The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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The Norton Anthology of English Literature

EIGHTH EDITION VOLUME 2

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Carol T. Christ

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY PRESIDENT, SMITH COLLEGE

Alfred David

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH EMERITUS, INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Barbara K. Lewalski

WILLIAM R. KENAN PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Lawrence Lipking

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND CHESTER D. TRIPP PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

George M. Logan

JAMES CAPPON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY

Deidre Shauna Lynch

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Katharine Eisaman Maus

JAMES BRANCH CABELL PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

James Noggle

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND WHITEHEAD ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CRITICAL THOUGHT, WELLESLEY COLLEGE

Jahan Ramazani

EDGAR F. SHANNON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Catherine Robson

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND CHANCELLOR'S FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

James Simpson

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Jon Stallworthy

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Jack Stillinger

CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

Editors Emeriti

E. Talbot Donaldson, LATE OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY � Hallett Smith, LATE OF THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY � Robert M. Adams, LATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES � Samuel Holt Monk, LATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA � George H. Ford, LATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER � David Daiches, LATE OF THE INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

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The Norton Antkology of English Literature

EIGHTH EDITION

VOLUME 2

Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

COGAN UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

M. H. Abrams, Founding Editor Emeritus CLASS OF 1916 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH EMERITUS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

W � W � NORTON & COMPANY � New York � London

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The Library of Congress has cataloged another edition as follows:

The Norton anthology of English literature / Stephen Greenblatt, general editor ; M.H. Abrams, founding editor emeritus.�8th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0-393-92713-X (v. 1) � ISBN 0-393-92531-5 (v. l:pbk.)

ISBN 0-393-92715-6 (v. 2) � ISBN 0-393-92532-3 (v. 2: pbk.)

1. English literature. 2. Great Britain�Literary collections. I. Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943- II. Abrams, M. H. (Meyer Howard), 1912PR1109. N6 2005 820.8�dc22 2005052313 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London WIT 3QT 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

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Contents

PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xliii

The Romantic Period (1785-1830) l

Introduction 1 Timeline 23

ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) 26 The Mouse's Petition 27 An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study 28 A Summer Evening's Meditation 29 Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade 32 The Rights of Woman 35 To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible 36 Washing-Day 37

CHARLOTTE SMITH (1749-1806) 39

ELEGIAC SONNETS 40

Written at the Close of Spring 40 To Sleep 40 To Night 40 Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex 41 On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic 41 The Sea View 42

The Emigrants 42 Beachy Head 47

MARY ROBINSON (1757?-1800) 66 January, 1795 68 London's Summer Morning 69 The Camp 70 The Poor Singing Dame 71 The Haunted Beach 72 To the Poet Coleridge 74

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WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) All Religions Are One 79 There Is No Natural Religion [a] 80 There Is No Natural Religion [b] 80

SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE

Songs of Innocence 81

Introduction 81 The Ecchoing Green 82 The Lamb 83 The Little Black Boy 84 The Chimney Sweeper 85 The Divine Image 85 Holy Thursday 86 Nurse's Song 86 Infant Joy 87 Songs of Experience 87 Introduction 87 Earth's Answer 88 The Clod & the Pebble 89 Holy Thursday 90 The Chimney Sweeper 90 Nurse's Song 90 The Sick Rose 91 The Fly 91 The Tyger 92 My Pretty Rose Tree 93 Ah Sun-flower 93 The Garden of Love 94 London 94 The Human Abstract 95 Infant Sorrow 95 A Poison Tree 96 To Tirzah 96 A Divine Image 97

The BookofThel 97 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 102 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 110 A Song of Liberty 121

BLAKE'S NOTEBOOK 122

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau 1 Never pain to tell thy love 122 I asked a thief 123

And did those feet 123 From A Vision of the Last Judgment 124 Two Letters on Sight and Vision 126

ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796) Green grow the rashes 131 Holy Willie's Prayer 132

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CONTENTS / ix

To a Mouse 135 To a Louse 136 Auld Lang Syne 137 Afton Water 138 Tam o' Shanter: A Tale 139 Such a parcel of rogues in a nation 144 Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn 145 A Red, Red Rose 145 Song: For a' that and a' that 146

THE REVOLUTION CONTROVERSY AND THE "SPIRIT OF THE AGE" 148

RICHARD PRICE: From A Discourse on the Love of Our Country 149

EDMUND BURKE: From Reflections on the Revolution in France 152

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: From A Vindication of the Rights of Men 158

THOMAS PAINE: From Rights of Man 163

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797) 167 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 170 Introduction 170 Chap. 2. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed 174 From Chap. 4. Observations on the State of Degradation . . . 189 Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 195 Advertisement 196 Letter 1 196 Letter 4 202 Letter 8 204 Letter 19 208

JOANNA BAILLIE (1762-1851) 212 A Winter's Day 213 A Mother to Her Waking Infant 220 Up! quit thy bower 221 Song: Woo'd and married and a' 222 Address to a Steam Vessel 223

MARIA EDGEWORTH (1768-1849) 226 The Irish Incognito 228

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) 243

LYRICAL BALLADS 245

Simon Lee 245 We Are Seven 248 Lines Written in Early Spring 250 Expostulation and Reply 250 The Tables Turned 251

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The Thorn 252 Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey 258 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) 262 [The Subject and Language of Poetry] 263 ["What Is a Poet?"] 269 ["Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity"] 273

Strange fits of passion have I known 274 She dwelt among the untrodden ways 275 Three years she grew 275 A slumber did my spirit seal 276 I travelled among unknown men 277 Lucy Gray 277 Nutting 279 The Ruined Cottage 280 Michael 292 Resolution and Independence 302 I wandered lonely as a cloud 305 My heart leaps up 306 Ode: Intimations of Immortality 306 Ode to Duty 312 The Solitary Reaper 314 Elegiac Stanzas 315

SONNETS 31 7

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 317 It is a beauteous evening 317 To Toussaint 1'Ouverture 318 September 1st, 1802 318 London,1802 319 The world is too much with us 319 Surprised by joy 320 Mutability 320 Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways 320

Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg 321 The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind 322 Book First. Introduction, Childhood, and School-time 324 Book Second. School-time continued 338 Book Third. Residence at Cambridge 348 [Arrival at St. John's College. "The Glory of My Youth"] 348 Book Fourth. Summer Vacation 352 [The Walks with His Terrier. The Circuit of the Lake] 352 [The Walk Home from the Dance. The Discharged Soldier] 354 Book Fifth. Books 357 [The Dream of the Arab] 357 [The Boy of Winander] 359 ["The Mystery of Words"] 361 Book Sixth. Cambridge, and the Alps 361 ["Human Nature Seeming Born Again"] 361 [Crossing Simplon Pass] 362 Book Seventh. Residence in London 364 [The Blind Beggar. Bartholomew Fair] 364

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Book Eighth. Retrospect, Love of Nature leading to Love of Man 367 [The Shepherd in the Mist] 367 Book Ninth. Residence in France 368 [Paris and Orleans. Becomes a "Patriot"] 368 Book Tenth. France continued 371 [The Revolution: Paris and England] 371 [The Reign of Terror. Nightmares] 373 Book Eleventh. France, concluded 374 [Retrospect: "Bliss Was It in That Dawn." Recourse to "Reason's Naked Self"] 374 [Crisis, Breakdown, and Recovery] 378 Book Twelfth. Imagination and Taste, how impaired and restored 378 [Spots of Time] 378 Book Thirteenth. Subject concluded 381 [Poetry of "Unassuming Things"] 381 [Discovery of His Poetic Subject. Salisbury Plain. Sight of "a New World"] 382 Book Fourteenth. Conclusion 385 [The Vision on Mount Snowdon] 385 [Conclusion: "The Mind of Man"] 387

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (1771-1855) 389 From The Alfoxden Journal 390 From The Grasmere Journals 392 Grasmere�A Fragment 402 Thoughts on My Sick-Bed 404

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832) 406 The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Introduction 407 Proud Maisie 410

REDGAUNTLET 41 1

Wandering Willie's Tale 411

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) 424 The Eolian Harp 426 This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison 428 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 430 Kubla Khan 446 Christabel 449 Frost at Midnight 464 Dejection: An Ode 466 The Pains of Sleep 469 To William Wordsworth 471 Epitaph 473 Biographia Literaria 474 Chapter 4 474 [Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems] 474 [On fancy and imagination�the investigation of the distinction important to the fine arts] 476

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Chapter 13 477 [On the imagination, or esemplastic power] 477 Chapter 14. Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed-�preface to the second edition�the ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony�philosophic definitions of a poem and poetry with scholia. 478 Chapter 17 483 [Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth] 483 [Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavorable to the formation of a human diction-�the best parts of language the products of philosophers, not clowns or shepherds] 483 [The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager] 484 Lectures on Shakespeare 485 [Fancy and Imagination in Shakespeare's Poetry] 485 [Mechanic vs. Organic Form] 487 The Statesman's Manual 488 [On Symbol and Allegory] 488 [The Satanic Hero] 490

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) 491 From On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation 493 Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago 496 Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 505 Old China 510

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817) 514 Love and Friendship: A Novel in a Series of Letters 515 Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters 535

WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) 537 On Gusto 538 My First Acquaintance with Poets 541

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859) 554 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 556 Preliminary Confessions 556 [The Prostitute Ann] 556 Introduction to the Pains of Opium 559 [The Malay] 559 The Pains of Opium 560 [Opium Reveries and Dreams] 560 On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth 569 Alexander Pope 572 [The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power] 572

THE GOTHIC AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MASS READERSHIP 577

HORACE WALPOLE: From The Castle of Otranto 579

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CONTENTS / xiii

ANNA LETITIA AIKIN (later BARBAULD) and JOHN AIKIN: On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment 582

WILLIAM BECKFORD: From Vathek 587

ANN RADCLIFFE 592 From The Romance of the Forest 592 From The Mysteries of Udolpho 594

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS: From The Monk 595

ANONYMOUS: Terrorist Novel Writing 600

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 602 From Review of The Monk by Matthew Lewis 602 From Biographia Literaria 606

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824) 607 Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos 611 She walks in beauty 612 They say that Hope is happiness 613 When we two parted 613 Stanzas for Music 614 Darkness 614 So, we'll go no more a roving 616

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 617

Canto 1 617 ["Sin's Long Labyrinth"] 617 Canto 3 619 ["Once More Upon the Waters"] 619 [Waterloo] 622 [Napoleon] 625 [Switzerland] 628

Manfred 635

DON JUAN 669

Fragment 670 Canto 1 670 [Juan and Donna Julia] 670 Canto 2 697 [The Shipwreck] 697 [Juan and Haidee] 704 Canto 3 718 [Juan and Haidee] 718 Canto 4 725 [Juan and Haidee] 725

Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa 734 January 22nd. Missolonghi 735

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LETTERS 736

To Thomas Moore (Jan. 28, 1817) 736 To Douglas Kinnaird (Oct. 26, 1819) 738 To Percy Bysshe Shelley (Apr. 26,1821) 740

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) 741 Mutability 744 To Wordsworth 744 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude 745 Mont Blanc 762 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 766 Ozymandias 768 Stanzas Written in Dejection�December 1818, near Naples 769 A Song: "Men of England" 770 England in 1819 771 To Sidmouth and Castlereagh 771 To William Shelley 772 Ode to the West Wind 772 Prometheus Unbound 775 Preface 775 Act 1 779 Act 2 802 Scene 4 802 Scene 5 806 Act 3 809 Scene 1 809 From Scene 4 811 From Act 4 814 The Cloud 815 To a Sky-Lark 817 To Night 819 To [Music, when soft voices die] 820 O World, O Life, O Time 820 Chorus from Hellas 821 The world's great age 821 Adonais 822 When the lamp is shattered 836 To Jane (The keen stars were twinkling) 836 From A Defence of Poetry 837

JOHN CLARE (1793-1864) 850 The Nightingale's Nest 851 Pastoral Poesy 853 [Mouse's Nest] 856 A Vision 856 I Am 857 An Invite to Eternity 858 Clock a Clay 859 The Peasant Poet 859 Song [I hid my love] 860 Song [I peeled bits o' straws] 860 From Autobiographical Fragments 86 1

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FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS (1793-1835) England's Dead 865 The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England 867 Casabianca 868 The Homes of England 870 Corinne at the Capitol 871 A Spirit's Return 872

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) On First Looking into Chapman's Homer 880 Sleep and Poetry 881 [O for Ten Years] 881 On Seeing the Elgin Marbles 883 Endymion: A Poetic Romance 883 Preface 883 Book 1 884 [A Thing of Beauty] 884 [The "Pleasure Thermometer"] 885 On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again 887 When I have fears that I may cease to be 888 To Homer 888 The Eve of St. Agnes 888 Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell 898 Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art 898 La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad 899 Sonnet to Sleep 900 Ode to Psyche 901 Ode to a Nightingale 903 Ode on a Grecian Urn 905 Ode on Melancholy 906 Ode on Indolence 908 Lamia 909 To Autumn 925 The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream 926 This living hand, now warm and capable 939

LETTERS 940

To Benjamin Bailey (Nov. 22, 1817) 940 To George and Thomas Keats (Dec. 21, 27 [?], 1817) 942 To John Hamilton Reynolds (Feb. 3, 1818) 943 To John Taylor (Feb. 27, 1818) 944 To John Hamilton Reynolds (May 3, 1818) 945 To Richard Woodhouse (Oct. 27, 1818) 947 To George and Georgiana Keats (Feb. 14-May 3, 1819) 948 To Fanny Brawne (July 25, 1819) 952 To Percy Bysshe Shelley (Aug. 16, 1820) 953 To Charles Brown (Nov. 30, 1820) 954

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (1797-1851) The Last Man: Introduction 958 The Mortal Immortal 961

LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON (1802-1838) The Proud Ladye 971

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Love's Last Lesson 973 Revenge 976 The Little Shroud 977

The Victorian Age (1830-1901) 979

Introduction 979 Timeline 1000

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) 1002 Sartor Resartus 1006 The Everlasting No 1006 Centre of Indifference 1011 The Everlasting Yea 1017 Past and Present 1024 Democracy 1024 Captains of Industry 1029

JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN (1801-1890) 1033 The Idea of a University 1035 From Discourse 5. Knowledge Its Own End 1035 From Discourse 7. Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill 1036 From Discourse 8. Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion 1041

JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) 1043 What Is Poetry? 1044 On Liberty 1051 From Chapter 3. Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Weil- Being 1051 The Subjection of Women 1060 From Chapter 1 1061 Autobiography 1070 From Chapter 5. A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward 1070

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861) 1077 The Cry of the Children 1079 To George Sand: A Desire 1083 To George Sand: A Recognition 1083 Sonnets from the Portuguese 1084 21 ("Say over again, and yet once over again") 1084 22 ("When our two souls stand up erect and strong") 1084 32 ("The first time that the sun rose on thine oath") 1084 43 ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways") 1085 The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point 1085 Aurora Leigh 1092 Book 1 1092 [The Education of Aurora Leigh] 1092 Book 2 1097 [Aurora's Aspirations] 1097

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CONTENTS / xvii

[Aurora's Rejection of Romney] 1100 Book 5 1104 [Poets and the Present Age] 1104 Mother and Poet 1106

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892) 1109 Mariana 1112 The Lady of Shalott 1114 The Lotos-Eaters 1119 Ulysses 1123 Tithonus 1125 Break, Break, Break 1126 The Epic [Morte d'Arthur] 1127 Locksley Hall 1129

THE PRINCESS 1135

Tears, Idle Tears 1135 Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal 1136 ["The woman's cause is man's"] 1136

From In Memoriam A. H. H. 1138 The Charge of the Light Brigade 1188

IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 1 89

The Coming of Arthur 1190 The Passing of Arthur 1201

Crossing the Bar 1211

EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883) 1212 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 1213

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865) 1221 The Old Nurse's Story 1222

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) 1236 A Visit to Newgate 1239

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) 1248 Porphyria's Lover 1252 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 1253 My Last Duchess 1255 The Lost Leader 1256 How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix 1257 The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church 1259 A Toccata of Galuppi's 1262 Love among the Ruins 1264 "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" 1266 Fra Lippo Lippi 1271 Andrea del Sarto 1280 A Grammarian's Funeral 1286 An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician 1289 Caliban upon Setebos 1296

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Abt Vogler 1303 Rabbi Ben Ezra 1305

