Ghazaldehyde To Autumn

Keats, in To Autumn, offers a very similar message to that of Shelley, and once again displays how some of the most well-known Romantics often engage with society instead of fleeing from it. Autumn is also used to set the tone in this poem, and whilst Autumn for many may produce visions of the death and decay, Keats urges us to remember that it is the “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”. The state imposed on the world by autumn is one of darkness and rot, yet this seasonal change is completely necessary to once again to “load and bless / With fruit the vines”. Keats defends Autumn reminding it that it “hast thy music too” and of its role, however dull, in maintaining balance on earth. Penned within a month of the events at Peterloo, this …show more content…
“England in 1819” disregards subtlety, focusing on an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king” and his princes that “flow / Through public scorn”. Shelley openly condemns his monarch and the army that “starved and stabbed in th’untilled field”, claiming their “liberticide” will act as a “two-edged sword” as some “glorious phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day”. The fact this text was supressed for two decades exemplifies why many Romantic writers may exhibit a detachment from, and unwillingness to explicitly comment on, their immediate …show more content…
Byron, for many, will come to mind most immediately as he was regarded as somewhat of a “roving freeshooter” as he wrote neoclassical plays and “abused Wordsworth and Keats”. Yet even Wordsworth, heralded as the father of The Romantics, produced poetry that seems rather apathetic towards themes of transcendentalism. “The Idiot Boy” - whilst Romantic in that it “rebelled against the established canons of neoclassical aesthetics” and “radically questions” the element of narrative within the ballad – is completely incongruous with McGann’s judgement. Wordsworth states the purpose of the poem was simply to trace “maternal love through many of its more subtle windings”, and this is conspicuous through the “mood or the emotion that the poem seeks to recreate” in lieu of containing any real narrative (98). Imagination is given impetus by this maternal love and plays a key role in the poem; however, it is not used to suggest that the mind can conceive a greater world, but quite the opposite. The world shaped by imagination in “The Idiot Boy” is full of the mother’s tormented thoughts that her son many be in some “goblin’s hall”, “among the ghosts” or lost to “wandering gypsey-folk”. The fact that “Betty herself projects many