1 Letteratura Inglese 1

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Letteratura Inglese 1 (A.A. 2013-2014) - LIN
Corso Istituzionale “Contesti”: Poesia romantica
Dott.ssa Simona Beccone
([email protected])
I. La visione del mondo romantica (cosmologia, teologia, episteme, concezione della Storia,
estetica)
II. Illuminismo vs. Romanticismo
III. Neoclassico vs. Romantico
IV. Concetti chiave
OGGETTIVO
SOGGETTIVO
STATICO
DINAMICO
MECCANICISMO
ORGANICISMO/ VITALISMO
UNIFORMISMO/ UNIVERSALISMO
DIVERSIFICAZIONE/ INDIVIDUALISMO
TRADIZIONE/ INNOVAZIONE;
TRADIZIONE/ INNOVAZIONE;
ANTICO/ MODERNO
ANTICO/ MODERNO
RAGIONE
ESTETICA NEOCLASSICA
IMMAGINAZIONE
(imagination vs. fancy)
ESTETICA ROMANTICA
V. Il Romanticismo inglese e il problema della periodizzazione (poesia protoromantica; Prima
e Seconda generazione romantica)
William Blake (1757-1827)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
VI. Testi
TESTO 1: William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800; corsivi miei)
a) The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a
selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain
colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect; [...]
b) For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to
blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to
reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. [...]
c) [A]ll good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true,
Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but
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by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long
and deeply. [...]
d) I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the
mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is
carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is
qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are
voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.
TESTO 2: John Keats, Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818 (corsivi miei)
In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. I think
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity – it should strike the reader as
a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance – Its touches of
Beauty should never be halfway thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the
rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural to him – shine over
him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight – but it is
easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it – and this leads me on to another axiom.
That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
TESTO 3: P.B. Shelley, Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 7 November 1818 (corsivi miei)
You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present &
tangible object.
TESTO 4: W. Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1803? - 1863), ll. 1-4
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
TESTO 5: John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817 (corsivi miei)
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of
Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before
or not – for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential beauty.
TESTO 6: John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, ll. 49-50; corsivi miei
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
TESTO 7: P.B. Shelley, Adonais, LII, ll. 460-64; corsivi miei
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
TESTO 8: G.G. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, Stanza 72
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
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High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
TESTO 9: S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part II, ll. 115-122
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
TESTO 10: John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci, ll. 1-8
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
TESTO 11: W. Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us…”
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. – Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
TESTO 12 : John Keats, “Bright Star”
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
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No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
TESTO 13 : P.B. Shelley, Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: – Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Bibliografia (opere citate e letture consigliate per approfondimento)
− Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford
UP, Oxford, 1953;
− Abrams, M.H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourt Brace College Pub., Fort Worth (TX),
1999, alle voci: “Elegy”, “Fancy/Imagination”, “Ode”, “Periods of English Lilterature”,
“Sonnet”;
− Doležel, L., Poetica occidentale. Tradizione e progresso, ed. it. a cura di Adelheid Conte,
Einaudi, Torino 1990, pp. XII-XVI (“Prefazione dell’autore”), 3-11 (“Riflessioni introduttive”),
pp. 68-98 (Cap. III, “La poetica romantica. Il modello morfologico”), pp. 99-121 (Cap. IV,
“L’idea di linguaggio poetico: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Frege”);
− Galigani, G., Il labirinto della mente: le odi di John Keats, Longo, Ravenna, 1989, pp. 7-50, 71119;
− Johnson, A.L., “A Study in Romantic Form: Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’”, Textus VII (1994), pp.
133-62;
− Johnson, A.L., “Formal Messages in Keats’s Sonnets”, in The Challenge of Keats, ed. A.C.
Christensen et al., Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 95-111;
− Kermode, F., Hollander, J. (eds.), The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Oxford UP, New
York, 1973, Vol. II: i saggi introduttivi su Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron e Keats, pp.
124-26; 233-36; 285-86; 398-400; 493-95;
− Marenco, F., (a cura di), Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, UTET, Torino, 1996, Vol. II,
Parte V: “Il romanticismo”: Capitolo II ( “Poetiche e lingua letteraria”, pp. 324-51); Capitolo IV
(“I poeti della prima generazione romantica”, pp. 369-408); Capitolo V (“I poeti della seconda
generazione romantica”, pp. 415-462);
− Pagnini, M., (a cura di), Il Romanticismo, il Mulino, Bologna, 1986: “Introduzione”, pp. 7-23.
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Testi primari citati
G.G. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
G.G. Byron, Don Juan (1818-1824)
John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817
John Keats, Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818
John Keats, “Bright Star” (1818?-1838)
John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
P.B. Shelley, Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 7 November 1818
P.B. Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)
P.B. Shelley, “Song: Rarely, rarely, comest thou…” (1821)
P.B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821-1840)
P.B. Shelley, Adonais (1821)
S.T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (1795-1796)
S.T. Coleridge, Kubla Khan (1797-1816)
S.T. Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” (1798)
S.T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
S.T. Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode (1802)
S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
W. Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1803?-1863)
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
William Wordsworth, “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us…” (1802-1807)