Bath!

 

Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and Mozart's No. 40

Berlioz, "Symphonie Fantastique"

The symphony's program can be found here
Or here

The idee fixe:

Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," conducted by Leonard Bernstein:
1st Mvt., Pt. 1:

1st Mvt., Pt. 2:

2nd Mvt.:

3rd Mvt., Pt. 1:

3rd Mvt., Pt. 2:

4th Mvt.:

5th Mvt.:

Two Sonatas

Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 10 in C Major, K 330 (1783):

Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (1839):

Dancing!

First, the country dance, a la Jane Austen in the BBC P&P:

Or if you prefer Keira et al:

And then there was the waltz!!!

The Grand Tour

Tremendous Resource from Indiana

Hebrew Melodies

Click here to HEAR Byron and Isaac Nathan's Hebrew Melodies

A Biography of Nathan

Lord Byron

A portrait of Lord Byron, which gets at the adventurous, roguish side of his character. The Albanian dress also shows how exotic his audience found him to be. If only he had spent more time writing poetry and less time fighting revolutions!

Keats, Vase-Gazing

Keats sees Greek amphoras (a certain kind of vase) at the British Museum [see top image].  He also is reading catalogues for artistic exhibitions.  The bottom image is Keats's rendering of images of the so-called Sosibios vase (middle image).

Lord Elgin's Marbles

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/article_index/w/what_are_the_elgin_marbles.aspx

From the British Museum:
 

What are the 'Elgin Marbles'?

The 'Elgin Marbles' is a popular term that in its widest use may refer to the collection of stone objects - sculptures, inscriptions and architectural features - acquired by Lord Elgin during his time as ambassador to the Ottoman court of the Sultan in Istanbul. More specifically, and more usually, it is used to refer to those sculptures, inscriptions and architectural features that he acquired in Athens between 1801 and 1805. These objects were purchased by the British Parliament from Lord Elgin in 1816 and presented by Parliament to the British Museum.

The collection includes sculptures from the Parthenon, roughly half of what now survives: 247 feet of the original 524 feet of frieze; 15 of 92 metopes; 17 figures from the pediments, and various other pieces of architecture. It also includes objects from other buildings on the Acropolis: the Erechtheion, the Propylaia, and the Temple of Athena Nike.

In the nineteenth century the term 'Elgin Marbles' was used to describe the collection, which was housed in the Elgin Room at the British Museum, completed in 1832, where it remained until the Duveen Gallery (Room 18) was built.

Herschel, The Discovery of Uranus

Herschel's note on his new discovery (the planet Uranus) reads: "curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet"

Keats: Option A

When I have fears that I may cease to be

 When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high grav'd books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.

Keats: Option B

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   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.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. 

 

 

Keats: Option C

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
 Round many western islands have I been
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
 That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
 Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
 When a new planet swims into his ken;
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
 He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

From Chapman's Odyssey (1616):

HE man, O Muse, inform, that many a way

      Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
      That wandered wondrous far, when he the town
      Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down;
      The cities of a world of nations,                                5
      With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
      He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
      Much care sustained, to save from overthrows
      Himself and friends in their retreat for home;
      But so their fates he could not overcome,                       10
      Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise,
      They perish'd by their own impieties,
      That in their hunger's rapine would not shun
      The oxen of the lofty-going Sun,
      Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft                    15
      Of safe return. These acts, in some part left,
      Tell us, as others, deified Seed of Jove.

Jeremy Bentham on Poetry

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is considered one of the founding lights of Utilitarianism, a philosophy that, as the name suggests, experiences, laws, social arrangements around assessments of utility.  One of the things that makes Bentham such a polarizing figure is his willingness to call everything into question in light of his utilitarian commitments... including such long-venerated matters as poetry.

In his "Defence," Shelley is concerned about the kind of thinking that we find here, in Bentham's The Rationale of Reward:

 The utility of all these arts and sciences,—I speak both of those of amusement and curiosity,—the value which they possess, is exactly in proportion to the pleasure they yield. Every other species of preeminence which may be attempted to be established among them is altogether fanciful. Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry. Indeed, between poetry and truth there is natural opposition: false morals and fictitious nature. The poet always stands in need of something false. When he pretends to lay has foundations in truth, the ornaments of his superstructure are fictions; his business consist in stimulating our passions, and exciting our prejudices. Truth, exactitude of every kind is fatal to poetry. The poet must see everything through coloured media, and strive to make every one else do the same. It is true, there have been noble spirits, to whom poetry and philosophy have been equally indebted; but these exceptions do not counteract the mischiefs which have resulted from this magic art. If poetry and music deserve to he preferred before a game of push-pin, it must be because they are calculated to gratify those individuals who are most difficult to be pleased.

All the arts and sciences, without exception, inasmuch as they constitute innocent employments, at least of time, possess a species of moral utility, neither the less real or important because it is frequently unobserved. They compete with, and occupy the place of those mischievous and dangerous passions and employments, to which want of occupation and ennui give birth. They are excellent substitutes for drunkenness, slander, and the love of gaming.


http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/bentham/bentham.xr18.html

Mont Blanc

Turner's Mont Blanc

Sublimity!

