The Columbia History of British Poetry (99 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 395
a paradox emphasized in the portrait of Napoleon drawn in Canto III of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
. "But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell. . . ." Typically, in Byron's narratives of male power, the very character traits that allow greatness destroy a man: "a fire / And motion of the soul" aspire "beyond the fitting medium of desire." "Quenchless" once ''kindled," this fire encompasses all, becoming "fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore."
The ardor that drove Napoleon to conquer the world inevitably forces him to the island of St. Helena. Byron describes him there in
The Age of Bronze
as an eagle reduced to nibbling at his cage, a man who occupies himself squabbling with his jailers about what he gets to eat. Yet even in ruin, he retains more dignity than the other rulers depicted in the poem. Bound on the rock of St. Helena, Napoleon calls on "earth, air, ocean, all that felt or feel / His power and glory."
This image establishes another association with Napoleon, that of Prometheus. Myths of the Titans, especially of Prometheus, are central to considerations of human history in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In Byron's "Prometheus" the figure becomes representative of man as "part divine, / A troubled stream from a pure source." For Shelley, Prometheus is an "imaginary being" of the most "poetical character," described in the preface to
Prometheus Unbound
as "the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends." Prometheus's gift of fire makes human consciousness possible. His name means "the forethinker," and it is he who knows who will overthrow Jupiter. Prometheus is endurance and wisdom and love.
In
Prometheus Unbound
, Shelley sets out the possibilities for human revolution, regeneration, and renewal that he urged Byron and Keats to take as their poetic material. The lyrical drama takes place over eons, or in one hour, or in an instantand is set in the mind of Prometheus, in the mind of man, or in the universe. In this revision of Aeschylus's
Prometheus Bound
, Prometheus has cursed Jupiterthe tyrannical, patriarchal authority that men establish to rule and persecute themselvestherefore causing himself to be chained on a rock "eyeless in hate."
When Prometheus "recalls" his curseremembers it, talks about it, takes it backhe can free himself from Jupiter's tyranny. Prometheus's love allows the earth to get back into its proper position, to turn on its axis, so that the ice of hatred thaws and the springs of affection flow.
 
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Prometheus is reunited with Asia, his wife and counterpart. The closing lines promise the "firm assurance / Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength" by four great virtues that can dominate human life"Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance." The revolution of
Prometheus Unbound
may not endure, but the poem promises that it can always be recalled to grant men "Life, Joy, Empire and Victory."
The antithesis of such victory follows the defeat of endurance in Shelley's
Cenci
, perhaps the most successful English verse drama written in the nineteenth century.
The Cenci
is a tragedy of perversion. Beatrice Cenci enters, saying, "Pervert not truth," but her murderous, incestuous father undoes her sexually and morally. Count Cenci considers himself a "scourge . . . wielded" by God; in denying she is a parricide, Beatrice speaks of "a sword in the right hand of justest God" and asks, ''Wherefore should I have wielded it?" Abused to her very soul, Beatrice is caught in a deadly repetition. This self-justification or what the preface terms "anatomizing casuistry" implicates the audience itself, as it necessarily participates in and responds to "the dramatic character of what she did and suffered."
Beatrice cannot defend herself. Shelley, however, sees his own age containing greater possibilities for freedom. In the preface to his lyrical drama
Hellas
he declares that "a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread."
Hellas
draws on Aeschylus's
Persians
as a model for celebrating the 1821 revolt of the Greeks against the Turks who had oppressed them for centuries. The preface sets out Shelley's intention to "suggest the final triumph of the Greek cause as a portion of the cause of civilization and social improvement."
In
Hellas
Shelley characterizes this renovation in part as a return to the rule of Saturn, in Greek thought a golden age"The world's great age begins anew, / The golden years return." More typically, the Western world has accepted the myth of progress set out in Virgil's
Aeneid
. The vegetative, lawless society of the children of Saturn is well replaced by the military law and order exemplified by Aeneas and the descendants of Jove, the Romans. This view of the shift in mythic cyclesthe why and wherefore of the changes in dominant structuresfascinated Keats, who took Prometheus and the other Titans as the subject of two poems about ruling systems and poetic power:
Hyperion: A Fragment
and "The Fall of Hyperion."
 
