The Relationship Between Lord Byron and the Romantic movement - Essay Example

The Relationship between Lord Byron and the Romantic Movement Introduction Having been the most fashionable poet of those decades, Lord Byron was likewise the most notorious and flamboyant major of Romantics. In his list of his creations, there is immense works of a popular Romantic hero that comprise of melancholy, defiant, and secret guilt that haunted him. Additionally, he is a Romantic’s paradox, which is otherwise a leader of the poetic revolution era. Lord Byron is a Romantic’s paradox since he used interesting mix of categories to avoid idolizing Romanticism. Lord Byron otherwise known as George Gordon named Alexander Pope as his teacher or master. He was an ideal worshiper of the ideal who never lost grip with the reality (Chaplain and Faflak, 2011:43). Revised literary thread of Lord Byron’s work shows that he was highly influenced by Calvinism and Romanticism provided just the perfect means to finding meaning to life. Lord Byron was an ideal worshiper of Calvinism. Sources present him as a freethinker and a deist who retained a Calvinist sense of original sin from his young age as well as a peer realm. This paper will seek to present the relationship between Lord Byron and the Romantic Movement as well as research to give a clear overview of romanticism and his influence on the era. In addition, this paper will also show how he differed or related to his contemporaries of the era who include William Wordsmith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats among others. Creation of romanticism Pure evidence shows that Lord Byron was a child born and raised in a poor family. Having been born in poverty wrecked background; his rise into high rank did not set him free of difficulties and had much to take care of while determining his future career. The verses he wrote in Prometheus painted a clear picture portraying the economic conditions of his time whereby, if he could have been born in a wealthy family, he would have never been the poem Revolutionist. This is seldom believable since he wrote verses in whatever circumstances surrounding his conditions of birth. At this instance, it is possible to define romanticism where research findings and definitions sum up their explanation for romanticism as an artistic and literary intellectual movement that had its roots in England (Narayan, 2010:7). It existed towards the fall of the 18th century. It had its peak during the approximate years between 1800 and 1840. The Romantic Movement was partly a reaction of the Industrial Revolution where it resolved to revolt against the atrocities brought forth by aristocratic political and social norms of the Age of Enlightenment. This movement also reacted following the scientific attempt to rationalize nature where it embodied mostly and strongly in the literature, visual arts, and music. However, its actions had a huge impact on things like education, historiography, and the natural sciences. Regarding its effects on politics, they were complex and considerable. The peak of the Romantic Movement associated this period with radicalism and nationalism and in the end; its impacts on nationalism were more significant. This movement valued strong emotion as the backbone of its authentic aesthetic source of experience and placed new emphasis on such emotions like horror, trepidation, and terror (Natarajan, 2007:217). It also stressed on awe, which artists experienced while confronting the sublimity of things such as untamed nature in association with its picturesque qualities. Despite the fact that this movement had its roots in the German Storm and Stress movement which at all cost prized emotion and intuition in Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of revolution that took place in France laid background and foundation from which Romanticism emerged. The confines surrounding Industrial revolution also influenced the movement that was partly the escape from modern realities and indeed the second half of the 19th century. Realism presented a polarized offer for Romanticism. Romanticism prominence the achievements attained by what it perceived as heroic artists and individualists whose spear heading instances would lofty the society (Carazo and University of Missouri- Kansas City 2008:98). In addition, it legitimized personal imagination as a crucial authority that allowed freedom from classical form of art and notions. Creation of romanticism presented its ideas with a strong recourse that revolved around natural and historical inevitability. Romantics commonly referred to this formula as zeitgeist. Romantic Movement creation also offered a transformation regarding how people thought about art and writing among other endeavors of creation. Romanticism era that began in the wake of 1700s created change and deliverance from one notion to another throughout its existence that ceased in the midst of the nineteenth century. Due to its cravings for change, it shifted people’s way of thinking singling out the importance of emotions and vision with correspondence to art and creativity. The Romantic Movement artists and writers led to creation of works that feasted over nature and spirit of individual thinking. Their common ingredients composed of three constituents that included imagination, emotion, and independent thinking (Crisafulli and Pietropoli, 2008:12). Fact-findings reveal that once this movement set its roots into being, people tossed out the traditional and conventional stale rules of thinking with immediate effect in order to give room for completely new dimension to artistic creation such as Lord Byron’s poems, aristomenes, ballad, and away, away, ye notes of woe. Lord Byron landed densely in the field of poetry through inspiration by his cousin Margaret Parker where he dashed firstly into poetry. Upon her death, two years down the line, Lord Byron dropped his composition of “On the Death of a Young Lady” and throughout his life, poetry served him as a catharsis of strapping emotion (Berwick, Goslee, and Hoeveler, 2012:102). Upon schooling early, Lord Byron instilled total dedication towards reading and preferably a grand passion for history that later informed much of his writings. This is evident in poems such as when we two parted that talked of his love. He became the number six Baron Byron of Rockdale and inherited the Newstead Abbey, which was the family seat in Nottinghamshire after the death of his great uncle otherwise referred to as the “Wicked” fifth Lord Byron (Wasson, 2012:66). He spent most of his time at Harrow in years between 1801 and 1805 where he excelled in oratory, played sports, and wrote verses. When Byron fell deeply in love with his distant cousin during the summer of 1803, he interrupted his education for a whole term in order to go and stay close to her. Due to his unrequited passion, he found expression for some of his poems such as “Hills of Annesley” and “The Adieu” (Cunningham and Reich, 2009:76). In the wake of 1804, he grew apart with his coarse mother and developed an intimate correspondence with his half sister, Augusta who was five years senior. Nevertheless, while he was romantically involved, he underwent a violent, but surprisingly pure passion and affection for poetry. He prepared publication for his verses in South well, a place where his mother had moved in 1803 (Grumman, 2007:198). He began distributing them in 1806 in this place starting with his poetry book named “Fugitive Pieces. His advisor, Reverend John Thomas Belcher who was a local minister objected some of his lines due to their frank eroticism. Poems like the girl of Cadiz and the Giaour faced some tense due to their frank eroticism. From October 1805 to July 1808, Lord Byron was a college student at Trinity College, Cambridge where he received an M.A. degree. Industrial Revolution and Romanticism Many consider industrial Revolution to have had a big impact on the writer’s choice of language and image in their works. This because, by the time Industrial Revolution took hold of the time, many artists differed with ideals that it espoused. The ideals that Industrial Revolution presented that led to differences between different artists and writers included temperance, structure, discipline, and expressions of the Enlightenment. Later, these feelings turned into Romantic Movement that encouraged individualism, emotion, and freedom. Industrial Revolution influenced Romanticism in years between 1800 and 1850 where it generally assumed the characteristics of a highly imaginative and subjective approach, visionary or dreamlike quality, and emotional intensity (White, 2008:56). Lord Byron in conjunction with other artists played a big role in bringing out dimensions of the Industrial Revolution that influenced the course of Romanticism. When the Industrial Revolution started, it brought about a dramatic change in social structure of society. Prior its commencement, people used to live small villages where they worked in either agriculture or skilled artisanship. People enjoyed working together as a family and lending a hand to the others (White, 2008:63). Nevertheless, upon entry of Industrial Revolution, this system changed drastically. It left many poor farmers bankrupt and jobless since the new enclosure laws required them to fence their grazing land using their own means and many of them could not settle the expenses (Lau, 2009:3). Introduction of machines, because of Industrial Revolution, forced small hand weavers into redundancy as machines could do their work much faster and cheaply. As elaborated, rationalists and philosophers’ ideas dominated the age of reason and created the hope and vision a new and different world where science and technology had a purpose of solving man’s economic problems. Simultaneously, this age presented an opportunity in which science and technology would give people a well-ordered society with justice and equality. Rationalism and science promised a new Golden Age but the reality failed to match up to the dream. The result of the Age of Reason came in twofold upheaval. At first, the aftermath of terror brought in by the French Revolution followed by the new restrictions of individual freedom under the command of Napoleon. Secondly, the Industrial Revolution that led to destruction of the old fashion of living and initiated an early phase that created social injustice and visual squalor (Faflak and Wright, 2012:200). Following the mechanistic age that posed a threat of swamping individual imagination and freedom, an upsurge of artists among other creative individuals formed an anti-scientific movement. With reference to the nature’s supremacy over human heroism and man’s invention, death became inevitable. Consequently, these presented an upsurge of tragic emotional themes of the Romantic Movement. Lord Byron presented the most powerful expressions in his poetry where he often painted his work literally with great sensation and passion. English romanticism acquired two directions since England was free of wars. The first one took revival of medieval art while the second based on legend and themes of nature (Open University A207 Course Team and Watson, 2004:48). Some romantic writers used influence of the Industrial Revolution that brought about new technology as well as the new science of meteorology to make an analytical formation of cloud by ignoring the Industrial Revolution realities. Religion Developments that came along with the Romantic Movement are complex as regards religion. During this period, writers transformed religion into a major subject where they treated it with artistic tune upon removing the traditional