Name: Bhatt Dhara
Roll No: 02
M.A. SEM II
Assignment topic: Revival of Romantic Features in Shelley and Byron
Submitted to: Mr. Jay Mehta
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University,
Bhavnagar.
ü Introduction
· The romantic revival:-
No label can accurately describe a period so rich and varied in achievement as the fifty years following the death of Johnson. Romanticism generally speaking is the expression in terms of art of sharpened sensibilities, heightened imagination point of view that has influenced many art forms and has left its mark also philosophy and history.
The supreme romantic movement in English letters was the renalsence. It had transformed not only English but European life ; but like every great impulse in art and life . it had been followed by a period of reaction. The great romanticism were , as I have said, also always generates a certain tendency to exaggeration and aloofness from the condition of ordinary life.
The romantic revival was the result of no one cause .broadly speaking, it was the inevitable corollary of the renascence and reformation. the dignity and importance of man as man, the glries of the world of nature ,-these ideas of which we hear so much at the close of the eighteenth century were born centuries before and had been gradually working in men’s minds through all the political unrest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first flowering of romanticism in England the bloody horrors of the French revolution the kindling of a new idealistic philosophy in germony under kant and hegek. The political upheaval in American all these things were but varying symptoms of a general ferment that had lasted on from the fifteenth century.
It is well to remember this for although the social theories of rousseau roughly embodies in the familiar phrase the “return to nature” did materially affect dootrinaires like William godwin and through godwin Shelley ; and although the battle-cry of the revolutionaries.
“Liberty equality and fraternity”impressed itself on the youthful imagination of words worth and Coleridge the general characteristics of the revival suggested above were collateral with the revolution not derived from it.
Emerson’s spiritual asceticism thoreau’s “reduction of life to its lowest terms” and his sylvan solitudes; the open-air democratic fervor of whitmen are offshoots of romanticism ; while the absorption by Byron and Shelley of certain aspects of the French revolution the glorification of liberty the vindication of the natural instincts these matters that merged into the great stream of humanitarian sentiment which swept through our life and literature and literature in the early years of nineteenth century had their source and inspiration in the revival of romance.
(our Victorian literature) the chief thing to remember is that the Fresh air was badly wanted ; our literature needed a vivifying and expanding influence. This the writers of the time achieved our Victorian literature had ben far less rich in concrete beutifuties in intellectual constructiveness in sanity and strength without even the untrained and riotous splendor that gave dynamic power to the men and women of the romantic revival.
v Lord Byron:à
ü Byron - the great poet of freedom and liberty:à
Byron was one of the proudest revolutionary poets and the poets of freedom and liberty that England has ever produced. He was a born rebel and the fire of liberty and hatred for tyolannyburntfurioutsly in his veins.
Buron has been from childhood days a great fighter and he stood vigorously against all forms of tyrannies and oppressions. He attacked all the conventional all the hypocrisies all the moral commonplace of English society in his poetry.
ü Byron – the great champion of the outcast-byron:
Byron was the great advocate of the out-cast and down-trodden people and always stood the defense of liberty and freedom .this love for freedom was not a theoretical principle with him but a practical beacon of life. He cried against the powers of tyranny in the following words:
“What shall revolting thralldom be the patched up idol of enlightened days”
ü Byron stood for both personal and nation liberty:à
He stood for personal liberty and the liberty of nation. His views were determined by a powerful and positive bilief in the work individual man. He fought for the cause of liberty and went to Greece to support the Greeks in their struggle against tyranny. “his conception of liberty” as bowra observes “was more instructive than intellectual if he something followed mere whims and impulses if some of his ambitions were no more than affectation he was not without guiding principles and his death at rissolonghi shows that he was not an actor but soldier a man of affairs and a master of man”
This love of liberty is well-marked in Byron;s works. He wrote the ‘prisoner of chillon’ in the defense of liberty and the here bonnivard is a votary of liberty like Byron himself the whole oppressed Europe looked to him for salvation and he became the trumpet voice of freedom with Byron liberty became the ruling passion and he considered it his birth right to fight against all tyranny;
“for I will rack if possible the stars to rise against earth’s tyrants”
ü Both Byron and Shelley attacked tyrants:à
This love of liberty is expressed in the denunciation of tyrants such as nepolean and the duke of wellington “best of cut throats” and in denouncing czar and evil-agents. In this connection it is better to compare Shelley and Byron. Shelley thought of the future and was inspired by an ideal future Byron attacked tyrants wherever they existed and pleaded the cause of oppressed humanity Byron accused his own country men of arraying their strength in the side of tyranny and stated that freedom could be possible whwn the powerful obstacles thrones and courts were removed.
ü Byron – a true follower of the principles of the French revolution:à
Byron remained more than other romantics a true follower of the principles of the revolution.
