Poets for the session on Aug 25, 2023
In addition to the usual English suspects, Shelley and Keats, we had two American poets Whitman and Emerson, a French poet Victor Hugo, and a Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz.
Within the English Romantic poets there was the younger generation consisting of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, that rebelled against the the older generation, signified by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Not only was the lifestyle of the youthful poets freer, but they were uncompromising in their support for the French Revolution, and for greater freedom of speech and belief, which they hoped would usher in a freer Britain. Byron’s contempt for Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge (the old guard) led to the creation of a freer and even more Romantic era of poetry.
Wordsworth and Coleridge were close collaborators in writing poetry and in developing theories about poetic values and how poetry arises, culminating in the Lyrical Ballads. That joint collection of poems, first published in 1798, is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The 1800 edition had the famous Preface that set out the changes Wordsworth hoped to bring about by treating poetry not as elevated speech, but common speech enlivened “with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” toward Nature. He gave his famous definition of Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
The younger generation knew each other’s work and generally had good opinions to share. Keats did not come from nobility as Shelley and Byron did, and did not have the benefit of University education that came as a birthright for the well-born. However he made up for it by reading everything he could get his hands on via his friend Cowden Clark.
Shelley and Byron did collaborate during their famous 1816 sojourn in Switzerland. Poems like Julian and Maddalo by Shelley about two friends: Julian the idealist who is like Shelley, and Maddalo the aristocrat who resembles Byron. That Swiss contact made by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron rented villas, had many other literary consequences. There Byron found the medieval Château de Chillon, which inspired his long poem, Prisoner of Chillon. Mary Shelley wrote her famous thriller, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus. And Byron finished the third canto of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in the villa Diodati.
Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron met in 1816
The modern poet Vijay Seshadri writes about how he was inspired by the grand old poet – Whitman. Seshadri says in an interview that he is amazed by the delicacy of Whitman’s technique, the more so because he is thought of historically, as “massive and powerful.” Seshadri says Whitman “has a control over the minutiae of poetry that is of the same order as Emily Dickinson’s. You can just marvel and marvel at the little effects, and the little changes.” But the greatest challenge in Whitman is “the visionary life and the prophetic experience” he brings. Can one rise to that?
Arundhathy
Like an ocean Naiad marooned in the forest ...
Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets. He would influence many poets who came later, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Simon Ortiz, C.K. Williams, and Martín Espada.
Born on Long Island, NY, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and had limited formal education. His occupations during his lifetime included those of printer, schoolteacher, reporter, and editor.
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first edition, 1855
Whitman self-published a collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, which was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier. According to the Longman Anthology of Poetry, “Whitman received little public acclaim for his poems during his lifetime for several reasons: openness regarding sex, his self-presentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations.” Whitman “abandoned the regular meter and rhyme patterns” of his contemporaries in his poems. He was “influenced by the long cadences … of Biblical poetry.”
As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life was published as a part of Whitman’s famous collection Leaves of Grass. The poem is in the section titled Sea Shore that deals with the sea, as well as other themes such as life, growing up, and the meaning of existence. In this particular poem, the poet describes an existential crisis that came over him while visiting his home.
Throughout this poem, the poet offers complex, beautiful, and personal images that describe his quest to find a side of himself that he has not yet discovered. Through his poetry he has only been able to express his ego thus far, the poet says, but there is much that he does not understand about himself. Perhaps some of the mysteries will be cleared up by this walking along the ocean.
Devika
.jpeg)
Thomas Love Peacock, son of Samuel Peacock and Sarah Love, was an accomplished poet, essayist, opera critic, and satiric novelist. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work. He was born in England in 1785. When he was six years old, he began studying at an Englefield Green school. He only stayed for six years and decided that he had had enough of traditional education.
