves as a great insight into his life and how he actually felt about dieing. Keats seems to lose interest in life and living for these brief three stanzas. As brief as these stanzas are, so are our lives. He no longer has time to think of the living, especially when he is sad due to his current situations. For a lot of Keats’ poems, he seems to say “so much for pleasure in poetry.”

Buisness and Pleasure: Coleridge Takes on Poets and Poetry!

I find that the mind behind the poetry is very fascinating (which is why I have been primarily writing about the essays and prefaces to many of the writer’s works). How a writer feels about his or her poetry is very important to them. After all, that is why they write a lot of it! It is exciting to see how some of the author’s views differ in and out of the poetic media. For instance, Samuel Coleridge writes in his Philosophic Definitions of a Poem and Poetry that “[a] poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth” (355). The idea that poetry is immediately for pleasure and not for truth in many ways goes against what many people teach about poetry. We spend hours upon hours searching through stanzas and lines to find truth in poetry, yet Coleridge believes that these verses were written primarily for our pleasure. It is difficult to imagine what other authors of the age would say when approached with this proposal. I think, especially for the romantic writers, it is difficult to separate the two. A lot of them are writing for beauty, which is their truth, and through that truth they find the beauty of poetry and the pleasure of poetry. I can see where Coleridge may be saying that we should approach poetry from a stand point that is primarily of pleasure and then hopefully we may find the truth.

Coleridge goes on to give examples of different poems or poetic writings that may complicate this idea of a separation of pleasure and truth. He writes about the first chapter in Isaiah saying that “it would not be less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet” (355). So then how can a poem be written primarily for pleasure when we have entire books of the bible written in poetic forms? Of course not everyone sees the bible as being “the truth,” so this is how Coleridge starts to define his idea of poetry. He starts with saying that “whatever specific import we attach to the word, poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry” (355). This is interesting! The entirety of the poem is not necessarily poetry, eh? Much like my discussion of Wordsworth’s view of poetry yesterday, Coleridge feels that you cannot see why a poet writes about anything until you define what a poem is and in doing so, you unearth the essence of the poet.

In Coleridge’s philosophical discussion of the poem and poet, he gives the poet a lot power that, in the end, seems rather mystical. Coleridge describes the poet as someone who “brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name imagination” (355). Again, we see the importance of imagination in the poet’s world. According to Coleridge, the poet has a lot of power, and in order to function, the perfect poet must affect the reader in many ways by using this combination of influences called imagination. So what do we make of the pleasure vs. truth debate? Coleridge gives his philosophical ideas, but never seems to answer what he was initially talking about. I feel that his conclusion on the poet is still very important, and it is very much in the vein of the romantics to focus so strongly on imagination. I still posit that you cannot have the pleasure without the truth no matter what the reader or the author’s intention was at first.

Now I’m Speaking Out, Speaking About my Friends: Wordsworth and his Poetry

Key parts of the Romantic Movement were the use of imagination and simplicity in the messages and subjects of the writings. William Wordsworth, much like William Blake and his fellow Romantic poets, wrote about everyday life in pastoral settings. In the Preface for his collection of poems in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that “[t]he principal object…was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language that was used by man” (206). Wordsworth wanted his writings to be accessible by the common man, and he wanted to write what he felt they could relate to. By bringing “a certain colouring of imagination” into his writings he could bring the reader to a new height and also make these ordinary incidents seem more fanciful and interesting (206). That is all nice and dandy, but why does he write about these common incidents? What was so important about them that he needed to be able to tell his readers about them but with more imagination?

Wordsworth does not make his reader wait at all when it comes to answering these questions. “[A]ll good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” says Wordsworth in the next part of his Preface (207). Therefore, he may not care what his reader thinks of his poetry because it was not written to be received by anyone. It was a spark of imagination that hit him and led him to write these poems. These poems do not go without purpose either, that is “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement” (207). How amazing is that? Wordsworth obviously takes great care in what he is writing and who he is writing to. Of the authors we have read so far, I think Wordsworth is the one that cares the most about his readers. His poetry explores more than just common events in everyday life. His poems serve as bridges between our minds and our eyes, our motives and the hands that carry them out, and our imagination and the world among other things. Wordsworth’s words are more powerful than we may initially read. He makes his poems very real and close to home for the readers of his time, yet he complicates them with ideas and imagination in order to draw the gap between what we see and how we feel closer and closer (208).