EMILY BRONTE (1818-1848) 1311 I'm happiest when most away 1311 The Night-Wind 1312 Remembrance 1313 Stars . 1314 The Prisoner. A Fragment 1315 No coward soul is mine 1317

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) 1317 Modern Painters 1320 [A Definition of Greatness in Art] 1320 ["The Slave Ship"] 1321 From Of the Pathetic Fallacy 1322 The Stones of Venice 1324 [The Savageness of Gothic Architecture] 1324

GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880) 1334 Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft 1337 From Silly Novels by Lady Novelists 1342

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888) 1350 Isolation. To Marguerite 1354 To Marguerite�Continued 1355 The Buried Life 1356 Memorial Verses 1358 Lines Written in Kensington Gardens 1360 The Scholar Gypsy 1361 Dover Beach 1368 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse 1369 Preface to Poems (1853) 1374 From The Function of Criticism at the Present Time 1384 Culture and Anarchy 1398 From Chapter 1. Sweetness and Light 1398 From Chapter 2. Doing As One Likes 1399 From Chapter 5. Porro Unum Est Necessarium 1402 From The Study of Poetry 1404 Literature and Science 1415

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY (1825-1895) 1427 Science and Culture 1429 [The Values of Education in the Sciences] 1429 Agnosticism and Christianity 1436 [Agnosticism Defined] 1436

GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909) 1440 Modern Love 1440 1 ("By this he knew she wept with waking eyes") 1440 2 ("It ended, and the morrow brought the task") 1440 17 ("At dinner, she is hostess, I am host") 1441

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CONTENTS / xix

49 ("He found her by the ocean's moaning verge") 1441 50 ("Thus piteously Love closed what he begat") 1441

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882) 1442 The Blessed Damozel 1443 My Sister's Sleep 1447 Jenny 1449 The House of Life 1457 The Sonnet 1457 Nuptial Sleep 1458

19. Silent Noon 1458

77. Soul's Beauty 1458

78. Body's Beauty 1459

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894) 1459 Song ("She sat and sang alway") 1460 Song ("When I am dead, my dearest") 1461 After Death 1461 Dead before Death 1462 Cobwebs 1462 A Triad 1462 In an Artist's Studio 1463 A Birthday 1463 An Apple-Gathering 1464 Winter: My Secret 1464 Up-Hill 1465 Goblin Market 1466 "No, Thank You, John" 1478 Promises Like Pie-Crust 1479 In Progress 1479 A Life's Parallels 1480 Later Life 1480 17 ("Something this foggy day, a something which") 1480 Cardinal Newman 1480 Sleeping at Last 1481

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) 1481 The Defence of Guenevere 1483 How I Became a Socialist 1491

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837-1909) 1494 Hymn to Proserpine 1496 Hermaphroditus 1499 Ave atque Vale 1500

WALTER PATER (1839-1894) 1505 Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1507 Preface 1507 ["La Gioconda"] 1510 Conclusion 1511

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844-1889) 1513 God's Grandeur 1516

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The Starlight Night 1516 As Kingfishers Catch Fire 1517 Spring 1517 The Windhover 1518 Pied Beauty 1518 Hurrahing in Harvest 1519 Binsey Poplars 1519 Duns Scotus's Oxford 1520 Felix Randal 1520 Spring and Fall: to a young child 1521 [Carrion Comfort] 1521 No worst, there is none 1522 I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day 1522 That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire 1523 Thou art indeed just, Lord 1524 From Journal 1524

LIGHT VERSE 1527

EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888) 1527 Limerick ("There was an Old Man who supposed") 1528 The Jumblies 1528

LEWIS CARROLL (1832-1898) 1529 Jabberwocky 1530 [Humpty Dumpty's Explication of "Jabberwocky"] 1530 The White Knight's Song 1532

W. S. GILBERT (1836-1911) 1534 When I, Good Friends, Was Called to the Bar 1534 If You're Anxious for to Shine in the High Aesthetic Line 1534

VICTORIAN ISSUES 1538

EVOLUTION 1538 Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species 1539 From Chapter 3. Struggle for Existence 1539 From Chapter 15. Recapitulation and Conclusion 1541 Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man 1 545 [Natural Selection and Sexual Selection] 1546 Leonard Huxley: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley 1549 [The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate at Oxford] 1550 Sir Edmund Gosse: From Father and Son 1553

INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE? 1556 Thomas Babington Macaulay: A Review of Southey's Colloquies 1557 [Evidence of Progress] 1557 The Children's Employment Commission: From First Report of the Commissioners, Mines 1563 [Child Mine-Worker in Yorkshire] 1563 Friedrich Engels: From The Great Towns 1565 Charles Kingsley: Alton Locke 1 572

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CONTENTS / xxi

[A London Slum] 1572 Charles Dickens: Hard Times 1573 [Coketown] 1573 Anonymous: Poverty Knock 1574 Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor 1576 [Boy Inmate of the Casual Wards] 1 576 Annie Besant: The "White Slavery" of London Match Workers 1577 Ada Nield Chew: A Living Wage for Factory Girls at Crewe 1579

THE "WOMAN QUESTION": THE VICTORIAN DEBATE ABOUT GENDEB 1581 Sarah Stickney Ellis: The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits 1583 [Disinterested Kindness] 1584 Coventry Patmore: The Angel in the House 1585 The Paragon 1586 John Ruskin: From Of Queens' Gardens 1 587 Harriet Martineau: From Autobiography 1589 Anonymous: The Great Social Evil 1592 Dinah Maria Mulock: A Woman's Thoughts about Women 1596 [Something to Do] 1596 Florence Nightingale: Cassandra 1598 [Nothing to Do] 1598 Mona Caird: From Marriage 1601 Walter Besant: The Queen's Reign 1605 [The Transformation of Women's Status between 1837 and 1897] 1605

EMPIRE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 1607 Thomas Babington Macaulay: Minute on Indian Education 1610 William Howard Bussell: My Diary in India, In the Year 1858-9 1612 Eliza Cook: The Englishman 1615 Charles Mackay: Songs from "The Emigrants" 1616 Anonymous: [Proclamation of an Irish Republic] 1618 Matthew Arnold: From On the Study of Celtic Literature 1619 James Anthony Froude: From The English in the West Indies 1621 John Jacob Thomas: Froudacity 1624 From Social Revolution 1624 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen 1625

T. N. Mukharji: A Visit to Europe 1627 [The Indian and Colonial Exhibition] 1627 Joseph Chamberlain: From The True Conception of Empire 1630

J. A. Hobson: Imperialism: A Study 1632 [The Political Significance of Imperialism] 1632

LATE VICTORIANS 1635

MICHAEL FIELD (Katherine Bradley: 1846-1914; and Edith Cooper: 1862-1913) 1513 [Maids, not to you my mind doth change] 1638

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[A girl] 1639 Unbosoming 1639 [It was deep April, and the morn] 1639 To Christina Rossetti 1640 Nests in Elms 1640 Eros 1641

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY (1849-1903) 1641 In Hospital 1642 Invictus 1642

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) 1643 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1645

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) 1686 Impression du Matin 1687 The Harlot's House 1688 The Critic as Artist 1689 [Criticism Itself an Art] 1689 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray 1697 The Importance of Being Earnest 1698 From De Profundis 1740

BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950) 1743 Mrs Warren's Profession 1746

MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE (1861-1907) 1790 The Other Side of a Mirror 1791 The Witch 1792

RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) 1793 The Man Who Would Be King 1794 Danny Deever 1818 The Widow at Windsor 1819 Recessional 1820 The White Man's Burden 1821 If� 1822

ERNEST DOWSON (1867-1900) 1823 Cynara 1824 They Are Not Long 1825

The Twentieth Century and After 1827

Introduction 1827 Timeline 1848

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) 1851 On the Western Circuit 1852 Hap 1868 Neutral Tones 1869 I Look into My Glass 1869

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A Broken Appointment 1870 Drummer Hodge 1870 The Darkling Thrush 1871 The Ruined Maid 1872 A Trampwoman's Tragedy 1872 One We Knew 1875 She Hears the Storm 1876 Channel Firing 1877 The Convergence of the Twain 1878 Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave? 1879 Under the Waterfall 1880 The Walk 1881 The Voice 1882 TheWorkbox 1882 During Wind and Rain 1883 In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' 1884 He Never Expected Much 1884

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" 1887 [The Task of the Artist] 1887 Heart of Darkness 1890

A. E. HOUSMAN (1859-1936) Loveliest of Trees 1948 When I Was One-and-Twenty 1949 To an Athlete Dying Young 1949 Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff 1950 The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux 1952 Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries 1953

VOICES FROM WORLD WAR I

RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915) The Soldier 1955

EDWABD THOMAS (1878-1917) Adlestrop 1956 Tears 1957 . The Owl 1957 Rain 1958 The Cherry Trees 1958 As the Team's Head Brass 1959

SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886-1967) 'They' 1960 The Rear-Guard 1961 The General 1961 Glory of Women 1962 Everyone Sang 1962 On Passing the New Menin Gate 1963

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Memoirs of an Infantry Officer 1963 [The Opening of the Battle of the Somme] 1963

IVOR GURNEY (1890-1937) 1965 To His Love 1965 The Silent One 1966

ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890-1918) 1966 Break of Day in the Trenches 1967 Louse Hunting 1967 Returning, We Hear the Larks 1968 Dead Man's Dump 1969

WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918) 1971 Anthem for Doomed Youth 1971 Apologia Pro Poemate Meo 1972 Miners 1973 Dulce Et Decorum Est 1974 Strange Meeting 1975 Futility 1976

S.I.W. 1976 Disabled 1977 From Owen's Letters to His Mother 1979 Preface 1980

MAY WEDDERBURN CANNAN (1893-1973) 1981 Rouen 1981 From Grey Ghosts and Voices 1983

ROBERT GRAVES (1895-1985) 1984 Goodbye to All That 1985 [The Attack on High Wood] 1985 The Dead Fox Hunter 1987 Recalling War 1988

DAVID JONES (1895-1974) 1989

IN PARENTHESIS 1990

From Preface 1990 From Part 7: The Five Unmistakeable Marks 1992

MODERNIST MANIFESTOS 1996

T. E. HULME: From Romanticism and Classicism (w. 1911-12) 1998

F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND: Imagisme; A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste (1913) 2003

AN IMAGIST CLUSTER 2007

T. E. Hulme: Autumn 2008 Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro 2008

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H. D. 2009 Oread 2009 Sea Rose 2009

Blast (1914) 2009 Long Live the Vortex! 2010 Blast 6 2012

MINA LOY: Feminist Manifesto (w. 1914) 2015

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939) 2019 The Stolen Child 2022 Down by the Salley Gardens 2024 The Rose of the World 2024 The Lake Isle of Innisfree 2025 The Sorrow of Love 2025 When You Are Old 2026 Who Goes with Fergus? 2026 The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland 2026 Adam's Curse 2028 No Second Troy 2029 The Fascination of What's Difficult 2029 A Coat 2029 September 1913 2030 Easter, 1916 2031 The Wild Swans at Coole 2033 In Memory of Major Robert Gregory 2034 The Second Coming 2036 A Prayer for My Daughter 2037 Leda and the Swan 2039 Sailing to Byzantium 2046 Among School Children 2041 A Dialogue of Self and Soul 2042 Byzantium 2044 Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop 2045 Lapis Lazuli 2046 Under Ben Bulben 2047 Man and the Echo 2050 The Circus Animals' Desertion 2051 From Introduction [A General Introduction for My Work] 2053

E. M. FORSTER (1879-1970) 2058 The Other Boat 2059

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) 2080 The Mark on the Wall 2082 Modern Fiction 2087 A Room of One's Own 2092 Professions for Women 2152 A Sketch of the Past 2155 [Moments of Being and Non-Being] 2155

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JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) 2163 Araby 2168 The Dead 2172 Ulysses 2200 [Proteus] 2200 [Lestrygonians] 2213 Finnegans Wake 2239 From Anna Livia Plurabelle 2239

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930) 2243 Odour of Chrysanthemums 2245 The Horse Dealer's Daughter 2258 Why the Novel Matters 2269 Love on the Farm 2273 Piano 2275 Tortoise Shout 2275 Bavarian Gentians 2278 Snake 2278 Cypresses 2280 How Beastly the Bourgeois Is 2282 The Ship of Death 2283

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965) 2286 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 2289 Sweeney among the Nightingales 2293 The Waste Land 2295 The Hollow Men 2309 Journey of the Magi 2312

FOUR QUARTETS 2312

Little Gidding 2313

Tradition and the Individual Talent 2319 The Metaphysical Poets 2325

KATHERINE MANSFIELD (1888-1923) 2332 The Daughters of the Late Colonel 2333 The Garden Party 2346

JEAN RHYS (1890-1979) 2356 The Day They Burned the Books 2357 Let Them Call It Jazz 2361

STEVIE SMITH (1902-1971) 2372 Sunt Leones 2373 Our Bog Is Dood 2374 Not Waving but Drowning 2374 Thoughts About the Person from Porlock 2375 Pretty 2377

GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) 237 8 Shooting an Elephant 2379 Politics and the English Language 238 4

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SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) Endgame 2394

W. H. AUDEN (1907-1973) Petition 2422 On This Island 2422 Lullaby 2423 Spain 2424 As I Walked Out One Evening 2427 Musee des Beaux Arts 2428 In Memory of W. B. Yeats 2429 The Unknown Citizen 2431 September 1, 1939 2432 In Praise of Limestone 2435 The Shield of Achilles 2437 [Poetry as Memorable Speech] 2438

LOUIS MACNEICE (1907-1963) Sunday Morning 2442 The Sunlight on the Garden 2442 Bagpipe Music 2443 Star-Gazer 2444

DYLAN THOMAS (1914-1953) The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower The Hunchback in the Park 2446 Poem in October 2447 Fern Hill 2448 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night 2450

VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II

EDITH SITWELL (1887-1964) Still Falls the Rain 2453

HENRY REED (1914-1986) Lessons of the War 2455

1. Naming of Parts 2455

KEITH DOUGLAS (1920-1944) Gallantry 2456 Vergissmeinnicht 2457 Aristocrats 2458

CHARLES CAUSLEY (1917-2003) At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux 2459 Armistice Day 2460

NATION AND LANGUAGE

CLAUDE McKAY (1890-1948) Old England 2463 If We Must Die 2464

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HUGH MACDIARMID (1892-1978) [The Splendid Variety of Languages and Dialects] 2465 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle 2466

1. Farewell to Dostoevski 2466

2. Yet Ha'e I Silence Left 2467 In Memoriam James Joyce 2467 We Must Look at the Harebell 2467 Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries 2468

LOUISE BENNETT (1919-2006) Jamaica Language 2469 Dry-Foot Bwoy 2470 Colonization in Reverse 2472 Jamaica Oman 2473

BRIAN FRIEL (b. 1929) Translations 2477

KAMAU BBATHWAITE (b. 1930) [Nation Language] 2523 Calypso 2527

WOLE SOYINKA (b. 1934) Telephone Conversation 2529

TONY HARRISON (b. 1937) Heredity 2531 National Trust 2531 Book Ends 2532 Long Distance 2533 Turns 2534 Marked with D. 2534

NGUGI WA THIONG'O (b. 1938) Decolonising the Mind 2535 From The Language of African Literature 2535

SALMAN RUSHDIE (b. 1947) [English Is an Indian Literary Language] 2540

JOHN AGARD (b. 1949) Listen Mr Oxford Don 2542

DORIS LESSING (b. 1919) To Room Nineteen 2544

PHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985) Church Going 2566 MCMXIV 2568 Talking in Bed 2569 Ambulances 2569 High Windows 2570

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Sad Steps 2571 Homage to a Government 2571 The Explosion 2572 This Be The Verse 2572 Aubade 2573

NADINE GORDIMER (b. 1923) 2574 The Moment before the Gun Went Off 2575

A. K. RAMANUJAN (1929-1993) 2578 Self-Portrait 2579 Elements of Composition 2579 Foundlings in the Yukon 2581

THOM GUNN (1929-2004) 2582 Black Jackets 2583 My Sad Captains 2583 From the Wave 2584 Still Life 2585 The Missing 2585

DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930) 2586 A Far Cry from Africa 2587 The Schooner Flight 2588 1 Adios, Carenage 2588 The Season of Phastasmal Peace 2590

OMEROS 2591

1.3.3 [" 'Mais qui qa qui rivait-'ous, Philoctete?' "] 2591 6.49.1�2 ["She bathed him in the brew of the root. The basin"] 2592