By the age of fifteen Peacock was working as a clerk for the merchant house of Ludlow, Fraser, and Co. in London, but he remained in their employment only briefly. He began writing poems and incidental essays at this time, and in late 1805, Palmyra, his first collection of poems, was published and well received. He was only 20 at the time. In 1808 Peacock served briefly as under-secretary to Admiral Sir Home Popham aboard the HMS Venerable, which never left the harbour while Peacock was on board. The nature of his duties is not clear, but he was happy to go ashore after some six months to begin a walking tour of the Thames. Soon afterward, he recounted his travels in The Genius of the Thames (1810), an ode in two parts. The poem represents Peacock’s attempt to describe the river and all that it meant to him and to England. The tour of the Thames was followed by a journey to Wales, where Peacock finished the poem, and met Jane Gryffydh, daughter of a Welsh parson. Peacock would propose marriage to her eight years later, but for the time being his mind seems to have been on poetry, which he continued to write and publish.
In October or November of 1812, Peacock met Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would soon come to depend on Peacock as a friend and as a literary critic and assistant. Shelley seems to have admired Peacock’s poetry (especially Palmyra), despite the marked differences in the two poets’ subjects and techniques. Since Peacock was a poet of some repute and a brilliant classical scholar (entirely self-taught) he exercised a powerful influence over Shelley’s reading of Latin and Greek texts.
At the beginning of 1819, Peacock was unexpectedly summoned to London for a period of probation with the East India Company who needed to reinforce their staff with talented people. On 13 January 1819, he wrote from 5 York Street, Covent Garden: “I now pass every morning at the India House, from half-past 10 to half-past 4, studying Indian affairs. My object is not yet attained, though I have little doubt but that it will be. It is not in the common routine of office, but is an employment of a very interesting and intellectual kind, connected with finance and legislation, in which it is possible to be of great service, not only to the Company, but to the millions under their dominion.”
In 1820 Peacock proposed to Jane Gryffydh, whom he had met on his tour of Wales. Peacock had neither seen nor corresponded with his future wife since 1811, but the proposal, which he made by post, was accepted, and the couple was married on March 20, 1820. Peacock continued his employment at the India House, and in April 1821 he passed his probationary period and received an increase in salary from 600 to 800 pounds per year. Literature was never far from his mind, and at various times Shelley called upon him to read and correct proofs of several poems.
Peacock retired from the India House on 29 March 1856 with an ample pension. In his retirement he seldom left Halliford and spent his life among his books, and in the garden, in which he took great pleasure, and on the river Thames.
Peacock died at Lower Halliford, 23 January 1866, from injuries sustained in a fire when he attempted to save his library; he was buried in the new cemetery at Shepperton. His granddaughter remembered him in these words:
"In society my grandfather was ever a welcome guest; his genial manner, hearty appreciation of wit and humour in others, and the amusing way in which he told stories made him a very delightful acquaintance; he was always so agreeable and so very witty that he was called by his most intimate friends the “Laughing Philosopher.”
A Note on Peacock’s Influence on Shelley (taken from the book Young Romantics by Daisy May):
Peacock persuaded Shelley to give up his diet of bread, butter, and to start eating meat again, which helped to improve his pallid complexion. He offered the young couple a certain level of practical protection from their creditors, as he assumed responsibility for Shelley’s financial negotiations. He was frequently sceptical about some of Shelley’s wilder ideas and he acted as a calming influence, introducing a new element of domestic equilibrium into their previously turbulent life together.
The benefits of Peacock’s friendship with Shelley and Mary were reciprocal. While he provided them with practical and moral support, they repaid him by welcoming his presence at their fireside and including him in their conversations and literary pursuits. For the first time in his life, Peacock found himself part of a circle from which he could draw both emotional and intellectual support. The fruits of this became apparent in the second half of 1815 as he finished Headlong Hall, the first of the satirical works which would make his name. Headlong Hall and the novels which followed it were comedic arguments, in which plot was made subservient to debate and dialogue. The conversations of this period would be played out and reworked in Peacock’s subsequent novels, Melincourt and Nightmare Abbey (his best work), both of which simultaneously celebrated and criticised the friends from whom he derived his inspiration.
One also cannot forget the criticism levelled by Peacock against the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) in their mountain retirement, “passing the whole day in the innocent and amiable occupation of going up and down hill, receiving poetical impressions, and communicating them in immortal verse to admiring generations.”
