1. Emily Dickinson
& Romanticism

2. “She saw no comfort
in refusing to question
that about which she
wished most to be sure.”
~Marianne Moore,
after reading Emily Dickinson

3. Classicism and Neo-Classicism
Classicism
As a critical term, a body of doctrine thought to be derived from or to reflect the
qualities of ancient Greek and Roman culture, particularly in literature,
philosophy, art, or criticism. It is commonly opposed to Romanticism and
Realism, although these terms overlap in their “characteristics” and are not
mutually Exclusive. It is dangerous to classify writers or types as perfect
exponents of classicism. Ben Jonson, for example, was a self-proclaimed
advocate of classicism as a critic and dramatist, yet his Classical Tragedy,
contain non-classical elements, such as Comic Relief. Likewise some of the
“romanticists” of the eighteenth century cultivated Classical qualities, just as
such a “neo-classicist” as Alexander Pope exhibited some “romantic” traits.
Neo-Classicism
The period in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English
throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the
publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. It falls into
three relatively distinct segments; the Restoration Age (1660-1700), and the
Age of Johnson (1750-1798).

4. Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830
Lyric Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Wordsworth

5. Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830
LONDON: J. and A. ARCH, 1798
Lyric Ballads William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads.
The poets William Wordsworth) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge first met in Bristol in
August 1795. The most fruitful period of their association came two years later, when they
lived within walking distance of each other in western Somerset, Coleridge with his wife
and infant son at the small village of Nether Stowey, Wordsworth with his beloved sister
Dorothy at nearby Alfoxden. Although in later life Wordsworth's politics became increasingly
conservative, at this stage of his career he shared Coleridge's republican zeal. Both poets were
convinced of the need to replace the artificial diction of late eighteenth-century verse with a
fresher language more attuned to everyday speech.
In financial strife, Cottle changed his mind about publishing after all the pages had been
printer and transferred the edition of about 500 to the Arch brothers of London, who replaced
the original title-page with one bearing their imprint. Despite some negative reviews, the book
sold well enough for revised two-volume editions to prove viable in 1800, 1802 and 1805.
These added a lengthy introduction and many new poems by Wordsworth but only one
further poem (‘Love’) by Coleridge. Deemed too obscure to be an inviting opener, ‘The
Ancient Mariner’, which had pride of place in 1798, was moved further back in
subsequent editions.

6. Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830
Lyric Ballads
Imagination! Lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; . . .
. . . In such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
. .
The mind beneath such banners militant
Thinks not of spoils or trophies, nor of aught
That may attest its prowess, blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in itself, and in the access of joy
Which hides it like the overflowing Nile.
(The Prelude, VI, 591-614)
~ William Wordsworth

7. Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Lyric Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary
critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth,
was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and
one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose
work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on
Shakespeare, is highly influential, and he helped introduce German
idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many
familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of
disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American
transcendentalism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834)

8. Romanticism in England: 1789 – 1830
Tintern Abbey
Lyric Ballads
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally
considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical
poem of his early years which the poet revised and
expanded a number of times. The work was
posthumously titled and published, prior to which
it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge".
Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843
until his death in 1850.
William Wordsworth
(7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850)

9. Emily Dickinson: Romantic Influences Then & Now
"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in
the mind."
The Poet "considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of
man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature."
~William Wordsworth

10. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
A little Road –– not made of Man ––
Enabled of the Eye –
Accessible to Thill of Bee –
Or Cart of Butterfly –
If Town it have – beyond itself –
‘Tis that – I cannot say –
I only know – no Curricle that rumble there
Bear Me –
Poem 647
c. 1862
Johnson, 321 (Air)

11. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
Air has no Residence, no Neighbor,
No Ear, no Door,
No Apprehension of Another
Oh, Happy Air!
Ethereal Guest at e’en an Outcast’s Pillow
Essential Host, in Life’s faint, wailing Inn,
Later than Light thy Consciousness across me
Till it depart, persuading Mine –
Poem 1060
c. 1865
Johnson, 483 (Air)

12. Jean Jacques Rousseau: Founder of Romanticism & Anti-Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 in
Geneva, Switzerland. His mother died shortly after his
birth. When Rousseau was 10 his father fled from Geneva
to avoid imprisonment for a minor offense, leaving young
Jean-Jacques to be raised by an aunt and uncle. Rousseau
left Geneva at 16, wandering from place to place, finally
moving to Paris in 1742. He earned his living during this
period, working as everything from footman to assistant
to an ambassador.
Rousseau's profound insight can be found in almost
every trace of modern philosophy today. Somewhat
complicated and ambiguous, Rousseau's general
philosophy tried to grasp an emotional and passionate Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712 – 1778)
side of man which he felt was left out of most previous
philosophical thinking.