“much more than wordsworth and Coleridge who after their first enthusiasm for the revolution surrendered to caution and seepticism more even than heats whose love of liberty was hardly developed to its full range Byron wished to be free and wished the other men must be free too ”
Byron was equally revolutionary in his attitude towards the evils and vices of his age. He was social revolutionary and ruthlessly exposed and attacked as in ‘danjuan’ the philistinism of upper English class the artistocracy and monarchy. He exposed the hypocrisy the senseless cruelty the snobbery the fraud the cant and the indolence of the upper classes in society.
He may have felt scornful of the saceharine joys of romanticism but the had a sweet tooth and yielded to its blandishments on the whole Byron was more interesting as a person a personality than writer because of his complex nature and of his picturesaue setting in the social condition of his time.
The second generation of romantics with the exception of heats who lived in an ivory tower of his own crated by his love of beauty carried on a revolt against the social structure kings and unjust laws. though the first generation of the romantics gave up their revolutionary enthusiasm yet the romantic revolt went on, the romantic movement began as a conscious protest and never lost the attitude of rebellioum Byron had a grudge against society and without knowing much of it he satirized bourgeois life.
v PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
The poet Shelley was the eldest own son of narrow minded representative of an old country family the shelleys of field place Sussex where this “brilliant wayward ill-fated youth” was born on august 4,1792
ü A lover of liberty and freedom:à
Shelley had certain inherent tendencies of character which ultimately made him a rebel and reformer a prophet and an idealist in his life. He was from his eton days a lover of liberty and freedom and his soul revolted against all forms of tyranny and oppression shelley’s humanitarianism his love of liberty and hatred of oppression turned him in to a rebel against all those established institutions,political,religious and social which meant to suppress mankind in any part of the world. The practice of sham religious and morals prevailing in the contempory society often excite his fragile exterior in pury and revolt.
· His work:à
Shelley exhaled verse as a flower exhales fragrance and just as the fragrance of a blossom varies in quality and power, so did Shelley’s verse vary in poetics merit.
One other thing distinguish Shelley from his contemporaries. He is a reformer as well as a poet little interested in the past mindful only of the present when it jarred on his social idealism his eyes are fixed intensely on the future. To renovate the world to bring about utopia that his constant aim and for this reason we may regard Shelley as emphatically the poet of eagar sensitive youth not the animal youth of Byron but the spiritual youth of the visionary and reformer. The revolution Shelley was much more than a political upheaval it was a spiritual awakening. The beginning of a new life. Master yourself he cries and external freedom will enable you to realize your utmost capabilities. Love is to reign supreme for only in an atmosphere of love can liberty efficiently work love is with Shelley a transcendentital force kinding all things into beauty.
ü “the ode to the west wind”:à
The ode to the west wind is not greater artistically that were impossible but is has an intellectual and human interest designedly absent from the shorter piece
The logical development of imaginative idea is so admirable that it deserves the fullest attention weakingalongthe banks of the arno the poet has seen from the wood hard by the rising autumnal storm carrying with its freight of leaves surging along comes this beneficent destroyer scattering the black , scarlet , and fellow leaves far and wide:
“Yellow and black and pale and hectic red pestilence stricken multitudes: o thou who chariotest to dark wintry bed.
The winged seeds where they lie cold and low each like a corpse within its grave until thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarieon o’er the dreming earth and fill (driving sweest buds like flocks to feed in air) with living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild spirit which art anoving everywhere destroyer and preserver hear o hear ”
The “wild spirit” is then both “a destroyer and preserver”
With each variation of the priginal thought the poet given us a flood of superb imagery strengthening the main theme never weakening by far fetched conceits we pass in turn over earth sky and sea the music growing fuller and more majestic as the poem sweeps on “o life me as wave a leaf a cloud” find as in visible world so in the poet’s soul the wind is both destroyer and preserve:
“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to auicken a new birth”
Then from the individual the poem passes to the universal. The old world must go a new world must come with the spiringladen with fresh sweest promises for suffering humanity:
“O, wind if winter comes can spring be far behind?”
Thus does this wonderful lyrics end there is no greater lyric in our language.
ü Shelley’s method of reformation :à
Shelley’s method of reformation was to direct the attention of the reformers to an idealized picture of the world. He pointed out in ‘promethus unbound’
“My purpose has hither to been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealism of moral excellence.”
Shelley made his appeal of reform not to the masses of the people but to the highly refined imagination of the select poetical readers.he sought to usher in an order of society in which equality, liberty and justice would be the watchwords of sociall life. He planned a society based on liberty and love, brotherhood ofmankind and the victory of good over evil. In short shelley’s reformed world of ideal happiness for all humanbeings.
ü Shelley was ahead of his times:à
Though Shelley could not bring the about reform that he strove to introduce through his poetry in his life time yet during the Victorian age his unheard voice sought to be captured in new idealistic fervor for reform thet followed in the wake of the reform bills. What Shelley sounded in queen mab and revolt of islam became the guiding principles of reformers during the victoirian age and earned the praise in our times of such Fabian socialists as George Bernard shaw. To day Shelley is considered a prophet and an idealist a man for in advance of his times in reformative zeal and if the poet had been alive to day he would have been honoured and admired for he had in him the seeds of a true reformer.
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