A service Peacock did to his estimable friend, Shelley, was to have published the volume Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley, with Shelley’s letters to Peacock:
https://archive.org/details/peacocksmemoirof00peacrich/mode/2up
It contains 34 letters of Shelley to him, long interesting letters, written with care, and often with critical appreciation of art and literature. Wonderful travel writing too from his sojourn in Europe. It is written in a lively conversational style, and one wishes the letters would not end. One may read and derive pleasure in the company of the humane and discerning artist Shelley was.
Geetha
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (STC) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and
theologian, who with William Wordsworth was a founder of the Romantic Movement
in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
STC was born on October 21, 1772 in the remote Devon village of Ottery St. Mary, the tenth and youngest child of Ann Bowdon Coleridge and John Coleridge, a school-master and vicar whom he was said to resemble physically as well as mentally.
His career as a poet and writer was established after he befriended Wordsworth and together they produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798. He became one the most influential and controversial figures of the Romantic period.
Some
of his famous poems are The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work, Biographia Literaria,
which is a critical autobiography published in 1870.
Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. It has been speculated that he had a bipolar disorder which had not been defined during his lifetime. We are familiar with the term, nowadays. He was plagued by other childhood illnesses as well, for which he was treated with laudanum, a tincture containing 10 percent powdered opium. This fostered a lifelong opium addiction.
Geetha was somehow pulled into these melancholic, sad poems. She loves the poetry of Coleridge. It's an ode, Coleridge's exploration of despair, joy and imagination. The poem, Dejection: An Ode, written on April 4, 1802, is STC’s swan song lamenting the decline of his creative imagination. It is a deeply personal and autobiographical poem and depicts his mental state at the time.
Nothing was going right for him. Apparently he was not his marriage was not working. He thought was being robbed of his imaginative powers. He was cast down but he was madly in love with another Sara, Sara Hutchinson, she was the younger sister of Mary Wordsworth, the poet's wife. Coleridge fell in love with Hutchinson in winter 1799 during his first visit to the north of England and the Lakes.
That
gave rise to a ballad-poem Love,
addressed to this new Sara. It began as a letter and then by the poetic
transmutation of storytelling Coleridge turns it into a poem of great pathos.
It seems to be an allegory of his own yearning for this Sara, retold as the
crazed love a knight for a lady called Genevieve, a love which is not at first
reciprocated. But when he wins her it’s too late, for he is dying. It has
memorable lines:
And
she forgave me, that I gazed
Too
fondly on her face!
Coleridge had married his wife Sara Fricker in 1795 (Robert Southey married her sister Edith Fricker). But the marriage to Sara Fricker did not prosper and Coleridge grew to detest her and they separated in 1808 after the birth of their fourth child.
Dejection: An Ode is a sublime and heartrending poem, where Coleridge gives expression to an experience of double consciousness; his sense perceptions are vivid but his inner state is faint, blurred and unhappy.
One reviewer writes: “Seldom has grief found such tragic expression as in this poem, which has been called the poet's dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination.” Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in the description of his own feelings.
A remarkable thing about this poem is that Coleridge contradicts his own previous view of Nature, challenging Wordsworth’s nature creed also. In The Eolian Harp by Samuel Taylor Coleridge the poem focuses on the relationship between man and nature, using the image of the harp to represent the order and wildness of nature. In The Eolian Harp and Frost at Midnight, Coleridge had expressed belief in pantheism, which is the worship of nature. We know Wordsworth as a famous pantheist. Pantheism embraces the view that nature is a living whole, that a divine spirit passes through all objects in nature. Coleridge, too, was of the same belief. But in Dejection: An Ode, he contradicts that in some of the earlier stanzas, two and four, etc.
The story of Sir Patrick Spens, to which the poet alludes in the first stanza, is an ancient Scottish ballad about a sailor who drowns with a boatload of Scottish noblemen, sailing on orders from the king but against his own better judgment. It contains lines that refer to the moon as a predictor of storms, which Coleridge quotes as an epigraph for his ode.
‘A
saw the new muin late yestreen
Wi
the auld muin in her airm
And
gif we gang tae sea, maister,
A
fear we’ll cam tae hairm.’