Turner (1775-1851), Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812)
More here

Turner, Passage of the Gothard (1804)

Gericault (1791-1824), The Raft of the Medusa (1818-9)
Read more here

John Martin (1789-1854), The Great Day of His Wrath (1853):

Landscape Painting

William Gilpin (1724-1800), Scene without Picturesque Adornment (1792):

Scene with Picturesque Adornment:

John Constable (1776-1837), Salisbury Cathedral (1825):

Further info on this painting

Further info on this painting

The Royal Academy

The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787 by Johan Heinrich Ramberg and Pietro Martini [Print]:

The Murder of David Rizzio by John Opie [Painting]:

Prince George with Black Servant by Sir Joshua Reynolds [Painting]:

Reynolds, Seven Discourses on Art
A Nice Reynolds Timeline by the Tate

BBC Radio Program on Lyrical Ballads

Follow this link to another clever discussion led by Melvyn Bragg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cwszf/In_Our_Time_Lyrical_Ballads/

Further information here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cwszf#supporting-content

Circulating Libraries

The circulating library flourished in the later eighteenth century as the reading public of fiction, in particular, exploded.  Remember that the paperback is a twentieth-century invention and that public lending libraries exist but not on the scale (and easy of access) that we know today.  Several of our texts have refered to the triple-decker (three volume) format in which many books appeared; not surprisingly, the more volumes the more expensive the book.  To buy a copy of a triple-decker outright might cost--in modern terms--somewhere between $70 and $100, depending on how you estimate inflation.  Not surprisingly, paying (or subscribing) to a lending or circulating library proved a better option for most readers.  It is important to note that the lending library emerges alongside Gothic fiction in the 1790s: the institution enables the spread of such works (making them broadly availble to the public) and profits considerably from their popularity.

Follow this link for a few choice words on Jane Austen and the circulating library:
http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/the-circulating-library-in-regency-times/

A few words on the most successful of all 19th-c circulating libraries, Mudie's:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/mudie.html

Walpole, Strawberry Hill

Awesome tour experience provided by the wonderful people at the Walpole Library at Yale:
http://lwlimages.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/tour_home.html

Horace Walpole, Castle of Otranto

Title page of the first edition: notice that the book is pitched as a translation from Italian.

Title page of a later edition: from the second edition on, Walpole explained his work as "Gothic Story."

An illustration from The Castle of Otranto:

Southern Gothic

I had the pleasure of reading Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom last year for school.  Both are written in what is known as the Southern Gothic style. Southern Gothic seems to come into existence in the early decades of the 20th century and is very concerned with the predicament of identity in the South.  The South is economically anemic and culturally torn by the issues of civil rights.  Southern civilization has been toppled; Southern Gothic explores the ruins.

I am no expert, but it seems there are some surface parallels I can draw.  First, Southern Gothic makes use of the grotesque, the horrific, the decrepit just as writers within the Gothic tradition do.  Second, Southern Gothic fixates on ruins, both cultural and architectural(see picture).

 Lastly, I would just put in a good word for Flannery O'Connor's short stories. They are short (duh) and great and will give you a better idea of the style of Southern Gothic than I can convey.  Also, I speak as a lifelong northerner, so I certainly invite correction as this is a living literary tradition deeply rooted in southern culture.

here is a link to more picture

Reviews of Confessions

From The Eclectic Review (1823):

From the British Review (1821):

Gothic Resources

 A great site from CUNY, Brooklyn (particularly strong on literary terms):
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/index.html

Short but helpful remarks from our friends at Norton:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm

De Quincey Materials

 De Quincey's portrait, provided by the National Portrait Gallery website:
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01801/Thomas-de-Quincey?search=ss&sText=de+quincey&LinkID=mp01259&role=sit&rNo=0

An intriguing project that maps the London of De Quincey's Confessions:
http://drc.usask.ca/projects/eng803/joel/dequincey/dequincey.html

The Sublime

We'll be speaking in a number of later classes about poems that overtly or implicitly discuss the sublime.  It's a much debated concept in the Romantic period, and one of its key early investigators is none other than Burke.  Here are few sites to supplement our discussions in class:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_1/burke.htm
http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/sublime/sublimeov.html

Home at Grasmere

We've now reached the point in Wordsworth's career when he is firmly ensconced in the Lake District.  Found here:

The vale of Grasmere:

The Wordsworth reside at Dove Cottage until 1808:
http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/history/index.asp?pageid=36

Clips from Pandaemonium, Film on Wordy and Coleridge

Frost at Midnight and Coleridge and the Wordsworth talk poetics:

Virginia Woolf on Dorothy Wordsworth

Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence.  This is my professional opinion.  Among her multitiude of never failing sentences, I'd like to share a few that can be found in a short piece on Dorothy Wordsworth collected within the "Common Reader" series:

"It is strange how vividly all this [her life with her brother and Coleridge around the time that they writing Lyrical Ballads] is brought before us, considering that the diary is made up of brief notes such as any quiet woman might make of her garden’s changes and her brother’s moods and the progress of the seasons. It was warm and mild, she notes, after a day of rain. She met a cow in a field. “The cow looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the cow gave over eating.” She met an old man who walked with two sticks — for days on end she met nothing more out of the way than a cow eating and an old man walking. And her motives for writing are common enough —“because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes home again”. It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us, that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly at the object that if we look exactly along the line that it points we shall see precisely what she saw. “The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.” “The air was become still, the lake of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The bays shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet.” “There was no one waterfall above another — it was the sound of waters in the air— the voice of the air.” Even in such brief notes one feels the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of the naturalist, the power which, taking only the simplest facts, so orders them that the whole scene comes before us, heightened and composed, the lake in its quiet, the hills in their splendour. Yet she was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern was to be truthful — grace and symmetry must be made subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances. It is that spirit which goads her and urges her and keeps her faculties for ever on the stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had traced her perception along its course and fixed it in words, though they might be bald, or in an image, though it might be angular. Nature was a stern taskmistress. The exact prosaic detail must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline."

The complete piece can be found here:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301251h.html#e17

The Historical Development of Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads has a complex publication history.  Notice that the above title page of the first edition lacks the names of its authors.  As we'll discuss in class today, the subsequent editions are not so coy.  The later editions, too, offer increasing signs that Wordsworth means this book to mark a turning point in the history of poetics.

More on these issues can be found in this excellent electronic edition: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/preface.html