TED HUGHES (1930-1998) 2594 Wind 2594 Relic 2595 Pike 2595 Out 2597 Theology 2598 Crow's Last Stand 2599 Daffodils 2599

HAROLD PINTER (b. 1930) 2601 The Dumb Waiter 2601

CHINUAACHEBE (b. 1930) 2622 Things Fall Apart 2624 From An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness 2709

ALICE MUNRO (b. 1931) 2714 Walker Brothers Cowboy 2715

GEOFFREY HILL (b. 1932) 2725 In Memory of Jane Fraser 2725 Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings 2726

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September Song 2726 Mercian Hymns 2727 6 ("The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall") 2727 7 ("Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools") 2727 28 ("Processes of generation; deeds of settlement. The") 2728 30 ("And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-") 2728 An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England 2728

9. The Laurel Axe 2728

V. S. NAIPAUL (b. 1932) 2729 One Out of Many 2730

TOM STOPPARD (b. 1937) 2752 Arcadia 2753

LES MURRAY (b. 1938) 2820 Morse 2821 On Removing Spiderweb 2821 Corniche 2822

SEAMUS HEANEY(b. 1939) 2822 Digging 2824 The Forge 2825 The Grauballe Man 2825 Punishment 2826 Casualty 2828 The Skunk 2830 Station Island 2831 12 ("Like a convalescent, I took the hand") 2831 Clearances 2833 The Sharping Stone 2836

J. M. COETZEE (b. 1940) 2838 From Waiting for the Barbarians 2839

EAVAN BOLAND (b. 1944) 2848 Fond Memory 2848 That the Science of Cartography Is Limited 2849 The Dolls Museum in Dublin 2850 The Lost Land 2851

SALMAN RUSHDIE (b. 1947) 2852 The Prophet's Hair 2854

ANNE CARSON (b. 1950) 2863 The Glass Essay 2864 Hero 2864 Epitaph: Zion 2868

PAUL MULDOON (b. 1951) 2868 Meeting the British 2869 Gathering Mushrooms 2870 Milkweed and Monarch 2871 The Grand Conversation 2872

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CAROL ANN DUFFY (b. 1955) 2873 Warming Her Pearls 2874 Medusa 2875 Mrs Lazarus 2876

POEMS IN PROCESS A1 William Blake A2 The Tyger A2 William Wordsworth A4 She dwelt among the untrodden ways A4 Lord Byron A5

Don Juan A5 Canto 3, Stanza 9 A5 Canto 14, Stanza 95 A6

Percy Bysshe Shelley A7 O World, O Life, O Time A7

John Keats A9 The Eve of St. Agnes A9 To Autumn A10

Alfred, Lord Tennyson A11 The Lady of Shalott A11 Tithonus A14

Elizabeth Barrett Browning A15 The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point A15 Gerard Manley Hopkins A18 Thou art indeed just, Lord A18

William Butler Yeats A19 The Sorrow of Love A19 Leda and the Swan A21

D. H. Lawrence A23 The Piano A23 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES A25 Suggested General Readings A25 The Romantic Period A28 The Victorian Age A36 The Twentieth Century and After A45

APPENDIXES A74 Literary Terminology A74 Geographic Nomenclature A96 Map: London in the 19th and 20th Centuries A98 British Money A99 The British Baronage A104

The Royal Lines of England and Great Britain A106 Religions in England A109

Permissions Acknowledgments A113

Index A119

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Preface to the Eighth Edition

The outpouring of English literature overflows all boundaries, including the capacious boundaries of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. But these pages manage to contain many of the most remarkable works written in English during centuries of restless creative effort. We have included epic poems and short lyrics; love songs and satires; tragedies and comedies written for performance on the commercial stage, and private meditations meant to be perused in silence; prayers, popular ballads, prophecies, ecstatic visions, erotic fantasies, sermons, short stories, letters in verse and prose, critical essays, polemical tracts, several entire novels, and a great deal more. Such works generally form the core of courses that are designed to introduce students to English literature, with its history not only of gradual development, continuity, and dense internal echoes, but also of sudden change and startling innovation.

One of the joys of literature in English is its spectacular abundance. Even within the geographical confines of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where the majority of texts brought together in this collection originated, one can find more than enough distinguished and exciting works to fill the pages of this anthology many times over. The abundance is all the greater if one takes, as the editors of these volumes do, a broad understanding of the term literature. In the course of several centuries, the meaning of the term has shifted from the whole body of writing produced in a particular language to a subset of that writing consisting of works that claim special attention because of their unusual formal beauty or expressive power. Certain literary works, arousing enduring admiration, have achieved sufficient prominence to serve as widespread models for other writers and thus to constitute something approximating a canon. But just as in English-speaking countries there have never been academies empowered to regulate the use of language, so too there have never been firmly settled guidelines for canonizing particular texts. Any individual text's claim to attention is subject to constant debate and revision; established texts are jostled both by new arrivals and by previously neglected claimants; and the boundaries between the literary and whatever is thought to be "nonliterary" are constantly challenged and redrawn. The heart of this collection consists of poems, plays, and prose fiction, but, like the language in which they are written, these categories are themselves products of ongoing historical transformations, and we have included many texts that call into question any conception of literature as only a limited set of particular kinds of writing. English literature as a field arouses not a sense of order but what Yeats calls "the emotion of multitude."

Following the lead of most college courses, we have separated off, on pragmatic grounds, English literature from American literature, but, in keeping

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with the multinational, multicultural, and hugely expansive character of the language, we have incorporated, particularly for the modern period, a substantial number of texts by authors from other countries. This border-crossing is not a phenomenon of modernity only. It is fitting that among the first works here is Beowulf, a powerful epic written in the Germanic language known as Old English about a singularly restless Scandinavian hero. Beowulf's remarkable translator in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seamus Heaney, is one -of the great contemporary masters of English literature he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995�but it would be potentially misleading to call him an "English poet" for he was born in Northern Ireland and is not in fact English. It would be still more misleading to call him a "British poet," as if the British Empire were the most salient fact about the language he speaks and writes in or the culture by which he was shaped. What matters is that the language in which Heaney writes is English, and this fact links him powerfully with the authors assembled in these volumes, a linguistic community that stubbornly refuses to fit comfortably within any firm geographical or ethnic or national boundaries. So too, to glance at other authors and writings in the anthology, in the sixteenth century William Tyndale, in exile in the Low Countries and inspired by German religious reformers, translated the New Testament from Greek and thereby changed the course of the English language; in the seventeenth century Aphra Behn deeply touched her readers with a story that moves from Africa, where its hero is born, to South America, where Behn herself may have witnessed some of the tragic events she describes; and early in the twentieth century Joseph Conrad, born in Ukraine of Polish parents, wrote in eloquent English a celebrated novella whose vision of European empire was trenchantly challenged at the century's

end by the Nigerian-born writer in English, Chinua Achebe.

A vital literary culture is always on the move. This principle was the watchword of M. H. Abrams, the distinguished literary critic who first conceived The Norton Anthology of English Literature, brought together the original team of editors, and, with characteristic insight, diplomacy, and humor, oversaw seven editions and graciously offered counsel on this eighth edition. Abrams wisely understood that the dense continuities that underlie literary performance are perpetually challenged and revitalized by innovation. He understood too that new scholarly discoveries and the shifting interests of readers constantly alter the landscape of literary history. Hence from the start he foresaw that, if the anthology were to be successful, it would have to undergo a process of periodic revision and reselection, an ambitious enterprise that would draw upon the energy and ideas of new editors brought in to work with the seasoned team.

The Eighth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature represents the most thoroughgoing instance in its long publishing history of this generational renewal. Across the whole chronological breadth of the volumes, new editors joined forces with the existing editors in a spirit of close collaboration. The revitalized team has considered afresh each of the selections and rethought all the other myriad aspects of the anthology. In doing so, we have, as in past years, profited from a remarkable flow of voluntary corrections and suggestions proposed by teachers, as well as students, who view the anthology with a loyal but critical eye. Moreover, we have again solicited and received detailed information on the works actually assigned, proposals for deletions and additions, and suggestions for improving the editorial matter, from over

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two hundred reviewers from around the world, almost all of them teachers who use the book in a course. The active participation of an engaged and dedicated community of readers has been crucial as the editors of the Norton Anthology grapple with the task of retaining (and indeed strengthening) the selection of more traditional texts even while adding many texts that reflect the transformation and expansion of the field of English studies. The great challenge (and therefore the interest) of the task is linked to the space constraints that even these hefty volumes must observe. The virtually limitless resources of the anthology's Web site make at least some of the difficult choices less vexing, but the editorial team kept clearly in view the central importance in the classroom of the printed pages. The final decisions on what to include were made by the editors, but we were immeasurably assisted by our ongoing collaboration with teachers and students.

With each edition, The Norton Anthology of English Literature has offered a broadened canon without sacrificing major writers and a selection of complete longer texts in which readers can immerse themselves. Perhaps the most emblematic of these longer texts are the two great epics Beowulf and Paradise Lost. To the extensive list of such complete works, the Eighth Edition has added many others, including Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (restored to its entirety), Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and Brian Friel's Translations.

Though this latest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature has retained the works that have traditionally been identified and taught as the principal glories of English literature, many of the newer selections reflect the fact that the national conception of literary history, the conception by which English Literature meant the literature of England or at most of Great Britain, has begun to give way to something else. Writers like William Butler Yeats (born in Dublin), Hugh MacDiarmid (born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland), Virginia Woolf (born in London), and Dylan Thomas (born in Swansea, Wales) are now being taught, and are here anthologized, alongside such writers as Nadine Gordimer (born in the Transvaal, South Africa), Alice Munro (born in Wingham, Ontario), Derek Walcott (born on Saint Lucia in the West Indies), V. S. Naipaul (born in Trinidad), and Salman Rushdie (born in Bombay, India). English literature, like so many other collective enterprises in our century, has ceased to be principally about the identity of a single nation; it is a global phenomenon.

We have in this edition continued to expand the selection of writing by women in all of the historical periods. The sustained work of scholars in recent years has recovered dozens of significant authors who had been marginalized or neglected by a male-dominated literary tradition and has deepened our understanding of those women writers who had managed, against considerable odds, to claim a place in that tradition. The First Edition of the Norton Anthology included 6 women writers; this Eighth Edition includes 67, of whom 16 are newly added and 15 are reselected or expanded. Poets and dramatists whose names were scarcely mentioned even in the specialized literary histories of earlier generations�Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Leapor, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many others�now appear in the company of their male contemporaries. There are in addition four complete long prose works by women�Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Jane

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Austen's Love and Friendship, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own� along with new selections from such celebrated fiction writers as Maria Edge- worth, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, and Doris Lessing.

The novel is, of course, a stumbling block for an anthology. The length of many great novels defies their incorporation in any volume that hopes to include a broad spectrum of literature. At the same time it is difficult to excerpt representative passages from narratives whose power often depends upon amplitude or upon the slow development of character or upon the onrushing urgency of the story. Therefore, better to represent the achievements of novelists, the publisher is making available the full list of Norton Critical Editions� more than 180 titles�including the most frequently assigned novels: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. A free Norton Critical Edition may be packaged with Volume 1 or 2 clothbound, paperbound, or three-volume package.

Building on an innovation introduced in the Seventh Edition, the editors have included for each of the periods several clusters that gather together short texts illuminating the cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary concerns of the age. In the Eighth Edition we have rethought, streamlined, and more closely coordinated these clusters with three aims: to make them easier to teach in the space of a class meeting or two, to make them more lively and accessible, and to heighten their relevance to the surrounding works of literature. Hence, for example, a new cluster for the Middle Ages, "Christ's Humanity," broaches one of the broadest and most explosive cultural and literary movements of the period, a movement that brought forth new kinds of readers and writers and a highly contested cultural politics of the visual. Similarly, a new cluster for the eighteenth century, "Liberty," goes to the heart of a central and momentous contradiction: on the one hand, the period's passionate celebration of liberty as the core British value, and, on the other hand, its extensive and profitable engagement in the slave trade. The implications of this contradiction, as the conjoined texts demonstrate, ripple out through English philosophy, law, and literature. Another new cluster, to take a final example, focuses on the fraught relationship between nation and language in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through the vast extent of the former British Empire and, more recently, through American economic and political power, the English language has displaced or commingled with indigenous languages in many parts of the world. In consequence, imaginative writers from India to Africa, from the Caribbean to Hong Kong, have grappled with the kind of vexed questions about linguistic and national identity that have been confronted by generations of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish writers. The political, psychological, and cultural complexity of these questions is evident in the array of texts brought together in the "Nation and Language" cluster, while their rich literary potential is fully apparent in Brian Friel's powerful play Translations. We supplement the topical clusters for each period by several more extensive topical selections of texts, with illustrations, on the anthology Web site.

Now, as in the past, cultures define themselves by the songs they sing and the stories they love to tell. But the central importance of visual media in contemporary culture has heightened our awareness of the ways in which songs and stories have always been closely linked to the images that societies have fashioned. The Eighth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature features sixty pages of color plates (in seven new color inserts). In

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addition, black-and-white engravings and illustrations by Hogarth, Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti provide compelling examples of the hybrid art of the "visual narrative." In selecting visual material�from the Sutton Hoo treasure of the seventh century to Anish Kapoor's immense Marsyas in the twenty-first century�the editors sought to provide images that conjure up, whether directly or indirectly, the individual writers in each section; that relate specifically to individual works in the anthology; and that shape and illuminate the culture of a particular literary period. We have tried to choose visually striking images that will interest students and provoke discussion, and our captions draw attention to important details and cross-reference related texts in the anthology.

Period-by-Period Revisions

The scope of the extensive revisions we have undertaken can be conveyed more fully by a list of some of the principal texts and features that have been added to the Eighth Edition.

The Middle Ages. The period, edited by Alfred David and James Simpson, is divided into three sections: Anglo-Saxon Literature, Anglo-Norman Literature, and Middle English Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The heart of the Anglo-Saxon section is the great epic Beowidf, in an acclaimed translation, specially commissioned for The Norton Anthology of English Literature, by Seamus Heaney. The selection of Anglo-Saxon texts has been newly augmented with the alliterative poem Judith and with King Alfred's preface to the Pastoral Care. The Anglo-Norman section�a key bridge between the Anglo-Saxon period and the time of Chaucer�-includes two clusters of texts: "Legendary Histories of Britain" traces the origins of Arthurian romance in the accounts of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon. "Celtic Contexts" explores the complex multilingual situation of the period, represented by the Old Irish "Exile of the Sons of Uisliu"; newly added, the conclusion of Thomas of England's Le Roman de Tristan, which comes from Irish, Welsh, and Breton sources and was written down in Old French; and Marie de France's magnificent Breton lay Lanval, one of the period's principal texts, as well as her Chevrefoil, in a new verse translation by Alfred David. A tale from the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, a new author, complements the generous selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We have added new selections from the remarkable Margery Kempe and from Langland's Piers Plowman and an important new topical cluster, "Christ's Humanity." Our representation of medieval drama has been strengthened by the addition of the powerful York Play of the Crucifixion.

The Sixteenth Century.. For the first time with this edition, the anthology includes the whole of Thomas More's Utopia, the visionary masterpiece that helped to shape the modern world. Edited by George Logan and Stephen Greenblatt, this period includes five other complete longer texts: Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and King Lear. The selection of poems offers new works by Wyatt, five additional sonnets by Sidney, five additional sonnets by Shakespeare, and two sonnets by a poet introduced here for the first time, Richard Barnfield. In addition we provide modern prose translations of several of Petrarch's rime in order to show their close relationship with sonnets by Wyatt, Sidney, and Ralegh. The cluster on the period's bitter religious contro

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versies, "Faith in Conflict," has been redesigned in order to better represent the Catholic as well as the Protestant position. A new cluster, "Women in Power," greatly expands the selections from Queen Elizabeth and sets her writings alongside those of three compelling new figures: Mary Tudor ("Bloody Mary"), Lady Jane Grey, the tragic queen for nine days, and Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's cousin and prisoner. The topic as a whole provides insight into the strange position of female rulers attempting to shape their public performances in a society that ordinarily allowed little scope for women's shaping power.