To Wordsworth, a poet is “a man speaking to men” (210). Although that may sound simple, it is true. Wordsworth, especially, is speaking to men about their lives and in terms they can understand. His poems conjure images and ideas that are not foreign to anyone that also show the simplicity of nature while adding layers of language to incorporate his ideas and bring his true purpose to light. Wordsworth is a powerful wordsmith who uses words that any man would use in order to generate emotions from his readers about simple subjects.

Who Needs to Think when Your Feet Just Go: Poetic Genius and the Beat that Carries Us

William Blake was a very spiritual author whose writings carried with them many insights and explorations into the realm of religion and sanctity. In the series of poetic plates entitled All Religions are One, Blake writes of an eternal force that resides in all men: the “Poetic Genius.” He begins by including a passage from the bible in order to place himself in the role of a prophet of sorts for his generation (76). The “Poetic Genius” is, to Blake, an important part of all humans that guides, directs, and dictates their surroundings and appearance. Blake uses the “Poetic Genius” to portray an all inclusive God whose existence helps to bring all living creatures together under one central religion. Blake explains:

… [T]he Poetic Genius is

The true Man, and that

The body or outward form

Of Man is derived from the

Poetic Genius. (Principle 1)

Blake uses this as the beginning principle in his 10 plate series in order to set his argument in motion.

By asserting that the “Poetic Genius” is what creates our appearances and that it is essentially what the “true Man” is, Blake can easily move onto the next principle where he begins to tie together little bits of his idea. “As all men are alike in/ outward form,” he says, “So… all are alike in/ the Poetic Genius” (Principle 2). Since we all look a like, that is, we are all human beings, we are all controlled by the same “Poetic Genius” inside of us. This God figure has created us and, as Blake writes in his third principle, “all sects of/ Philosophy are from the/ Poetic Genius.” Therefore we were all created in his image and from his thoughts so that all our philosophies, or religions, are from the same origin thus, they are one.

Blake covers all of his tracks in order to make this work, explaining that there are an infinite variety of depictions, understandings, and receptions of the “Poetic Genius.” The different nations are all controlled by the same thing, but their interpretations are all different. The source of all is the “Poetic Genius” that made the “true Man” in his image. With that information as an underlying realization, Blake successfully creates and sustains his argument throughout the ten plates. Blake makes a return to the term on plate 12 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While dining with the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, Ezekiel refers to Blake’s “Poetic Genius” and helps to solidify the idea of the forming all in the world.

But why refer to this divine being as the “Poetic Genius”? Could it be just another name that Blake chose out of his imagination? Perhaps it is to bring in an underlying love for literature and help show how his poetry is used to get people closer to God, much like John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton felt it was his duty to show the people of earth the fall of Lucifer, the story of Adam and Eve, and the fall of man. By naming his God the “Poetic Genius,” Blake draws a parallel between his poetry and his God, as if he felt he were commissioned by God just like Milton.

Here at the Edge of the Stage – Helen Maria Williams Goes to France

Upon the first reading of Helen Maria William’s collection “Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790,” the first paragraph really caught my eye. Williams says that she has just witnessed “the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth (37).” Referring to the federation in France in such a way shows a lot about William’s view of the world and the current on going taking place in her surroundings. The use of the word “theatre” to refer to such an important historical event can mean many things. Theatre is a tool used to present truths on stage. Actors learn parts and present them for an audience. So in many ways, what Williams was describing was very much an important theatrical event. She describes several of the main components when she tells of the how the “[h]alf a million people assembled at a spectacle” that “connected the enthusiasm of moral sentiment with the solemn pomp of religious ceremonies (37).” Not only does Williams provide us with the audience for this “spectacle,” but she also describes it as a ceremony. The whole ordeal also takes place in an amphitheatre, solidifying William’s reference to theatre.

These letters are very important, not only because they show the views of Williams, but also because of her presentation of the material. The portrayal of this event as a theatrical performance shows how Williams thinks about the times and actions people are taking.