The Wreck, by Knud-Andreassen Baade
The following lines describe some of his inner feelings:
O
Lady! We receive but what we give,
And
in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours
is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
Coleridge is no longer able to get joy from Nature because he has no joy in his heart to reciprocate. He has realised that Nature cannot evoke in those who do not already have joy in their hearts:
A
grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A
stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which
finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In
word, or sigh, or tear —
The poet proceeds with an ever-deepening sadness, each stanza charged with heavy gloom.
The entire poem is full of gloom and dejection. But in the concluding stanza, there is a note of tenderness for his love.
Coleridge
wishes that the joy which has left him may forever bless his beloved (Sara
Hutchinson) who is addressed as ‘Dear Lady.’ The poet wishes that gentle sleep
may visit Sara and smile on her so as to make her gay and cheerful.
‘Tis
midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep:
Full
seldom may my friend such vigils keep!
Visit
her, gentle Sleep! With wings of healing,
…
Joy
lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;
To
her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their
life the eddying of her living soul!
O
simple spirit, guided from above,
Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,
Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.
(Notes from Wikipedia, Google, and other study)
Joe
Recall that Shelley had written and got printed a tract “The Necessity of Atheism” in 1811 when still a student at University College, Oxford, affirming an independence from religion. He was rusticated for that act. But as Shelley later made clear later he was not denying the existence of “a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe.” It is this pervading spirit that is the subject of HIB.
In the fifth stanza he remarks that in boyhood all the expectations of heavenly beings and life after death, came to mean nothing for him. Yet he suddenly discovered what brings ecstatic joy are:
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming
It is to this he now vows to devote his powers of poesy “With beating heart and streaming eyes.” Again he personifies the spirit of the world and reposes his faith that one who worships that Spirit will cast a net to bind all humankind in Love. Three words are written in all capitals in the poem: BEAUTY, LOVELINESS, and SPIRIT.
The ashes of Shelley, who died aged 29 during a storm off the Tuscan coast near Lerici in 1822, are buried in the highest part of Rome's Protestant Cemetery's zona vecchia
Here is some historical background taken from the book by Daisy May, Young Romantics, The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives.
When Shelley and Byron travelled to Switzerland to meet and stay together in a house by Lake Geneva, the manuscript of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ was in Shelley’s baggage. When he returned to England he sent Leigh Hunt, the influential critic, his poem. Hunt promptly lost the manuscript and, to Shelley’s disappointment, the poem remained unpublished. However, Hunt did at least read the poem before he mislaid it and he was impressed by what he saw and, in his ‘Young Poets’ article, (Dec 1816) he praised Shelley as a ‘striking and original thinker.’ That article is remembered now as the first piece of writing to anticipate the canonisation of Shelley and Keats.
The ‘Young Poets’ article of Hunt gave Keats the confidence, at the end of 1816, to give up his medical training for good and to devote himself to poetry. Shelley was equally delighted by Hunt’s article, which more than made up for his failure to publish the poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
Kumkum
.jpeg)
The Elgin Marbles went on public display in a temporary room of the British Museum in 1817 and soon broke attendance records. John Keats visited the British Museum in March 1817 and after coming away he expressed his admiration by composing the sonnet titled On Seeing the Elgin Marbles. The poet is contrasting his own fragile mortality with
… each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship …
projected by the magnificent sculptures. The ‘Grecian grandeur’ is a top artistic achievement presented to the eye of the visitor by the sculptures.
The poet notes that these scattered fragments of a classical order, now on display as museum pieces, are not immune to the ‘rude wasting’ of old time. What is the ‘undescribable feud’ Keats says burdens his heart on viewing these sculptures? Is it the tension caused by the loss of the sculptures’ identity when transplanted to the British Museum? If so Keats, has anticipated the modern cry to repatriate these plundered items to the Parthenon in Athens where they rightfully belong.
Keats is thought to have viewed the Vase that inspired his Ode on a Grecian Urn, during the same visit of March 1817. But he delayed composing the beautiful Ode to May 1819; the last few years till his death in Feb 1821 in Rome of consumption, were the most productive period of his brief life. Keats attained his full power as a poet during this time.