The Early Seventeenth Century. At the heart of this section, edited by Barbara Lewalski and Katharine Eisaman Maus, is John Milton's Paradise Lost, presented in its entirety. Other complete longer works include John Donne's soul-searching Satire 3, Aemilia Lanyer's country-house poem "The Description of Cookham," three major works by Ben Jonson (The Masque of Blackness, Volpone [freshly edited by Katharine Eisaman Maus], and the Cary-Morison ode), John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, and Milton's Lycidas. Significant additions have been made to the works of Donne, Jonson, Bacon, Carew, and Hobbes. Three newly conceived topical clusters will help teachers organize the rich profusion of seventeenth-century texts. "The Gender Wars" offers the stark contrast between Joseph Swetnam's misogynistic diatribe and Bachel Speght's vigorous response. "Forms of Inquiry" represents the vital intellectual currents of the period by bringing together reselected texts by Bacon, Burton, Browne, and Hobbes. And introducing riveting reports on the trial and execution of Charles I, political writings by the conservative Filmer and the revolutionaries Milton and Winstanley, and searching memoirs by Lucy Hutchinson, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lady Anne Halkett, and Dorothy Waugh, "Crisis of Authority" shows how new literary forms arose out of the trauma of political conflict.

The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. In response to widespread demand and our own sense of its literary merit, the editors, Lawrence Lipking and James Noggle, include the complete text of Samuel Johnson's philosophical fable Rasselas. We introduce as well Fantomina, a novella of sexual role- playing by an author new to the anthology, Eliza Haywood. Other complete longer texts in this section include Dryden's satires Ahsolom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe, Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko, Congreve's comedy The Way of the World, Pope's Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Epistle to Dr. Ahuthnot, Gay's Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's graphic satire "Marriage A-la- Mode," Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village." Additions have been made to the works of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Bochester, and Mary Leapor, and the selection from Joseph Addison and Sir Bichard Steele has been recast. "Liberty," a new thematic cluster on freedom and slavery, brings together texts by John Locke, Mary Astell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and others.

The Romantic Period. The principal changes introduced by the editors, Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, center on significantly increased attention to women writers of both poetry and prose. There are more poems by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith (including the great long work Beachy Head and a substantial selection from The Emigrants), Mary Bobinson, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans. Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth are now joined by two new woman authors, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Mary Shelley is represented by two works, her introduction to The Last Man

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and her story "The Mortal Immortal" (Frankenstein, formerly in the anthology, is now available in a Norton Critical Edition). There are additional poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats and new prose pieces by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, and John Clare. A new topic, "The Gothic and the Development of a Mass Readership," focuses on the controversial history of a genre that continues to shape popular fiction and films. Writings by Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Ann Radcliff, and "Monk" Lewis, together with commentaries and reviews by contemporaries such as Anna Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, illuminate the promise and menace that this period saw in a mode of writing that opened up a realm of nightmarish terror to literary exploration.

The Victorian Age. Among the major additions to this section, edited by Carol Christ and Catherine Bobson, are Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; two new long poems�Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jenny; a new complete text of FitzGerald's The Rubaiydt of Omar Kayyam; and Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden and If. Kipling's novella The Man Who Would Be King and Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest continue to be featured, as does the poetry of Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and others. Along with the widely assigned "Victorian Issues" clusters (Evolution, Industrialism, and the "Woman Question"), we present the topic "Empire and National Identity." This is an innovative and highly teachable sequence of paired texts, grappling with fiercely contentious issues that repeatedly arose across the empire's vast extent.

The Twentieth Century and After. A host of new writers and topics mark this major revision by the editors, Jon Stallworthy and Jahan Ramazani. The section now features two brilliant plays, Brian Friel's Translations and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, both of which have vital connections to literary and cultural issues that extend throughout these volumes. The many writers introduced to the anthology for the first time include the Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, and the English poet Carol Ann Duffy. There are new stories by E. M. Forster and Jean Rhys, a new selection from J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and new poems by W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Derek Walcott, and Ted Hughes. There is, as before, a remarkable array of complete longer texts, including Hardy's "On the Western Circuit," Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's "The Garden Party" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," Beckett's Endgame, Lessing's "To Room Nineteen," Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Naipaul's One Out of Many. And two new, highly innovative topics will enable teachers to introduce students to major aspects of the period's cultural scene. The first, "Modernist Manifestos," brings together the radical experiments of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, H. D., Wyndham Lewis, and Mina Loy. The second, "Nation and Language," gets to the heart of the questions that face colonial and postcolonial writers who must grapple with the power, at once estranging and liberating, of the English language. The voices in this cluster, Claude McKay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Louise Bennett, Brian Friel, Kamau Brathwaite, Wole Soyinka, Tony Harrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Salman Rushdie, and John Agard, bear eloquent witness to the global diffusion of English, the urgency of unresolved issues of nation and identity, and the rich complexity of literary history. That history is not a straightforward sequence. Seamus Heaney's works, to which two new poems

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have been added, provide the occasion to look back again to Heaney's translation of Beowulf at the beginning of the anthology. This translation is a reminder that the most recent works can double back upon the distant past, and that words set down by men and women who have crumbled into dust can speak to us with astonishing directness.

Editorial Procedures

The Eighth Edition adheres to the core principles that have always characterized The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Period introductions, headnotes, and annotation are designed to enhance students' reading and, without imposing an interpretation, to give students the information they need to understand each text. The aim of these editorial materials is to make the anthology self-sufficient, so that it can be read anywhere�in a coffee bar, on a bus, or under a tree. Above all, we have tried always to keep in mind the actual classroom situation. Teachability is central to every aspect of these volumes.

Our fidelity to a trusted and well-tried format may make it difficult for longtime users to take in, at first glance, how thoroughgoing and extensive the revisions to the Eighth Edition actually are. The editorial team undertook to rethink and update virtually everything in these pages, from the endpaper maps, scrutinized for accuracy by Catherine Robson and redrawn by cartographer Adrian Kitzinger, to the appendix on English money, which, thanks to James Noggle's clever chart, now provides, at a glance, answers to the perennial question, But what was money actually worth? Similarly, "Religions in England," rewritten by Katharine Maus, and "Geographic Nomenclature," revised by Jahan Ramazani, quickly and elegantly illuminate what students have often found obscure. Each volume of the anthology includes a "Poems in Process" section, revised and expanded by Deidre Lynch with the help of Alfred David and James Simpson, which reproduces from manuscripts and printed texts the genesis and evolution of a number of poems whose final form is printed in that volume. And, thanks to the thoroughgoing work of James Simpson, we now have a freshly conceived and thoroughly rewritten "Literary Terminology" appendix, recast as a quick-reference alphabetical glossary with examples from works in The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Drawing upon the latest scholarship and upon classroom experience, the editors have substantially rewritten the period introductions and headnotes. We have updated as well the bibliographies and have carefully revised the timelines. And we have provided in-text references to the Norton Literature Online Web site. With all aspects of the anthology's apparatus our intention is to facilitate direct and informed access to the extraordinary works of literature assembled here.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature prides itself on both the scholarly accuracy and the readability of its texts. To ease students' encounter with some works, we have normalized spelling and capitalization in texts up to and including the Romantic period�for the most part they now follow the conventions of modern English; we leave unaltered, however, texts in which such modernizing would change semantic or metrical qualities. From the Victorian period onward, we have restored the original spelling and punctuation to selections retained from the previous edition.

We continue other editorial procedures that have proved useful in the past. After each work, we cite the date of first publication on the right; in some

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instances, this date is followed by the date of a revised edition for which the author was responsible. Dates of composition, when they differ from those of publication and when they are known, are provided on the left. We have used square brackets to indicate titles supplied by the editors for the convenience of readers. Whenever a portion of a text has been omitted, we have indicated that omission with three asterisks. If the omitted portion is important for following the plot or argument, we have provided a brief summary within the text or in a footnote. Finally, we have reconsidered annotations throughout and increased the number of marginal glosses for archaic, dialect, or unfamiliar words.

Additional Resources

With the Eighth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, the publisher is proud to launch an extensive new resource�Norton Literature Online (unvnorton.com/literature)�the gateway to all of the outstanding online literature resources available from Norton. Students who activate the password included in each new copy of the anthology will find at Norton Literature Online a deep and broad array of general resources, among them a glossary of literary terms, advice on writing about literature and using MLA documentation style, study aids and quizzes, a portrait gallery featuring 380 authors, more than 100 maps, and over 90 minutes of recorded readings and musical selections. To encourage students to explore Norton Literature Online, cross-references in the anthology draw attention to relevant materials, notably to the 27 topical clusters (augmenting the 17 in-text topics) in the much-praised Norton Topics Online site. Prepared by the anthology editors, each topic includes an introduction, a gathering of annotated texts and images, and study questions and research links. For use with the Eighth Edition, three entirely new Twentieth Century topics�"Imagining Ireland," "Modernist Experiment," and "Representing the Great War"�and a recast Romantic topic, "The Satanic and Byronic Hero," have been added, among other updates and improvements. Norton Literature Online is also the portal to the Online Archive (wwnorton.com/nael/noa), which offers more than 150 downloadable texts from the Middle Ages through the early Victorian period, as well as some 80 audio files. An ongoing project, the Online Archive is being expanded with all public-domain texts trimmed from The Norton Anthology of English Literature over six editions. A new feature of the archive, a Publication Chronology, lists over 1,000 texts and the edition of the anthology in which each was introduced, dropped, and sometimes reintroduced. As such, the table, and the archive of texts now being assembled (a massive project of a few years' duration) are a unique window on changing interests in the teaching of English literature over four decades.

Teaching with The Norton Anthology of English Literature: A Guide for Instructors has been reconceived for ease of use and substantially rewritten by Sondra Archimedes, University of California, Santa Cruz, Elizabeth Fowler, University of Virginia, Laura Runge, University of South Florida, and Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter. The Guide offers extensive help with teaching a course, from planning, to developing a syllabus and course objectives, to preparing exams. For authors and works, the Guide entries provide a "hook" to start class discussion; a "Quick Read" section to help instructors review essential information about a text or author; teaching suggestions that call out interesting textual or contextual features; teaching clusters of suggested

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groups or pairs of texts; and discussion questions. Built into the Guide for Instructors is a freestanding Media Guide, by Philip Schwyzer, which offers specific suggestions for integrating the anthology's rich multimedia resources with the text and for incorporating them into traditional or distance-learning courses. Finally, the Norton Resource Library (wwnorton.com/nrl), also by Philip Schwyzer, offers instructors brief period introductions and "class sessions" to facilitate close reading, art galleries and literary links, enhanced period timelines, essay assignments, sample syllabi, and instructions for customizing the material. These materials are compatible with WebCT and other course management systems.

The editors are deeply grateful to the hundreds of teachers worldwide who have helped us to improve The Norton Anthology of English Literature. A list of the advisors who prepared in-depth reviews and of the instructors who replied to a detailed questionnaire follows on a separate page, under Acknowledgments. The editors would like to express appreciation for their assistance to Elizabeth Anker (University of Virginia), Sandie Byrne (Oxford University), Timothy Campbell (Indiana University), Sarita Cargas (Oxford University), Jason Coats (University of Virginia), Joseph W. Childers (University of California, Riverside), Daniel Cook (University of California, Davis), Linda David, Christopher Fanning (Queens University), William Flesch (Brandeis University), Robert Folkenflik (University of California, Irvine), Robert D. Fulk (Indiana University), Omaar Hena (University of Virginia), Tom Keirstead (Indiana University), Shayna Kessel (University of Southern California), Joanna Lip- king (Northwestern University), Ian Little (Liverpool University), Tricia Loo- tens (University of Georgia), Erin Minear (Harvard University), Elaine Musgrave (University of California, Davis), J. Morgan Myers (University of Virginia), Kate Nash (University of Virginia), Ruth Perry (M.I.T.), Emily Peterson (Harvard University), Kate Pilson (Harvard University), Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes University), Leah Price (Harvard University), Angelique Richardson (Exeter University), Philip Schwyzer (Exeter University), and Ramie Targoff (Brandeis University). We especially thank John W. Sider (Westmont College) for his meticulous review of standing annotations and myriad suggestions for improvements. We also thank the many people at Norton who contributed to the Eighth Edition: Julia Reidhead, who served not only as the inhouse supervisor but also as an unfailingly wise and effective collaborator in every aspect of planning and accomplishing this Eighth Edition; Marian Johnson, managing editor for college books, who kept the project moving forward with a remarkable blend of focused energy, intelligence, and common sense; Kurt Wildermuth, developmental and project editor; Alice Falk, Katharine Ings, Candace Levy, Alan Shaw, and Ann Tappert, manuscript editors; Eileen Connell, electronic media editor; Diane O'Connor, production manager; Nancy Rodwan and Katrina Washington, permissions managers; Toni Krass, designer; Neil Ryder Hoos, art researcher; Erin Granville, associate editor; and Catherine Spencer, editorial assistant. All these friends provided the editors with indispensable help in meeting the challenge of representing the unparalleled range and variety of English literature.

We dedicate this Eighth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature to our friend, mentor, and inspiring guide M. H. Abrams. His shaping power over these volumes and the profession it serves will long endure.

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Acknowledgments

Among our many critics, advisors, and friends, the following were of especial help toward the preparation of the Eighth Edition, either by offering advice or by providing critiques of particular periods of the anthology: Daniel Albright (University of Rochester), David L. Anderson (Butler County Community College), Judith H. Anderson (Indiana University), David Barnard (University of Regina), Ian Baucom (Duke University), Dr. Richard Beadle (St John's College, Cambridge University), Elleke Boehmer (Nottingham Trent University), Scott Boltwood (Emory and Henry College), Joseph Bristow (University of California, Los Angeles), James Chandler (University of Chicago), William Cohen (University of Maryland, College Park), Helen Cooper (Oxford University), Valentine Cunningham (Oxford University), Timothy Drake (Queen's University), Ian Duncan (University of California), Elizabeth Hanson (Queen's University), Brean Hammond (University of Nottingham), Claudia Johnson (Princeton University), Emrys Jones (Oxford University), Suzanne Keen, Shanya Kessel (University of Southern California), Bruce King, Rebecca Krug (University of Minnesota), David Kuijt (University of Maryland), John Leonard (University of Western Ontario), Peter Lindenbaum (Indiana University), Jesse Matz (Kenyon College), Brian May (Northern Illinois University), Father Germain Marc'hadour (Angers, France), Vincent Gillespie (Oxford University), Leah S. Marcus (Vanderbilt University), Paula McDowell (Rutgers University), Clarence H. Miller (St. Louis University), Tyrus Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz), Michael Moses (Duke University), Barbara Newman (Northwestern University), Michael North (University of California, Los Angeles), Stephen Orgel, (Stanford University), Ruth Perry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Adela Pinch (University of Michigan), David Porter (University of Michigan), Laura Quinney (Brandeis University), Alan Richardson (Boston College), Phillip Rogers (Queen's University), Mary Beth Rose (University of Illinois at Chicago), Elizabeth Scala (University of Texas), Nigel Smith (Princeton University), Janet Sorensen (Indiana University), Michele Stanco (Universita degli Studi di Napoli "Frederico"), Marta Straznicky (Queen's University), Helen Thompson (Northwestern University), Blakey Vermeule (Northwestern University), Richard Wendorf (Boston Athenaeum), Johnny Wink (Ouachita Baptist University), David Wyatt (University of Maryland), Steven Zwicker (Washington University, St. Louis).

