This thesis explores pictorialism in eighteenth-century poetry and landscape. The tradition of ut pictura poesis is presented in terms of its origins in antiquity, its background in the thought of the eighteenth century, its manifestations in the poetry of the period, and its relations to the picturesque in landscape. A sketch of the origins and development of literary pictorialism in Greece and Rome, the medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance periods, outlines its leading features and furnishes a historical perspective against which eighteenth-century practices can be viewed. Special attention is given to the bond between the sister arts of painting and poetry and to the new standards of artistic excellence deriving from Italian Renaissance and baroque painting. In eighteenth-century poetry, passages from Pope and Thomson illustrate neo-classical pictorial practice with respect to the ancient doctrine of enargeia (vivid, lifelike imitation), the means of idealizing nature, and the iconic tradition of imitating or describing objects of art. These practices are shown to serve aesthetic, social, or moral purposes. Finally, the thesis discusses Thomson's pictorial poetry as the product of traditional ut pictura poesis and not as the cause of picturesque landscape vision. The relationship between literary pictorialism and the landscape picturesque is clarified by relating Thomson's characteristic landscape form to Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, and Nicolas Poussin. And the landscape picturesque itself, discussed largely in terms of its origins in the English natural garden and its formalization in the aesthetic theories of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, is shown, like poetic pictorialism, to be a product of the neo-classical doctrine of models, another form of neo-classical "imitation." As such it rounds out the paper's study of pictorialism in the eighteenth century. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1950 O4 / Master of Science

Jerome McGann observes that 'Deceptive apparitions haunt romantic writing'. This thesis investigates one such haunting apparition; it analyses the ways in which selected eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets engage with the poetry of Alexander Pope. The received view of "Romantic" anti-Popeanism is expressed in comments such as that of William Hazlitt's 'I do not think there is any point of sympathy between Pope and the Lake School: on the contrary, I know there is an antipathy between them'. There is plenty of evidence to suggest some Romantic writers had an aversion to the previous literary age. In a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in March 1819, for example, Keats reviews a play by mocking that it 'was bad even in comparison with ... the Augustan age'. Pope had been the pre-eminent figure of Augustan poetry. Hence, the argument runs, Pope was rejected wholesale by Romantic poets. Such an understanding of literary history is, however, too dogmatic. Rather than accepting the view that the progression from Pope's era to the Romantic period involved a sudden pivot in taste, I explore how Popean poetic principles filtered into the development of his successors' literary aesthetics and ideas about poetry. The central questions I ask are how, and in what ways, Pope's successors used Pope's poetry to formulate their own poetic visions. I address these questions in four main chapters. In the first, I analyse Joseph Warton's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. I show that Warton's Essay on Pope should not be taken as a denigration of Pope's poetic achievement, and suggest ways in which Pope's work permeates his, and his brother Thomas', poetry. In the second, I examine the response to Pope's Iliad, a text which prompted conflicting reactions among his successors. In particular, I appraise William Cowper's response to Pope's translation, not only as contained in his prose discussion of it, but also as revealed by his own translation. My third chapter considers ways in which Wordsworth plays with Pope's poetic legacy, and acknowledges Pope's contribution to the formulation of his own ideas of what constitutes good poetry. In the final chapter, I illustrate that even in the poetry of Keats - who, at times, vociferously rejects Pope as a mere handicraftsman - there is a sympathy in song between brother-poets. Literary criticism has often stressed the prominence of authors such as Lord Byron, Erasmus Darwin and George Crabbe in Pope's poetic reception and legacy. Yet Pope haunts other writers in subtler, but no less compelling, ways. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge observes, in Biographia Literaria, 'many ... formed ... their notions of poetry, from the writings of Mr. Pope'. What I try to give colour to here are some of the ways in which subsequent 'notions of poetry' were 'formed' from 'the writings of Mr. Pope'.

