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15 - Keats, Shelley, Byron, and the Hunt circle
- from Part II - Writers, circles, traditions
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- By Greg Kucich
- Edited by Thomas Keymer, University of Oxford, Jon Mee, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2004, pp 263-279
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Summary
One of the longstanding stereotypes of British Romanticism features the Romantic poet as a solitary genius, an outcast bard like Blake's Rintrah in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, either communing with Nature in sublime isolation or delving into the inner reaches of the imagination for visionary prophecies of a new millennial order. Exemplified in the vatic utterances of Wordsworth's 'Prospectus' to The Recluse (a fragment first published in his 1814 preface to The Excursion), this model of the Romantic poet gained widespread prevalence through M. H. Abrams's landmark study Natural Supernaturalism. However, more recent scholarship on Romanticism, much of which attends more closely to the social contexts of literary experience, places new emphasis on the group interactions and collaborative dynamics that generated a significant amount of the era's major poetry. Jack Stillinger, for instance, qualifies the Romantic ‘myth of solitary genius’ in his important analyses of the ‘multiple consciousnesses’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude and the various ‘helpers’ involved in the production of Keats’s Isabella (1818).
14 - Biographer
- from Part 3 - Professional personae
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- By Greg Kucich
- Edited by Esther Schor, Princeton University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2003, pp 226-241
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Summary
Social isolation, financial stress, and haunting grief over deceased loved ones put Mary Shelley in “deep sorrows” throughout much of the 1830s, yet she found one alleviating source of “pleasure” in the research and writing of biographical essays (L II 257, 209). “[T]here is,” she declared, “no more delightful task” (LL I 116). Biographical writing fascinated Shelley throughout her literary career. At seventeen, she started a life of Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai, himself a memoir writer and man of letters as well as a Girondist leader during the French Revolution. The core narrative of Frankenstein, the creature's account of his own history and the life of Safie, functions as both autobiography and biography. Much of Shelley's later fiction, such as Valperga and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, draws on biographical sources and assumes the shape of fictional life writing. In 1823, Shelley contributed a biographical essay on Rousseau's beloved Madame d'Houdetôt to The Liberal, the radical journal established in Italy by Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. Several years later, Shelley proposed to the publisher John Murray an ambitious range of biographical ventures, including lives of Madame de Staël, Empress Josephine, Columbus, Mahomet, the “English Philosophers,” and “Celebrated women” (L II 113-15). As Susan J.Wolfson shows in chapter 12, Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Shelley's Posthumous Poems and her larger 1839 edition of his works feature extensive biographical comments on his life. Shelley also wrote a “Memoir” of her father, William Godwin, for the 1831 reissue of his novel Caleb Williams, and she later composed an advanced draft of his biography, a work she never completed. Shelley joined in many other biographical projects during these years, including her memoir of Lord Byron, now lost, and manuscript notes for a planned life of Percy Shelley, which Thomas Jefferson Hogg later used, or rather distorted, for his life of Percy Shelley (1858). She also produced biographical sketches for Thomas Moore's life of Byron (1830), and Cyrus Redding's portrayal of Percy Shelley in the 1829 Galignani edition of his poetry.
12 - Keats and English poetry
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- By Greg Kucich
- Edited by Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Keats
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2001, pp 186-202
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Summary
I long to feast upon old Homer as we have upon Shakespeare, and as I have lately upon Milton.
Keats to Reynolds, 27 April 1818Describing himself as “one who passes his life among books and thoughts on books” (KL 1.274), Keats “feasted upon” great poets with extraordinary relish, an appetitive reading he put in terms of delightful eating, drinking, imbibing, and inhaling. His copies of mighty poetic forebears teem with marks and annotations that witness a critical engagement as well as a rapid, enthusiastic absorption of words and thoughts. This poetic “food” (“How many bards”) could provide creative inspiration when Keats craved it most, consolation in times of distress, and themes for his own poetry (On First Looking into Chapman's Homer; On Sitting Down to Read “King Lear” Once Again). The “Remembrance of Chaucer,” he buoyantly affirmed during a lull in the writing of Endymion in May 1817, “will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball” (KL 1.147). Keats often began writing with a ritual of welcoming into his mind “throngs” of elder bards whose “pleasing chime” inspired him (“How many bards”). As he matured, such chimes could be less pleasing, even sometimes a convulsive din, provoking sensations of insuffi- ciency before such creative amplitude or apprehensions of not finding a voice of his own among the throng. “Aye, the count / Of mighty Poets is made up; the scroll / Is folded by the Muses,” laments the narrator of Endymion; “the sun of poesy is set” (2.723-25, 729). Yet for all this seeming finish, the play of predecessor poets in his own voice vitally informed Keats's creative efforts and his sense of poetic identity. He envisioned these interactions as a “greeting of the Spirit” (KL1.243), a partnership in “immortal freemasonry” - as he described actor Edmund Kean's way with Shakespeare (“Mr. Kean”; Cook, 346).