1 s entimentali s m, Exotici s m, andMy s ticis m

1 S e n t i m e n t a l i s m , E x o t i c i s m , a n d M y s t i c i s m

L i f e :

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  democratic sympathies: admirer of the republican rev. in Am. and Fr.
  
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  opponent of the strict Calvinism (father of a number of illegitimate children)
  

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  = consid. a natural genius, a poet by instinct; styled a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, or a ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ x but: well-read, though largely self-educated
  
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  < (a) the oral tradition of Scott. folklore and folk song
  
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  < (b) the lit. tradition of poems in the Scots dialect of E
  
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  > revived the lyric and the legends of folk culture, and wrote in the language really spoken by the common people > anticipated William Wordsworth
  

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  F o l k  S o n g s :
  

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  coll., ed., restored, and imitated traditional songs, also wrote new verses to traditional dance tunes
  
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  keen ear for Scots vocabulary, idiom, and rhythm
  
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  author of over 300 songs on love, drink, work, friendship, patriotism, and bawdry
  
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  hearty, generous, and tender in tone, with a sympathy to all humans
  

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  as a co-ed. of James Johnson’s anthology of Scott. songs
  

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  as a co-ed. of George Thomson’s (1757 – 1821, a collector) coll.
  

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  P o e t r y :
  

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  (a) in Scots, the northern dialect of E spoken by rural people: his best poetry (“To a Mouse”)
  
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  (b) in standard E: poetry in the genteel poetic tradition, with few exceptions (“Afton Water”) conventional
  

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  his 1^st publ. vol., an immediate success
  

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  a mock-heroic verse narrative
  

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  also wrote: satire, incl. devastating satires against the rigid relig.; and verse epistles to friends
  

L i f e :

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  apprenticed as an engraver x but: followed his ‘divine vision’  a life of isolation, misunderstanding, and poverty
  

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  author of paintings, engravings, and illustr. for works of oth. poets & his own
  
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  illustr. for his poems = an integral and mutually enlightening combination of words and design
  
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  ‘illuminated printing’ = his own method of relief etching, used to produce most of his books of poems (hand-coloured, or printed in colour)
  

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  P o e t r y :
  

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  subtle, symbolic, and allusive x but: the ambiguous style veils radical relig., moral, and political opinions
  

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  his 1^st vol., dissatisfied with the reigning poetic tradition  sought new forms and techniques
  

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  = visions of the world by ‘two contrary states of the human soul’
  
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  (1) Songs of Innocence: a hymn-like simplicity, use of nursery-rhyme
  
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  (2) Songs of Experience: compressed metaphor and symbol of multiple references (“The Tyger”, “London”, & oth.)
  
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  interrelates the poems of both vol. as a series of shifting perceptions = (1) a falling away from the Edenic innocence to experience > (2) the possibility of progress twd a Christ-inspired ‘higher’ innocence
  
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  (1): challenges the innocent state
  
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  > “Holy Thursday”, celebrates the infant joy of the charity-children march x condemns the exploitation of ‘the aged men’
  
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  (2): equates the ‘wisdom’ of the old with oppression  satirical, even sarcastic
  
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  > “The Sick Rose”, suggests the mental, spiritual, and intellectual distortion by the “invisible worm” destroying the beauty of the rose
  
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  > “The Poison Tree” (= orig. “Christian Forbearance”), on the destructive force of repression; the tree = (a) the forbidden tree of knowledge, or (b) a metaphor of repressed emotion > (c) the negative Christian hypocrisy, and/or (d) the positive Christian forgiveness
  
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  > “The Garden of Love”, ironically wrecked by the ‘thou shalt nots’ of the priests
  
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  (1): introd. by the piper > (2): introd. by the ‘voice of the bard who present, past, and future sees’ = (1): a shift beyond the innocence… > (2): …into an awareness of the Fall
  
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  (2): the vol. opens with a daybreak > darkened by the following poems > closes by another morning in the concl. poem, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” = a regeneration, a new age of spiritual liberty
  