The editors would like to express appreciation and thanks to the hundreds of teachers who provided reviews: Laila Abdalla (Central Washington University), Avis Adams (Green River Community College), Kimberly VanEsveld Adams (Elizabethtown College), Thomas Amarose (Seattle Pacific University), Mark Addison Amos (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), M. G. Aune (North Dakota State College), E. Baldwin (University of Victoria), Jackson Barry (University of Maryland, College Park), Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (The

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Pennsylvania State University), Thomas Bestul (University of Illinois at Chicago), J. Christopher Bittenbender (Eastern University), Dr. K Blumerich (Grand Valley State University), Karl Boehler (University of Wisconsin, Osh Kosh), Bruce Brandt (South Dakota State University), Caroline Breashears (St. Lawrence University), Dr. Chris Brooks (Wichita State University), M. Brown (SUNY, Morrisville), Jennifer Bryan (Oberlin College), Kristin Bryant (Portland Community College), Stephen Buhler (University of Nebraska- Lincoln), Michel Camp (Jackson State Community College), Joseph Candido (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), Tim Carens (College of Charleston), Cynthia Caywood (University of San Diego), Merlin Cheney (Weber State University), William Christmas (San Francisco State University), Caroline Cherry (Eastern University)* Joyce Coleman (University of North Dakota), Brian Connery (Oakland University), Kevin L. Cope (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge), J. Cortelloni (Lincoln College), Richard Cox (Abilene Christian University), Joanne Craig (Bishop's University), S. B. Darrell (Southern Indiana University), J. A. Dane (University of South California),

M. V. Davidson (University of Wisconsin, La Crosse), William Dawson (University of Missouri), Danette DiMarco (Slippery Rock University), Michael Doerrer (University of Maryland, College Park), Alfred J. Drake (California State University, Fullerton), George Drake (Central Washington University), Ende Duffy (University of California, Santa Barbara), Judy Elsley (Weber State University), Dan Embree (Mississippi State University), Audrey Fisch (New Jersey City University), Annette Federico (James Madison University), Robert Forman (St. John's University), Thomas Frosch (City University of New York, Queens), Dr. Donald Fucci (Ramapo College), Mark Fulk (Buffalo State College), Kevin Gardner (Baylor University), Robert Geary (James Madison University), Marc Geisler (Western Washington University), Jason Gieger (California State University, Sacramento), Cynthia Gilliatt (James Madison University), Julia Giordano (Nassau Community College), Stephen Glosecki (University of Alabama at Birmingham), William Gracie (Miami University of Ohio), Kenneth Graham (University of Waterloo), Loren C. Gruber (Missouri Valley College), Leigh Harbin (Angelo State University), H. George Hawn (Towson University), Douglas Hayes (Winona State University), Aeron Haynie (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay), Begina Hewitt (University of South Florida), Matthew Hill (University of Maryland, College Park), Jim Hoogenakker (Washburn University), Bobert Hoskins (James Madison University), Kathy Houff (University of Georgia), Claudia House (Nashville State Tech Community College), Darren Howard (University of California, Los Angeles), Bebecca Kajs (Anne Arundel Community College), Bridget Keegan (Creighton University), Erin Kelly (University of Maryland), Julie Kim (Northeastern Illinois University), Jackie Kogan (California State University, Northridge), Neal Kramer (Brigham Young University), Jonathan Kramnick (Butgers University), Deborah Knuth (Colgate University), E. Carole Knuth (Buffalo State College), Wai-Leung Kwok (San Francisco State University), Elizabeth Lambert (Gettysburg College), Mary Lenard (University of Wisconsin, Parkside), George Evans Light (Mississippi State University), Henry Limouze (Wright State University), Sherry Little (San Diego State), Debbie Lopez (University of Texas, San Antonio), Susan Lorsch (Hofstra University), Thomas Lyons (University of Colorado, Boulder), Susan Maher (University of Nebraska, Omaha), Phoebe Mainster (Wayne State University), W. J. Martin (Niagara University), Nicholas Mason (Brigham Young University), Ian McAdam (University of

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Lethbridge), Ruth McAdams (Tarrant County College), John McCombe (University of Dayton), Kristen McDermott (Central Michigan University), Joseph McGowan (University of San Diego), Christian Michener (St. Mary's University, Minnesota), D. Keith Mikolavich (Diablo Valley College), Nicholas Moschovakis (George Washington University), Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State University), Daniel Mosser (Virginia Polytechnic Institute), K. D. Neill (University of Victoria, British Columbia), Douglas Nordfor (James Madison University), Michael North (University of California, Los Angeles), Bernie O'Donnell (University of Florida). Michael Olmert (University of Maryland, College Park), C. R. Orchard (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Panek (University of Ottawa), Cynthia Patton (Emporia State University), James Persoon (Grand Valley State University), Sara Pfaffenroth (County College of Morris), John Pfordreshen (Georgetown University), Jennifer Phegley (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Trey Philpotts (Arkansas Technical University), Brenda Powell (University of St. Thomas, St. Paul), Tison Pugh (University of Central Florida), Katherine Quinsey (University of Windsor), Eric Reimer (University of Montana), Kathryn Rummel (California Polytechnic State University), Harbindar Sanghara (University of Victoria, Canada), William Scheuede (University of South Florida), Michael Schoenfeldt (University of Michigan), R. M. Schuler (University of Victoria, British Columbia), D. Schwartz (Cal Poly, Saint Louis Obispo), Michael Schwartz (California State University, Chico), Richard Sha (American University), George Shuffelton (Carleton College), Brandie Sigfried (Brigham Young University), Elizabeth Signorotti (Binghamton University), Dawn Simmons (Ohio State University), Erik Simpson (Grinnell College), Sarah Singer (Delaware County Community College), Dr. Mary-Antoinette Smith (Seattle University), Jonathan Smith (University of Michigan, Dearborn), Nigel Smith (Princeton University), Malinda Snow (Georgia State University), Jean Sorenson (Grayson County College), C. Spinks (Trinity College), Donald Stone (City University of New York, Queens), Kevin Swafford (Bradley University), Andrew Taylor (University of Ottawa), Bebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University), Bente Videbaek (State University New York, Stony Brook), Joseph Viscome (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Jennie Wakefield (Clemson University), David Ward (University of Pittsburgh), Tracy Ware (Queen's University), Alexander Weiss (Radford University), Lachlan Whalen (Marshall University), Christopher Wheatley (Catholic University of America), C. Williams (Mississippi State University), Jodi Wyett (Xavier University, Cincinnati), Jiyeon Yoo (University of California, Los Angeles), Richard Zeikowitz (University of South Alabama).

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The Norton Anthology of English Literature

EIGHTH EDITION VOLUME 2

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The Romantic Period

1785-1830

1789�1815: Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France.�1789: The Revolution begins with the assembly of the States- General in May and the storming of the Bastille on July 14.� 1793: King Louis XVI executed; England joins the alliance against France.�1793�94: The Reign of Terror under Robespierre. 1804: Napoleon crowned emperor.�1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

1807: British slave trade outlawed (slavery abolished throughout the empire, including the West Indies, twenty-six years later) 1811�20: The Regency�George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for

George III, who has been declared incurably insane 1819: Peterloo Massacre 1820: Accession of George IV

The Romantic period, though by far the shortest, is at least as complex and diverse as any other period in British literary history. For much of the twentieth century, scholars singled out five poets�Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats, adding Blake belatedly to make a sixth�and constructed notions of a unified Romanticism on the basis of their works. But there were problems all along: even the two closest collaborators of the 1790s, Words- worth and Coleridge, would fit no single definition; Byron despised both Coleridge's philosophical speculations and Wordsworth's poetry; Shelley and Keats were at opposite poles from each other stylistically and philosophically; Blake was not at all like any of the other five.

Nowadays, although the six poets remain, by most measures of canonicity, the principal canonical figures, we recognize a greater range of accomplishments. In 1798, the year of Wordsworth and Coleridge's first Lyrical Ballads, neither of the authors had much of a reputation; Wordsworth was not even included among the 1,112 entries in David Rivers's Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain of that year, and Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously because, as Coleridge told the publisher, "Wordsworth's name is nothing-�to a large number of people mine stinks." Some of the best-regarded poets of the time were women�Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson� and Wordsworth and Coleridge (junior colleagues of Robinson when she was poetry editor of the Morning Post in the late 1790s) looked up to them and learned their craft from them. The rest of the then-established figures were the later eighteenth-century poets who are printed at the end of volume 1 of this anthology�Gray, Collins, Crabbe, and Cowper in particular. Only Byron, among the now-canonical poets, was instantly famous; and Felicia

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2 / THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Hemans and Letitia Landon ran him a close race as best-sellers. The Romantic period had a great many more participants than the six principal male poets and was shaped by a multitude of political, social, and economic changes.

REVOLUTION AND REACTION

Following a widespread practice of historians of English literature, we use "Romantic period" to refer to the span between the year 1785, the midpoint of the decade in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake, Burns, and Smith published their first poems, and 1830, by which time the major writers of the preceding century were either dead or no longer productive. This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation. And this change occurred in a context of revolution�first the American and then the more radical French�and of war, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties.

The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille, evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike. Three important books epitomize the radical social thinking stimulated by the Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) justified the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791-92) also advocated for England a democratic republic that was to be achieved, if lesser pressures failed, by popular revolution. More important as an influence on Wordsworth and Percy Shelley was William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which foretold an inevitable but peaceful evolution of society to a final stage in which property would be equally distributed and government would wither away. But English sympathizers dropped off as the Revolution followed its increasingly grim course: the accession to power by Jacobin extremists, intent on purifying their new republic by purging it of its enemies; the "September Massacres" of the imprisoned nobility in 1792, followed by the execution of the king and queen; the new French Republic's invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands, which brought England into the war against France; the guillotining of thousands in the Reign of Terror under Robespierre; and, after the execution in their turn of the men who had directed the Terror, the emergence of Napoleon, first as dictator then as emperor of France. As Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude,

become Oppressors in their turn, Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence For one of Conquest, losing sight of all Which they had struggled for (11.206-09)

Napoleon, the brilliant tactician whose rise through the ranks of the army had seemed to epitomize the egalitarian principles of the Revolution, had become an arch-aggressor, a despot, and would-be founder of a new imperial dynasty. By 1800 liberals found they had no side they could wholeheartedly espouse. Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 proved to be the triumph, not of

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INTRODUCTION /

progress and reform, but of reactionary despotisms throughout continental Europe.

In England this was a period of harsh, repressive measures. Public meetings were prohibited, the right of habeas corpus (the legal principle protecting individuals from arbitrary imprisonment) was suspended for the first time in over a hundred years, and advocates of even moderate political change were charged with treason. Efforts during these war years to repeal the laws that barred Protestants who did not conform to the Anglican Church from the universities and government came to nothing: in the new climate of counterrevolutionary alarm, it was easy to portray even a slight abridgement of the privileges of the established Church as a measure that, validating the Jacobins' campaigns to de-Christianize France, would aid the enemy cause. Another early casualty of this counterrevolution was the movement to abolish the slave trade, a cause supported initially by a wide cross-section of English society. In the 1780s and 1790s numerous writers, both white (Barbauld, Robinson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth) and black (Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano), attacked the greed of the owners of the West Indian sugar plantations and detailed the horrors of the traffic in African flesh that provided them with their labor power. But the bloodshed that accompanied political change in France strengthened the hand of apologists for slavery, by making any manner of reform seem the prelude to violent insurrection. Parliament rejected a bill abolishing the trade in 1791, and sixteen years�marked by slave rebellions and by the planters' brutal reprisals�elapsed before it passed a new version of the bill.

The frustration of the abolitionist cause is an emblematic chapter in the larger story of how a reactionary government sacrificed hopes of reform while it mobilized the nation's resources for war. Yet this was the very time when economic and social changes were creating a desperate need for corresponding changes in political arrangements. For one thing, new classes inside England�manufacturing rather than agricultural�were beginning to demand a voice in government proportionate to their wealth. The "Industrial Revolution"�the shift in manufacturing that resulted from the invention of power-driven machinery to replace hand labor�had begun in the mid- eighteenth century with improvements in machines for processing textiles, and was given immense impetus when James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1765. In the succeeding decades steam replaced wind and water as the primary source of power for all sorts of manufacturing processes, beginning that dynamic of ever-accelerating economic expansion and technological development that we still identify as the hallmark of the modern age. A new laboring population massed in sprawling mill towns such as Manchester, whose population increased by a factor of five in fifty years. In agricultural communities the destruction of home industry was accompanied by the acceleration of the process of enclosing open fields and wastelands (usually, in fact, "commons" that had provided the means of subsistence for entire communities) and incorporating them into larger, privately owned holdings. Enclosure was by and large necessary for the more efficient methods of agriculture required to feed the nation's growing population (although some of the land that the wealthy acquired through parliamentary acts of enclosure they in fact incorporated into their private estates). But enclosure was socially destructive, breaking up villages, creating a landless class who either migrated to the industrial towns or remained as farm laborers, subsisting on starvation wages and the little they

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could obtain from parish charity. The landscape of England began to take on its modern appearance�the hitherto open rural areas subdivided into a checkerboard of fields enclosed by hedges and stone walls, with the factories of the cities casting a pall of smoke over vast areas of cheaply built houses and slum tenements. Meanwhile, the population was increasingly polarized into what Disraeli later called the "Two Nations"�the two classes of capital and labor, the rich and the poor.

No attempt was made to regulate this shift from the old economic world to the new, since even liberal reformers were committed to the philosophy of laissez-faire. This theory of "let alone," set out in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776, holds that the general welfare can be ensured only by the free operation of economic laws; the government should maintain a policy of strict noninterference and leave people to pursue, unfettered, their private interests. On the one hand, laissez-faire thinking might have helped pave the way for the long-postponed emancipation of the slave population of the West Indies; by 1833, when Parliament finally ended slavery, the anomaly that their unfree labor represented for the new economic and social orthodoxies evidently had become intolerable. But for the great majority of the laboring class at home, the results of laissez-faire and the "freedom" of contract it secured were inadequate wages and long hours of work under harsh discipline and in sordid conditions. Investigators' reports on the coal mines, where male and female children of ten or even five years of age were harnessed to heavy coal- sledges that they dragged by crawling on their hands and knees, read like scenes from Dante's Inferno. With the end of the war in 1815, the nation's workforce was enlarged by demobilized troops at the very moment when demand for manufactured goods, until now augmented by the needs of the military, fell dramatically. The result was an unemployment crisis that persisted through the 1820s. Since the workers had no vote and were prevented by law from unionizing, their only recourses were petitions, protest meetings, and riots, to which the ruling class responded with even more repressive measures. The introduction of new machinery into the mills resulted in further loss of jobs, provoking sporadic attempts by the displaced workers to destroy the machines. After one such outbreak of "Luddite" machine-breaking, the House of Lords�despite Byron's eloquent protest�passed a bill (1812) making death the penalty for destroying the frames used for weaving in the stocking industry. In 1819 hundreds of thousands of workers organized meetings to demand parliamentary reform. In August of that year, a huge but orderly assembly at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, was charged by saber-wielding troops, who killed nine and severely injured hundreds more; this was the notorious "Peterloo Massacre," so named with sardonic reference to the Battle of Waterloo, and condemned by Shelley in his poem for the working class "England in 1819."

Suffering was largely confined to the poor, however, while the landed classes and industrialists prospered. So did many merchants, who profited from the new markets opened up as the British Empire expanded aggressively, compensating with victories against the French for the traumatic loss of America in 1783. England's merchants profited, too, thanks to the marketing successes that, over time, converted once-exotic imports from these colonies into everyday fare for the English. In the eighteenth century tea and sugar had been transformed in this way, and in the nineteenth century other commodities followed suit: the Indian muslin, for instance, that was the fabric of choice

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for gentlemen's cravats and fashionable ladies' gowns, and the laudanum (Indian opium dissolved in alcohol) that so many ailing writers of the period appear to have found irresistible. The West End of London and new seaside resorts like Brighton became in the early nineteenth century consumers' paradises, sites where West Indian planters and nabobs (a Hindi word that entered English as a name for those who owed their fortunes to Indian gain) could be glimpsed displaying their purchasing power in a manner that made them moralists' favorite examples of nouveau riche vulgarity. The word shopping came into English usage in this era. Luxury villas sprang up in London, and the prince regent, who in 1820 became George IV, built himself palaces and pleasure domes, retreats from his not very onerous public responsibilities.

But even, or especially, in private life at home, the prosperous could not escape being touched by the great events of this period. French revolutionary principles were feared by English conservatives almost as much for their challenge to the "proper" ordering of the relations between men and women as for their challenge to traditional political arrangements. Yet the account of what it meant to be English that developed in reaction to this challenge�an account emphasizing the special virtues of the English sense of home and family�was in its way equally revolutionary. The war that the English waged almost without intermission between 1793 and 1815 was one that in an unprecedented manner had a "home front": the menaced sanctuary of the domestic fireside became the symbol of what the nation's military might was safeguarding. What popularity the monarchy held on to during this turbulent period was thus a function not of the two King Georges' traditional exercise of a monarch's sovereign powers but instead of the publicity, tailored to suit this nationalist rhetoric, that emphasized each one's domestic bliss within a "royal family." Conceptions of proper femininity altered as well under the influence of this new idealization and nationalization of the home, this project (as Burke put it) of "binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties."

