Introduction to Literature

Introduction to Literature Lesson thirteen: Shelley and whitman Self-Identity Margarette Connor

Contents • Shelley background • The Romantics/Romanticism • “Ozymandias” discussion • Walt Whitman background • Free verse definition • From ”I Sing the Body Electric” discussion • From ”Song of Myself” discussion

Introduction • Today, continuing our quest for self-identity, we’ll be looking at two very different poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walt Whitman. In their poems both explore the issue of self-identity, but Shelley chooses the more analytic road while Whitman chooses the personal in a way that shocked his contemporaries, yet started an entirely new direction in poetry in the United States.

Percy Bysshe Shelley • Born August 4, 1792. • Son of Sir Timothy Shelley, the M.P. for New Shoreham and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold Shelley. • As the eldest son, he was in line inherit not only his grandfather's considerable estate but also his father's seat in Parliament.

Education • Eton, 1804-1810 • developed a strong hatred of tyranny • Oxford University, entered 1810 • published his first book, Zastrozzi (1810), a Gothic novel • began reading books by radical political writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin.

Expulsion • “The Necessity of Atheism”, a pamphlet that attacked the idea of compulsory Christianity. • Oxford University was shocked when they discovered what Shelley had written and on 25th March, 1811 he was expelled.

Elopement, Number one • 1811, Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, a 16-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. • He was 19. • Terrible scandal and Shelley's father never forgave him for what he had done.

Radical politics • After his marriage, he became more and more involved in the radical politics of the day. • He met radical philosopher William Godwin the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.

First major poem • Shelley also renewed his friendship with Leigh Hunt, the young editor of The Examiner. • Hunt published Queen Mab, a long poem by Shelley celebrating the merits of republicanism, atheism, vegetarianism and free love, much of which was based on the philosophy advocated by Godwin.

Elopement, Number two • In the summer of 1814 Shelley fell in love and eloped to Europe with Mary, Godwin’s daughter. • In spite of his own free beliefs, Godwin was initially furious. • After six weeks, out of money, they returned to England. Mary Godwin

Father times two • In November 1814 Harriet Shelley bore a son, her second child. A daughter had been born a year after the marriage. • In February 1815 Mary Godwin gave birth prematurely to a child who died two weeks later.

Mary and Percy’s other children • January 1816, Mary bore another son, named William after her father. • She would also have a daughter, Clare and a son Percy. • Only Percy survived.

Geneva • In May the couple went to Lake Geneva, where Shelley spent a great deal of time with George Gordon, Lord Byron, sailing on Lake Geneva and discussing poetry and other topics.

Bitter and Sweet • In December 1816 Harriet Shelley committed suicide. • Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Shelley and Mary Godwin officially were married.

Living abroad • Early in 1818, he and his new wife left England for the last time. • Traveling and living in various Italian cities, the Shelleys were friendly with the British poet Leigh Hunt and his family as well as with Byron.

Productive years • During the remaining four years of his life, Shelley produced all his major works, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). A bust of Shelley at his birthplace.

Tragic early death • On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to Le Spezia, Italy, to visit Hunt. • He left his young widow Mary and their infant son Percy.

Romanticism • A movement in literature, art, music and philosophy. Chiefly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and the Neoclassical movement and their rules about Reason, order, balance, rationality and intellect.

Roots • Spurred in part by the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of French Revolution, the romantics are associated with belief in a return to nature and in the innate goodness of humans, as expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau; an admiration for the heroic and for the individuality and imagination of the artist; the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect; and interest in the medieval, exotic, primitive, and nationalistic.

Major figures • Critics date English literary romanticism from the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) • though William Blake’s mysticism foreshadowed the movement. • Romantic poets like Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley focused on the individual's highly personal response to life, as did Thomas de Quincy, William Hazlitt and of course, Mary Shelley, in prose

Romantics emphasized: • The individual • The subjective • The irrational • The imaginative • The personal • The spontaneous • The emotional • The visionary • The transcendental

Characteristics of Romanticism • Deepened appreciation of the beauties of Nature • A general exaltation of emotion over reason • An exaltation of the senses over the intellect • A turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality • A preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure

Characteristics, con’t • A new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures • An emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth

Characteristics concluded • A consuming interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins and the medieval era • A predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased and even the satanic

Ozymandias • Ozymandias, which is the Greek name for he Egyptian Pharoah Ramses II. • His statue was indeed found. • According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, the inscription was “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.”

