Brit Lit: The Romantic Age--1785-1830 Quiz

Answer: William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) published "We Are Seven" as part of the highly influential "Lyrical Ballads", a book of poetry jointly written by Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book was groundbreaking and turned English poetry on its head, for instead of focusing on epic poetry, satire, and philosophic/political/social commentary, it focused on, as the title suggests, lyrical poetry and ballads but also on the common man, natural scenery, feelings, and spirituality.

In the famous "Preface" to the work, Wordsworth argues that a poet "is a man speaking to men" and that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility".

In "We Are Seven", the little girl frequently visits the cemetery where two of her siblings lie.

She often eats and plays by their graves and sometimes sings to them. The man who encounters her cannot understand her or her math, for she insists that she and her siblings number seven.

He tries to explain to her, "You run about, my little Maid, / Your limbs they are alive; / If two are in the church-yard laid, / Then ye are only five". She refuses to accept his reasoning, and by the end he grows frustrated with her and shouts, "But they are dead; those two are dead! / Their spirits are in heaven!" Then he concludes, "'Twas throwing words away, for still / The little Maid would have her will, / And said, 'Nay, we are seven!'"

Answer: Robert Burns

Robert Burns (1759-1796) was about to accept a position on a Jamaican plantation when he encountered success as a poet in 1786 with the publication of his collection "Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect". On the profits he earned, he returned to farming and married his love Jean Armour, with whom he already had two children.

When the farm failed, he moved to Dumfries, where he took a position as a tax collector, a position that perhaps seems unexpected to us when we consider that he was a man with no great love for government and was a supporter of both the American and the French Revolutions. Burns is today celebrated in Scotland as an important national figure.

He collected and revised numbers of Scottish songs, such as "Green Grow the Rashes", and wrote more than 200 himself, such us "Auld Lang Syne". Of course, he is admired for his poetry such as "To a Mouse", which includes the famous lines: "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley (go oft awry)". Of course, many misquote and refer to "the best laid plans".

Answer: William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) composed the poems in a collection entitled "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", which he published in 1794. Many of the "Songs of Innocence", such as "The Lamb", have a companion piece among the "Songs of Experience", such as "The Tyger". Blake believed that his companion poems represented the two contrary elements of the human soul and that both of these contrary elements must exist and exist in a balance.

His philosophy is most certainly captured in his famous questions posed in "The Tyger": "Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Of course, for Blake, the answer was "yes", for he believed that God made both the lamb and the tiger and thus that God made both innocence and its opposite. Blake's poetry became increasing more symbolic and radically religious following an experience that occurred in 1803.

When a soldier standing in Blake's garden refused to remove himself, Blake grew so angry that he pushed the soldier for fifty yards back to where the soldier was quartered. Blake was then charged with treason, a crime for which he would have been hanged, but he was found innocent of any wrongdoing and released. Nevertheless, the soldier, their altercation, and the trial haunted Blake's dreams and imagination for the rest of his life.

He grew more and more convinced that ominous and demonic forces were operating in the world to destroy or frustrate goodness. He began to speak out against the shallowness and blindness of people in the world around him.

Answer: Mary Wollstonecraft

"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was well received when it was published. Wollstonecraft argued that leaving the rearing of children to ignorant women made no sense and that wives made better companions to their educated husbands the more educated they themselves were. Furthermore, she argued that women were neither property nor ornaments but human beings with the same inherent rights as men possessed. Most found her reasoning sound.

However, after her death and her husband's subsequent publication of "Memoirs of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'", most of the public rejected her and her book as well.

Her husband William Godwin, the philosopher who advocated the abolition of marriage and spurred the anarchist movement, loved Wollstonecraft deeply and naively believed himself to be writing a loving biography of her life ruined her reputation by exposing to the public her extra-marital affairs, children born out of wedlock, and her attempts at suicide. Wollstonecraft died a couple of weeks after giving birth to Mary Godwin, who would later become Mary Shelley, the famed author of "Frankenstein". Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia, which was the result of a torn placenta that became infected.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) at one point in his early life planned to move to America with his friend Robert Southey, a man known for his radical religious and political views. The plan was to create an ideal democratic society on some property in Pennsylvania, and the scheme called for the creation of offspring. Thus, they had to have wives, and Coleridge became engaged to the sister of Southey's fiance.

The adventure never got off the ground; nevertheless, Coleridge kept his promise to marry Sara Fricker, despite his misery at being locked into a marriage.

His poem "The Eolian Harp", published in 1795, is about a box-shaped stringed instrument secured in an open window that makes musical sounds when the wind blows across it. Coleridge imagined that the wind was the spirit, the strings were the mind, and the music was the product of the creative activity of the mind. From that point, he ponders the possibility that all things in existence are ". . . but organic harps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of All".

In 1798, he and his friend William Wordsworth would publish their collaboration "Lyrical Ballads", within which is found one of Coleridge's most famous poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". In 1817, he published his "Biographia Literaria", a narrative of his life as a writer.

Answer: Frederick Wentworth

Frederick Wentworth is a captain and gallant naval officer in "Persuasion", published in 1817, and the object of the heroine Anne Elliot's affections. The other three are all clergymen. William Collins appears in "Pride and Prejudice", published in 1813.