13. Romanticism in America: 1830 - 1865
Emily Dickinson & Romanticism
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet.
Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she
lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy
for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals,
she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or,
later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by
correspondence.
Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly
eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that
was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers
to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the
era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant
rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems
deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

14. Metaphysical Poetry
The metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who s
hared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them.
The label "metaphysical" was given much later by Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley.
These poets themselves did not form a school or start a movement; most of them did not even
know or read each other. Their style was characterized by wit, subtle argumentations, ”
metaphysical conceits", and/or an unusual simile or metaphor such as in Andrew
Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew. Several metaphysical poets,
especially John Donne, were influenced by Neo-Platonism. One of the primary Platonic
concepts found in metaphysical poetry is the idea that the perfection of beauty in the beloved
acted as a remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm. In a famous definition Georg
Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist critic, described the school's common trait of "looking beyond
the palpable" and "attempting to erase one's own image from the mirror in front so that it
should reflect the not-now and not-here"as foreshadowing existentialism (as quoted in
The Aesthetics of Georg Lukács by B. Királyfalvi (1975). Though secular subjects
drew them (in particular matter drawn from the new science, from the expanding
geographical horizons of the period, and from dialectic) there was also a strong causal
element to their work, defining their relationship with God.

15. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
Ashes denote that Fire was ––
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile ––
Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates.
Poem 1068
c. 1865
Johnson, 484 (Fire)

16. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
You cannot put a Fire out ––
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan ––
Upon the slowest Night ––
You cannot fold a Flood ––
And put it in a Drawer ––
Because the Winds would find it out ––
And tell your Cedar Floor ––
Poem 530
c. 1862
Johnson, 259 (Fire)

17. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
The smouldering embers blush ––
Oh Hearts within the Coal
Hast thou survived so many years?
The smouldering embers smile ––
Soft stirs the news of Light
The stolid seconds glow
One requisite has Fire that lasts
Prometheus never knew ––
Poem 1132
c. 1868 (unfinished)
Johnson,508 (Fire)

18. Transcendentalism
Brook Farm
A reliance on the intuition and the conscience, a form of idealism; a
Philosophical Romanticism reaching America a generation or two
after it developed in Europe. Transcendentalism, though based on doctrines
of ancient and modern European philosophers (particularly Kant) and
sponsored in America chiefly by Emerson after he had absorbed it from
Carlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, and others, took on especial significance
in the United States, where it so largely dominated the New England
authors as to become a literary movement as well as a philosophic conception.
Brook Farm, a celebrated nineteenth-century New England utopian community,
was founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley and other progressive,
Transcendentalist Unitarians, to be, in Ripley's words, a new Jerusalem,
the "city of God, anew." From its founding in 1841 until it went bankrupt in 1847,
Brook Farm influenced many of the social reform movements of its day: abolitionism,
associationalism, the workingmen's movement, and the women's rights
movement. It represented both a test of Transcendentalist dreams and a challenge
to Transcendentalist individualism.

19. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
Three times – we parted – Breath – and I –
Three times – He would not go –
But strove to stay.
Three Times – the Billows tossed me up –
Then caught me – like a Ball –
Then made Blue faces in my face –
And pushed away my sail
That crawled Leagues off – I liked to see –
For thinking – while I die –
How pleasant to behold a Thing
Where Human faces – be –
The Waves grew sleepy – Breath –– did not –
The Winds – like Children – lulled –
Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis –
And I stood up – and lived –
Poem 598
c. 1862
Johnson, 294 (Water)

20. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
Though the great Waters sleep,
That they are still the Deep,
We cannot doubt –
No vacillating God
Ignited this Abode
To put it out ––
Poem 1599
c. 1862
Johnson, 661 (Water)

21. Naturalism
A term sometimes applied to writing that demonstrates a deep interest in Nature, such as
Wordsworth and other Romantic writers had; and sometimes used to describe any form
of extreme Realism, although this usage is a very loose one. It should properly be reserved
to designate a movement in the Novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
in France, America, and England.
In its simplest sense Naturalism is the application of the principles of scientific Determinism
In Fiction. It draws its name from its basic assumption that everything that is real exists in
Nature; Nature being conceived as the world of objects, actions, and forces which yield
the secrets of their causation and their being to objective scientific inquiry. The fundamental
view of man which the naturalist takes is of an animal in the natural world, responding to
environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which he has control
and none of which he fully understands. It tends to differ from Realism, not in its attempt to
be accurate in the portal of its materials but in the selection and organization of those
materials, selecting not the common place but the representative and so arranging the material
in that the structure of the Novel reveals the pattern of ideas –– in this case, scientific theory
–– which forms the author’s view of the nature of experience.

22. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
My Garden – like the Beach –
Denotes there be – a Sea –
That’s Summer –
Such as These – the Pearls
She fetches – such as Me
Poem 484
c. 1862
Johnson, 233 (Garden)

23. Realism
In the broadest sense, Realism is imply fidelity to actuality in its representation in
literature; a term loosely synonymous with Verisimilitude; and in the sense it has been a
significant element in almost every school of writing in human history. In order to give it
more precise definition, however, one needs to limit it to the movement which arose in
the nineteenth century, at least partially in reaction to Romanticism, which was centered
in the Novel, and which was dominant in France, England, and America from roughly
mid-century to the closing decade, when it was replaced by Naturalism In this latter
since, realism defines a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a
particular kind of subject matter.
Realism has been defined as “the truthful treatment of material” by one of its more
vigorous advocates, William Dean Howells, but the statement means little until the
realist’s concept of truth and his selection of materials are designated. Generally, the
realist is a believer in Pragmatism and the truth he seeks to find and express is a
relativistic truth, associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience.
Generally, too, the realist is a believer in democracy, and the materials he elects to describe
are the common, the average, the everyday. Furthermore, realism can be thought of as the
ultimate of middle-class art, and it finds it subjects in bourgeois life and manners. Where
the romanticist transcends the immediate to find the ideal, and the naturalist plumbs the
actual to find the scientific laws which control its actions, the realist centers his attention to
a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the
verifiable consequence.

24. Emily Dickinson: Romantic Influences Then & Now
“I have said that this is a poem of exquisite ironies. It is, indeed, through in a very
different mode, related to Dickinson’s “little girl” strategy. The woman who feels herself
to be Vesuvius at home has need of a mask, at least, of innocuousness and of
containment.”
On my volcano grows the Grass
A meditative spot –
An acre for a Bird to Choose
Would be the General thought –
How red the Fire rocks below –
How insecure the sod
Did I disclose
Would populate with awe my solitude.
~Adrienne Rich
Excerpt from: “Vesuvius at Home - The Power of Emily Dickinson”
Poem 1677
c. unknown
McQuade, 45 (Volcanoes)

25. Emily Dickinson: Then & Now
The reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan –
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man.
If nature will not tell the tale
Jehovah told to her
Can human nature not survive
Without a listener?
Admonished by her buckled lips
Let every babbler be
The only secret people keep
Is Immortality.
Poem 1748
c. unknown
Johnson, 708 (Volcanoes)

26. Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More
specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated
cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to
Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses
the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture,
literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the
new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.
Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that
of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. This is not to say that all
modernists or modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of
Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the
axioms of the previous age.

27. Emily Dickinson: Romantic Influences Then & Now
“Dickinson’s poems, her dangers, are also often authenticated by her losses. So many of
them ––battles with those emissaries of silence which are the ocean, the wind, the light of
day (with its terrible raised expectations – unfulfilled promises –– or vision) and the
speechlessness of pain, of fear –– end on great failures of human speech, victories of “the
Tooth/That nibbles at the Soul.” It has the last word everywhere, as one can see in these
seven instances:
Interrupt –– to die ––
~Jorie Graham Until the Moss had reached our Lips ––
Excerpt from: “Some Notes on Silence” And covered up –– our Names ––
Withdraws –– and leaves the dazzled Soul
In her unfurnished Rooms
Then – close the Valves of her attention ––
Like Stone ––
When orchestra is dumb …
And Ear –– and Heaven –– numb ––
The Heavens with a smile
Sweep by our disappointed Heads
Without a syllable ––
The Tapestries of Paradise
So Notelessly –– are made!

28. Emily Dickinson: Romantic Influences Then & Now
“Punctuation re-invents an original privacy in the social space between words.
A dream manages it like this: a woman is about to write something but first she
needs surgery on her throat. She must drive to a hospital near and ocean. At
the edge of the ocean she stops: a van has been carried up by the waves and
people are dragging out a hurt man–– dark, broken into discrete black parts,
each shape. Like a punctuation mark: an arm, severed legs, not just two, a
penis, a curled piece of chest hair. The helpers put him into a cardboard box
where he stays a short time. Soon he is taken out of the Box whole, not broken
anymore. The woman can then write her poem.”
~ Brenda Hillman
Excerpt from: A Cadenced Privacy
(some thoughts on punctuation in contemporary poems)

29. Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of
the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments
for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to
present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping” or creative power,
the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature
or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power,
with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating
all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to
constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only
perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both
reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical
phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the
ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile
differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The
reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics.
Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two
major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us
to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

30. "Nature" meant many things to the Romantics.
As suggested above, it was often presented as I
tself a work of art, constructed by a divine
Nature
imagination
In emblematic language. For example,throughout
"Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of
presenting commonplace items innature--"ants,”
"heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing
divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a
At the same time, Romantics gave
natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the
Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to Greater attention both to describing
natural phenomena accurately and to
nature varied considerably--nature as a healing
capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this
power,
nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a is as true of Romantic landscape
refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, painting as of Romantic nature
including artificial language--the prevailing view poetry. Accuracy of observation,
s accorded nature the status of an organically unified however, was not sought for its
whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, own sake. Romantic nature poetry
as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system is essentially a poetry of meditation.
of”mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the
rationalist view of the universe as a machine
(e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue
of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself.

31. Symbolism and Myth were given great prominence in the
Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were
the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language
They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest
many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one
communications of allegory.
Symbolism & Myth
Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--
the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to
symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

32. Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts.
Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater
emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics
generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to
purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a
very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry
as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in
literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist,
the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability
to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic
theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a
source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a
prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period.
The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the
poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both
paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the
development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric
components.
Other Concepts:
Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

33. It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the
Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of
the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of
English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of
terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of
the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and
of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in
1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and
Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts,
Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the
second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature
than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and
painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum
(1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert
Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and
Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's
writings throughout Europe.

34. “Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door
with an imaginary key, turned and said:
‘Matty: here’s freedom.’”
~Adrienne Rich
Excerpt from: “Vesuvius at Home - The Power of Emily Dickinson”
(Mcquade, 33)

35. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloom, Harold, Ed. Romanticism and Consciousness, Essays in Criticism.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1970
Graham, Jorie.. “Some Notes on Silence) (pp. 173 - 171). McQuade, Molly,
Ed. By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. 2000
Hillman, Brenda. “A Cadenced Privacy (some thoughts on pumctuation in contemporary poems)”
(pp. 182 - 186). McQuade, Molly, Ed. By Herself, Women Reclaim Poetry. Saint Paul: Graywolf
Press. 2000
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. Based on the Original by
William Flint Thralland and Addison Hibbard Third Edition. Indianapolis: The Oddysey
Press, A Division of The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1975
Leavell, Linda. “Marianne Moore's Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal - Volume 12,
Number 2, Fall 2003, pp. 1-20; E-ISSN: 1096-858X Print ISSN: 1059-6879; DOI: 10.1353/edj.2003.0009

36. INTERNET RESOURCES
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge 2009
Metaphysical Poets
Wikipedia.org. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets> 2009
Modernism:
Wikipedia.org < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism>. 2009
Jean Jacques Rousseau
VoS: Voice of the Shuttle <http://vos.ucsb.edu/>
Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jacque_Rousseau. 2009
William Wordsworth
Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth. 2009

37. Emily Dickinson & Romanticism
Carole S. Mora
ENG 475
An Introduction to Emily Dickinson
Professor Wendy Martin
November 16, 2009
Claremont Graduate University