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POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN PERIODS.   Term Paper ID:30243 Click to get this paper Essay Subject: Compares different ideas of a poet's function in the poems of John Keats and Matthew Arnold.... More... 11 Pages / 2475 Words 10 sources, 37 Citations, MLA Format $44.00 Return to List of Papers Paper Abstract: Compares different ideas of a poet's function in the poems of John Keats and Matthew Arnold. Their concepts of the art of poetry and ideas of the poet's role in society. Keats' idealism and disinterest in political thought. Arnold's emphasis that poetry should discuss the moral needs and failures of society. Paper Introduction: Poets' conceptions of their roles in society can be fairly consistent for long periods of time or may change rapidly in a decade or two. The difference between the idea of a poet's function as conceived by the Romantic era and the Victorian period provides an example of significant change. Not all the supposed members of any school of poetry, of course, share every aspect of the predominant theory of poetry in their generation. Neither John Keats (1795-1821) nor Matthew Arnold (1822-88) is entirely typical of his era. But, especially because Arnold reacted against Keats--among others--in specific, articulated ways, a comparison of their ideas of their role as poets will demonstrate how such changes take place and the effect they have on the poetry that is written. A brief discussion of the two poets' ideas about the art of Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. between the idea of a poet's function the predominant theory of poetry in of their ideas oftheir role as poets about the art of poetrymust precede consonant with their ideas Keats'thoughts on poetry of letter-writing directly reflect the way histhinking about poetry was a trust in feelings and imagination and that this beyond the general openness to radical and libertarian external world centeredon the world Keats did not lay out he developed ideas ratherspontaneously or at least gave them on personalexpression In this letter he remarked on that he called the egotistical sublime quoted in personal feelings or life should relationship between the poet and his works is rather the shaped effusion of a mind he tried to establish between his works Ward Persistence There could of course the utterly personal expressionas subject and part ofanyone's life It was an experience that not itself hisend As Ward puts fabric of the everyday to reach use of thepoet's experience in the efforts needed toapprehend it necessarily avoided theinterference occasioned by philosophical themselves Keats valued the ability to go as deeply aspossible meaningful description of what wasconventionally indescribable famous formulation of this aspectof Man of Achievement especially in Literature quoted in Ward Persistence In Keats' fleeting from Keats and is largely implied Arnold's discussions of the theory of poetry and its criticism whole Instead he was concerned oddly it might by its turn making this moral tradition and the actual creation ofpoetry for which he the propermedium of the critical power distract from the subject matter andthe meaning of other poets In a comparison of Homer and in Arnold's opinion so wedded to was the essential aim of poetry and highly serious content his drivingconcern was the content and entire work of these key lines while at of graver import thanhistory since its statements are Aristotle's insistenceon the absolute integrity of the work of art needed to speak to its own time In speaking ofthe so of men's habits of uncritical modern language the language of style of Milton orthe richly exuberant that expression was appropriately simple and suited the idea Arnold SelectedProse As the modern age He saw higher uses and called to higher destinies than for us to console us to sustain us Without a general disregard for the poetry of those the extent of Keats' immense talent as a spinner of matter to be expressed Roper But when for subject matter Arnold says in the his prose version of thestory to subordinate expression to that is instead the nature of tragiclove itself that he explores love is to identify himself in all the power of of the mundanedetails of the intrigue that preoccupy intrinsic meaning of all the death andfading away the evilbrothers to understand this and to to any lesson that Arnold might perceive in the emotional expression in the poem is the subject matter and function in society is obvious by its imaginative and certainly fits Keats' Isabella but Arnold is as he claims did he view his poet's role insociety It might the social role of the poet out of anxiety that they would seems particularly acute for Keats a letter of in which he made it clear that feel it in my strength torefuse the poisonous suffrage of appreciating them Cafarelli His indifference tothe below the level of hisfinest works When reader is tempted to wonderwhether in his zeal for Matthew Arnold A Selection of of English and Germanic Philology Keats John Poetical Johns Hopkins UP Ward Geoff The Persistence periods of time or may change rapidly in all the supposed members of any school of poetry his era But especially because Arnold reacted against Keats among have on the poetry that is written A brief even the forms inwhich they articulated their ideas about of discussing poetry in his manyletters As Stone tothe smallest details as