Ramses II • Pharaoh of Egypt for 67 years, an incredibly long time, • Reigned c1300 BCE. • His colossal statute does lie prostrate in the sands of Luxor. Ramses II’s temple

Ozymandias (2) I met a traveller from an antique land 1 Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 2 Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 3 Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 4 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 5 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 6 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,  We see the face of Ozymandias, which was cold sneer, and contemptuous because he’s king of the kings

Ozymandias (3) The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 8 And on the pedestal these words appear: 9 "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 10 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" 11 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 12 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 13 The lone and level sands stretch far away.  Ozymandias has a great self-image, but time and nature has destroyed it.

Walt Whitman • He was born in May 31, 1819, • The second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. Whitman 1842

Little formal education • Whitman attended grammar school in Brooklyn. • Took his first job as a printer's assistant for the Long Island Patriot when he was 12. • Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Work at a young age • By 1835, when he was 16 years old, he was employed as a printer in New York City. • 1836, returns to Long Island to teach in one-room school houses. • He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career

Life as a newspaper man • Between 1841 and the summer of 1859, Whitman held editorial positions on seven different newspapers, four of them on Long Island, two in New York City, and one as far away as New Orleans. • In all these positions, he was an outspoken advocate of social, economic and political reform in both local and national issues. Engraving 1855

Leaves of Grass • In the spring of 1855, at his own expense, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, • The work would evolve during his life, • It was a volume of poetry that literally changed the course of American poetry.

Many editions, the nation’s poem • Second edition, 1856 with 20 new poems. • Third edition, 1860, the collection had tripled in size. • Between 1855 and 1892, there would be nine successive editions. • In each edition, Whitman made alterations or deletions, but the book grew apace with the nation.

The Civil War • During 1862, Whitman left Brooklyn to find his brother George who was listed as missing after the Battle of Fredericksburg. • Shocked by the plight of the wounded in Washington's military hospitals, Whitman secured a Civil Service post, and in his spare time, made nearly 600 hospital visits.

Important time • Whitman calls this time "the greatest privilege and satisfaction...and the most profound lesson of my life.” • His feelings about the war changed from anger to sadness Whitman in the 1860s

From “The Wound Dresser” • Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the • Alarum, and urge relentless war, • But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face • Droop'd and I resign'd myself, • To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or • Silently watch the dead...

Change of residence • These wartime experiences changed his focus both in his life and in his poetry. • He was no longer a poet of Long Island, he now belonged to the nation. • In line with this change was a change of residence, and he lived in the nation's capital until 1873.

War time poetry • Whitman published his wartime verses in 1865 in a small volume entitled Drum Taps. • They were later included in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass.

“Vulgar” writer • In 1873, Whitman was dismissed from his job as a clerk in the Department of the Interior when the Interior Secretary found out that he was the author of a "vulgar" book, Leaves of Grass. Whitman in the 70s

Camden, New Jersey • He moved to Camden, NJ where his brother and mother lived. Later that same year he had a debilitating stroke. He was never fully recovered, but he filled his time with travel, revising Leaves of Grass, overseeing new editions. An autographed picture card from the 1890s.

Literary luminary • He also had a number of visitors including literary luminaries Alfred Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. • He was more popular abroad than at home. Whitman shortly before his death in 1892.

Free verse • verse which “lacks regular meter and line length, relying upon the natural speech rhythms of the language, the cadences of which result from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables….Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is perhaps, the most notable example” (Beckson and Lenz, Literary Terms, a dictionary).

“Thought-rhythm” • This form is found in Old Testament poetry • especially in the King James version of the Song of Solomon and in the psalms • In sacred books of India such as the Bhagavad-Gita, which Whitman knew in translation.

Whitman on rhyme and meter • “The poetic quality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but it is the life of these and much else and is in the soul. The profit of the rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. (con’t)

Whitman, part two • “The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form . . .but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.”

“I Sing the Body Electric” • While the catalogue is "a struggle against alienation. It is a struggle the poet seems to lose. What ought to be a ritual of repossession . . . comes to seem instead like an obsessive enumeration". • Tenney Nathanson on part nine

Love of the human body • "If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred" (section 8) • "And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?" (section 1).

Emerson vs Whitman • "[H]e was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home . . . of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems . . . each point of Emerson's statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put--and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way".

I Sing the Body Electric Sec. 9 • O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you; I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul;) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems; Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, […]

Introduction to Literature