Frankenstein posts I

Hello Romanticists,

On Thursday we will be discussing the first volume of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and even if you have not read it before, much of the novel will feel eerily familiar.  The opening lines are written by a man about to set sail to an isolated polar region.  Remind you of anything we read?  It will.  Specifically, our initial narrator writes:

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.  I arrived here yesterday; and my first task it to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

A male author imposes an interpretation (“You will rejoice to hear…”) on an absent, silent female whose presence is nonetheless felt by reference to her disagreement with the author: that could easily be a summary of one of Coleridge’s conversation poems.  The “dear sister” may also remind us of Dorothy Wordsworth, beloved but silenced companion of so many of William’s poems.  Margaret’s “forebodings” might even remind us of Rebecca’s concerns about another kind of dangerous adventuring: chivalric quests.  Shelley’s novel will provide a much more strident critique of male ego than any of her predecessors, though.

For your response, close read a passage that relates to one of the authors we have previously read.  You might choose a passage in which Shelley directly quotes on of our friends (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Percy Shelley will all make appearances).  Or you might focus on a theme or image that other authors have addressed (Mont Blanc and Chamonix, dreams and disillusionment, the supernatural, etc.).

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

Lynd Ward's illustration of the creature

Bernie Wrightson's illustration of the creature and Frankenstein

Percy Shelley Posts

Hello Romanticists,

Excellent work analyzing Shelley’s sonnets in class today.  As we discussed, the sonnet form allows Shelley to exercise his powers of renovation, his ability to produce new meaning from something tired, conventional, or familiar.

You will find the same ideology of renovation in Shelley’s great work of poetic theory, “A Defence [sic] of Poetry.”  A poet’s language, he argues, “marks the before unapprehended relations of things,” often by revitalizing images and words that have become meaningless through overuse.  This is why he claims that poetic language is “vitally metaphorical”: poetic language is “vital” in the etymological sense of being alive with meaning rather than deadened by custom, and it is metaphorical because metaphor is the central tool for revealing connections or “relations” between seemingly diverse things.

We’ll talk through this concept further in class.  For your posts, investigate one or more of the many metaphors Shelley employs in one of the poems.  You might choose the wind or the dead leaves in “Ode to the West Wind,” the glow-worm or rose of “To a Skylark,” or the string of metaphors used to describe Intellectual Beauty.  Or indeed any other metaphor that strikes your fancy.

Happy reading,

Prof. M.

To get you thinking about birds and wind and other fleeting, incorporeal things, enjoy some of Romantic painter John Constable's famous cloud studies: