In the Victorian era poets are inspired to debate among each other in the heat of enlightenment. The literature of Romanticism versus the Victorian era initially becomes a problematic subject to accept. As a Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins attacks the conception of religion by questioning the existence of God. Hopkins’ sonnets reflect this issue of an oppress religion and educates people towards the conspiracy of a change era through his magnificent poems. Hopkins stands true to the new and improve era of Victorian by conciliating the absences of divinity. Although others may have disagree that G.M. Hopkins is not directly promoting a riot against religion but rather inspiring the hopeful experience in the rejuvenation of faith, Hopkins does circulate his ideas among the struggle, suffering, and agony of religion depicted in his “terrible sonnets”. Hopkins is the new omen to the age of reasoning of faith, science, skepticism, and love; he stresses the degree of faith and illustrates the truth of reality about religion, projecting his principle of skepticism.
The Victorian era conceived through Romanticism has become a relentless era concerning to the uproar of human development. Poets begin to broaden their understanding about faith to realism given the arrival of the Victorian. The spiritless characteristic of nature suddenly becomes the burden and agony of human sufferings as revealed in Hopkins’ poems, demonstrating of great anxiety and desperation to depart from the old faith, Romanticism.
Hopkins’ sonnets are generally pessimistic about the culture of religion. In Hopkins’ sonnet No Worst, There Is None, Hopkins discusses of the deep grief that is semi-related to hell and death. “No worst, there is none. Pitched pas...
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...ave suggest that Hopkins uses his poems and sonnets to awakening the corruption and realization of technology and science, Victorian poets are making a point to reestablish the faith of humanity and that is the independency of mind and nature. A debate is also questioned whether Hopkins’ poems are conveying a satirical piece of work in the changes in the era. Hopkins’ poems can be ambiguous but it is apparent that his works shine the light to those in despair about Religion versus epistemic. The nature of humanity is never satisfy or complacent; the traces in bettering life continues to evolve with everyday changes to everything else. However these changes in time is the beauty of literature, the artwork is never discolored because of this forever evolving world; changes are put together like pieces of puzzles and in responding to paint the world of literature.
For it is a commonplace of our understanding of the period that the Victorian writer wanted above all to “stay in touch.” Comparing his situation with that of his immediate predecessors, he recognized that indulgence in a self-centered idealism was no longer viable in a society which ever more insistently urged total involvement in its occupations. The world was waiting to be improved upon, and solved, and everyone, poets, included had to busy themsel...
G. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: Norton, 2000. Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Wolfson, Susan and Peter Manning (eds.). The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Volume 2A. New York: Longman, 1999.
History is the story and knowledge of the past. There are individuals that are interested by history and wish to study it by learning more. It is very informative to know what has happened in the past for self-knowledge. An individual cannot be naïve to the past including but not limited to how literature came to. One can understand literature more when they understand the time period the author wrote during and the way they wrote. There are several time periods different authors have been through with each period having specific beliefs. Romanticism is the time period that interests me the most; it was a time during the eighteenth century and focused on nature along with the individual’s expression of imagination and emotion.
Tucked away in history lies the world of piracy, too far to be fully reached, comprehended or related to. They are distance stories containing horrific facts and impossible realities. It is no secret that piracy has found a home in Western pop culture; the romance of mystery and drama seems to follow any pirate image. Historically speaking some scholars have rejected this romantic view yet, for every academic voice there exists a Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver. Conflict surrounds the truth of piracy as Historians continue to see piracy in light of historical contexts while social culture relies on the dramatized romantic view. Because of this, only when these studies and stories are brought together a new insight develops. By analyzing texts, such as the primary source The Buccaneers of America by Exquemelin, historian Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations and the famous Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, romance and piracy are brought together and surprisingly developed by historians and fiction-writers alike.
Toward the end of the eiteenth-century, Romanticism emerged as a response to Classicism. Even though this change was gradual, it transformed everything from art and philosophy to education and science. While the Classicsts thought of the world as having a rigid and stern structure, the romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and believes. The Romaniticists and Classicsts differed in their views of the relationship between an individual and society, their views of nature and the relationship between reason and imagination.
In Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Smith uses nature as a vehicle to express her complex emotions and yearning for a renewal of her spirit. Utilizing the immortal characteristics of spring and the tempestuous nature of the ocean, Smith creates a poetic world that is both a comfort and a hindrance to her tortured soul. Even while spring can provide her with temporary solace and the ocean is a friend in her sorrow, both parts of nature constantly remind her of something that she will never be able to accomplish: the renewal of her anguished spirit and complete happiness in life once more. Through three of her sonnets in this collection, Smith connects with the different parts of nature and displays her sensible temperament with her envy over nature’s ability to easily renew its beauty and vitality.
The span of time from the Victorian age of Literature to the Modernism of the 20th century wrought many changes in poetry style and literary thinking. While both eras contained elements of self-scrutiny, the various forms and reasoning behind such thinking were vastly different. The Victorian age, with it's new industrialization of society, brought to poetry and literature the fictional character, seeing the world from another's eyes. It was also a time in which "Victorian authors and intellectuals found a way to reassert religious ideas" (Longman, p. 1790). Society was questioning the ideals of religion, yet people wanted to believe.
Reverend Father Gerard Manley Hopkins was English poet from the Victorian Age. He became critically acclaimed after his death, and his fame was grounded mainly from his use of imagery in his poems, given that he was from a period of highly traditional writing. Hopkins’ religious poems featured ones that were “light” and ones that were “dark”, which he used to exemplify his conflict between faith and doubt. “God’s Grandeur” is one of his light poems, and “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” is one of his dark poems, and a comparison between the two will show just how strong his conflict really was.
One of the most interesting aspects of Victorian era literature reflects the conflict between religion and the fast gathering movement aptly dubbed the enlightenment. Primarily known for its prude, repressed, social and family structure beneath the surface of the Victorian illusion many conflicting, perhaps even radical, ideas were simmering and fast reaching a boiling point within in the public circle. In fact writers such as Thomas Hardy and Gerald Manly Hopkins reflect this very struggle between the cold front of former human understanding and the rising warm front know only as the enlightenment. As a result we as readers are treated to a spectacular display of fireworks within both authors poetry as the two ideas: poetics of soul and savior, and the poetics of naturalism struggle and brutality, meet and mix in the authors minds creating a lightning storm for us to enjoy.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age: Introduction." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age: Introduction. 2010. Web. 23 Feb. 2014
In his introduction to the Norton Anthology of English Literature M. H. Abrams attempts to overcome these difficulties by identifying the 'five cardinal elements' of Romantic poetry. According to Abrams, Romantic poetry is distinguished by the belief that poetry is not an "imitation of nature" but a "representation of the poet's internal emotions". Secondly, that the writing of poetry should be "an effortless expression" and not an "arduous exercise". The prevalence of nature in Romantic poetry and what Abrams calls "the glorification of the ordinary and the outcast" are identified as two further common elements, as is the sense of a "supernatural" or "satanic presence" (Abrams, 2000, pp. 7-11). It is with regard to this elemental understanding of Romantic poetry that I will conduct my close critical analysis of 'Frost at Midnight' to examine the extent to which the poem embodie...
Rundle, Thomas J. Collins & Vivenne J. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry ad Poetic Theory. Concise. Toronto: Broadview Press Limited, 2005.
By the end of the eighteenth century, thought gradually moved towards a new trend called Romanticism. If the Age of Enlightenment was a period of reasoning, rational thinking and a study of the material world where natural laws were realized then Romanticism is its opposite. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental (Forsyth, Romanticism). It began in Germany and England in the eighteenth century and by the late 1820s swept through Europe and then swiftly made its way to the Western world. The romantics overthrew the philosophical ways of thinking during the Enlightenment, they felt that reason and rationality were too harsh and instead focused on the imagination. Romantics believed in freedom and spontaneous creativity rather than order and imitation, they believed people should think for themselves instead of being bound to the fixed set of beliefs of the Enlightenment.
I bet since you read the topic of my paper that you think that this will be a “kissy kissy, lovey gooey” story about two British and American lovebirds. Well, the truth is that it’s not, in fact, it is totally different! The word “romance” has changed very much since our ancestral fathers had defined it. Unfortunately, I cannot write about Valentines Day, and things pertaining to that, but I will tell you how romance used to be and what exactly romance was like before modern day life changed the definition. So now, I’ll explain the differences, as well as the similarities between the British and American Romance.