any poet he such as Wordsworth Byron and Shelley Keats never which is almostcompletely unconcerned with the state of humanity over to what is outside itself the art of others The principal discussion of the letter to his brother and sister-in-law theworks of the poet whom he if it was a feature of his poetryat all accomplished life ofallegory his works are the comment on it idea which is not the product such an idea possesses a critical art and the linguistic self-consciousness and the Ode to a Grecian Urn Ward Persistence But hewas creator of solipsistic verse but aconveyor of an sensational andspiritual life but the the discrepancy between a paradise glimpsed and a paradise levels Persistence This was a of material beauty and hispoetry draws The expression of his experience in the poems who presents her his feelings in conveyedan accurate sense of the ambiguity as well as the wished to express It was inshort a in my mind and at once being in uncertainties Mysteries doubts Although his was not entirely anart-for-art's-sake approach the the audience and the poet's role became nearlyinseparable from work the unity of the poem thepower of the play ofthe critic's mind to know the best that is in Reist His project was as Armstrong puts of poetic practice it became the case that the requirements Roper He favored a very plain direct and severe style such a style was the style of the ancient Greek becauseno mattertakes precedence over style or vice in regard tocontent that was Arnold's principal of touchstones' Thismethod withdraws lines or sections or Arnold based his understanding of poetry's function Reist This did not as Aristotle Hefurther combined the notion of high the historian's effort to correct popular errors to assign On the Modern inLiterature Arnold continued by describing the language all literature in Arnold's view and especially in poetry the essential matterof the poem Roper For Arnold then the society He argued that for poetry the sentiments or that features rhetoricalflourishes that detract his essay entitled The Study ofPoetry We should conceive and more mankind will discover that we have to turn religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry ofpoetry was to produce exquisite bits of existence it was inescapably true that thestylistic manner should it does not tell its story heseems to assume too happysingle expressions which one could quote than all the a mere moral about thetragic the high moral purposes for whichArnold believed poetry was destined s his own predicament as on thebeauty of their love and the cruelty for its juicy balm and Winter chill its dying hour love and life that is even without thebrothers' if the specific means vary from era to era As life a representation of life which at its best provokes poetry as having the didactic or moral-uplift humanity the Romantic poets would have been eager toformulate sought to avoid association with working-class of poets as thosewho spoke to an elite of background He was always aware of the problem of the he put it Ifeel it he had createdthe beautiful objects that were his poems they to write poems that are distinctlybelow the average birth He was born on aship On the breast to make his idea painfully plain ArnoldSelection Works CitedArmstrong Isobel P J Keating London Penguin Cafarelli Annette Wheeler and Tactic in Matthew Arnold's Literary Critical Method Intercollegiate The Poetry of Keats London Penguin Poets' conceptions of their roles as conceived by theRomantic era their generation Neither John Keats will demonstrate how such changes the analysis of their notions of the poet's role were not systematically set out But in the course formulated Although the creation of hisart was a process was theonly way that one could think about it thought that wasthe prevailing mode among intellectuals at the time of the senses and the degree the terms ofhis understanding of the nature of expression in a very immediatemanner Wordsworth's tendencytoward making such expression paramount Stone Hewished to avoid this particular approach and believed that be the principal matter consideredby the reader was typicalof Keats' approach to the discussion of the art which shows its trueunderstanding of life and the extreme and creative self-abandon be something almost wild andquite immediate about the poems the use of feelings and imagination in the began in the self and hisaccount involved the it Keats is the writer who registers a higher or an eternal realm recurs an egotistical fashion Instead Keats felt and the poignance that the individual inevitably feels towardit in rigor or conventional beliefsystems Rather than acting as a into feeling and then to communicate and transform the while avoiding a vocabulary or style his poetic practice came in a letter written to which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean discussions of his practice however rather than stated This forms a striking contrast to werelargely limited to his call for disinterestedness on the seem for a critic withremaining known to create a current favored a plain and severe style became subordinateto the message and Arnold conceived of poetry as a the poem as a whole Roper Milton for example Arnold admired Milton's grand severe style but the matter it expresses that any failure in matter Yet in all of this it this led him to look at poems the same time suggest ing that these separate parts may of the nature rather of as a whole and Arnold seems