English-Literature-Poetry
English-Literature-Poetry
**QUESTIONS REQUIRE A LOT OF DETAIL**
The Romantic Period (cont.)
George Gordon, Lord Byron / Percy Bysshe Shelley / John Keats
Reading
- The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2
George Gordon, Lord Byron: “Written after Swimming” (pages 611-612)
“She walks in beauty” (page 612)From
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Canto 3 (pages 619-635) Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias” (page 768)
“Mont Blanc” (pages 762-766)”Ode to the West Wind” (pages 772-775)”To a Sky-Lark” (pages 817-819)From
A Defence of Poetry
(pages 837-850) John Keats: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (pages 880-881)
“When I have fears that I may cease to be” (page 888)”Ode on a Grecian Urn” (pages 905-906)”Ode on Melancholy” (pages 906-908)”To Autumn” (pages 925-926)
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1.In A Defence of Poetry, how does Shelley define poetry?
2.How does Shelley define a poet?
3.In “She walks in beauty,” how does Byron use the opposing imagery of darkness and light to describe the woman?
4.In “Ozymandias,” the traveler suggests that the statue’s sculptor intended his work to express the power and arrogance of Ramses II. Why are the tyrant’s words, on the pedestal, ironic? What statement do the ruins make about human history?
5.Look at the sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” In the first three quatrains, the speaker talks about things that he is concerned with missing out on in life. What are they? In the final couplet, what does the speaker realize?
6.To what sorts of things does the speaker in “To a Sky-Lark” compare the skylark in an attempt to describe or define it? Why can’t the speaker define the skylark? How does the skylark exceed the capacity of human language to describe its qualities or the qualities of its song?
7.In Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, what impression do you get of Byron? What is his mood throughout the poem? What things is he concerned about?
8.Critics argue over the meaning of the last two lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” How do you interpret them? What does it mean to equate truth and beauty-two realms that we generally insist on keeping separate, just as we separate ethics or morality from aesthetics or beauty?
9.Nature and what it represented was a major theme for the Romantic poets. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Canto 3 of Byron’s Childe Harold were both written when Shelley and Bryon were in Switzerland in 1816. Compare and contrast how each poet views “nature.”