Though one can trace the influence of the Elgin Marbles sonnet in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the two poems are different in many ways. As a piece of poetry Ode on a Grecian Urn is definitely a masterpiece, whereas the sonnet On Seeing the Elgin Marbles is not a finely chiseled poem. It has some rambling phrases and confused thoughts. Keats’ rapid development to perfect craftsmanship between 1817 and 1819 is evident.
The poet does not describe the statues nor does he describe any scene depicted in them. Instead, he luxuriates in describing the effects of these ancient statues on his weakened self. Keats was by then fully aware of his approaching death from TB. He felt powerless, like a ‘sick eagle,’ who could look at the sky but not fly up to reach it. The poet also recognises the disorder in his thoughts. Ultimately, he does talk about the ‘Grecian grandeur,’ with a warning note that even these beautiful statues will not be able to withstand the passage of time. They are already showing signs of decay.
Ode on a Grecian Urn stands in sharp contrast. It focuses on the idea of art capturing a frozen moment in time, presenting an eternal world that is unaffected by time. The Urn becomes a symbol of permanence and tension between life and death. Keats contemplates the unchanging beauty of the scenes depicted on the urn, suggesting the power of art to transcend the limitation of temporal existence.
Keats philosophy that art is capable of conquering time is strongly expressed in his ode.
The poem chosen by Pamela is Ode to Beauty by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Biography of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo is a very famous French author, and is best-known for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables. However, he was also one of the great Romantic poets (and playwrights). His poetry collections contain some of the finest works of the era, and reflect upon themes such as death, nature, and love, as well as the political issues of his day. He had a prolific literary career of 60 years. After the great popularity of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, people started noticing that the Notre Dame Cathedral was crumbling. The authorities then started thinking about heritage, and preserving it. So all his books impacted society.
Like
many young writers of his generation, Hugo was profoundly influenced by
François-René de Chateaubriand, the founder of Romanticism and France's
pre-eminent literary figure during the early 1800s. In his youth, Hugo resolved
to be ‘Chateaubriand or nothing,’ and his life would come to parallel that of
his predecessor in many ways.
Like Chateaubriand, Hugo would further the cause of Romanticism, become involved in politics as a champion of Republicanism, and be forced into exile on account of his political stances.
In his writing career, Victor Hugo produced some brilliant epic poems, including La Fin de Satan (1886); and Dieu (1891).
Between 1829 and 1840 he would publish five more volumes of poetry (Les Orientales, 1829; Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Les Voix intérieures, 1837; and Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840, thus cementing his reputation as one the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.
His poems captured the spirit of the Romantic era. They were largely devoted to 19th-century causes. Many touched on religious themes. Initially they were royalist but soon became Bonapartist, Republican and liberal. He campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment. Hugo's poems on nature revealed a continuing search for the great sublime.
The passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Nouvelles Odes et Poésies Diverses) was published in 1824, when Hugo was only 22 years old, and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervour and fluency, it was the collection that followed two years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) which revealed Hugo to be a great poet – a natural master of lyric and creative song.
Hugo was also known for his plays like Cromwell and Hernani. He produced more than 4000 drawings in his lifetime. He started drawing as a hobby and later on, it became an important aspect of his life. Between 1848 and 1851, drawing was his exclusive creative outlet. His surviving drawings foreshadow the experimental techniques of abstract expressionism and surrealism.
Family life
Born
to Joseph Leopold Hugo, an atheist republican, and Sophie Trebuchet who was
Catholic and a Royalist, Hugo had two brothers. The family was from Nancy,
Lorraine in East France. Hugo’s father Leopold enlisted in the Revolutionary
Army at the age of 14. The family moved often to places where Leopold happened
to be serving.
Leopold wrote to his son that he was conceived in the Vosges Mountains on a journey from Luneville to Besançon. “This elevated origin seems to have had effects on you so that your muse is now continually sublime.”
Victor’s literary talent was spotted early on when a poem written by him won an award. He joined law school and got engaged to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher against his mother’s wishes. In 1821 after the death of his mother, Victor married his mistress Catherine Thomas. A year later he married Adele Foucher. Together with his brother he brought out a periodical called Le Conservative Litteraire.
