FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS DA USP
Área de Estudos Linguísticos e Literários em Inglês
MOVIMENTOS DA POESIA 2017 (FLM 0575) – EVENING GROUP
MID SEMESTER EVALUATION ACTIVITY (WORTH 4 POINTS)
Instructions
This Evaluation Activity covers the topics discussed in the first part of the course:
William Blake’s and William Wordsworth’s poems.
Please, choose and answer ONE question from part 1 and ONE question from part 2.
Each question is worth 2 (two) points.
Each question is preceded by a critical passage related to the poem or aspect it deals
with. You may refer to these critical passages in your answers if you want to.
Use your own words and ideas in the answer.
Deadline: May 15
Send your Mid Semester Evaluation file in a message specifically
addressed to [email protected]
PART I: WILLIAM BLAKE
Blake, from his very childhood, knew two worlds, city and country: the innocence of
green fields, and the experience of industrial revolution; a pastoral heaven, and a hell of
'dark satanic mills'. It is characteristic of his whole philosophy that he took both into
account. A less courageous soul might well have hated the city and loved the fields, or,
like Dr. Johnson, loved the coffeehouses and shrunk from the solitudes of nature. Blake
felt with full intensity the martyrdom of the toiling, suffering humanity of London, and
he loved fields, green mountains, summer trees; but he saw the human spirit at work
alike amid the furnaces of hell and the fountains of paradise.
Source: RAINE, Kathleen. William Blake. Longmans, Green. London. 1951.
Pg.10
London was to Blake both home and school, both Pandemonium and Celestial City.[…]
To those who know London to-day, it is hard to realize that a London boy might have
found green fields, elm-trees, lanes and footpaths and ponds within walking distance of
Soho; the great cancerous proliferation of bricks and mortar that extends now for so
many miles round a city, many of whose features remain much as Blake knew them, has
utterly obliterated the trees and cornfields of Peckham Rye, where, as a young boy,
Blake saw angels walking among the harvesters.
Source: RAINE, Kathleen. William Blake. Op. cit. Pg. 9
The Romantic poets more typically saw the city as exemplifying the misery and want
that urban life and the Industrial Revolution brought to the working poor. William
Blake was one of the first poets to draw attention to their plight. In “London” (1794),
written about the same time as Robinson's and Wordsworth's descriptions, Blake paints
a much more chilling portrait of the inhabitants of the city. As the poet “wander[s]”
through the city streets, he sees in every face “marks of weakness, marks of woe.” From
the faces, the poet moves to the sounds of the city, and again the misery of the people is
the subject of his startling images of an un-Christian world where the poor are
neglected, exploited, and despised. The chimney-sweeper's cry “appalls” the “blackning
Church,” while the soldier's sigh “runs in blood down Palace walls.” Most violent of all
these perversions of human nature, twisted in the “mind-forg'd manacles” of modern
city life, is the harlot's curse (venereal disease) that destroys both infant and marriage.
Source: GLANCY ,Ruth. Thematic Guide to British Poetry. Greenwood Press.
Westport, CT. 2002. Pg. 107
QUESTION 1: Comment on the representation of city and country in the poems by
Blake read and discussed in class.
********
Like Blake, William Wordsworth is always associated with the theme of innocence and
experience because he idealized childhood as a time of powerful imagination and
natural spirituality. His “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1802–1804) has already
been discussed as explaining his belief in the preexistence of the soul, thus accounting
for the child's superior powers of intuition and perception. The short lyric “My Heart
Leaps Up” (1802) also exemplifies Wordsworth's faith in the child. Although as an
adult he is still stirred by the sight of a rainbow, his innate early response to it makes
this later response possible. “The child is father of the man,” he argues, because the
child's intuition gives rise to any sense of the divine that the adult may have. “Natural
piety” binds the adult to the child; the adult thus learns, not from experience, but from
retaining childhood innocence.
Source: GLANCY ,Ruth. Thematic Guide to British Poetry. Op. cit. Page
number: 116
The contrasting ideas of innocence and experience are most commonly associated with
the Romantic movement—William Blake and William Wordsworth in particular. The
Romantic poets believed that children were more spiritually aware and more simply
moral than adults because their imaginations had not been curbed by institutional
thinking. The Romantics were responding to two views of children that were widely
held in the eighteenth century, both antithetical to them. Rationalists like John Locke
held that we come into the world with no innate perceptions (what the Romantics would
call imagination), and thus education was all important. Until the child is educated and
experienced, he has no contribution to make. Equally critical of children but from a
different perspective were Puritanical Christians, whose belief in Original Sin led to the
conviction that children come into the world in a state of sin and have to be educated
(and disciplined) into righteousness. Romanticism, in response, held that experience
(living in the everyday world, beset by human rules and narrow-minded conformity)
deprives us of our imaginative, creative impulses and hardens us, if not into realists and
cynics, at least into disappointed, materialistic adults too busy with “life” to appreciate
the natural world and experience wonder and joy. The Romantics brought innocence as
a virtue back into the real world. Christian belief had placed innocence in the Garden of
Eden; Adam and Eve lost their innocence and were driven out of the Garden into the
real world (of experience) because they desired (and received—by eating from the
forbidden tree) knowledge of good and evil. The ancients also saw innocence as an
early stage in mankind's development, a “Golden Age” long ago when men lived in
harmony with nature and there was no evil. Such an innocent, Utopian world is no
longer attainable in these systems, For some poets, childhood innocence implies a prior
existence with God, a former blessed state that is remembered by the child and accounts
for his recognition of the divine in the world. Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” (1802–1804) describes the gradual loss of this innocence in the real world
of experience, described as the “prison house” that closes around the growing child.
