Shorter Selections

Front 1

A Vindication of the Rights of
Men(Selected Work)

Back 1

Mary Wollstonecraft’s critical response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; uses emotional appeals to advocate social change

Front 2

A Song of Liberty(Selected Work)

Back 2

The concluding poem in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell; envisions the apocalyptic arrival of a new revolutionary order

Front 3

The Social Contract(Selected Work)

Back 3

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous political tract; argues that
citizens subject themselves to government by the general will in order
to ensure that the state preserves their natural rights

Front 4

The Rights of Man(Selected Work)

Back 4

Thomas Paine’s critical response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France; claims that the French Revolution aimed to
unseat despotic principles rather than a despotic monarch

Front 5

The Prelude(Selected Work)

Back 5

William Wordsworth’s posthumously published autobiographical
poem

Front 6

Monarchy(Selected Work)

Back 6

A chapter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract that describes
the inherent drawbacks of investing all the power of the state in a
single, corruptible individual

Front 7

The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell(Selected Work)

Back 7

One of Blake’s prophetic, illuminated prose-poems; the first step in
Blake’s elaboration of a new mythological framework

Front 8

The French Revolution as It
Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its
Commencement(Selected Work)

Back 8

A segment from William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The
Prelude; describes the optimistic sentiments of the earliest
revolutionaries in France

Front 9

Don Juan(Selected Work)

Back 9

Lord Byron’s semi-autobiographical satiric epic; the “Dedication”
ridicules an older generation of Romantic poets for abandoning their
radical political principles

Front 10

Battle of Valmy

Back 10

“A Song of Liberty” presents a political allegory of this 1792 battle;
French forces defeated Prussian and Austrian invaders, securing the
continuation of the revolution

Front 11

Enlightenment

Back 11

The intellectual movement that preceded Romanticism; thinkers
during this period prized reason above emotions and posited constant human progress; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot belong to this generation of philosophers

Front 12

Glorious Revolution

Back 12

The revolt in England that unseated Charles I and James II from the
English throne; in Thomas Paine’s framework, an example of a
revolution against people rather than principles

Front 13

Gordon Riots

Back 13

A series of protests that occurred in England during the summer of
1780; they followed Parliament’s lifting of sanctions against Catholics;
the storming of Newgate Prison formed a part of this larger pattern

Front 14

Reign of Terror

Back 14

A particularly violent phase of the French Revolution that took place
between September 1793 and July 1794; the events of this period
prevented Wordsworth from visiting his French mistress and daughter

Front 15

Romantic Era

Back 15

A literary movement that emphasized emotion and imagination in
poetry; Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron are poets of this era
GENERAL

Front 16

Blank verse

Back 16

A verse form that features unrhymed iambic pentameter;
Wordsworth’s Prelude, including “The French Revolution,” uses this
metrical scheme

Front 17

Enjambment

Back 17

A poetry technique; one syntactic unit (like a sentence or clause) spans
more than one line of the poem; the opposite of an end-stopped line;
Wordsworth’s “The French Revolution” features this device

Front 18

Ottava rima

Back 18

Verse form that Giovanni Batista Casti uses in Il Poema Tartaro; Byron
borrows this style for Don Juan; it consists of eight-line stanzas in
iambic pentameter that rhyme according to an abababcc pattern

Front 19

Academy of Dijon

Back 19

Solicited essays for a contest in 1750; Rousseau responded to their call
with his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and won the top prize

Front 20

Basire, James

Back 20

Engraver to whom Blake was apprenticed

Front 21

Blood, Fanny

Back 21

Close friend of Mary Wollstonecraft; traveled to Newington Green to
establish a school with her; died in Europe after a difficult pregnancy;
inspired Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction

Front 22

Don Juan

Back 22

Title character in Lord Byron’s autobiographical mock epic poem;
Byron’s own personality and history inspired many of his traits and
adventures

Front 23

Don Quixote

Back 23

Hero and title character of a picaresque novel by Miguel de Cervantes;Don Juan resembles this character

Front 24

Enitharmon

Back 24

The name that Blake later gives to the “Eternal Female” from “A Song
of Liberty

Front 25

Orc

Back 25

One of Blake’s mythological figures; he possesses both destructive and
redemptive properties, suggestive of Christ’s second coming; in “A
Song of Liberty,” Blake refers to him as the “new-born terror” and the
“son of fire”

Front 26

Urizen

Back 26

One of Blake’s mythological figures; known as the “starry king” and
the “jealous king” in Blake’s “A Song of Liberty”

Front 27

(MODERN CRITICS AND SCHOLARS)
Halsted, Scott

Back 27

Comments on the inner human sympathies that lie beneath Don Juan
and Byron’s “cynical veneer[s]”

Front 28

Hamilton, Paul

Back 28

Believes that the struggle to move from revolution to restoration
defines the central dilemma of the Romantic poets

Front 29

Hobsbawm, Eric

Back 29

Notes the inexplicable deification of Napoleon that occurred after the
general’s defeat at Waterloo

Front 30

Todd, Janet

Back 30

Suggests that Edmund Burke’s feminization of revolutionary evils
fueled Mary Wollstonecraft’s angry response to his Reflections

Front 31

Vultee, Denise

Back 31

Claims that the extant first book of Blake’s prophetic poem The French
Revolution contains more real history than do Blake’s similar works,
America and Europe

Front 32

Williams, John

Back 32

Highlights the influence that contemporary political events and social
changes, including the French Revolution and the agrarian and
industrial revolutions in England, exerted on Wordsworth’s writing

Front 33

Carbonari movement

Back 33

The group that advocated Italian national independence; Byron
associated with this group because of his friendship with the Countess
Guiccioli

Front 34

Castlereagh, Lord

Back 34

English Foreign Minister; Byron questions his manliness and
condemns his policies in the “Dedication” to Don Juan; he brutally
crushed an uprising in Ireland

Front 35

Dissenter

Back 35

English citizens who renounced the Anglican Church, including
William Blake’s parents and the citizens of Newington Green, where
Mary Wollstonecraft established a school

Front 36

Jacobins

Back 36

Radical French revolutionaries who advocated the execution of King
Louis XVI

Front 37

National Assembly

Back 37

A French governing body; exhumed Rousseau’s body and reburied him
in the Panthéon; issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen

Front 38

Poet Laureate

Back 38

The national poet of England; both Robert Southey and William
Wordsworth filled this role

Front 39

Whig

Back 39

The English political party that opposed the Tories; Byron supported
this organization; its colors were buff (beige) and blue

Front 40

Blake, William

Back 40

Visionary and early Romantic poet; authored “A Song of Liberty” from
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Front 41

Byron, Lord George Gordon

Back 41

Second-generation Romantic poet; fought in the Greek war for
independence; his “Dedication” from Don Juan appears among the
selected works

Front 42

Paine, Thomas

Back 42

Radical pamphleteer who supported both the American and French
Revolutions in his writing; wrote The Rights of Man

Front 43

Wollstonecraft, Mary

Back 43

An early feminist thinker and political radical; authored the first
response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,
titled A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Front 44

Wordsworth, William

Back 44

Lake Poet and early Romantic; witnessed the French Revolution
firsthand and wrote about that experience in The Prelude, which
includes “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its
Commencement”

Front 45

The Edinburgh Review

Back 45

A Scottish newspaper that harshly criticized Byron’s Fugitive Pieces and
Hours of Idleness; its negative reviews spurred Byron to write a satirical
piece called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

Front 46

Archimedes

Back 46

Ancient Greek inventor and mathematician; Rousseau compares a
monarch directing the state to this figure guiding a boat from the shore

Front 47

Burke, Edmund

Back 47

Authored the reactionary paper Reflections on the Revolution in France
in response to Reverend Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country;
believed that the French People should not have revolted against so
mild a ruler as Louis XVI; Wollstonecraft and Paine challenged his
assertions in their pamphlets

Front 48

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Back 48

A friend of William Wordsworth and fellow Lake Poet; co-authored
Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth; suffered from an opium addiction
and wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Front 49

Dante

Back 49

Italian poet whose works Byron read avidly in Italy

Front 50

Johnson, Joseph

Back 50

Designation given to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge; the label refers to the Lake District where they lived

Front 51

Lake Poets

Back 51

A liberal London publisher and radical intellectual; a friend of Mary
Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and
William Blake; published the two parts of Paine’s The Rights of Man