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Hyperion: A Fragment
tells of the Titans' overthrow by the gods of Olympus. In "The Fall of Hyperion"written almost two years laterthe story of the gods is filtered through the presence of the goddess Moneta or Memory, whose work serves to generate a man's growth from dreamer to poet. The poems show how man's religious and political structures change and evolve as he demands new qualities from those who dominate him. The old gods, the Titans, become aware of why they must be replacedof why their successors are superior. In
Hyperion: A Fragment
Apollo succeeds Hyperion and is born a god when he can cry, "'Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.'" An awareness of human historyof "'Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, sovran voices, agonies'"is the basis of his understanding.
Oceanus provides a more general explanation by appealing to "'the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might.'" In Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"in one of English poetry's most discussed assertions"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" Beauty is not just a pretty face. In "The Fall of Hyperion" the face of Moneta reveals the beauty that is truth, the "high tragedy'' that "could give so dread a stress / To her cold lips, and fill with such a light / Her planetary eyes." The man who would be a poet replaces Apollo as he who "dies into life." Only those can approach Moneta's altar "'to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.'" Lovers of mankind or laborers for mortal good or dreamers cannot fathom Moneta's knowledge. The poet has such power, and although he is filled with his own inadequacy, the speaker parts Moneta's veils and tells how he "set myself / Upon an eagle's watch, that I might see."
The position is that of "
Negative Capability
," Keats's phrase in a letter of 1817 defining the poetic character as "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Political and religious concerns become part of his generalized statements about the expansion and development of poetic consciousness. "Life" Keats writes in letters of 1818 and 1819, is a "vale of Soul-making," or a many-chambered mansion through which man progresses. From the "infant" or "thoughtless" chamber he moves to the "chamber of maiden-thought." When that room gradually darkens, he feels the "'burden of the Mystery.'" To explore "those dark Passages" is to fulfill one's poetic genius. The poet of "The Fall of Hyperion" sits poised for such exploration of "truth"what Keats in a letter of 1817
 
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calls the "holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination," for "what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."
You speak of Lord Byron and meThere is this great difference between us. He describes what he seesI describe what I imagineMine is the hardest task.
Keats in a letter of 1819 to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana
In describing what they see and what they imagine, Keats, Byron, and Shelley narrate the continuity of the individual being over time. Criticism often addresses the construction or energies of self-representation typical of early nineteenth-century literature. In taking the self as a literary subject, these poets write about mind, being, and the apprehending and comprehending of the world as experienced by individual consciousness.
Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds about the "grand democracy" of mind that allows all men to intersect in a final greeting. In this curved universe of Romantic thought, Keats and Shelley start from different points. Shelley's "Mont Blanc"a key to much of his poetryfollows Wordsworth's humanist ''Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's religious "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni?" in asking what mind can make of the external world. Shelley's answer seems to be "everything"a response based on nature's essential inaccessibility to us and imaged by the quiet, snowy top of Mont Blanc: "And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind's imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?" For Shelley, the imagination finds through interpreting nature the authority people have to repeal all the "large codes of fraud and woe" that suppress human happiness.
In contrast, Keats, though famous for saying that imagination "seizes" truth, has one of his most transformative experiences in the Lake country in 1818. The material reality of mountains and waterfalls supersedes imagination's desire: "I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest." Such rest, however, doesn't last long, as Keats's odes demonstrate. Written with legendary precision in a few months, they are stunning examples of Romantic renovation of received poetic form.
Even in its modern voices, the serious ode retains its classical purpose as an address to a superior entity. Keats's speakers allegorize and personify common mythical objects. Psyche, the nightingale, the Grecian urn, melancholy, indolence, and autumn all make the eye of the

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