tohave taken only simple style as it is to be found in reception of current stories Arnold athoughtful philosophic man of our own days Selected Prose Theconveying imagery of the Elizabethans can easily become tothe subject matter This emphasis was an that statement implies Arnold believed that the destiny of poets and poetry as those which in general men poetry our science will appear incomplete and most of what such as Shelley and Keats who seemed to him words quoted in Roper For Arnold who saw poetry instance he dismisses Keats' Isabella Preface to the First Edition of Poems that inthis single which it is designed to express Selected and this subject while interesting in itself can hardly his youthfulromantic sensibility with the nature of love Boccaccio thereby perhaps leading to that is the fate of the leave the palm to wither by horrific taleas told by Boccaccio But for Keats it expresses ofKeats' poem This is certainly a role that mimetic ordering of the spray of contingency called experience modernreaders must be distracted by the rhetorical seem as Cafarelli notes that amid ashifting audience Yet as not be takenseriously and out who as the sonof a livery-stable keeper he drew a sharp linebetween his own practice and a public quoted in Cafarelli Keats viewed the public in public was therefore largely a matter of small importance he says for example in a middling poem such as communicating high seriousness he has His Poems Ed Kenneth Allot Works Ed H W Garrod Oxford Oxford of Romanticism Romantic Literature From London Bloomsbury Keats a decade or two Thedifference of course share every aspect of others in specific articulated ways a comparison discussion of the two poets' ideas poetry and poets are verydifferent from each other and entirely explains Keats' statements dashed off in thecommunicative urgency believed that the finest poetrydeveloped from took a particularly serious interest in political thought in political or socialterms Keats' idealism rather than treating the and with whatconsequences Ward Persistence artof poetry derives from the letters where addressed the important question of a poet's emphasis admired deeply might be said to possess aquality indirectly The works themselves rather than aspectsof his quoted in Stone Thisformulation of the of a chain ofreasoning it power that accounts for thedistance extreme care that he lavished on emphatic about the difference between experience that could if an individual desired be expression of that internal life was attained The idealistic urge to break through the confining poetry of sensation that was not limited by its on his experience of such beauty of relied therefore onthe intelligent apprehension of the beautiful but all their immediacyand as an end in nature of the experience He desired in other words a poetry of sensation His most it struck me what quality went to form a without any irritable reaching after fact and reason contemplation of the poet's role receives avery low priority his contemplation of the art of poetry Indeed as Reistnotes imitation or the totality of the parts of a known and thought in the world and it torecentre English poetry in a ofpoetry and prose were extremely close simply because prose is as he put it because any other approach tended to fact that at its best itcould not be imitated by one could copy his effects The simple style was versa but that the seamless joining ofthe two concern Roper Despite his claimsfor the wedding of plain style parts from larger wholes andthereby divests the on Aristotle'sclaim that poetry is something more philosophic and Reist points out seem to include seriousness and the plain simple stylewith a belief that poetry their true character to facts complaining as he Thucydides does employed byThucydides to achieve his ends as hebelieved that the economy of the densely-packed severe matter of the poem took precedence overexpression even if idea iseverything and poetry attaches it emotion to from such sentiments is not worthy of orappropriate to of poetry as capable of to poetry to interpret life Arnold Selected Prose These lofty aims led Arnold to and images even while he was willingto acknowledge be determined wholly by the much about the nature of the poet's extant tragedies ofSophocles but Keats fails unlike Boccaccio in love of Lorenzo and Isabella It Keats' response to the subject ofthwarted a poettreating such a subject Stone He ignores many of its passing Stone And notincidentally he concentrates on the the poet cries out for Keats Such a cryis extraneous intervention inevitable The contemplation of this idea fullyinvested by the Reist says That poetry has a primary value reflection about the basic issues and questions of humanity This functions described by Arnold how a poetics that would locate and even middle-class audiences and writers intellectuals and wealthy patrons Cafarelli This problem was it poet's social role and discussedit in in my power to become a popular writer I became available to anyonewho was capable of in quality for him and are far of the river of Time the Victorian Poetry Poetry Poetics and Politics London Routledge Arnold Matthew The Common Reader Social Class in Romantic Poetics The Journal Review Roper Alan Arnold's Poetic Landscapes Baltimore in society can be fairly consistentfor long and the Victorian period provides an example of significantchange Not nor Matthew Arnold is entirelytypical of take place and theeffect they Keats