Williams does a great job at chronicling the events of the day. She shows, with great detail, the people present, delivering depictions of people dancing and kneeling in the streets, almost as if it really were some sort of religious ceremony. Since this was a celebration marking the fall of the Bastille and the new constitution in France, the people had every right to be happy. The French revolution was a very dangerous time, full of oppression in the country and messy political business. Williams brings back to England a great description of their celebration.

News of this was very important for the English people, because, as discussed in the podcast, this was a time of great change and flux. The happenings of the world were important for any person living at the time. To know everything that was going on with their neighbor was very important also because of their relationship. During the later parts of the 1790’s, the two countries would enter a war against each other and see the rise of Napoleon (36). Williams went on to write about the way that France took care of their problems in the mid 1790’s, discussing their revolts and overthrow of the king (44). The destruction of the monarchy in France was an extremely important event for English and France. Williams describes it as something that “finally alienated the minds of Englishmen from the French revolution; rendered popular a war, which otherwise no minister would have dared to undertake; disgusted all wise, and shocked all humane men (44).” Williams plays an important part here as both historian and critic of the events that took place during the 1790’s in France. Her views are important for people of her times and ours.

Perhaps William’s depiction of the theatrical event in the summer of 1790 is more true to her form that she intended. The parties and celebration were all part of nothing more than a performance. A mere three years later, destruction and a loss of hope would enter the scene, followed by war and Napoleon. “[T]he theatre of this earth” had its stage in France, and there, at the end of it, stood a country begging to be set free. 

I Got Wild Imagination. Talkin’ transubstantiation.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and amazing creation. One of the most fascinating aspects of the dictionary is its inclusion of each words etymology. The reader can see when the word was first used, its original spelling, and how it has evolved throughout time. So the word Romantic’s first recorded sighting came about in 1659 when Henry More used it in his Immortal Soul II, saying “I speak especially of the Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions.” Right off we see that the word we use today was spelled a little differently and probably had a different definition. Here, More was using it as an adjective to describe a certain type of invention. The word carried with it the meaning “of the nature or, having the qualities of, romance in respect to form and content” (OED). Well, this makes perfect sense, right? The definition follows pretty closely to how we would think of it now-a-days. It relates to romance in some way, shape, or form. More’s “Romantick Invention” could be a love sonnet or some story that deals with lovers and their romance. Only six years later though, Robert Boyle writes about More and promptly drops the “k” at the end of More’s word. A good move if I do say so myself.

When words were first being spelled and brought over to the English language, there were a lot of spellings that seemed redundant or silly. As time went on, other authors adopted and adapted words to make them sleeker and more easy to use. In 1066, the Norman conquest took place and that changed how we speak today quite a lot. So we went through several transitions in spellings and meanings when we left old English and went to middle and then from middle to early modern and so on. One would think that back then, since printing was not as easy today, they would try to spell words as easily as possible. There are, of course, some words that just got harder to spell as time went on…but that is because people are silly.

I think that the most interesting facet of the definition of romantic is its many meanings that have nothing to do with romance. For instance, the second definition deals with romantic meaning “[o]f a fabulous or fictitious character; having no foundation in fact.” Wow. How cool is that?! We have gone from romantic having a strict tie to romance, to it meaning something that is completely made up. How does that happen (Might I add that the author, Mr. Pepys, spelled the word “romantique.” How does that happen?)? I think it says a lot about how people looked at language back then and how they interpreted words. Perhaps Mr. Pepys here didn’t think that there was such a thing as romance. Or maybe that the idea of romance is so fantastic it could only be made up. Romance is something that is unattainable by human kind. Something only divine could accomplish perhaps? The meaning didn’t stop here though. Four years later, Sir W. Thompson used romantic to mean “[f]antastic, extravagant, quixotic; going beyond what is customary or practical” when talking about building a bridge over the river at Putney.

Romantic has had quite the etymological journey over time. It is so cool to see how this word has changed so much over time, and these are only a few of the stops along the way. I feel that it really enriches our lives to know that there are deeper meanings to words other than what we may read on dictionary.com. We can find out so much more about words by doing a little investigating. Don’t be a stranger!