And that alteration both put new pressures on women and granted them new opportunities. As in earlier English history, women in the Romantic period were provided only limited schooling, were subjected to a rigid code of sexual behavior, and (especially after marriage) were bereft of legal rights. In this period women began, as well, to be deluged by books, sermons, and magazine articles that insisted vehemently on the physical and mental differences between the sexes and instructed women that, because of these differences, they should accept that their roles in life involved child rearing, housekeeping, and nothing more. (Of course, in tendering this advice promoters of female domesticity conveniently ignored the definitions of duty that industrialists imposed on the poor women who worked in their mills.) Yet a paradoxical byproduct of the connections that the new nationalist rhetoric forged between the well-being of the state and domestic life was that the identity of the patriot became one a woman might attempt, with some legitimacy, to claim. Within the framework created by the new accounts of English national identity, a woman's private virtues now had a public relevance. They had to be seen as crucial to the nation's welfare. Those virtues might well be manifested in the work of raising patriotic sons, but, as the thousands of women in this period who made their ostensibly natural feminine feelings of pity their alibi for participation in abolitionism demonstrated, they could be turned to nontraditional uses as well.

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The new idea that, as the historian Linda Colley has put it, a woman's place was not simply in the home but also in the nation could also justify or at least extenuate the affront to proper feminine modesty represented by publication� by a woman's entry into the public sphere of authorship. "Bluestockings"� educated women�remained targets of masculine scorn. This became, nonetheless, the first era in literary history in which women writers began to compete with men in their numbers, sales, and literary reputations: just in the category of poetry, some nine hundred women are listed in J. R. de J. Jackson's comprehensive bibliography, Romantic Poetry by Women. These female authors had to tread carefully, to be sure, to avoid suggesting that (as one male critic fulminated) they wished the nation's "affectionate wives, kind mothers, and lovely daughters" to be metamorphosed into "studious philosophers" and "busy politicians." And figures like Wollstonecraft, who in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman grafted a radical proposal about gender equality onto a more orthodox argument about the education women needed to be proper mothers, remained exceptional. Later women writers tended cautiously to either ignore her example or define themselves against it.

Only in the Victorian period would Wollstonecraft's cause of women's rights rally enough support for substantial legal reform to begin, and that process would not be completed until the twentieth century. In the early nineteenth century the pressures for political reform focused on the rights of men, as distinct from women. Middle-class and working-class men, entering into strategic and short-lived alliances, made the restructuring of the British electoral system their common cause. Finally, at a time of acute economic distress, and after unprecedented disorders that threatened to break out into revolution, the first Reform Bill was passed in 1832. It did away with the rotten boroughs (depopulated areas whose seats in the House of Commons were at the disposal of a few noblemen), redistributed parliamentary representation to include the industrial cities, and extended the franchise. Although about half the middle class, almost all the working class, and all women remained without a vote, the principle of the peaceful adjustment of conflicting interests by parliamentary majority had been firmly established. Reform was to go on, by stages, until Britain acquired universal adult suffrage in 1928.

"THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE"

Writers working in the period 1785�1830 did not think of themselves as "Romantic"; the word was not applied until half a century later, by English historians. Contemporary reviewers treated them as independent individuals, or else grouped them (often maliciously, but with some basis in fact) into a number of separate schools: the "Lake School" of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey; the "Cockney School," a derogatory term for the Londoners Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and associated writers, including Keats; and the "Satanic School" of Percy Shelley, Ryron, and their followers.

Many writers, however, felt that there was something distinctive about their time�not a shared doctrine or literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some of them called "the spirit of the age." They had the sense that (as Keats wrote) "Great spirits now on earth are sojourning," and that there was evidence of the experimental boldness that marks a literary renaissance. In his "Defence of Poetry" Shelley claimed that the literature of the age "has arisen as it were from a new birth," and that "an electric life

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burns" within the words of its best writers, "less their spirit than the spirit of the age." He explained this spirit as an accompaniment of revolution, and others agreed. Francis Jeffrey, the foremost conservative reviewer of the day, connected "the revolution in our literature" with "the agitations of the French Revolution, and the discussions as well as the hopes and terrors to which it gave occasion." Hazlitt, who devoted a series of essays entitled The S-pirit of the Age to assessing his contemporaries, maintained that the new poetry of the school of Wordsworth "had its origin in the French Revolution."

The imagination of many Romantic-period writers was preoccupied with revolution, and from that fact and idea they derived the framework that enabled them to think of themselves as inhabiting a distinctive period in history. The deep familiarity that many late-eighteenth-century Englishmen and -women had with the prophetic writings of the Bible contributed from the start to their readiness to attribute a tremendous significance to the political transformations set in motion in 1789. Religious belief predisposed many to view these convulsions as something more than local historical events and to cast them instead as harbingers of a new age in the history of all human beings. Seeing the hand of God in the events in France and understanding those events as the fulfillment of prophecies of the coming millennium came easily to figures such as Barbauld, Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, and, above all, Blake: all were affiliated with the traditions of radical Protestant Dissent, in which accounts of the imminence of the Apocalypse and the coming of the Kingdom of God had long been central. A quarter-century later, their millenarian interpretation of the Revolution would be recapitulated by radical writers such as Percy Shelley and Hazlitt, who, though they tended to place their faith in notions of progress and the diffusion of knowledge and tended to identify a rational citizenry and not God as the moving force of history, were just as convinced as their predecessors were that the Revolution had marked human- ity's chance to start history over again (a chance that had been lost but was perhaps recoverable).

Another method that writers of this period took when they sought to salvage the millennial hopes that had, for many, been dashed by the bloodshed of the Terror involved granting a crucial role to the creative imagination. Some writers rethought apocalyptic transformation so that it no longer depended on the political action of collective humanity but depended instead (in a shift from the external to the internal) on the individual consciousness. The new heaven and earth promised in the prophecies could, in this account, be gained by the individual who had achieved a new, spiritualized, and visionary way of seeing. An apocalypse of the imagination could liberate the individual from time, from what Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of imprisoning orthodoxies and from what Percy Shelley called "the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions."

Wordsworth, whose formulations of this notion of a revolution in imagination would prove immensely influential, wrote in The Prelude the classic description of the spirit of the early 1790s. "Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, / France standing on top of the golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again" (6.340�42). "Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth, / The beauty wore of promise" (6.117�18). Something of this sense of possibility and anticipation of spiritual regeneration (captured in that phrase "born again") survived the disenchantment with politics that Wordsworth experienced later in the decade. His sense of the emancipatory opportunities

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brought in by the new historical moment carried over to the year 1797, when, working in tandem, he and Coleridge revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. The product of their exuberant daily discussions was the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.

POETIC THEORY AND POETIC PRACTICE

Wordsworth undertook to justify those poems by means of a critical manifesto, or statement of poetic principles, which appeared first as a short Advertisement in the original Lyrical Ballads and then as an extended Preface to the second edition in 1800, which he enlarged still further in the third edition of 1802. In it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those writers of the eighteenth century who, in his view, had imposed on poetry artificial conventions that distorted its free and natural expression. Many of Wordsworth's later critical writings were attempts to clarify, buttress, or qualify points made in this first declaration. Coleridge said that the Preface was "half a child of my own brain"; and although he developed doubts about some of Wordsworth's unguarded statements, he did not question the Tightness of Wordsworth's attempt to overthrow the reigning tradition. Of course, many writers in eighteenth-century England had anticipated Wordsworth's attempt, as well as the definitions of the "authentic" language of poetry it assumed. Far from unprecedented, efforts to displace the authority of a poet such as Pope can be dated back to only a few years after Pope's death in 1744; by 1800 readers were accustomed to hear, for instance, that Pope's propensities for satire had derailed true poetry by elevating wit over feeling. Moreover, the last half of the eighteenth century, a time when philosophers and moralists highlighted in new ways the role that emotional sensitivity ("sensibility") plays in mental and social life, had seen the emergence of many of the critical concepts, as well as a number of the poetic subjects and forms, that later would

be exploited by Wordsworth and his contemporaries.

Wordsworth's Preface nevertheless deserves its reputation as a turning point in literary history, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory, and made them the rationale for his own achievements. We can safely use concepts in the Preface as points of departure for a survey of some of the distinctive elements in the poetry of the Romantic period� especially if we bear in mind that during this era of revolution definitions of good poetry, like definitions of the good society, were sure to create as much contention as consensus.

The Concept of the Poet and the Poem

Seeking a stable foundation on which social institutions might be constructed, eighteenth-century British philosophers had devoted much energy to demonstrating that human nature must be everywhere the same, because it everywhere derived from individuals' shared sensory experience of an external world that could be objectively represented. As the century went on, however, philosophers began emphasizing�and poets began developing a new language for�individual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and to re-create reality. This was the shift Words- worth registered when in the Preface he located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology of the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were not the external people and events it

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represented but the inner feelings of the author, or external objects only after these have been transformed by the author's feelings. Wordsworth in 1802 described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Other Romantic theories concurred by referring to the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet for the origin, content, and defining attributes of a poem. Using a metaphor that parallels Wordsworth's "overflow," and that Wordsworth would revive in a late poem, Mary Robinson and Coleridge identified some of their key poems of the 1790s as "effusions"�ardent outpourings of feeling. Coleridge subsequently drew on German precedents and introduced into English criticism an account of the organic form of literary works; in this account the work is conceptualized as a self-originating and self-organizing process, parallel to the growth of a plant, that begins with a seedlike idea in the poet's imagination, grows by assimilating both the poet's feelings and the materials of sensory experience, and evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each other and to the whole.

In keeping with the view that poetry expresses the poet's feelings, the lyric poem written in the first person, which for much of literary history was regarded as a minor kind, became a major Romantic form and was often described as the most essentially poetic of all the genres. And in most Romantic lyrics the "I" is no longer a conventionally typical lyric speaker, such as the Petrarchan lover or Cavalier gallant of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century love poems, but one who shares recognizable traits with the poet. The experiences and states of mind expressed by the lyric speaker often accord closely with the known facts of the poet's life and the personal confessions in the poet's letters and journals. This reinvention of the lyric complicated established understandings of the gender of authorship. It may not be an accident, some critics suggest, that Wordsworth in the Preface defines poetry as "the real language of men" and the Poet as a "man speaking to men": Wordsworth, who began to publish when women such as Robinson and Charlotte Smith occupied the vanguard of the new personal poetry, might have decided that to establish the distinctiveness of his project he needed to counterbalance his emphasis on his feelings with an emphasis on those feelings' "manly" dignity. This is not to say that women writers' relationship to the new ideas about poetry was straightforward either. In one of her prefaces Smith says that she anticipates being criticized for "bringing forward 'with querulous egotism,' the mention of myself." For many female poets the other challenge those ideas about poetry posed might have consisted in their potential to reinforce the old, prejudicial idea that their sex�traditionally seen as creatures of feeling rather than intellect�wrote about their own experiences because they were capable of nothing else. For male poets the risks of poetic self-revelation were different�and in some measure they were actively seized by those who, like Coleridge and Shelley, intimated darkly that the introspective tendency and emotional sensitivity that made someone a poet could also lead him to melancholy and madness.

It was not only the lyric that registered these new accounts of the poet. Byron confounded his contemporaries' expectations about which poetic genre was best suited to self-revelation by inviting his audience to equate the heroes of Childe Harold, Manfred, and Don Juan with their author, and to see these fictional protagonists' experiences as disclosing the deep truths of his secret self. Wordsworth's Prelude represents an extreme instance of this tendency to

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self-reference. Though the poem is of epic length and seriousness, its subject is not, as is customary in an epic, history on a world-changing scale but the growth of the poet's mind.

The Prelude exemplifies two other important tendencies. Like Blake, Cole- ridge in early poems, and later on Shelley, Wordsworth presents himself as, in his words, "a chosen son" or "Bard." That is, he assumes the persona of a poet-prophet, a composite figure modeled on Milton, the biblical prophets, and figures of a national music, the harp-playing patriots, Celtic or Anglo- Saxon, whom eighteenth-century poets and antiquarians had located in a legendary Dark Ages Britain. Adopting this bardic guise, Wordsworth puts himself forward as a spokesman for civilization at a time of crisis�a time, as Wordsworth said in The Prelude, of the "melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown." (Spokesman is appropriate here: almost always, the bardic poet- prophet was a distinctively male persona.) The Prelude is also an instance of a central literary form of English, as of European, Romanticism�a long work about the crisis and renewal of the self, recounted as the story of an interior journey taken in quest of one's true identity and destined spiritual home and vocation. Blake's Milton, Keats's Endymion and Fall of Hyperion, and, in Victorian poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh also exemplify this form. Late in the period there are equivalent developments in prose: spiritual autobiographies (Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater) undergo a revival, at the same time that Lamb and Hazlitt rediscover the essay as a medium of self-revelation.

Spontaneity and the Impulses of Feeling Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as the "spontaneous overflow" of feelings. In traditional poetics, poetry had been regarded as supremely an art�an art that in modern times is practiced by poets who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the "rules" governing the kind of poem they are writing, and (except for the happy touches that, as Pope said, are "beyond the reach of art") deliberately employ tested means to achieve premeditated effects on an audience. But to Wordsworth, although the composition of a poem originates from "emotion recollected in tranquillity" and may be preceded and followed by reflection, the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous�arising from impulse and free from rules. Keats listed as an "axiom" a similar proposition�that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all."

Other Romantics voiced similar declarations of artistic independence from inherited precepts, sometimes in a manner involving, paradoxically, a turn from the here-and-now toward a remote, preliterate, and primitive past. If the ancient bard was a charismatic figure for many Romantics, this was in part because imagining the songs he might have sung made it easier to think about an alternative to the mundane language of modernity�about a natural, oral poetry, blissfully unconscious of modern decorums. (Though they chafed against this expectation, writers from the rural working class�Burns and later John Clare�could be expected, by virtue of their perceived distance from the restraint and refinement of civilized discourse, to play a comparable role inside modern culture, that of peasant poet or natural genius.) When, after Waterloo, writers like Byron, Hunt, and the Shelleys traveled to Italy, taking these bardic ideals with them, they became enthralled with the arts of the improvisatore and improvisatrice, men and women whose electrifying oral performances of

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poetry involved no texts but those of immediate inspiration. One of the writers who praised and emulated that rhapsodic spontaneity, Percy Shelley, thought it "an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study." He suggested instead that these were the products of an unconscious creativity: "A great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother's womb."

The emphasis in this period on the spontaneous activity of the imagination is linked to a belief (which links the Romantics' literary productions to the poetry and fiction of sensibility written earlier in the eighteenth century) in the essential role of passion, whether in the province of art, philosophy, or morality. The intuitive feelings of "the heart" had to supplement the judgments of the purely logical faculty, "the head." "Deep thinking," Coleridge wrote, "is attainable only by a man of deep feeling"; hence, "a metaphysical solution that does not tell you something in the heart is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal."

Romantic "Nature Poetry" Wordsworth identified Lyrical Ballads as his effort to counteract the degradation in taste that had resulted from "the increasing accumulation of men in cities": the revolution in style he proposed in the Preface was meant in part to undo the harmful effects of urbanization. Because he and many fellow writers kept their distance from city life, and because natural scenes so often provide the occasions for their writing, Romantic poetry for present-day readers has become almost synonymous with "nature poetry." In the Essay that supplements his Preface, Wordsworth portrays himself as remedying the failings of predecessors who, he argues, were unable truthfully to depict natural phenomena such as a moonlit sky: from Dryden to Pope, he asserts, there are almost no images of external nature "from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object." Neither Romantic theory nor practice, however, justifies the opinion that Romantic poets valued description for its own sake, though many poems of the period are almost unmatched in their ability to capture the sensuous nuances of the natural scene, and the writers participated enthusiastically in the touring of picturesque scenery that was a new leisure activity of their age. But in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface, Wordsworth's complaint against eighteenth- century poetic imagery continues: take an image from an early-eighteenthcentury poem, and it will show no signs either, he says, that the Poet's "feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination." For Wordsworth the ability to observe objects accurately is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poetry, "as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects." And while many of the great Romantic lyrics�Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," Keats's "Nightingale," Smith's Beachy Head� remark on an aspect or a change of aspect in the natural scene, this serves only as stimulus to the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking. The longer Romantic "nature poems" are in fact usually meditative, using the presented scene to suggest a personal crisis; the organizing principle of the poem involves that crisis's development and resolution.

