the romantic poets

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The Romantic Poets From “Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets” by Professor Willard Spiegelman turned into a Power Point Presentation by Kathleen Curran for Advanced Placement Literature

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I am very excited about this presentation. At first I planned to include background information, images, and a poem by each author. As I researched the Romantic Poets I found youtube vidoes as well as audio presentations of the poems being read. This pushed me to learn how to embed video and audio links so my students can now hear a poem by each author being read by a professional. Hearing the poems read well as the students read the words in the presentation will make such a positive difference in the student appreciation and understanding of both the poems ad the Romantic poets. I had several problems uploading this presentation. I followed instructions on the slideshare site and converted the PPT to a pdf file. Hopefully this does the trick and allows me to upload this presentation. This is my fifth try.

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Page 1: The romantic poets

The Romantic Poets From  “Lives  and  Works  of  the  English  Romantic  

Poets”  by    Professor  Willard  Spiegelman  turned  into  a  Power  Point  Presentation  by    

Kathleen  Curran  for    Advanced  Placement  Literature  

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 Common  concerns  

among  the  Romantics:    •  They  wrote  about  Man's  relationship  to  

nature,  which,  with  the  universe,  they  considered  active,  dynamic  entities.  There  is,  though,  a  counter-­‐desire  to  escape  from  nature  and  to  deny  Man's  connection  to  it.  

•  There  is  a  concern  with  society  and  politics,  and  an  idealistic  notion  that  humanity  can  transcend  its  enslaving  traditions.    

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The  Romantics  were  conscious  of  

consciousness  itself—of  the  power  of  the  mind  as  a  force  for  self-­‐glorification  

and  a  seed  of  self-­‐destruction.  

 

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Lord  Byron  

http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/images/lord-­‐byron-­‐1.jpg  

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Lord  Byron  was  a  dashing,  swashbuckling  figure,  "mad,  bad,  and  dangerous  to  know"  said  a  woman  who  did  know—and  loved—him.  A  man  of  monstrous  appetites  and  ambitions,  his  insouciance  and  supreme  self-­‐confidence  are  reflected  in  his  agile  turns  of  phrase  and  his  audacious,  almost  cheeky  rhymes.  

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But  there  are  other  sides  to  Byron:  the  brooding  Byronic  hero,  morose  and  reclusive,  and  his  tender,  generous,  and  stoic  side.  This  is  the  man  who  would  write  to  his  sister,  in  the  twilight  of  his  truncated  life:  

But  there  are  other  sides  to  Byron:  the  brooding  Byronic  hero,  morose  and  reclusive,  and  his  tender,  generous,  and  stoic  side.  This  is  the  man  who  would  write  to  his  sister,  in  the  twilight  of  his  truncated  life:  

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Though  the  day  of  my  destiny's  over,    And  the  star  of  my  fate  hath  declined,    Thy  soft  heart  refused  to  discover    The  faults  that  so  many  could  find.      From  “Stanzas  to  Augusta”  1816  

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William  Blake  

http://www.online-­‐literature.com/authorpics/blake.jpg  

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William  Blake  never  achieved  even  the  limited  fame  of  his  Romantic  counterparts,  but  his  radical,  idiosyncratically  Christian  vision  inspired  many  in  the  counter-­‐culture  movements  of  the  1960s.  

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An  advocate  of  free  love  who  remained  happily  married  for  all  of  his  adult  life,  whose  poetry  was  caustic  social  and  political  protest,  Blake  was  an  individual  in  the  extreme.  Much  of  his  poetry,  notably  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Experience,  seems  simple,  but  it  contains  layers  of  complexity  and  theological  sophistication.  As  Dr.  Spiegelman  puts  it,  "difficulty  is  not  the  same  thing  as  depth."  

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Here  Blake  ruminates  on  the  nature  of  darkness  and  evil  in  these  lines  from  "The  Tyger":  When  the  stars  threw  down  their  spears    And  water'd  heaven  with  their  tears:    Did  he  smile  his  work  to  see?    Did  he  who  made  the  Lamb  make  thee?  