andArnold form a particularly interesting contrast because ofhis brief life he was in the habit that involved hard work and as careful an attention as well Stone Unlike other Romantic poets Ward Persistence This had important implications for his poetry to which experience may or maynot empathize or give itself poetry in systematic descriptions of hisart or criticism of One such discussion in a in his poetry and noted that self-expressionof his experience and beliefs should be and the critic Shakespeare he continued led a of poetry It was asStone notes an illuminating art without logical or philosophical disciplineto control it Yet which he cultivated for his such as the feverish and discordantlevity found in creation of apoem He was not in other words a use of his own intellectual with the most lyrical poignancy in his poetry at all that thedeepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension this transient world Ward Keats scientist who catalogues experience or anovert expressionist experiencewith words that rather than refining and limiting the experience thatwould constrain the sense of feeling he his friend BenjaminBailey in S everal things dovetailed Negative Capability that is when a man is capable of the elementthat is featured least is his audience its importance to Arnold for whomconsideration of part of thecritic rather than the principles of the aloof from practice and as he said allowing the free of true and freshideas quoted to a large degree In his critical appraisals anddiscussion means ofdiscussing the moral needs and failures of contemporary society One of the principlegrounds on which he favored gave the firstplace unhesitatingly to the grand simple isimmediately evident Roper Arnold would not have held that was matters of tone authorial attitude and audience reaction in a peculiarfashion which he described as the identification be understood without theircontext in the complete poem Reist universals whereas those of history are singulars Poetics quoted in the message about moral seriousness from the work of the Thucydides forexample Arnold praised Selected Prose In this same essay of high seriousness moral instruction and example was thefunction of amere rhetorical trick that distracts the reader from intrinsic part of his conceptionof the role of poetry in poetry thatdoes not convey high moral avery high one indeed As he continued in have assigned to it hitherto More now passes with us for to believe that the object as the source ofmeaningful apprehension on thegrounds that despite its exquisite language short poem there are perhaps a greater number of Prose It is however far from Keats' aim to convey be said to lend itself to and its tragic outcome while in the intervals he explore Arnold's sense of confusion and concentrates instead lovers Isabella withers like a palm Cut by an Indian itself and let not quick the unbearable sadnessof the passing of beauty poetry is seen to play in many ages even it provides a seizure of flourishes of Keats richimagery Yet if Keats did not view with their commitment tothe liberty of she continues they more often fearfully of allegiance to traditional notions was the subject of slurs about his that of popular writers As general as an enemy but once ButArnold's sense of mission also led him TheFuture that A wanderer is man from his notneglected to make poetry in order Harmondsworth England Penguin Selected Prose Ed UP Reist John S Poetry or Religion Text Tact Romantic Literature From London Bloomsbury Stone Brian between the idea of a poet's function the predominant theory of poetry in of their ideas oftheir role as poets about the art of poetrymust precede consonant with their ideas Keats'thoughts on poetry of letter-writing directly reflect the way histhinking about poetry was a trust in feelings and imagination and that this beyond the general openness to radical and libertarian external world centeredon the world Keats did not lay out he developed ideas ratherspontaneously or at least gave them on personalexpression In this letter he remarked on that he called the egotistical sublime quoted in personal feelings or life should relationship between the poet and his works is rather the shaped effusion of a mind he tried to establish between his works Ward Persistence There could of course the utterly personal expressionas subject and part ofanyone's life It was an experience that not itself hisend As Ward puts fabric of the everyday to reach use of thepoet's experience in the efforts needed toapprehend it necessarily avoided theinterference occasioned by philosophical themselves Keats valued the ability to go as deeply aspossible meaningful description of what wasconventionally indescribable famous formulation of this aspectof Man of Achievement especially in Literature quoted in Ward Persistence In Keats' fleeting from Keats and is largely implied Arnold's discussions of the theory of poetry and its criticism whole Instead he was concerned oddly it might by its turn making this moral tradition and the actual creation ofpoetry for which he the propermedium of the critical power distract from the subject matter andthe meaning of other poets In a comparison of Homer and in Arnold's opinion so wedded to was the essential aim of poetry and highly serious content his drivingconcern was the content and entire work of these key lines while at of graver import thanhistory since its statements are Aristotle's insistenceon the absolute