Victor Hugo was 31 years old in 1833 when he met Juliette Drouet (born Julienne Josephine Gauvain), a beautiful 26-year-old actress. He hired her to play the role of the Princess Negroni in his play Lucrèce Borgia. They were quick to fall in love with each other and began an affair that lasted for nearly 50 years.
Victor Hugo had a sad personal life after he lost his 19-year-old newly wed daughter, Léopoldine, in a boating accident on the Seine. She and her husband, newly married daughter, were going to the sea and the boat capsized. Her skirt was so heavy that though the husband tried to save her, she sank and perished.
He wrote in A Villequier,
You
see, our children are very necessary to us,
Lord
; when we saw in our life, one morning,
In
the midst of troubles, sorrows, miseries,
And
of the shadow cast over us by our destiny,
Les Misérables
A novel about social misery, Les Misérables took 17 years in the writing. Ninety-Three is the last novel by Victor Hugo,
published in 1874. The setting is the year 1793 of The French Revolution,
during the Reign of Terror.
Hugo’s popularity declined with the rise of Flaubert and Emile Zola. He was honoured for his literary and political contributions with a grand public parade in 1881. An avenue was named after him. He died from pneumonia on May 22, 1885 at the age of 83. Victor Hugo justified colonialism as a means to civilise . He wanted to create a United States of Europe and had a significant contribution in shaping French democracy.
(taken from a profile by Michael Partridge, who writes extensively on culture, the arts and language in France)
The poems
Demain, dès l’aube (Tomorrow, At Dawn)
This is a famous poem of Victor Hugo which was written
four years after the death of his recently married daughter Léopoldine, who
drowned alongside her husband in a boating accident on the Seine in 1843. It
was included in the collection Les Contemplations, which was divided into Autrefois (‘In the Past’) and Aujourd’hui (‘Today’). The moment of his daughter’s
passing is the mark between these two sections.
And when I arrive, I will place on your tomb
A bouquet of green holly and of flowering heather.
Flowering heather and holly may have some kind of association with death.
La tombe dit à la rose (The Grave and The Rose)
La tombe dit à la rose appears in Victor Hugo’s 1837 collection of poems, Les
Voix Intérieures (“Inner Voices”). It’s a typical Romantic poem,
imagining a conversation between an anthropomorphised grave and rose. In its
simplicity the poem conveys a unique poignancy, and with its imagery of a
grave, the dawn, and the glistening dew, it’s comparable to Demain, des l’aube.
Après la bataille (After The Battle)
Après la bataille
was mentioned by Priya but she did not read it and left it for the readers to
pursue at their leisure. It appeared in the first series of Victor Hugo’s poem
collection, La Légende des
Siècles (1859). It was
written in honour of his father, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo (1773 – 1828),
who served as an army general under Napoleon Bonaparte. The poem is set during
the Peninsular War (1808 – 1814), which was one of the conflicts of the
Napoleonic Wars (1800 – 1815). During this war, the French fought against
Spanish, Portuguese, and British troops.
Thomo
decided to read some poems of Adam Mickiewicz after Joe recognised a statue in
Krakow which he had posted on his blog as that of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's
national poet.
Mickiewicz is revered in Poland and in Lithuania, too and he is considered as one of the greatest Slavic and European poets. Described as the Slavic bard, he was a leading Romantic dramatist and has been compared in Poland and in Europe with Byron and Goethe.
He is best known for the poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz, which Shoba read at a KRG session. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. All these served as inspiration for uprisings against the three imperial powers – the Habsburg monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire – that had partitioned and absorbed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence.
Mickiewicz was born in the Russian partitioned territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and he was active in the struggle to win independence for his home region. As a consequence he was exiled to central Russia for five years. In 1829 he succeeded in leaving the Russian Empire and, like many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life as an expatriate abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at the Collège de France. He died, probably of cholera, at Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, where he had gone to help organise Polish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War.
Thomo’s selection was from the Crimean Sonnets of Mickiewicz which are set against the background of the war in Crimea between English and French forces against the Russian Empire. The first sonnet selected is Becalmed.