[…]
The contrasting ideas of innocence and experience are most commonly associated with
the Romantic movement—William Blake and William Wordsworth in particular. The
Romantic poets believed that children were more spiritually aware and more simply
moral than adults because their imaginations had not been curbed by institutional
thinking. The Romantics were responding to two views of children that were widely
held in the eighteenth century, both antithetical to them. Rationalists like John Locke
held that we come into the world with no innate perceptions (what the Romantics would
call imagination), and thus education was all important. Until the child is educated and
experienced, he has no contribution to make. Equally critical of children but from a
different perspective were Puritanical Christians, whose belief in Original Sin led to the
conviction that children come into the world in a state of sin and have to be educated
(and disciplined) into righteousness. Romanticism, in response, held that experience
(living in the everyday world, beset by human rules and narrow-minded conformity)
deprives us of our imaginative, creative impulses and hardens us, if not into realists and
cynics, at least into disappointed, materialistic adults too busy with “life” to appreciate
the natural world and experience wonder and joy. The Romantics brought innocence as
a virtue back into the real world. Christian belief had placed innocence in the Garden of
Eden; Adam and Eve lost their innocence and were driven out of the Garden into the
real world (of experience) because they desired (and received—by eating from the
forbidden tree) knowledge of good and evil. The ancients also saw innocence as an
early stage in mankind's development, a “Golden Age” long ago when men lived in
harmony with nature and there was no evil. Such an innocent, Utopian world is no
longer attainable in these systems, For some poets, childhood innocence implies a prior
existence with God, a former blessed state that is remembered by the child and accounts
for his recognition of the divine in the world. Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” (1802–1804) describes the gradual loss of this innocence in the real world
of experience, described as the “prison house” that closes around the growing child.
[…]
The poet most often associated with innocence and experience is William Blake because
he wrote a series of contrasting poems under those headings. In 1789 he published
“Songs of Innocence,” and in 1794 he reissued them with a complementary set of songs,
titling the collection “Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary
States of the Human Soul.” Blake, therefore, was not associating innocence necessarily
with childhood and experience with adulthood, as earlier poets had. Neither did he see
innocence as an unqualifiedly better state; rather, he seemed to incorporate the biblical
injunction “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a
child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In a poem that he wrote as
a preface to the “Songs” he suggests that childhood innocence is also a kind of
ignorance that leads the child into following blindly the thoughts of others. Experience,
he says, can sometimes teach us to free ourselves from restrictions and think
imaginatively.
Source: GLANCY ,Ruth. Thematic Guide to British Poetry. Op. cit.Pgs. 111113
QUESTION 2: Comment on the representation of childhood in Blake’s poems read in
class and in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations from Immortality Recollected”.
**********
The Proverbs of Hell form a series of paradoxes in perhaps every one of which there is a
germ of truth: "What is now proved, was once only imagined"; "The bird a nest, the
spider a web, man friend ship"; "Damn braces, Bless relaxes." Not a few of Blake's
paradoxes are indeed among the bricks of which Nietzsche's philosophy was to be
builded: "The weak in courage are the strong in cunning"; "The apple tree never asks
the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his prey."
Source: GRIERSON , Herbert J. C. SMITH J. C.. A Critical History of English
Poetry. Oxford University Press. New York. 1946. Pg. 324
QUESTION 3: Comment on the resulting effect of the use of paradoxes in Blake’s
“Proverbs of Hell”.
PART II : WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) is of all British poets the one most readily associated
with nature (Shelley called him “Poet of Nature” in his sonnet to him). […]The
rejuvenation of spring in nature reminds the poet that such rebirth is harder to achieve in
the human world.[…] Wordsworth grieves the unnatural cruelty of the world created by
man. He is not specific about the wrongs, lamenting generally “what man has made of
man,” but at this stage in his life Wordsworth was a radical, acutely conscious of class
oppression and the injustices perpetrated by human systems and institutions. Man has
somehow transgressed “Nature's holy plan” in causing such suffering.
Source: GLANCY ,Ruth. Thematic Guide to British Poetry. Op. cit. Pg. 163
QUESTION 4: Comment on the representation of nature in Wordsworth’s “Ode:
Intimations from Immortality Recollected”.
*********
Wordsworth is still in the great Renaissance tradition which saw in the poet a
responsible human spokesman. As against the eighteenth century he must insist on a
reconstitution of 'the truth'. His view of what is to be inculcated will be different from
that of a poet like Thomson, but poetry, he will agree, must continue to be both moral
and didactic. Moral edification, however, is not now with him a matter of verbal
precept. Rather, it is the embodiment of living occasions in words, the admission of the
reader through words into the remoulding experience. It is in fact poems: poems
'proper', as poems, after the romantics, will be considered to be. A new standard of
actuality in poetry is insisted upon, a new conception of what poets should be, a new
understanding of how their words actually work upon their audience.
Source: DANBY ,John F.. The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 17971807. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London. Publication year: 1960. Pg. 17
Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, made it clear that his intention was to
realize, in poetry, the 'real language of men', 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling'. In short, he wanted poetry to operate as the immediate, subjective and
emotional counterpart to the conventions of speech.
Source: BRADFORD , Richard. A Linguistic History of English Poetry.
Routledge. London. Publication year: 1993. Pgs. 98-99
QUESTION 5: What aspects and ideas introduced in the Preface of the Lyrical
Ballads, were innovative in the context of the early 1800’s?
*******
QUESTION 6: YOUR OWN QUESTION: Formulate and answer a question based on
an aspect related to the analyses of William Wordsworth’s and William Blake’s poems
read and discussed in class.