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William  Wordsworth  

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/authors/william-­‐wordsworth/448x/william-­‐wordsworth.jpg  

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William  Wordsworth  was  a  bundle  of  contradictions.  Beginning  his  career,  Wordsworth  was  involved  in  radical  political  circles;  some  speculate  that,  in  Germany,  he  was  an  agent  for  the  British  Foreign  Office.  

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His  poetry  is  marked  by  guilt,  loss,  and  inward  reflection.  Dr.  Spiegelman  puts  it  this  way:  "Wordsworth  has  struck  many  readers  as  sane,  haughty,  and  impossible  to  know.  The  man  who  called  the  poet  'a  man  speaking  to  men'  in  the  preface  to  Lyrical  Ballads  often  seems  troublingly  opaque."  Later  in  life,  though,  Wordsworth  found  himself  comfortably  ensconced  as  a  minor  celebrity,  an  elite  country  gentleman  and  the  Poet  Laureate,  light  years  removed  from  the  anxiety  of  his  youth    

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Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01975/SamuelTaylorColeri_1975686c.jpg  

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Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  formed  one  half  of  the  greatest  intellectual  friendship  in  literary  history,  but,  for  good  and  for  ill,  he  stood  apart  from  his  protégé  Wordsworth.  In  several  handfuls  of  poems,  15  at  most,  he  transformed  English  poetry.  

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Perhaps  no  other  writer  so  gifted  as  Coleridge  was  ever  plagued  by  so  much  neurosis  and  self-­‐doubt.  Plastic  and  vast,  his  mind  contained  multitudes,  yet,  hobbled  by  an  addiction  to  laudanum  and  paralyzed  by  the  contradictions  of  his  own  self-­‐examining  processes  of  thought,  he  constantly  berated  himself  for  laziness.  

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Coleridge  could  never  be  pigeon-­‐holed,  and  his  output  ranged  from  the  somber  tale  of  crime  and  punishment  that  is  "The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner"  to  his  gentle,  expansive  conversation  poems,  such  as  "This  Lime-­‐Tree  Bower  My  Prison."  

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Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Alfred_Clint.jpg/220px-­‐Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_by_Alfred_Clint.jpg  

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Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  similarly  resists  containment  or  easy  definition,  exploding  as  he  did  with  talent  and  creativity.  Possessed  of  almost  unnatural  physical  beauty,  Shelley  wrote  poetry  that  inclined  toward  the  metaphysical,  occupying  the  realms  of  dense,  abstract,  philosophical  thought.  

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The  same  Oxford  University  .  that  expelled  him  for  preaching  atheism  later  erected  a  statue  of  the  deceased  poet  as  a  fallen  angel.  He  had  a  very  interesting  life  that  we  will  learn  more  about.    

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John  Keats  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/John_Keats_by_William_Hilton.jpg/300px-­‐John_Keats_by_William_Hilton.jpg  

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John  Keats  has  also  been  cast  as  something  of  a  fragile  beauty,  too  tender  for  this  world.  His  life  and  work  contradict  this  characterization.  These  lectures  introduce  you  to  the  genial  but  fierce  young  man  of  flaming  ambition  and  terrier  courage,  the  man  whose  indomitable  will  kept  him  going  in  his  final  months,  long  after  the  resources  of  his  body  had  abandoned  him.  

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This  spirit  and  drive  transformed  what  was,  by  all  accounts,  a  pedestrian  poet  in  1816  into  a  poet  for  the  ages  only  four  years  later.  Keats's  poetry  was  alive  to  the  last,  whether  examining  intellectual  adventure  and  wonder  in  "On  First  Looking  into  Chapman's  Homer"  or  reflecting  on  mortality  as  a  form  of  "ripeness"  in  "To  Autumn."  

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Citation  Page  1.  Lives  and  Works  of  the  English  Romantic  Poets  Professor  Willard  

Spiegelman