art of religion. Even though the Enlightenment had weakened, uprooting it was hard since it had established religion in Europe. As time went by, sophisticated artists and writers appeared less likely to be conventionally pious. Nonetheless, at the era of the Romantic Movement, religious imagery drawn many of the artists and writers in the same direction as Arthurian and the other ancient traditions that they believed no more had drawn them (Carazo and University of Missouri- Kansas City 2008:136). They etherized religion and writers felt free to pull together Biblical themes with the uniform freedom as their predecessors drew on classical mythology. They drew these Biblical themes with the same little reverence. Writers and artists exclaimed that “Faust” began and ended in Heaven whereby God and the devil were the major characters. On the other hand, angels and demons were supporting players and drew a wide variety of Christian materials. However, it is worthwhile noting that, this was not a Christian play. The hold of Christianity in the society had weakened due to the presence of the Enlightenment to the level that some of them no longer saw the requirement of engaging in the sort of fierce battles with Christianity (Lau, 2009:93). Their attitude is comparable to the works of the English pre Raphaelite painters who started in mid-century and treated Christian subjects in the context of charmingly naive Medievalism. Medievalism brought forth the joy of classical art that Romantics like Lord Byron celebrated throughout 12th to 14th centuries. Byron’s influence on the era Classical culture value Lord Byron was a staunch pal of the classical world where he grieved what seemed to him the desecration of its cultural traditions and achievements. While he travelled through Greece, he witnessed the dilapidated state of famous ruins, part of which turned to uses that are more mundane in the past. Additionally, he vilified Lord Elgin of England making him the chief despoiler of ancient treasures since he procured a number of marble statutes from Greece and displayed them in England (Wasson, 2012:101). As such, he became Byron’s primary target and a sign of cultural oppression the same way Turkey and Napoleon became signs of political oppression. Realism in literature Despite the fact that Byron was a Romantic poet, he saw much of his figurative work as descriptions of reality as it existed as opposed to how people imagined it. This shows that most of his subjects depicted in his poems are fruits of his personal experiences and history. Byron inspired people through his poems since he drew reasonable and tacit models of life experiences such as “the Prisoner of Chillan”. This was an inspirational poem written to describe the real life of Francois de Bonnivard that he underwent while in was in prison. Through his artistry, he influenced biographical writing via travelogue as opposed to adventure tale. He wrote the apocalyptic “Darkness” in order to reflect on the mass hysteria that up surged out of superstitious prophetic revelations that related to natural disasters of volcano eruption (Chaplain and Faflak, 2011:77). The arts’ power of endurance Apart from believing the loss of culture of classics via the despoiling of Greek ruins, Lord Byron saw permanence in the art founded and created by these cultures in conjunction with his own contemporaries. In canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron noted that in spite of the greatest decline in civilizations, his art and literature remained. He influenced the Romantic Movement era by contrasting to oppressive power of oppression such as that seen in nations like Napoleon’s France. He used his artistic power to bring out creative nature that did not exist until that instance (Ruskin and William, 2004:155). Still in this theme, Lord Byron engaged his poetry in demonstrating the ephemeral nature of human civilization and at the same time creating works of art that would stay as long as any empire of his own day. His influence on visual arts Painting in Europe, pioneered by a new generation of the French school, the sensibility of Romanticism contrasted with the neoclassicism that tutors taught in academics. Within a revived clash between design and color, the mood of color and its expressiveness emphasized in the new prominence that came along with brushstroke and impasto of the artists, free handling of paint. This tended to have a representation in the neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish. Through romanticism, Lord Byron influenced other artists in using Romanticism to express their ideas via paintings (Cunningham and Reich, 2009:144). His affluence on his American contemporaries led to use of verses to distinguish and remember presence of powerful scenes that are only available in America. To some extent, a number of American paintings influenced by Lord Byron promoted the literary idea summed up as noble savage. Individualism Lord Byron’s influence led to one of the most crucial developments that the Romantic era achieved the rise of importance of individualism. Prior the eighteenth century, just a few Europeans concerned themselves with unleashing their own individual identities. They stayed the way they came into this world peasants, nobles, or merchants. However, as capitalism and mercantilism gradually transformed the European nation, it destabilized the old patterns. The upcoming industrialists were fond of crediting themselves for having built their large amounts of fortunes and denied the right of society to regulate or control taxation in their enterprises. At times, they tried fitting into the society by buying their titles but more often developed their individual tastes in arts and ended up creating artistic and social movements alien to the old aristocracy (Lau, 2009:194). Analytical