The thesis undertakes to examine the dimensions of involvement that may exist between the reader and the Romantic poem. The introductory chapter briefly explores some of the grounds for the mis-conception and denigration of Romantic poetry. Some of the problems in differentiating between Romantic modes of conception and the "normal" results of discursive reasoning as applied to Romantic poetry are introduced. Romantic conception points to an order of interaction with the world that is beyond the capacity of ordinary linear thinking. This chapter suggests the primary significance of the experience of Romantic poets as informing their thought. It also stresses the relation that exists between the "subject" matter of Romantic poems and metaphysical doctrines not usually connected with "historical" Romanticism. The active principles that initiate both Romantic poems and Romantic thought are the same principles that inform the reading experience. The introduction concludes by suggesting the "formal" similarity between the original experience of the poet and the response which a reader may have in any given poem. The reader is often carried beyond what a linear conception of the poem would indicate. The second chapter picks up the theme of detachment from normal, pre-defined codes of awareness, as this occurs in the historical context of the Romantic movement. Mainly, the chapter explores the existential implications of the Romantic withdrawal from the Enlightenment cultural and intellectual milieu. The condition of vulnerability, which disorientation from conventional values engendered in the poets, becomes the central construct for the ensuing pages. For it is believed that vulnerability initiates the possibility of openness, and that it is from this ground of receptivity that the poets emerge as discoverers. The real dynamics of human life and awareness are not to be found in the world of conceptual thinking, but in the immediate relations a man has with the concrete things in the environment. The discovery of things, in a state of total receptivity, leads to a dramatic new conception of being, as well as to a new poetic presentation of those dynamics. But it is in a particular culture that these trans-cultural ideas are fostered. It is the impetus of an entire cultural milieu which compels the re-valuation of conceptual and non-conceptual experience that we know as Romanticism. Chapter Three contains a discussion of the theoretical relation of a reader to Blake's THE SICK ROSE, in order to illustrate the requirement of a suspension of disbelief. The central idea here is that the search for the "meaning"of a poem must begin, and does begin, in the very experience a reader "has" while he is engaged in the poem. The principles of the reader's engagement in the activity of the poem are paralleled with the principles of the poet's original discovery of certain energies. The reader actually repeats the Romantic disorientation, and thus comes to make the Romantic discovery. The chapter stresses the necessity of a high degree of involvement with any Romantic poem before the full dimensions of the poem's meaning can be truly comprehended. The reader's involvement is fundamentally characterized by a disruption of one's ordinary anticipation of both language and experience. The fourth chapter is an illustration of the physical aspects of disorientation, mainly in terms of the reader. Using the analogy of music, the chapter argues the concept of "surprise" as a signal of engagement in the stimulus, be it poem or drums. The fact that physical involvement in the new stimulus can be demonstrated to precede conceptualizing indicates that sense perception actuates new physical orientations even without consultation with logical reflection. This brief interlude prepares for the following chapters by pointing to the fact of physical immediacy in the act of dislocation from a conventional context of response and entrance into the world dictated by the energies of the present stimulus. The next chapter deals with the "ideas" of some Romantic poets in terms of the ground from which they emerge, The emphasishere is on the fact that a certain order of non-conceptual experience is necessary before linear conception is capable of entertaining ideas such as those found throughout Romantic writing. Perception precedes conception. But perception— powerful, direct—also stops conception. In Romantic poetry and prose we find that a process of "negative capability" is pre-requisite to any direct perception. Negative capability is a conceptual construct for the process through which the poet gradually, sometimes swiftly, is opened to the things in his immediate environment. Whether that environment be the life of external or internal phenomena does not alter the process, however much the resultant poem may be influenced. The stress which most Romantics give to negative capability and its resulting theodicy, justifies critical attention upon the experiences realized in "spots of time." These experiences are a major source of Romantic concepts of the mind. At the same time, the inherent form of these experiences gives rise to the mythic, multi-dimensional ideas of Romantic thought. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the formal principles of some Romantic poetry—that poetry in which the full dimensions implicit in a spot of time are expressed. Chapter Six employs Charles Olson's theory of "projective" verse in order to grasp the formal dynamics of Romantic verse. Olson's work is used because his conception of the "projective" act issues from the same ground that gives birth to the most comprehensive vision of Romanticism—the synthesis of the contraries in a direct apprehension of unity. The last chapter demonstrates some precise ways in which the formal properties of certain Romantic poems compel the reader to act in certain ways. Here, the concern is primarily with the dimensions of experience that the unfolding poem is capable of initiating in the 'negatively capable' reader. In conclusion, the formal activity of certain Romantic poems can be shown to have emerged from a complex experiential matrix, and to have rendered the energies of that matrix to a receptive reader. This transference is the prime "legislative" act of Romantic poetry. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study is an exploration into the Romantics' transcendence of the dualistic world view and their attainment of a holistic vision. Chapter I formulates a dichotomy between the archaic (sacrosanct) world view and the modern (mechanistic) world view. Chapter II discusses the reality of the religious experience in Romanticism. Chapter III elucidates the Romantics' use of mystic myths and noetic symbols. Chapter IV treats the Romantic transcendence of the dualistic world view and the problems of expressing the transcendental experience in aesthetic form. Supporting theories include those of Henri Bergson, Martin Buber, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and M. H. Abrams. The study concludes by assessing the validity of the Romantic vision in the modern world.

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Rhetoric, seen either as the art of persuasion or as the art of figurative expression, has been largely neglected as an approach to the poetry of the Romantics. The most important reason for this seems to be the rejection of rhetoric by the Romantics themselves. As a result of negative comments about rhetoric by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, scholars seeking clues about the Romantics' literary principles in their critical writings have agreed that eighteenth-century rhetoric was either abandoned or substantially altered by early nineteenth century poets. The eighteenth-century belief that figures possess a unique power of communicating an author's passions and emotions continued to be transmitted as a viable literary tradition in the nineteenth century. Poetry was thought to have special privilege in the employment of rhetorical devices. In practice, if not in theory, early nineteenth-century poets did not abandon the use of such devices in their creations. An analysis of the role of rhetorical figures in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats demonstrates that it is a mistake to envision the poetry of the Romantic movement as a spontaneous outgrowth of an abrupt shift in poetic taste, a shift which demanded the omission of classical poetic devices. Often the Romantic poets were more nearly in accord with the strictures of rhetoricians such as Blackwall or Ward than many of the Augustan poets had been.