British Literature: The Early Modern Era

It seems to me that the transition from the Victorian to the Modern era was essentially a change in point of view.  Whereas the Victorian point of view prevailed at least up until the last decade or so of the 1800s, now you had the prevalence of modern opinion.  This sort of A/B comparison I think is well represented in Siegfried Sassoon’s They. (Greenblatt, 1960)  In the poem’s first stanza you have the voice of the bishop, whom I take to represent the personification of the old, Victorian order.  In the second or last stanza, you have the voice of “the boys,” that is, the soldiers returned from the Great War.  Taken together, the two stanzas provide, in microcosm, the two eras, Victorian and modern, in conversation with each other.

Incidentally, They is a war poem and Sassoon is considered a war poet. (Greenblatt, 1830)  In other words, there is a substrata of modern era writers whose works was either directly or indirectly (but either way, rather heavily) by the war.  Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, May Wedderman Cannan, Robert Graves and David Jones belong to this category.

According to the lecture notes, one of the characteristics of the modern era is the tendency to see the world as neatly divided between "civilized" and "savage" peoples. (Froisy)  Sassoon’s lines in the first stanza about sending the boys out to destroy “Anti-Christ” and, in his place “breed an honourable race,” seem to reflect this line of thinking.

Soldiers of the Great War

Another essential element of modernism is the questioning of received truths of Christian tradition. (Froisy)  Christian tradition, in Sassoon’s poem, is represented by the words of the bishop in the first stanza.  But “the boys” (representing modern, i.e., “realistic” thought) contradict the words of the bishop.  While the bishop speaks in platitudes and in the abstract, the boys answer back in terms of stark reality.  Yes, the boys aren’t same, like the bishop said, but not in the same way.  This may be taken as the elevation of rationality over other sources of truth, another essential element of modernism. (Froisy)

Modernists challenged the idea that God played an active role in the world, which led them to challenge the Victorian assumption that there was meaning and purpose behind world events. (Froisy)  A hint of this is seen in the bishops weak acknowledgement, in the end, that “the ways of God are strange!” (Greenblatt, 1961)

Another Modernist tendency is that modern writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses  a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to re-establish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms." (Froisy)  I found no correlation between this essential tenet of modernism and Sassoon’s poem, but it did suggest to me that, had the modern era’s rapid technological advances delivered computers and Microsoft to the early modernist writers, they might perhaps have produced their poems on PowerPoint, a present day example of a fragmentary form from which readers struggle to piece together a coherent meaning.

Works Cited.

Froisy, Carol.  Lecture Notes, Week 8.  Literature 211.  American Public University. 

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Oscar Wilde: Victorian or Not?

Up to this point, we have examined two periods, the Romantic and the Victorian, each of which was defined primarily in terms of time.  The Romantic period, we said ran basically from 1789 to 1832. (Froisy)  The Victorian period which immediately followed ran on until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.  There were some general trends associated with each period and, by and large, the writers who wrote during those eras tended to follow them.  The thing, however, that classified a writer as Romantic or Victorian was not whether he was a trend follower, but when did he/she actually write.

Oscar Wilde

Now we must answer the question about whether a certain writer, namely, Oscar Wilde, was or was not a Victorian.  Of course, the immediate answer is that he was without question a Victorian writer; his heyday was the late 19^th Century, the Victorian era.  But we know the question cannot be answered so simply because we are asked to answer in a way that tells us that the basis of the question had nothing to do with time but with things like style, and technique, and the writer’s willingness to publish things that did not exactly run true to the Victorian ideal. 

The suggestion is that Oscar Wilde was not a Victorian writer because he satirized Victorian morals, Victorian attitudes, especially toward sex, and Victorian manners and thinking in general.  Two of Wilde’s poems, Impression du Matin and The Harlot’s House, touch on the theme of prostitution, the whole idea behind these two satirical poems being that:  Hark! here, in the heart of prim and proper, Victorian England, there are prostitutes and men who frequent them.  These are the real Victorian virtues.  That is what he was saying.

Ozymandias

The "colossal wreck" of Ozymandias

The most amusing thing I read about Percy Shelley, son of privilege, was when, after he had written that stupid pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, and had the gumption to mail it to the bishops and higher muckety-mucks at Oxford, he “to his shock and grief” was unceremoniously booted from the university. (Greenblatt, 741)  It showed that, even in the Romantic era, there remained plenty of people of good character and common sense, albeit at Oxford.

Shelley, at least in his youth (he only lived 30 years), was a loser in the mold of his contemporary, Lord Byron.  Kicked out of college, he ran off with a “commoner” and became a drifter.  No job.  No money.  No skill or willingness to work.  Yet he thought the world owed him something.  His development of thought, as expressed through one of his worthless poems, that “institutional religion and … morality” were the “roots of social evil,” and that they must soon “wither away and humanity will return to its natural condition of goodness and felicity” revealed him to be quite insane. (Greenblatt, 742)

The episode with Harriet, his wife whom he was tired of, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, whom he ran off with, and that girl’s stepsister … inviting his estranged wife, Harriet to come and live with them, revealed him to be … not exactly the kind of guy you’d want your daughter to bring home for dinner.

Shelley the poet “almost entirely lacked an audience.” (Greenblatt, 742)  This demonstrated that, in the Romantic period, good character and common sense was not limited to the faculty at Oxford.  It was something the lower and middle classes possessed in great quantity.  To gain his audience, Shelley was forced to sojourn in Italy.

