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Teachers' Resource Web Notes for Undergraduate Lecture on Blake and Shelley Al Drake, UCI Expression (follows upon imaginative acts of perception) Shift from Locke to Kant to those who extrapolate from Kant, until we get Coleridge with his poetic imagination and symbolic poetry, fusing "summmject and ommmject." With romanticism comes full conception that the mind is note a passive receiver of sensory data--rather, it plays an active role in constructing the world we perceive. Go to Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection." Failure (the moment of insight) of imagination, thanks to alienated, fragmented consciousness. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection": Failure of imagination--the poem's title announces its failure. Nature is not a mere reflection of the poet's inner state, but there is some relation. As in Coleridge, the poet's failure to animate nature by imagination is the theme. The poem valorizes an extreme emotional state (unlike neoclassical authors, who shunned extremes as indecorous and dangerous). Point is to get beyond the scripts or rules that civilization hands us from birth, even if the price of the attempt is to expose our failure. The poet can describe nature, but he cannot feel the power of his words. It is always possible for poetic language to fail: breath/dead leaves. The poet is in a state of alienation from nature and from his fellow humans. He cannot reproduce original joy in others; he can only set going a chain reaction of alienation and depression. The poem is about alienated consciousness. The poet cannot simply take from nature what he needs because the relation is reciprocal--he needs to be able to animate nature before it will respond. "Ozymandias": Theme of history in romanticism. See handout comment. Significance of ruins of past civilization. Ruins, rebellion, religion. Has Pharaoh won? The same problems remain. The poem is rebellious. The traveler reports his observation a something to be wondered at, considered in its mysteriousness and persistence. I saw this--what do you make of it? What Sphinx-like riddle does the head of Ramses II hold for us? The riddle of human cruelty, mastery, pride, power inequalities, political and spiritual oppression. The sculptor rebelled, mocked Ramses 3000 years ago, and the Hebrew God defeated Ramses, hardened his heart, etc. But the cruel expression and "sneer of cold command" outlived all of this, and here it is confronting us again. So has Ramses won after all? Still, the statue does not mean quite what Ramses wanted it to mean. We do not despair because he built a monument to himself; that material thing is not important. That his cruelty and oppressiveness, his hardness of heart, are still around: that is the problem, the reason for our despair. Why does blank Nature recede? It is blank and pitiless, gives no answer. The traveler thinks he has brought home to us something exotic, a little picturesque fragment from an ancient time. But he has brought us home to the same old passions, the same political and spiritual riddle of human nature. Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience. These separate works don't refer to an Edenic state and a fallen state; both are differing modes of fallen perception. Draw circle around the titles, labeling it "fallen state of human imagination." Alienation theme. Compare the "innocent" poems on poverty, pity, etc. to the "experienced" version of these poems. Tyger as example of "mystery" created by our own fallenness, inability to handle nature? Blake constantly exposes everyone's tendency to become trapped in constructions of our own making--mental traps, and physical traps, too--as in "London." One way Blake combats this tendency is by propounding his doctrine of contraries. Contrary things are those which are not eternally split into false oppositions; they will come together again: reprobate and redeemed, devil and angel, reason and energy--the Tyger? Perhaps.
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