In addition, Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness. Many poets respond to the outer universe as a vital entity that participates in the feelings of the observer (an idea of sym

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pathetic exchange between nature and humanity that Mary Shelley, however, would probe fiercely in her novel The Last Man). James Thomson and other descriptive poets of the eighteenth century had depicted the created universe as giving direct access to the deity. In "Tintern Abbey" and other poems, Wordsworth not only exhibits toward the landscape attitudes and sentiments that human beings had earlier felt for God; he also loves it in the way human beings love a father, a mother, or a beloved. Still, there was a competing sense, evident'especially in the poetry of Blake and Percy Shelley, that natural objects were meaningful primarily for the correspondences linking them to an inner or spiritual world. In their poems a rose, a sunflower, a cloud, or a mountain is presented not as something to be observed and imaged but as an object imbued with a significance beyond itself. "I always seek in what I see," Shelley said, "the likeness of something beyond the present and tangible object." And by Blake, mere nature, as perceived by the physical eye, was spurned "as the dust upon my feet, no part of me." Annotating a copy of Wordsworth's 1815 Poems, Blake deplored what he perceived as Wordsworth's commitment to unspiritualized observation: "Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in men."

The Glorification of the Ordinary

Also discussing Wordsworth, Hazlitt declared his school of poetry the literary equivalent of the French Revolution, which translated political change into poetical experiment. "Kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere. . . . The paradox [these poets] set out with was that all things are by nature, equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference to give, those that are the meanest [i.e., most humble] and most unpromising are the best." Hazlitt had in mind Wordsworth's statement that the aim of Lyrical Ballads was "to choose incidents and situations from common life" and to use a "language really spoken by men": for Wordsworth's polemical purposes, it is in "humble and rustic life" that this language is found. Later eighteenth-century writers had already experimented with the simple treatment of simple subjects. Burns�like the young Wordsworth, a sympathizer with the Revolution�had with great success represented "the rural scenes and rural pleasures of [his] natal Soil," and in a language aiming to be true to the rhythms of his regional Scots dialect. Women poets especially�Barbauld, Bobinson, Baillie�assimilated to their poems the subject matter of everyday life. But Wordsworth underwrote his poetic practice with a theory that inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects, and styles: it elevated humble life and the plain style, which in earlier theory were appropriate only for the pastoral, the genre at the bottom of the traditional hierarchy, into the principal subject and medium for poetry in general. And in his practice, as Hazlitt also noted, Words- worth went further and turned for the subjects of serious poems not only to humble country folk but to the disgraced, outcast, and delinquent�'"convicts, female vagrants, gypsies . . . idiot boys and mad mothers." Hence the scorn of Lord Byron, who facetiously summoned ghosts from the eighteenth century to help him demonstrate that Wordsworth's innovations had been taking literature in the wrong direction:

"Peddlers," and "Boats," and "Wagons"! Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?

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Yet Wordsworth's project was not simply to represent the world as it is but, as he announced in his Preface, to throw over "situations from common life .. . a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." No one can read his poems without noticing the reverence with which he invests words that for earlier writers had been derogatory�words such as "common," "ordinary," "everyday," "humble." Wordsworth's aim was to shatter the lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder in the everyday, the trivial, and the lowly. In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson had said that "wonder is a pause of reason"�"the effect of novelty upon ignorance." But for many Romantics, to arouse in the sophisticated mind that sense of wonder presumed to be felt by the ignorant and the innocent�to renew the universe, Percy Shelley wrote, "after it has been blunted by reiteration"�was a major function of poetry. Commenting on the special imaginative quality of Wordsworth's early verse, Coleridge remarked: "To combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar . . . this is the character and privilege of genius." Contributing to this poetry of the child's-eye view, Baillie and Barbauld wrote poems centered on an observer's effort to imagine the unknowable perspective of beings for whom thought and sensation are new or not begun�in Baillie's case, a "waking infant," in Barbauld's, a "little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible" but is still in its mother's womb.

The Supernatural, the Romance, and Psychological Extremes

In most of his poems, Coleridge, like Wordsworth, dealt with everyday things, and in "Frost at Midnight" he showed how well he too could achieve the effect of wonder in the familiar. But Coleridge tells us in Biographia Literaria that, according to the division of labor that organized their collaboration on Lyrical Ballads, his assignment was to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and of the ordinary course of events: in his poems "the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural." And in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christahel, and "Kubla Khan," Coleridge opened up to modern poetry a realm of mystery and magic. Stories of bewitchings, hauntings, and possession�-shaped by antiquated treatises on demonology, folklore, and Gothic novels�supplied him with the means of impressing upon readers a sense of occult powers and unknown modes of being.

Materials like these were often grouped together under the rubric "romance," a term that would some time after the fact give the "Romantic" period its name. On the one hand romances were writings that turned, in their quest for settings conducive to supernatural happenings, to "strange fits of passion" and strange adventures, to distant pasts, faraway places, or both� Keats's "perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn" or the China of "Kubla Khan." On the other hand romance also named a homegrown, native tradition of literature, made unfamiliar and alien by the passage of time. For many authors, starting with Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1764) began the tradition of Gothic fiction, writing under the banner of romance meant reclaiming their national birthright: a literature of untrammeled imagination� associated, above all, with Spenser and the Shakespeare of fairy magic and witchcraft�that had been forced underground by the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and refinement. Byron negotiated between romance's two sets of associations in Childe Harold, having his hero travel in far-off Albania

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and become entranced by the inhabitants' savage songs, but also giving the poem the subtitle "A Romaunt" (an archaic spelling of romance) and writing it in Spenserian stanzas. This was the same stanzaic form, neglected for much of the eighteenth century, that Keats drew on for The Eve of St. Agnes, the poem in which he proved himself a master of that Romantic mode that establishes a medieval setting for events that violate our sense of realism and the natural order. The Romantic period's "medieval revival" was also promoted by women: Robinson, for instance (author of "Old English," "Monkish," and "Gothic" Tales), as well as Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Joanna Baillie, and others, women who often matched the arch-medievalist Sir Walter Scott in the historical learning they brought to their compositions.

The "addition of strangeness to beauty" that Walter Pater near the end of the nineteenth century would identify as a key Romantic tendency is seen not only in this concern with the exotic and archaic landscapes of romance, but also in the Romantic interest in the mysteries of mental life and determination to investigate psychological extremes. Wordsworth explored visionary states of consciousness that are common among children but violate the categories of adult judgment. Coleridge and De Quincey shared an interest in dreams and nightmares and in the altered consciousness they experienced under their addiction to opium. In his odes as in the quasi-medieval "ballad" "La Belle Dame sans Merci" Keats recorded strange mixtures of pleasure and pain with extraordinary sensitivity, pondering the destructive aspects of sexuality and the erotic quality of the longing for death. And Byron made repeated use of the fascination of the forbidden and the appeal of the terrifying yet seductive Satanic hero.

There were, of course, writers who resisted these poetic engagements with fantasized landscapes and strange passions. Significant dissent came from women, who, given accounts of their sex as especially susceptible to the delusions of romantic love, had particular reason to continue the Enlightenment program and promote the rational regulation of emotion. Barbauld wrote a poem gently advising the young Coleridge not to prolong his stay in the "fairy bower" of romance but to engage actively with the world as it is. Often satirical when she assesses characters who imagine themselves the pitiable victims of their own powerful feelings, Jane Austen had her heroine in Persuasion, while conversing with a melancholy, Byron-reading young man, caution him against overindulgence in Byron's "impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony" and "prescribe" to him a "larger allowance of prose in his daily study." And yet this heroine, having "been forced into prudence in her youth," has "learned romance as she grew older." The reversal of the sequence that usually orders the story line of female socialization suggests a receptivity to romance's allure that links even Austen to the spirit of the age.

Individualism and Alienation

Another feature of Byron's poetry that attracted notice and, in some quarters, censure was its insistence on his or his hero's self-sufficiency. Hazlitt, for instance, borrowed lines from Shakespeare's Coriolanus to object to Byron's habit of spurning human connection "[a]s if a man were author of himself, / And owned no other kin." The audacious individualism that Hazlitt questions here (a questioning that he carries on in part by enacting his own reliance on others and supplementing his words with Shakespeare's) was, however, central to the celebrations of creativity occupying many Romantic-period writers:

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INTRODUCTION / 15

indeed, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (as if anticipating and preemptively defying Hazlitt) had already characterized his poetic experimentation as an exercise in artistic self-sufficiency. The Preface has been read as a document in which Wordsworth, proving himself a self-made man, arranges for his disinheritance�arranges to cut himself off, he says, "from a large portion of the phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets." The German philosophers who generated many of the characteristic ideas of European Romanticism had likewise developed an account of how individuals might author and create themselves. In the work of Kant and others, the human mind was described as creating the universe it perceived and so creating its own experience. Mind is "not passive," Kant's admirer Coleridge wrote, but "made in God's image, and that too in the sublimest sense�the Image of the Creator." And Wordsworth declared in The Prelude that the individual mind "Doth, like an Agent of the one great Mind, / Create, creator and receiver both." The Romantic period, the epoch of free enterprise, imperial expansion, and boundless revolutionary hope, was also an epoch of individualism in which philosophers and poets alike put an extraordinarily high estimate on human potentialities and powers.

In representing this expanded scope for individual initiative, much poetry of the period redefined heroism and made a ceaseless striving for the unattainable its crucial element. Viewed by moralists of previous ages as sin or lamentable error, longings that can never be satisfied�in Percy Shelley's phrase, "the desire of the moth for a star"�came to be revalued as the glory of human nature. "Less than everything," Blake announced, "cannot satisfy man." Discussions of the nature of art developed similarly. The German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel's proposal that poetry "should forever be becoming and never be perfected" supplied a way to understand the unfinished, "fragment" poems of the period (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" most famously) not as failures but instead as confirmations that the most poetic poetry was defined as much by what was absent as by what was present: the poem, in this understanding, was a fragmentary trace of an original conception that was too grand ever to be fully realized. This defiant attitude toward limits also made many writers impatient with the conceptions of literary genre they inherited from the past. The result was that, creating new genres from old, they produced an astonishing variety of hybrid forms constructed on fresh principles of organization and style: "elegiac sonnets," "lyrical ballads," the poetic autobiography of The Prelude, Percy Shelley's "lyric drama" of cosmic reach, Prometheus Unbound, and (in the field of prose) the "historical novels" of Scott and the complex interweaving of letters, reported oral confessions, and interpolated tales that is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Blake went furthest: the composite art of word and image and "illuminated printing" he created for his poems daringly reinvented the concept of the book.

In this context many writers' choice to portray poetry as a product of solitude and poets as loners might be understood as a means of reinforcing the individuality of their vision. (The sociability of the extroverted narrator of Don Juan, who is forever buttonholing "the gentle reader," is exceptional�Byron's way of harkening back to the satire of the eighteenth century.) And the pervasiveness of nature poetry in the period can be attributed to a determination to idealize the natural scene as a site where the individual could find freedom from social laws, an idealization that was easier to sustain when nature was,

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16 / THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

as often in the era, represented not as cultivated fields but as uninhabitable wild wastes, unploughed uplands, caves, and chasms. Rural community, threatened by the enclosures that were breaking up village life, was a tenuous presence in poetry as well.

Wordsworth's imagination is typically released, for instance, by the sudden apparition of a single figure, stark and solitary against a natural background; the words "solitary," "by one self," "alone" sound through his poems. In the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron (before Don Juan launched Byron's own satire on Byronism), the desolate landscapes are often the haunts of disillusioned visionaries and accursed outlaws, figures whose thwarted ambitions and torments connect them, variously, to Cain, the Wandering Jew, Satan, and even Napoleon. A variant of this figure is Prometheus, the hero of classical mythology, who is Satan-like in setting himself in opposition to God, but who, unlike Satan, is the champion rather than the enemy of the human race. Mary Shelley subjected this hero, central to her husband's mythmaking, to ironic rewriting in Frankenstein: Victor Frankenstein, a "Modern Prometheus," is far from championing humankind. For other women writers of the period, and for Shelley in novels following Frankenstein, the equivalent to these half- charismatic, half-condemnable figures of alienation is the woman of "genius." In a world in which�as Wollstonecraft complained in the Rights of Woman� "all women are to be levelled by meekness and docility, into one character of . . . gentle compliance," the woman who in "unfeminine" fashion claimed a distinctive individuality did not gain authority but risked ostracism. As for the woman of genius, in writings by Robinson, Hemans, and Landon particularly, her story was often told as a modern variation on ancient legends of the Greek Sappho, the ill-fated female poet who had triumphed in poetry but died of love. Pressured by the emergent Victorianism of the 1820s and playing it safe, Hemans and Landon especially were careful to associate genius with self-inflicted sorrow and happiness with a woman's embrace of her domestic calling.

WRITING IN THE MARKETPLACE AND THE COURTS

Even Romantics who wished to associate literature with isolated poets holding mute converse with their souls had to acknowledge that in real life the writer did not dwell in solitude but confronted, and was accountable to, a crowd. For many commentators the most revolutionary aspect of the age was the spread of literacy and the dramatic expansion of the potential audience for literature. This revolution, like the Revolution in France, occasioned a conservative reaction: the worry, frequently expressed as books ceased to be written exclusively for an elite, that this bigger audience (by 1830, about half England's population of fourteen million) would be less qualified to judge or understand what it read. Beginning in 1780, more members of the working classes had learned to read as a result of lessons provided in Sunday schools (informal sites for the education of the poor that long antedated state- supported schools). At the same time reading matter became more plentiful and cheaper, thanks to innovations in retailing�the cut-rate sales of remaindered books and the spread of circulating libraries where volumes could be "rented"-�and thanks to technological developments. By the end of the period, printing presses were driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of paper had been mechanized; publishers had mastered publicity, the art (as it was

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INTRODUCTION / 17

called) of "the puff." Surveying the consequences of these changes, Coleridge muttered darkly about that "misgrowth," "a Reading Public," making it sound like something freakish. Books had become a big business, one enrolling increasing numbers of individuals who found it possible to do without the assistance of wealthy patrons and who, accordingly, looked to this public for their hopes of survival. A few writers became celebrities, invested with a glamor that formerly had been reserved for royalty and that we nowadays save for movie stars. This was the case for the best-selling Byron, particularly, whose enthusiastic public could by the 1830s purchase dinner services imprinted with illustrations from his life and works.

How such popular acclaim was to be understood and how the new reading public that bestowed it (and took it away) could possibly be reformed or monitored when, as Coleridge's term "misgrowth" suggests, its limits and composition seemed unknowable: these were pressing questions for the age. Opponents of the French Revolution and political reform at home pondered a frightening possibility: if "events . . . [had] made us a world of readers" (as Coleridge put it, thinking of how newspapers had proliferated in response to the political upheavals), it might also be true that readers could make events in turn, that the new members of the audience for print would demand a part in the drama of national politics. Conservatives were well aware of arguments conjecturing that the Revolution had been the result of the invention of the printing press three centuries before. They certainly could not forget that Paine's Rights of Man�not the reading matter for the poor the Sunday-school movement had envisioned�had sold an astonishing two hundred thousand copies in a year. Distributed by clubs of workers who pooled money for this purpose, read aloud in alehouses or as listeners worked in the fields, those copies reached a total audience that was much more numerous still.

However, the British state had lacked legal provisions for the prepublication censorship of books since 1695, which was when the last Licensing Act had lapsed. Throughout the Romantic period therefore the Crown tried out other methods for policing reading and criminalizing certain practices of authoring and publishing. Paine was in absentia found guilty of sedition, for instance, and in 1817 the radical publisher William Hone narrowly escaped conviction for blasphemy. Another government strategy was to use taxes to inflate the prices of printed matter and so keep political information out of the hands of the poor without exactly violating the freedom of the press. In the meantime worries about how the nation would fare now that "the people" read were matched by worries about how to regulate the reading done by women. In 1807 the bowdlerized edition was born, as the Reverend Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta produced The Family Shakespeare, concocting a Bard who, his indelicacies expurgated, could be sanctioned family fare.

Commentators who condemned the publishing industry as a scene of criminality also cited the frequency with which, during this chaotic time, bestselling books ended up republished in unauthorized, "pirated" editions. Novels were the pirates' favorite targets. But the radical underground of London's printing industry also appropriated one of the most politically daring works of Percy Shelley, Queen Mah, and by keeping it in print, and accessible in cheap editions, thwarted attempts to posthumously sanitize the poet's reputation. And in 1817 Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, was embarrassed to find his insurrectionary drama of 1794, Wat Tyler, republished without his permission. There was no chance, Southey learned, that the thieves who had filched his

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intellectual property and put this souvenir of his youthful radicalism back into circulation would be punished: the judiciary ruled that copyright law was for the law-abiding and did not apply to "sedition."