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  P r o p h e c i e s :
  

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  insisted he had been granted visions by God which he could transl. and interpret by interfusing picture and word (B.: ‘the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative’)
  
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  yearned for a faith free of dogmatic assertion > a visionary poetry based on a complete mythology of his own
  
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  < infl. by the Bible, the Bible-derived epic structures of Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321, [author of the epic poem The Divine Comedy]) and John Milton (1608 – 74, [author of the epic poem Paradise Lost]), and the hymnological tradition in E verse
  
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  < the eccentric Swedish visionary and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) > redefined his cosmology > close to the Ger. theosophist Jacob Boehme (1575 – 1624): God the Father = neither good nor evil x but: contains the germs of both > the necessity of merging heaven with the creative energy of hell  celebrated the contraries
  
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  > infl. W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  

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  wrote while supporting the Fr. Rev.: rev. = a purifying violence leading to the redemption of humanity
  
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  x but: his later poetry shifted from an apocalypse by rev. to an apocalypse by imagination (Orc = the fiery spirit of violent rev., gave way to Los)
  

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  = prophetic books
  
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  Urizen = oppressor and the negative God of “thou shalt nots” x embodiment of reason and law
  
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  Los = rebel against Urizen
  
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  Orc = both rebel and oppressor
  

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  = major prophetic books
  
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  conc. with the overall biblical plot interpreted in the ‘spiritual sense’: incl. the Creation, the Fall, the humanity in the fallen world, and redemption and the promise of a New Jerusalem
  
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  written in the persona, or ‘voice’, of ‘the Bard’, going back to Edmund Spenser (c. 1952 – 99, [author of the epic poem Faerie Queene]) > J. Milton > and the prophets of the Bible
  
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  the Four Zoas = Urizen + Tharmas + Luvah + Los = the results of the fall and division of the primeval man = Albion (= orig. an ancient mythological name for the Br. Isles)
  
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  the demonic characters in Jerusalem < the incident of his altercation with a private, haunting his imagination (B. pushed the soldier to the inn where he was quartered after he had refused to leave his garden and answered with threads and curses)
  

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  also wrote: A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810), a prose book
  

L i f e :

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  a scholarly bishop x but: did not feel pressurised to concentrate his energies on theology only
  
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  educated to appreciate classical principles x but: reflected the shift twd a new and receptive poetic sensibility
  

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  interested in lit. outside narrowly defined canons  pioneered the explorations of alternative lit. traditions
  

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  T r a n s l a t i o n s :
  

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  author of transl. of relig. / secular writings: transl. of the “Song of Solomon”, author of a key to the New Testament, & oth.
  

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  = a Chinese novel transl. from the Portug.
  

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  transl. from the Icelandic and ‘improved’ by the transl.
  
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  aimed for the market for ‘ancient poetry’ newly opened by James MacPherson’s Ossian
  

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  transl. from the French
  

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  B a l l a d s :
  

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  = a 3-vol. coll. of ballad poetry
  
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  < based on a various 17^th c. manuscript coll. now known as ‘The Percy Folio’ (saved it from destruction when he discovered it ‘being used by the maids to light the fire’)
  
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  ed. and ‘improved’ x but: with an alertness to the virtues of a plain mode of expression, in spite of the ‘polished age, like the present’
  
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  also visually pleasing: vignettes on the title pages, and a copperplate engraving in each of the 3 parts of the 3 vol.
  
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  > greatly successful x but: did not secure him an adequate living
  
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  > foreshadowed the ballad revival in E poetry, characteristic of the Romantic movement: W. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, & oth.
  