The other poem we’ve all read set in this theatre of war is Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade which glorifies a battle – the Battle of Balaclava 25th October 1854 – fought by Lord Raglan and Lord Cardigan, perhaps the most incompetent men ever to be commanders of British troops.
It is documented that they were the stupidest leaders. In those days, you bought your commissions in the army, and what they wanted was to wear these fancy military costumes and they would parade around London, with these bought commissions. They had no knowledge of war, no idea whatsoever. And when the English were successful in wars, it was the the people who had Indian experience who led. The commanders who had seen action in India were the successful generals. But for some reason, these two clowns, Cardigan and Raglan, were made commanders. Both are chiefly remembered in knitting circles now:
Raglan
is a knitting technique that involves
increasing stitches from the top down. The raglan seam is a long, slanted or
curved seam that runs from the neck to the underarm.
Cardigan is a type of knitted fabric that uses tuck stitches to create
a thicker fabric.
That through miscommunication, they sent their cavalry into the jaws of death to become cannon fodder for the Russian artillery, is glossed over in the frenetic imperialist fever of Kipling’s verse.
But historians agree that no British general has sent more soldiers to their grave than Field Marshal Douglas Haig; there were two million casualties under his watch in World War I. The Canadian War Museum comments: “His epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles.”
The
second sonnet Thomo read is called The
Castle Ruins of Balaclava. Now Balaclava
is a small town near Sevastopol, in the Crimean Peninsula, which became famous,
as mentioned, for the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. The British
troops there wore knitted headgear to help them protect them from the bitter
cold weather. These handmade headgear named Balaclava was a Russian concoction,
Thomo thought at first. It's not. It was the English, maybe the wives and
daughters, who hand-knitted this headwear. And they became famous as
‘balaclavas’ after the Battle of Balaclava.
Ruins of Castle at Balaclava, Crimea
Mickiewicz is remembering the ruins of some particular castle ruins. One wonders which castle it was, though no specific castle is mentioned there. Was it so obvious it needed no pointer? If you sail down the Rhine as Thomo and Geetha did many years ago, there are castles on both sides; particularly if you sail down from Switzerland. You can see them from a distance in Germany too.
Hearken to these two lines:
So,
in plague-desolated towns, grief's flags
Endlessly
flutter from the turret-peaks.
An Aside: In India, this headgear was adopted as standard winter wear by the Calcutta Bengali. The youngsters of today may be unaware that these were called ‘monkey caps’ in Calcutta a couple of generations ago. Today you will not find one Bengali youngster wearing this. In those days this was standard winter wear by men, and some women in Bengal.
In
the sonnet Becalmed Thomo loved these lines in the opening quartet:
The
water's sun-lit torso softly stirs;
So,
plunged in blissful dreams, the tender bride
No
sooner wakes, to sigh, than sleeps again.
The personification is beautiful. And the translators really got the essence of it. Joe included the version he liked, a new 1998 translation by Christopher Adam. Thomo asked Joe if there are different translations. Yes, because, Mickiewicz is a famous poet from Poland, he would have been translated by many. Joe saw this in a JSTOR listing and because he has online access to the JSTOR repository (a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources) through his membership of the Boston Public Library, he sent the 31-page article to Thomo as a PDF. It contains translations of all 18 Crimean Sonnets of Mickiewicz, prefaced by a 10-page introduction.
%20wrote%20the%20seminal%20poetry%20collection%20%E2%80%98Leaves%20of%20Grass%E2%80%99%20.png)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) wrote the seminal poetry collection ‘Leaves of Grass’
%20poet%20and%20satiric%20novelist.png)
%20The%20Poet%20of%20Imagination%20(1).png)
.png)
%20portrait%20by%20Joseph%20Severn.png)
,%20American%20essayist,%20lecturer,%20philosopher,%20and%20poet.png)
%20leading%20French%20novelist%20and%20poet.png)
%20Polish%20poet,%20dramatist,%20essayist,%20publicist,%20translator%20and%20political%20activist.png){kind=spacer}
No comments:
Post a Comment