presentation of the Romantic Movement shows this process as operating in part of early Renaissance in the Netherlands. The Industrial Revolution led to a transformed economy, which resulted to attractive individualism in the eyes of the newly rich people. Moreover, it led to a free market in the field of arts in which entrepreneurial painters, writers, and composers could seek out audience that could sympathize with them and pay them for their works. Still in this subject, individualism generated artistic power that no longer confined artistic market to a handful of Church and aristocratic patrons who in large numbers shared the same values (Lau, 2009:201). Due to individualism, artists could at this point afford to pursue their tastes individually in a way that was not possible during the time of Renaissance. Alike to his contemporaries of the era Most contemporaries including Lord Byron felt the need to touch about the relationship shared between the Romantic Movement and nature. Therefore, most of the ways in which the Western world celebrates nature today emerged from the Romantic period. The Enlightenment presented talks of natural law as the antique source of truth. However, this law manifested within the human society and related principally to civic behavior. Europeans, as opposed to Chinese and Japanese, traditionally had very little interest in natural landscapes for their own sake (Benson, 2001:1). They usually idealized the paintings of nature as extremely tended gardens or tidy versions of the Arcadian myth that is generally ancient Rome and Greece. Lord Byron loved to address atrocities brought about by rogue ruling. Furthermore, his works traverses series of life experiences, emotions, and nature appearance as well as mounts of figure incorporated with bad behavior such as drinking, bisexuality, and rage among other vices. As nature pulled the opposites and sometimes exercised an evil power, it tended to dehumanize and degrade those gradually drawn to it. The Romantics, the same way they cultivated sensitivity to the general emotion, they uniformly cultivated nature sensitivity. They later came to feel that, to muse a stream, to view a thundering waterfall, or precisely confront a rolling desert could gain a moral improvement (Cunningham and Reich, 2009:117). Most of writings regarding nature as expressed by almost every Romanticist, took place in the 19th century where it had religious absenteeism. Marginally, this effect of shift in attitude towards nature as depicted by most of Romantic poets and artists like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, prove a long lasting and an extremely powerful likeness or love for wilderness by Britons, Germans, and Americans. Close textual reference Poem analysis The Destruction of Sennacherib", by Lord Byron Lord Byron’s work is very influential in the Romanticism era as well as to date. This is because in the poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib" Lord Byron puts forward language in which one can derive adequate pleasure from part of the fundamental tools of poetry that he uses. In a poet’s toolbox, there are different elements that he uses to bring out contextual meaning basing facts of real situations. For instance, in this poem in line three stanzas two, Lord Byron uses rhyme and meter to bring out meaning of terminologies currently used but commonly incorporated by many Romantics (Frantz, 2007:99). In the first stanza of this poem, Byron describes the appearance of the Assyrians, their movement, their color, among other tiny factors. The use of language shares an intense knowledge that can describe almost every tiny bit of an object depicting his power of words in the Romantic Movement. As such, his use of rhyme and meter is rewarding and evident especially if the reader reads the poem loudly. The works of Romantic Movement elevated ancient custom and folk art and engaged in something noble that made spontaneous and desirable characteristic of the musical impromptu (Frantz, 2007:19). It argued for a natural epistemology of human activities giving considerations for nature control in the form of customary and language usage. Romanticism traversed beyond Classicist and rational ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and art elements as well as narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an effort to escape the confines brought about by population growth, industrialization, and urban sprawl. Furthermore, it also sought to embrace the unfamiliar and exotic as well as distant authenticity of harnessing the power of imagining and envisioning escape. This is evident in stanza three. Byron’s choice of words is very powerful and rolling giving evidence of rhythm that makes the whole factor of rhyme impossible to ignore. Actually, the physicality of the choice of words and language accounts for the largest measure of the poem’s impact. In this case, we are talking about the texture, how it feels to read and understand the poem as well as how it sounds to hear the flow of words. With reference to what Byron put down into writing in this poem, the poem does not contain any hidden context, deep meaning, or symbolic appeal. In fact, it is as simple and pleasurable to read, hear, and say the words. As a result, it becomes of great importance when one tries to question why the used language is pleasurable (Giuccioli, Rees, and Cohan, 2005:103). Additionally, it appears confusing upon attempting to account for how Byron conformed to this effect. Through romanticism, Lord Byron played an essential role in the awakening of the nations within Central Europe. He influenced the wake of many people lacking their own national states, at least in Poland, which had a recent loss of independence upon the Russia’s army crushing the Polish Rebellion under the command of Nicholas I. By use of art and poetry, he influenced the revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, traditions, and customs. His contemporaries helped him to paint using art, a platform that could distinguish their indigenous cultures from those shared by the dominant nations that could crystallize the myth graphic Romantic nationalism (Ruskin and William, 2004:186). Having influenced other artists and poets, he used his creative power to set in place patriotism, revolution, nationalism, and armed struggle for independence that later became popular themes in artistic point of view during this ear. “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” In this poem, it is surprising that the lines do not just have simple rhythm: they have regulated rhythm, which is uniform in every line. According to many, not all poems have regular rhythm. A poem that has regular rhythm is said to a particular meter. In Lord Byron’s “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair” every line contains a pattern, which is basic whereby; it has two unstressed syllables succeeded by a stressed syllable that comes in third. Byron repeats this basic pattern four times within a single line. Language analysts refer to these basic patterns as feet, term such pattern as weak-strong, and give it the name anapest. They go ahead to say that, a line that has four feet is a tetrameter. They derive the name from a Greek word tetra, which stands for four. Given this poem, it is agreeable that it has an appropriate and pleasurable rhythm. Nevertheless, this rhythm has a name whereby it describes method used in writing the poem (Ruskin and William, 2004:13). The poem has writing method called anapestic tetrameter. Those who use this procedure of analyzing poems call it scansion. During the Romanticism era, different romantics used language to describe the prevailing situations and activities coupling life experiences. Lord Byron entangled the nature of activities and the appeal of language to draw a common grounded system that used rhythms of poems and other creative works to assert the nature of experiences. Use of rhyme developed understanding and remembrance where using rhyme, he could repeat the same word repeatedly in order to generate the correct meaning by stressing. As elaborated, not all poems rhyme. With Lord Byron’s poems, there are instances full of rhyme that follows a particular pattern that others do not. Rhymes in his poem go in handy with one another thus emphasizing on sound, language, and nature. As such, Lord Byron was in a position to describe the nature of the time, language of the period, and the sound appropriate for addressing conceptual meaning of romantic experiences (Frantz, 2007:113). By use of the rhyming lines in the poem, it is sensible to finalize that Lord Byron’s choice of language brought about an appropriate rhyme pattern the used rhyming lines called couplets to foster physical nature, sound, and emphasis of alliteration. The evidence provided in some of Lord Byron’s works depicts disbelief and fascination with religion. In line four stanza one, it also illustrates an overall principal of intellectual history whereby, artistic and social movements almost did not behave like rigid clock pendulums that swung all the way from one point to another. This shows that they appeared shaking and almost never at a constant stand. A better metaphor that could work in place for social transformation is the frequent movement of waves on a beach whereby, an early wave is receding and at the same time, another advance over it and the two elements become mixed (Ruskin and William, 2004:91). To sum up the whole explanation, all of this poem’s features reacted in response to the rationale Enlightenment. Moreover, Romanticism incorporated much from the previous movement and coexisted with the changes that it bred. Conclusion and Byronic information link with Marxist According to the Marxist theory, (used to elaborate thesis and antithesis positions) at the beginning, the society that exists is the thesis, which has power vested in a particular class whereby, Marx in his conditions is the owner of the production means. In opposition is the antithesis whereby it is the group in need of change but lacks power. With reference to Marx’s theory, writers and artists could only instigate social change via revolution. With this respect, although Marxist believes that the result of revolution is synthesis, which is a combination between the thesis and the antithesis, a postmodern view would be that the result of the revolution would be communism. In conclusion, Romanticism calls for continuous number of movements, just as the Enlightenment. These numerous movements include Impressionism, Realism, Neo-classism, among others. Nonetheless, like the Enlightenment it keeps on moving forward despite the fact that none of these was to take place for the Romantic impulse. In fiction and film, hard-bitten naturalism coexists today with sweeping romanticism (Faflak and Wright, 2012:234). The Romantic Movement, as professed by Lord Byron, was more successful in the process of transforming history and the human definition. Bibliography Benson, J. 2001. Romanticism as embodied by Goya and Turner. Available from http://artofthefirebird.com/writing/Romanticism.pdf [Accessed May 1, 2012]. Burwick, F., Goslee, N. and Hoeveler, D. 2012. The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. Routledge: John Wiley & Sons. Carano, C. and University of Missouri- Kansas City 2008. Mad Lords and Irishmen: Representations of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde Since 1967. Manila: ProQuest. Chaplan, S. and Faflak, J. 2011. The Romanticism Handbook. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Crisafulli, L. and Pietropoli, C. 2008. 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