Lyrical ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge or the birth of a new literary movement during the Industrial Revolution
Résumé de l'exposé
Industrialism, expansion, profit, production and individualism were the feelings which took place during the period of the Industrial Revolution in England. People in Great Britain were led by the streams of progress, but the modernizations in technology had some important consequences on people: especially on the simplest kind of people, poorer people, those who lived in the country. While bourgeoisie and gentry only wanted to make profits and getting richer; while new classes of people were created, like merchants and tradesmen; farmers and country workers knew radical life transformations. Such changes induced a new form of literature, created by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This new movement in poetry, called Romanticism, was illustrated, at the time, by the collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads. An analysis will be made to determine in what extends this new genre in art was representing some specificities of Great Britain in the beginning of the nineteenth century. We are going to see in a first part that the topics of Romantic poetry were focusing on very simple people and very simple subjects.
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Sommaire de l'exposé
Introduction
Choosing the subjects of the poems
Theme of the poem
The true story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill
Belief of the poet
Wordsworth and Coleridge's criticism
Conclusion
Indicative bibliography
Extraits de l'exposé
[...] Wordsworth believed that children were able to have a very close relationship with nature, a relation that adults could not have. The poet also believed that nature could be a parent or a teacher for children. It was clearly expressed in the poem "The Foster-Mother's Tale", where a baby, who was found in nature, did is own education through nature and never get any instruction that could have acknowledged him in the civilized world. The boy was in harmony with nature and the fact that he whistled "as he were a bird himself" expresses the perfect relation that the boy had with his natural teacher. [...]
[...] The main subject of the poem is also culpability, and for Wordsworth and Coleridge, the essence of poetry was to find in the most simple subject and poetic syntax. Which was something very unusual at the time, and created the beginning of a new form of art and literature : the Romanticism, a new kind of concept which focused on emotion, nature, freedom and personal introspection. The true story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill also questioned people about laws and their necessity and about relations between people. [...]
[...] The style in which the poems are written was very surprising and even shocking for upper class society, they did not understand Coleridge and Wordsworth aim. But on the other hand, these poems drew a beautiful and serene portrait of a neglected type of people. Lyrical Ballads can, furthermore, stands for an account of the lower class society of the beginning of the nineteenth century. And that is why these poems are so important in the study of the early nineteenth century. [...]
[...] Such circumstances were not human for the writers of Lyrical Ballads, who praised childhood as an intense period of life. Wordsworth and Coleridge probably thought that adults were not able to correctly take care of the innocence of children. A discussion with a dad and his son in the poem ?Anecdote for Fathers?, leading to a dialogue leaving the reader with the mysterious wonder that this dialogue has provoked, illustrated how feelings were hard to describe with words, and were often to find in an incomprehensible way for an adult, as if to say, in the imagination of children. [...]
[...] In the poem "Lines, Written in Early Spring", there is a critic on what people have done with the growth of the industries, on "What man has made of man". For the poets, the headway that were taking men was not the best spiritual way to develop them in a human point of view. People were creating a hard way of life where failure was not permitted, because inability to succeed was very often leading to total poverty and extremely harsh conditions of living. To conclude, we can say that Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote one of the great pieces of literature of the century. [...]
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Philosophie & matières littéraires