He is the clergyman at Hunsford parsonage near the estate of his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the heir to the Bennet estate. He initially sets his sights on Jane Bennet until he discovers she is interested in another man; then he almost immediately begins paying attention to Elizabeth Bennet, who eventually rejects his repeated marriage proposals. Collins is presented as a vain, materialistic man, insensitive to beauty and feeling yet obsequious to those above him in social status.

Henry Tilney is the leading male character of "Northanger Abbey", published in 1817. He mentors, often patronizingly, the heroine Catherine Morland, and eventually falls in love with her because of her integrity and caring nature, despite her earlier error in thinking Tilney's father murdered Tilney's mother. Edmund Bertram is the lead male in "Mansfield Park", published in 1814.

He is the younger son of the wealthy Bertrams, with whom the heroine Fanny Price has gone to live. He is the only Bertram child with both a good head and a good heart and, after an ill-fated relationship with Mary Craword, realizes he loves Fanny.

Answer: Thomas De Quincey

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was an early admirer of both Wordsworth and Coleridge. In fact, he once gave Coleridge a £300 anonymous gift and later took up residence near the Wordsworths. Unfortunately, De Quincey eventually became addicted to what he described as "th $n .e pleasures and pains of opium"; he was never able to escape his addiction and was plagued by physical suffering and terrifying nightmares for the rest of his life.

The addiction started, as was often the case, after doctors advised him to use opium to help with a variety of painful ailments he was experiencing.

Many of his writings begin with something factual, something in the realm of reality, but then meander into an exploration of the dark side of human consciousness, where he speaks of his encounters with the grotesque and his feelings of angst, guilt, and alienation.

He speaks of symbolic and archetypal imagery in his dreams long before Freud and Jung existed. His literary criticism, such as "On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth'", is also significant, mainly because of his elaborate impressions stemming from his own experiences while reading.

Answer: Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) also had success as a novelist with the four-volume "Emmeline", the five-volume "Ethelinde", the four-volume "The Old Manor House", and several others. She even wrote children's stories. William Wordsworth wrote around five hundred sonnets in the early 1800s; he had read Smith's sonnets while he was a student at Cambridge and credited her with having influenced him.

He once explained, Smith "wrote . . . with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets". Coleridge also wrote, "Charlotte Smith and [William Lisle] Bowles are they who first made the Sonnet popular among the present English". Because of Smith's influence, Coleridge also began writing more conversational poetry such as "The Eolian Harp" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison".

Unfortunately, in a male-dominated canon of literature and a male-dominated education system, it is, of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as Byron, Shelley, and Keats who tend to get all the attention. Examples of her focus on nature and strong emotional responses to what she is experiencing are captured in lines such as these: "Another May new buds and flowers shall bring; / Ah! why has happiness--no second Spring?" ("Written at the Close of Spring") or "Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; / But vain to them the winds and waters rave; / They hear the warring elements no more: / While I am doom'd--by life's long storm opprest, / To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest" ("Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex").

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is one of the Romantic Age's most well-known figures not only because of his poetry, like "Ozymandias", "Ode to the West Wind", and "Mont Blanc", but also because of his personal life. After eloping with Harriet Westbrook, he eventually became a mentee of the philosopher William Godwin.

He then fell in love with Godwin's daughter Mary, who was also the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. He eloped with her, alienated himself from Godwin and the English public at large, and then offered Harriet to come and live with him and Mary in France, where she could live as a "sister" to them both. Harriet, of course, refused and later killed herself. Percy and Mary Shelley moved to Italy, where Shelley wrote "Prometheus Unbound" and several other famous pieces. According to the original myth, Prometheus stole fire from Heaven against Zeus's will to give it to human beings so that they might have light and warmth. Zeus punished Prometheus by having him chained to a mountain side, where vultures came and pecked out his liver. Prometheus eventually repented and was accepted back into Zeus's favor, according to the play "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus.

Shelley could not stand this idea, for he believed that if Prometheus repented, Prometheus would be asking forgiveness from a cruel god who perversely wanted to keep his own people without light and warmth and that Prometheus would make meaningless his compassionate sacrifice for mankind. In many ways, Shelley compares Prometheus to Satan. Both rebel against their gods; however, while Satan rebels for ambition, envy, hatred, and destructiveness, Prometheus rebels for compassion and justice. Thus, Shelley suggests that rebellion for the sake of doing what is morally correct is justifiable.

Answer: Darkness

George Gordon, Lord Byron, (1788-1824) is much more well-known for his master works "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" as well as his shorter lyrical verses like "She Walks in Beauty" or "So, We'll Go No More a Roving". However, "Darkness", published in 1816, is certainly an interesting poem itself.

It begins, "I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air".

However, the reader of the poem soon comes to realize that the earth is enshrouded in a darkness other than the physical or visual kind. Human beings are presented as selfish beasts with no enlightened souls.

As humans begin to starve, they turn on one another, and as Byron describes, "they were slain for food" and "no love was left; / All earth was but one thought--and that was death". In the end, only two men are left. They had been enemies earlier in life, but in the darkness, they cannot discern who the other is.

