T: as per syllabus, including Karshish.
Questions about poems assign?
Let me summarize what we saw last time by putting this in terms of the continuity and differences between Romantic and Victorian. We saw last time that represents both an attraction to letting go, giving up, dying, as represented by the Lotos-Eaters, and also the refusal to give up, an insistence upon purpose, even purpose for its own sake, as represented by Ulysses. So we could see this as a way of saying that Tennyson is both Romantic and Victorian:
|
"Romantic" (not?)
|
"Victorian" (not?)
|
|
attraction
to dreams, romance
attraction to death, letting go personal, private love of beauty |
realistic vision
of life |
The "not?" here is intended to suggest that "Romantic" and "Victorian" are misnomers to some extent. As we saw, Keats is in fact explicitly skeptical of the imagination, and Coleridge is subtly so. Similarly, even though our common conception of the Victorian is of a stuffy, repressed, duty-bound, thoroughly public individual, what we're actually seeing is that a tension between private and public, love of beauty and sense of responsibility, the needs of the self and the needs of society, is what is characteristically Victorian.
And in fact this makes perfect sense, especially for the early Victorians. On the one hand, you have the enormous pull of the Romantics. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--they're the ones an early Victorian has to learn his or her craft from, and they're the ones who have to be surmounted if the poet is to take the craft of poetry a step further. But on the other hand, 1832, which is approximately when the first drafts of all three of the Tennyson poems we're reading were written, is the date of the first Reform Bill, and therefore an era in which debates over the public responsibilities of the classes were very much in public view. Poetic traditions demanded, or at least taught, a poetry of the private self and of the imagination; the times demanded public engagement and responsibility.
One other thing we've seen: in Tennyson, at least, the urge to adopt a mask that underlies the dramatic monologue seems to be tied up with these tensions. In the "Lotos-Eaters," for example, speaking from the point of view of the lotos-eaters allows Tennyson to explore the socially unacceptable sides to his own view while still maintaining distance from them. Ulysses is a much more acceptably Victorian figure, but the mask allows Tennyson to explore the underside of the heroic figure. Worth noting again: many critics consider "Ulysses" to be the first true dramatic monologue.
"The Lady of Shalott"
http://www.iwu.edu/~wchapman/britpoet/shalottlinks.html
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/JWW_TheLadyOfShallot_1888.jpg
http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/shalott/art/waterhouse3.html
http://sandstead.com/images/wadsworth_athenaeum/HUNT_William_Holman_The_Lady_of_Shalott_1866-1905_Wadsworth_Athenaeum_source_Sandstead_d2h_09.jpg
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~suvir/favourites/images/paintings/waterhouse.lady-of-shalott.jpg
http://faculty.virginia.edu/eng-archive/web-content/Images/hunt_lady_of_shallot.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Cove/4353/shallot.html
The two most common ways of reading "The Lady of Shalott" are to read it as a poem about women and to read it as a poem about the artist. Since it fits more closely to the ideas we've been working with, I propose that we try to interpret the poem as a poem about art, but if we have time at the end we can try to combine the two themes. One way to do this: first answer the question, "what is the poem saying about art and artists?," then ask, "why does a poem about art and artists by a male Victorian poet feature a woman as the artist figure?"
Assume that the Lady is a figure of the artist. What do her circumstances imply about art and/or the artist?
So far in LoS:
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