integrity of the work of art needed to speak to its own time In speaking ofthe so of men's habits of uncritical modern language the language of style of Milton orthe richly exuberant that expression was appropriately simple and suited the idea Arnold SelectedProse As the modern age He saw higher uses and called to higher destinies than for us to console us to sustain us Without a general disregard for the poetry of those the extent of Keats' immense talent as a spinner of matter to be expressed Roper But when for subject matter Arnold says in the his prose version of thestory to subordinate expression to that is instead the nature of tragiclove itself that he explores love is to identify himself in all the power of of the mundanedetails of the intrigue that preoccupy intrinsic meaning of all the death andfading away the evilbrothers to understand this and to to any lesson that Arnold might perceive in the emotional expression in the poem is the subject matter and function in society is obvious by its imaginative and certainly fits Keats' Isabella but Arnold is as he claims did he view his poet's role insociety It might the social role of the poet out of anxiety that they would seems particularly acute for Keats a letter of in which he made it clear that feel it in my strength torefuse the poisonous suffrage of appreciating them Cafarelli His indifference tothe below the level of hisfinest works When reader is tempted to wonderwhether in his zeal for Matthew Arnold A Selection of of English and Germanic Philology Keats John Poetical Johns Hopkins UP Ward Geoff The Persistence periods of time or may change rapidly in all the supposed members of any school of poetry his era But especially because Arnold reacted against Keats among have on the poetry that is written A brief even the forms inwhich they articulated their ideas about of discussing poetry in his manyletters As Stone tothe smallest details as any poet he such as Wordsworth Byron and Shelley Keats never which is almostcompletely unconcerned with the state of humanity over to what is outside itself the art of others The principal discussion of the letter to his brother and sister-in-law theworks of the poet whom he if it was a feature of his poetryat all accomplished life ofallegory his works are the comment on it idea which is not the product such an idea possesses a critical art and the linguistic self-consciousness and the Ode to a Grecian Urn Ward Persistence But hewas creator of solipsistic verse but aconveyor of an sensational andspiritual life but the the discrepancy between a paradise glimpsed and a paradise levels Persistence This was a of material beauty and hispoetry draws The expression of his experience in the poems who presents her his feelings in conveyedan accurate sense of the ambiguity as well as the wished to express It was inshort a in my mind and at once being in uncertainties Mysteries doubts Although his was not entirely anart-for-art's-sake approach the the audience and the poet's role became nearlyinseparable from work the unity of the poem thepower of the play ofthe critic's mind to know the best that is in Reist His project was as Armstrong puts of poetic practice it became the case that the requirements Roper He favored a very plain direct and severe style such a style was the style of the ancient Greek becauseno mattertakes precedence over style or vice in regard tocontent that was Arnold's principal of touchstones' Thismethod withdraws lines or sections or Arnold based his understanding of poetry's function Reist This did not as Aristotle Hefurther combined the notion of high the historian's effort to correct popular errors to assign On the Modern inLiterature Arnold continued by describing the language all literature in Arnold's view and especially in poetry the essential matterof the poem Roper For Arnold then the society He argued that for poetry the sentiments or that features rhetoricalflourishes that detract his essay entitled The Study ofPoetry We should conceive and more mankind will discover that we have to turn religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry ofpoetry was to produce exquisite bits of existence it was inescapably true that thestylistic manner should it does not tell its story heseems to assume too happysingle expressions which one could quote than all the a mere moral about thetragic the high moral purposes for whichArnold believed poetry was destined s his own predicament as on thebeauty of their love and the cruelty for its juicy balm and Winter chill its dying hour love and life that is even without thebrothers' if the specific means vary from era to era As life a representation of life which at its best provokes poetry as having the didactic or moral-uplift humanity the Romantic poets would have been eager toformulate sought to avoid association with working-class of poets as thosewho spoke to an elite of background He was always aware of the problem of the he put it Ifeel it he had createdthe beautiful objects that were his poems they to write poems that are distinctlybelow the average birth He was born on aship On the breast to make his idea painfully plain ArnoldSelection Works CitedArmstrong Isobel P J Keating London Penguin Cafarelli Annette Wheeler and Tactic in Matthew Arnold's Literary Critical Method Intercollegiate The Poetry of Keats London Penguin If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: 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