They help each other to build a fire, only to see in the light finally who the other is. At this moment of ironic recognition, they both die in their shock and hatred.

Answer: John Clare

John Clare (1793-1864) was born of a barely literate field laborer and a completely illiterate mother. He began composing his own verse in his youth for the purpose of whiling away his time while working in the fields. He had very little schooling, only enough to be just able to read and write.

In 1820, he published a book of poems entitled "Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery". He attracted great critical attention, particularly among those who felt he represented the Romantic ideal of what a poet should be; however, his next three books were failures, and these among other stressors caused him to suffer emotional illness to such an extent that in 1837 he began living in an asylum.

The place was more of a refuge than anything else, for he was allowed to wander freely about the countryside and continue writing his poetry. "I am" rivals some of Shelley's, Byron's, and Keats' poems in which they express romantic angst, and "The Nightingale's Nest" and "Mouse's Nest" capture a purer rustic impressionism than Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Burns' "To a Mouse".

As was explained earlier, Clare was minimally educated, and his original copies contain grossly misspelled words, poor grammar and syntax, and hardly any punctuation. Editors of the 1800s attempted to "clean up" Clare's writing so that finding original copies of his work is quite difficult.

Answer: Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh and grew up with a fascination for history, folklore, and ballads. His father was a lawyer, and Scott himself became trained in the law; he served as sheriff (or a local judge) of Selkirkshire and later as clerk of session (or secretary to the highest civil court in Scotland).

His first novel, "Waverly", which he published in 1814, explored the Jacobite rebellion. He would go on to write such novels as "Old Mortality" (1816), "Rob Roy" (1817), "The Heart of Midlothian" (1818), and "Ivanhoe" (1819). Most of his novels created a highly entertaining blend of fiction and history, represented (like Byron) a flair for grandiosity in intense action/adventure and romantic love affairs, and often portrayed a hero who attempts to create a transition from the fading "old world" of chivalry and violence to the emerging "new world" in dire need of a life of meaning and principle.

Interestingly, Scott published all of his novels anonymously. In 1826, his own publishing firm failed financially, and he spent the rest of his life attempting to recover and pay off his debt.

Unfortunately, not until after his death were his creditors completely paid off from the sale of his books.

Answer: John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) wrote several letters that have been collected and preserved for future scholars of poetry to read. The letter in the question--"To Benjamin Bailey"--is one of the more important ones, but so is "To George and Thomas Keats". In this letter, Keats explains his theory of "negative capability", the ability to write about subjects by presenting them objectively, that is without feeling compelled to explain what cannot or perhaps what ought not be explained. Poets should strive to present material in such a manner that appeals to the reader's sense of beauty and nothing more. Keats is, of course, mostly known for his odes: "Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and others.

However, he is also famous for his narrative poetry, such as "Endymion", "The Eve of St. Agnes", and "La Belle Dame sans Merci", as well as his sonnets, such as "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "When I have fears that I may cease to be". Keats died at a very young age--25--of tuberculosis. Perhaps, he had reached the pinnacle of his greatness very early, or perhaps he would have gone on to excel the accomplishments of those typically regarded as England's greatest poets.

When Keats wrote his last poem at the age of 24, he had already surpassed what Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had accomplished by that same age.

Answer: "Dracula" by Bram Stoker

"Dracula" by Bram Stoker was published in 1897 at the height of the Victorian Age. Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" was published in 1764; Anne Radcliffe's "The Mysteries of Udolpho", in 1794; Matthew Gregory Lewis' "The Monk", in 1797; and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "Frankenstein", in 1818. Most of these tales were dependent upon a particular formula, which included a setting of a gloomy castle from the Middle Ages, a decaying mansion with dark and moist dungeons and secret passages, or a depressing and craggy landscape.

The novels also often included ghosts, supernatural phenomena, and the sexual persecution of a beautiful maiden. Finally, most of these works usually explored the dark, irrational side of human nature--a depraved devotion to selfish desires, perverse impulses and obsessions, and nightmarish terrors and phobias that lay within the subconscious.

Answer: The Prelude

William Wordsworth began working on "The Prelude" in 1798, and he originally planned to write it in two parts. However, by the end of his life, he had written enough to compose fourteen separate Books (or volumes). Its enlargement seems to stem partially from his decision to include his experiences in France as a young man and his ensuing mental and emotional crisis after the failure of the French Revolution.

While in France, Wordsworth began his support of the Revolution, and he also fell in love with Annette Vallon.

However, after she became pregnant with their child, he returned to England to gather more money with which he could support a family. Unfortunately, while at home, war broke out between England and France, and Wordsworth was denied re-entry to France.

By the time he could return, Vallon's affections had cooled, and she no longer wished to be with him. The loss of his lover and his child coupled with the failure of the French Revolution to usher in an age of moral social reform led Wordsworth to an emotional breakdown, the details of which he relates in "The Prelude". Overall, the goal of "The Prelude" became a presentation of life as a circular journey, an attempt to show life as a quest to return from which we came while experiencing that point of origin for the first time as it was meant to be experienced.