The most interesting thing I read about Percy Shelley, son of privilege, was his poem about Ozymandias.  I learned that Ozymandias is the Greek name for the famous Egyptian king (pharaoh) Ramses II.  I took the poem as somewhat autobiographical.  It was about a man who thought very highly of himself, calling himself “king of kings.”  But the only evidence of support for that conceit was “two vast and trunkless legs of stone in the desart,” a “shattered visage” still maintaining its “sneer of cold command,” and the words etched on a pedestal, “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings.”  Shelley described this sight as others might have described his life and work, as a “colossal wreck.” (Greenblatt, 768).

And, it was short.

Works Cited.

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   TheNorton Anthology to English Literature. 8th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Lord Byron: Lord Loser

The question to which we are asked to respond is whether one can separate the characteristically flamboyant “Byronic” lifestyle from Byron’s poetry—or whether the two are inextricable.  In other words, is it really Lord Byron’s poetry for which he is appreciated by the literary elite; or, is it the fact that he was such a dissolute loser that brings the accolades down upon his memory?

… The caveat being that his poetry is appreciated.

Byron’s poetry included Manfred (1816), at least parts of which were plagiarized.  Regarding the parts of the poem which seem to borrow heavily from Goethe’s Faust, the editors of the Norton Anthology preface to Manfred claim that “Byron denied that he had ever heard of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and because he knew no German he had not read Goethe’s Faust, of which part I had been published in 1808.”  The editors provide further elucidation upon this “Byronic” claim by relating the story of one Matthew Lewis who visited Byron two years before Manfred was published.  During that visit, the young Mr. Lewis, a friend also of Percy Bysshe Shelley, read parts of Faust aloud to Lord Byron, “translating as he went.”  Byron then “worked memories of this oral translation into his own drama in a way (the editor’s claim) that evoked Goethe’s admiration.” (Greenblatt, 635)  Perhaps Goethe’s admiration stemmed from the result that more attention was drawn to his own work than was gained by Byron’s.  Regardless, if an American Public University student circa 2012 were to compose an essay employing Byron’s technique, he or she would be exposed to the university’s stated “consequences for academic dishonesty.” (Student Handbook)

His Byronic heroes included the serial fornicator, Don Juan.  A work deemed so “unacceptably immoral” by his literary advisors that one of them only agreed to publishing its first two installments “without identifying Byron as the author or himself as the publisher.” (Greenblatt, 669).  The noted Thomas Carlyle’s counsel, concerning Byron’s poetry was to “close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” (Greenblatt, 607).

Byron was fond of choir boys (Lecture notes, slide 27), incestuous relationships (Greenblatt, 610), and idleness (Greenblatt, 609).  He led a generally sorry existence characterized by sexual promiscuity, wasteful spending, avoidance of military service, and public scandal.

One of account of his activity in the House of Lords—publicly supporting the cause of the Nottingham weavers “who had resorted to smashing the newly invented textile machines that had thrown them out of work” (Greenblatt, 609)—suggests that, had Byron lived in the United States circa 2011, he would have fit in well with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

George Gordon, Lord Byron loathed the military service of his own country and was derelict in his duties pertaining to national defense as a member of the House of Lords by touring Europe while England’s armies under the Duke of Wellington led the northern European coalition against the resurgent French emperor, Napoleon.  While England’s finest bled on the battlefields of Waterloo, Byron left on an extended jaunt around the continent punctuated by “a sequence of liaisons with ladies of fashion.” (Greenblatt, 609)  Byron’s scandalous lifestyle finally induced England to banish the young loser from the kingdom in 1816. (Greenblatt, 610)

Byron epitomized the “jet set” of his day.  He and his literary brethren were the Hollywood stars of their time.  Their published works were to a segment of the British public what Hollywood movies are to certain parts of the American public in our day and time.  Byron’s renown was fed by the scandals of his personal life as a member of the upper house of Parliament, his travels abroad, his personal intervention on the side of the Greeks in their quest to free themselves from the clutches of the Ottoman Empire, and the fact that he, Kennedy-like, died so young.  But Byronism, and the “Byronic” lifestyle, is synonymous for being a loser.  Therefore, the only plausible answer to the question of whether it is possible to treat Byron’s misspent life as a thing wholly unrelated to the things which he wrote is that, while doing so may make for an interesting academic exercise, it would only demonstrate in a backhanded way that such a thing is not possible.  No one in the real world would have ever wasted five minutes with anything Byron wrote apart from some level of knowledge about his life.  His life and his poetry are one.  There was no virtue in the former; there can be none in the latter.  George Gordon, Lord Byron was a colossal loser and his poetry survives because of that and that alone.

PS—

One really cannot separate the lives of any of these poets from their works and still be studying their works.

Works Cited.

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Student Handbook.  American Public University.  Accessed Jan. 16, 2012.  < http://www.apus.edu/
student-handbook/writing-standards/index.htm#Academic_Dishonesty >.

Lines Composed a Few Miles from Downtown Augusta

Tintern Abbey.  The poem is not about this place.
It's just that its location is near the banks of the Wye that
gives the poem its name.

My review of William Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” contained these comments ...

We are sometimes asked to describe in what sense William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey offer readers a "religion of nature.”  It is, one imagines, a typical question often asked about pieces written during the Romantic era.  In the writings of that era, religious allusions were frequent.  Profane literature was salted with the phraseology of the Bible.  Therefore, conclusions about the spirituality and religious character of writers, or at least the Christian content of their writings were—and still are—drawn.  For example, readers coming across The Lamb, by William Blake, frequently conclude that the work has some sort of religious meaning.  It doesn’t, but conclusions that it does are still drawn.

True, Blake’s allusion is to the Lamb of God revealed in scripture, but there is no more religious intent in his use of the phrase than in the use of phrases like “King of kings,” “virgin born,” “little Lord Jesus,” and “Mary and Joseph,” at Christmastime in America, circa 2011, by persons positively identifiable as … let’s just leave it as non-religious.