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  = his orig. ballad on the Warkworth castle
  
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  combined the vogue for the ‘Churchyard Poets’ + the ballad vogue he himself had set in motion
  
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  > Samuel Johnson’s (= Dr. Johnson, 1709 – 84, a poet, essayist, and biographer) 3 satires on the ‘simplicity’ of the ballad verse form: the narrow line btw the beautiful simplicity and simple mindedness
  

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  = a vicarious contrib. to lit.: pretended to have discovered and transl. the works of the early Scott. Gaelic poet ‘Ossian, the son of Fingal’
  
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  > a widely received Romantic image of the primitive poet
  
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  > depicted parallel to Homer (8^th c. BC, [author of epics Iliad and Odyssey]) as the Bard of the North on the proscenium arch of the rebuild Covent Garden Theatre (1858)
  

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  ‘ O s s i a n i c ’ F a k e s :
  

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  = supposedly a transl. of poetry from Scott. Gaelic
  
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  < based on the manuscripts he claimed to have discovered in the Highlands and Islands
  

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  = supposedly a transl. of an epic by the 3^rd c. bard Ossian
  
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  employed the musical measured prose he had used in his earlier vol.
  
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  (−) some Gaelic ballad poetry truly attributed to one ‘Oisean’, son of the warrior Fionn x but: cleverly adapted, re-created, and expanded mere fragments of surviving verse
  
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  (−) confounded stories belonging to different cycles to give a Homeric coherence and classical solemnity to the disparate ballad accounts of ancient Scott. feuds
  
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  (+) appreciated natural beauty, incl. the emotive associations of wild landscape
  
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  (+) treated the ancient legend of primitive heroism with a melancholy tenderness
  
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  > the authenticity immediately challenged by Dr. Johnson, claiming M. had found fragments of ancient poems and stories and woven them into a romance of his own composition
  
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  > modern critics tend to agree with Johnson
  
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  > admired by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 – 1832) who incorporated his transl. of a part of the work into his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
  

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  = another epic
  

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  = a coll. ed. of Fingal and Temora
  

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  also wrote: Iliad (1763), a stodgy prose version of Homer’s epic
  

L i f e :

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  wayward from his earliest y.: uninterested in the games of oth. children, liable to fits of abstraction when sitting for hours as if in trance or crying for no reason > consid. educationally backward
  
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  < his uncle held an office in a church > familiar with the altar tombs commemorating the dead knights and ecclesiastics, and with ancient legal documents laying there forgotten
  
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  < a voracious reader of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400), T. Percy’s Reliques, J. Macpherson’s Ossian, etc.
  
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  from the age of 11 contrib. relig. poems to a local journal > later political satires to London periodicals: his contrib. accepted x but: paid for little or not at all
  
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  did not have to suffer the dire poverty x but: too proud to accept help
  
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  financial distress + lack of lit. success  suicide (17+ y.) by drinking arsenic dissolved in water after tearing into fragments whatever lit. remains were at hand
  
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  > the Romantic image of the suffering of unacknowledged genius
  
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  > = the “marvellous Boy” in W. Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807)
  
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  > = the dedicatee of John Keats’s Endymion (1818)
  
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  > = the subject of Henry Wallis’s (1830 – 1916, pre-Raphaelite painter) painting (1856)
  
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  > commemorated in poems by S. T. Coleridge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, & oth.
  

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  fascinated with the Middle Ages > lived in an ideal medieval world of his own creation  forged the so-called ‘Rowley Poems’ = mock medieval poems by the imaginary 15^th c. priest Thomas Rowley
  

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  ‘ R o w l e y ’ F a k e s :
  

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  = the only of the ‘Rowley’ poems publ. during his lifetime, an ‘eclogue’
  
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  written before he was 12 > claimed it to be a transcription of Rowley’s work
  
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  incl. obvious borrowings, deliberate use of archaic words picked out of dictionaries, and anachronistic use of Elizabethan verse forms
  

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  = another of the “Rowley” poems, rejected for publ. in a periodical
  

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  = a posthum. coll. of the ‘Rowley’ poems
  
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  ed. by a Chaucerian scholar then believing them genuine medieval works
  
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  the authenticity challenged shortly thereafter > proved to be fakes
  

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  = a fragment of a larger unpreserved work = Tragedy of Goddwyn
  
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  may be counted among the finest martial lyrics in E
  

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  inc. passages of rare lyrical beauty
  

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  also wrote: prose / verse political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas, and satires