OTHER LITERARY FORMS

Prose

Although we now know the Romantic period as an age of poetry, centered on works of imagination, nonfiction prose forms�essays, reviews, political pamphlets� flourished during the epoch, as writers seized the opportunity to speak to and for the era's new audiences. In eighteenth-century England, prose, particularly in the urbane, accessible style that writers such as Addison and Hume cultivated in their essays, had been valued as the medium of sociable exchange that could integrate different points of view and unify the public space known as the "republic of letters." That ideal of civil discussion came under pressure in the Romantic period, however, since by then many intellectuals were uncertain whether a republic of letters could survive the arrival of those new readers, "the people," and whether in this age of class awareness such a thing as a unified public culture was even possible. Those uncertainties are never far from the surface in the masterpieces of Romantic prose�a category that ranges from the pamphleteering that drew Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Paine into the Revolution controversy of the 1790s, to the periodical essays, with suggestive titles like The Watchman and The Friend, in which Coleridge turned controversialist, to the magazine writing of Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey in the 1820s.

The issue of how the writer should relate to audience�as watchman or friend?�was especially tricky, because this period, when so many more people defined themselves as readers, saw the emergence of a new species of specialist reader. This was the critic, who, perhaps problematically, was empowered to tell all the others what to read. Following the establishment in 1802 of the Edinburgh Review and in 1809 of the Quarterly Review, a new professionalized breed of book reviewer claimed a degree of cultural authority to which eighteenth-century critics had never aspired. Whereas later-eighteenthcentury periodicals such as the Monthly Review and Critical Review had aimed to notice almost everything in print, the Edinburgh and Quarterly limited themselves to about fifteen books per issue. The selectivity enabled them to make decisive statements about what would count as culture and what would fall beyond the pale. They also conceptualized criticism as a space of discipline, in which the reputations of the writers under review were as likely to be marred as they were to be made. The stern Latin motto of the Edinburgh (founded by lawyers) translates as "the judge is condemned when the guilty go free." The continuing tension in the relations between criticism and literature and doubt about whether critical prose can be literature�whether it can have artistic value as well as social utility�are legacies from the Romantic era. Hazlitt wondered self-consciously in an essay on criticism whether his was not in fact a critical rather than a poetical age and whether "no great works of genius appear, because so much is said and written about them."

Hazlitt participated importantly in another development. In 1820 the found

ing editor of the London Magazine gathered a group of writers, Hazlitt, Lamb,

and De Quincey, who in the London's pages collectively developed the Roman

tic form known as the familiar essay: intimate-feeling commentaries, often

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INTRODUCTION / 19

presented as if prompted by incidents in the authors' private lives, on an eclectic range of topics, from pork to prize-fighting. In some of his essays, Hazlitt modeled an account of the individual's response to works of art as most important not for how, for instance, it prepares that person for public citizenship, but for what it helps him discover about his personality. For their essays Lamb and De Quincey developed a style that harkened back to writers who flourished before the republic of letters and who had more idiosyncratic eccentricities than eighteenth-century decorum would have allowed. Though these essayists were very differently circumstanced from the Romantic poets who were their friends�paid by the page and writing to a deadline, for a start�their works thus parallel the poets' in also turning toward the personal and subjective. One consequence of the essayists' cultivation of intimacy and preference for the impressionistic over the systematic is that, when we track the history of prose to the 1820s, we see it end up in a place very different from the one it occupies at the start of the Romantic period. Participants in the Revolution controversy of the 1790s had claimed to speak for all England. By the close of the period the achievement of the familiar essay was to have brought the medium of prose within the category of "the literary"�but by distancing it from public life.

Drama

Whether the plays composed during the Bomantic period can qualify as literature has been, by contrast, more of a puzzle. England throughout this period had a vibrant theatrical culture. Theater criticism, practiced with flair by Hazlitt and Lamb, emerged as a new prose genre; actors like Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean numbered the poets among their admirers and found their way into Romantic poetry; Mary Robinson was known as an actor before she was known as an author. But there were many restrictions limiting what could be staged in England and many calls for reform. As places where crowds gathered, theaters were always closely watched by suspicious government officials. The English had habitually extolled their theater as a site of social mixing�a mirror to the political order in that it supplied all the classes in the nation (those who, depending on how their tickets were priced, frequented the box, the pit, or the gallery) with another sort of representative assembly. But during this era disorder seemed the rule: riots broke out at Covent Garden in 1792 and 1809. The link between drama and disorder was one reason that new dramas had to meet the approval of a censor before they could be performed, a rule in place since 1737. Another restriction was that only the theaters royal (in London, Drury Lane and Covent Garden) had the legal right to produce "legitimate" (spoken word) drama, leaving the other stages limited to entertainments� pantomimes and melodramas mainly�in which dialogue was by regulation always combined with music. An evening's entertainment focused on legitimate drama would not have been so different. The stages and auditoriums of the two theaters royal were huge spaces, which encouraged their managers to favor grandiose spectacles or, more precisely, multimedia experiences, involving musicians, dancers, and artists who designed scenery, besides players and playwrights.

This theatrical culture's demotion of words might explain why the poets of the era, however stagestruck, found drama uncongenial. Nonetheless, almost all tried their hands at the form, tempted by the knowledge that the plays of certain of their (now less esteemed) contemporaries�Hannah Cowley and Charles Maturin, for example�had met with immense acclaim. Some of the

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poets' plays were composed to be read rather than performed: "closet dramas," such as Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and most of Baillie's Plays on the Passions, permitted experimentation with topic and form. Others were written expressly for the stage, but their authors were hampered by their inexperience and tendency, exacerbated by the censorship that encouraged them to seek safe subject matter in the past, to imitate the style of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. There were exceptions to this discouraging record. Coleridge's tragedy Remorse, for instance, was a minor hit and ran for twenty nights in 1813. The most capable dramatist among the poets was, surprisingly, Percy Shelley. His powerful tragedy The Cenci (1820), the story of a monstrous father who rapes his daughter and is murdered by her in turn, was deemed unstageable on political rather than artistic or technical grounds. It had no chance of getting by the Examiner of Plays; indeed, by thematizing the unspeakable topic of incest, Shelley predicted his own censoring.

The Novel

Novels at the start of the Romantic period were immensely popular but�as far as critics and some of the form's half-ashamed practitioners were concerned� not quite respectable. Loose in structure, they seemed to require fewer skills than other literary genres. This genre lacked the classic pedigree claimed by poetry and drama. It attracted (or so detractors declared) an undue proportion of readers who were women, and who, by consuming its escapist stories of romantic love, risked developing false ideas of life. It likewise attracted (so some of these same critics complained) too many writers who were women. (By the 1780s women were publishing as many novels as men.) Because of its popularity, the form also focused commentators' anxieties about the expansion of the book market and commercialization of literature: hence late-eighteenth-century reviewers of new novels often sarcastically described them as mass-produced commodities, not authored exactly, but instead stamped out automatically in "novel-mills." Matters changed decisively, however, starting around 1814. Reviews of Scott's Waverley series of historical novels and then a review that Scott wrote of Jane Austen's Emma declared a renaissance�"a new style of novel." By this time, too, the genre had its historians, who delineated the novel's origins and rise and in this manner established its particularity against the more reputable literary forms. It was having a canon created for it too; figures like Barbauld and Scott compiled and introduced collections of the best novels. So equipped, the novel began to endanger poetry's long-held monopoly on literary prestige.

There had in fact been earlier signs of these new ambitions for the genre, although reviewers did not then know what to make of them. The last decade of the eighteenth century saw bold experiments with novels' form and subject matter�in particular, new ways of linking fiction with philosophy and history. Rather than, as one reviewer put it, contentedly remaining in a "region of their own," some novels showed signs of having designs on the real world. The writers now known as the Jacobin novelists used the form to test political theories and represent the political upheavals of the age. Thus in Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are, the philosopher William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley) set out, he said, to "write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he had read it, shall ever be exactly the same": the result was a chilling novel of surveillance and entrapment in which a servant recounts the perse

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INTRODUCTION / 21

cutions he suffers at the hands of the master whose secret past he has detected. (The disturbing cat-and-mouse game between the two gets rewritten two decades later as the conclusion to Frankenstein, a novel that, among many other things, represents Shelley's tribute to the philosophical fictions of her parents.) Loyalists attacked the Jacobins with their own weapons and, in making novels their ammunition, contributed in turn to enhancing the genre's cultural presence:

Another innovation in novel-writing took shape, strangely enough, as a recovery of what was old. Writers whom we now describe as the Gothic novelists revisited the romance, the genre identified as the primitive forerunner of the modern novel, looking to a medieval (i.e., "Gothic") Europe that they pictured as a place of gloomy castles, devious Catholic monks, and stealthy ghosts. These authors�first Walpole, followed by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Matthew Lewis, and the hugely popular Ann Radcliffe�developed for the novel a repertory of settings and story lines meant to purvey to readers the pleasurable terror of regression to a premodern, prerational state. This Gothic turn was another instance of the period's "romance revival," another variation on the effort to renew the literature of the present by reworking the past. Gothic fiction was thus promoted in terms running parallel to those in accounts of the powers of poetry: when novels break with humdrum reality, Anna Barbauld explained, "our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers."

Possibly this "new world" was meant to supply Romantic-period readers with an escape route from the present and from what Godwin called "things as they are." Certainly, the pasts that Gothic novelists conjure up are conceived of in fanciful, freewheeling ways; it is comical just how often a Radcliffe heroine who is supposed to inhabit sixteenth-century France can act like a proper English girl on the marriage market in the 1790s. But even that example of anachronism might suggest that some Gothic novelists were inviting readers to assess their stories as engaging the questions of the day. Gothic horrors gave many writers a language in which to examine the nature of power�the elements of sadism and masochism in the relations between men and women, for instance. And frequently the Gothic novelists probe the very ideas of historical accuracy and legitimacy that critics use against them, and meditate on who is authorized to tell the story of the past and who is not.

The ascendancy of the novel in the early nineteenth century is in many ways a function of fiction writers' new self-consciousness about their relation to works of history. By 1814 the novelist and historian encroached on each other's territory more than ever. This was not exactly because nineteenth- century novelists were renewing their commitment to probability and realism (although, defining themselves against the critically reviled Gothic novelists, many were), but rather because the nature of things historical was also being reinvented. In light of the Revolution, history's traditional emphasis on public affairs and great men had begun to give way to an emphasis on beliefs, customs, everyday habits�the approach we now identify with social history. Novelists pursued similar interests: in works like Castle Rackrent, Maria Edge- worth, for instance, provides an almost anthropological account of the way of life of a bygone Ireland. The only novelist before Scott whom the influential Edinburgh Review took seriously, Edgeworth builds into her "national tales" details about local practices that demonstrate how people's ways of seeing

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are rooted in the particularities of their native places. Scott learned from her, incorporating her regionalism into his new style of historical novels, in which, with deeply moving results, he also portrayed the past as a place of adventure, pageantry, and grandeur.

Scott and Edgeworth establish the master theme of the early-nineteenthcentury novel: the question of how the individual consciousness intermeshes with larger social structures, of how far character is the product of history and how far it is not. Jane Austen's brilliance as a satirist of the English leisure class often prompts literary historians to compare her works to witty Restoration and eighteenth-century comedies. But she too helped bring this theme to the forefront of novel-writing, devising new ways of articulating the relationship between the psychological history of the individual and the history of society, and, with unsurpassed psychological insight, creating unforgettable heroines who live in time and change. As with other Romantics, Austen's topic is revolution�revolutions of the mind. The momentous event in her fictions, which resemble Wordsworth's poetry in finding out the extraordinary in the everyday, is the change of mind that creates the possibility of love. Contrasting his own "big bow-wow strain" with Austen's nuance, Scott wrote that Austen "had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." Nineteenth- century reviewers of his triumphant Waverley series were certain that Scott's example foretold the future of novel-writing. He, however, recognized the extent to which Austen had also changed the genre in which she worked, by developing a new novelistic language for the workings of the mind in flux.

Additional information about the Romantic Period, including primary texts and images, is available at Norton Literature Online (www.wwnorton.com/ literature). Online topics are

� Tintern Abbey, Tourism, and Romantic Landscape � The Satanic and Byronic Hero � The French Revolution � Romantic Orientalism

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THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

TEXT S CONTEXT S 1773 Anna Letitia Aikin (later Barbauld), Poems 1774 J. W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther 1776 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations 1778 Frances Burney, Evelina 1779 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1779-81) 1781 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions. J. C. Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers 1784 Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets 1785 William Cowper, The Task 1786 William Beckford, Vathek. Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect 1789 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation. William Blake, Songs of Innocence 1790 Joanna Baillie, Poems. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 1791 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest 1792 Mar>' Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1793 William Godwin, Political Justice 1794 Blake, Songs of Experience. Godwin, Caleb Williams. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho 1775 American War of Independence (1775� 83) 1780 Gordon Riots in London 1783 William Pitt becomes prime minister (serving until 1801 and again in 1804�06) 1784 Death of Samuel Johnson 1787 W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni. Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded 1789 Fall of the Bastille (beginning of the French Revolution) 1790 J. M. W. Turner first exhibits at the Royal Academy 1791 Revolution in Santo Domingo (modern Haiti) 1792 September Massacres in Paris. First gas lights in Britain 1793 Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. France declares war against Britain (and then Britain against France). The Reign of Terror 1794 The fall of Robespierre. Trials for high treason of members of the London Corresponding Society 1795 Pitt's Gagging Acts suppress freedom of speech and assembly in Britain

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TEXT S CONTEXT S 1796 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk 1798 Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, volume 1. Bentham, Political Economy. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1800 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent. Mary Robinson, Lyrical Tales 1805 Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel 1807 Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes 1808 Goethe, Faiist, part 1 1812 Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos 1 and 2. Felicia Hemans, The Domestic Affections 1813 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 1814 Walter Scott, Waverley. Wordsworth, The Excursion 1816 Byron, Childe Harold, cantos 3 and 4. Coleridge, Christahel, "Kubla Khan." Percy Shelley, Alastor 1817 Byron, Manfred. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves. John Keats, Poems 1818 Austen, Northanger Abbey. Keats, Endymion. Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1797 Death of complications resulting from childbirth of Mary Wollstonecraft 1798 Rebellion in Ireland 1801 Parliamentary Union of Ireland and Great Britain 1802 Treaty of Amiens. Edinburgh Review founded. John Constable first exhibits at the Royal Academy 1804 Napoleon crowned emperor. Founding of the republic of Haiti 1805 The French fleet defeated by the British at Trafalgar 1807 Abolition of the slave trade in Britain 1808 Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonies 5 and 6 1809 Quarterly Revieiv founded 1811 The Prince of Wales becomes regent for George III, who is declared incurably insane 1812 War between Britain and the United States (1812-15) 1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo. Corn Laws passed, protecting economic interests of the landed aristocracy 1817 BlacJnvood's Edinburgh Magazine founded. Death of Princess Charlotte. Death of Jane Austen

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TEXTS CONTEXT S 1819 Byron, Don Juan, cantos 1 and 2 1820 John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life. Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Percy Sheljey, Prometheus Unbound 1821 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Percy Shelley, Adonais 1824 Letitia Landon, The Improvisatrice 1827 Clare, The Shepherd's Calendar 1828 Hemans, Records of Woman 1830 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-33). Alfred Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1819 "Peterloo Massacre" in Manchester 1820 Death of George III; accession of George IV. London Magazine founded 1821 Deaths of Keats in Rome and Napoleon at St. Helena 1822 Franz Schubert, Unfinished Symphony. Death of Percy Shelley in the Bay of Spezia, near Lerici, Italy 1824 Death of Byron in Missolonghi 1828 Parliamentary repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts excluding Dissenters from state offices 1829 Catholic Emancipation 1830 Death of George IV; accession of William IV. Revolution in France 1832 First Reform Bill

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26

ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD 1743-1825

Anna Barbauld, born Anna Letitia Aikin, received an unusual education from her father, a minister and a teacher, after 1758, at the Warrington Academy in Lancashire, the great educational center for the Nonconformist community, whose religion barred them from admission to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dissenting academies such as Warrington had developed a modern curriculum in the natural sciences, as well as in modern languages and English literature. This progressive educational program deviated significantly from the classics-based curriculum, scarcely altered since the sixteenth century, that was supplied by the old universities. Barbauld benefited from the curriculum the Dissenters had designed with their sons in mind and mastered French and Italian, and then Latin and Greek, while still a girl.

She made her literary debut with Poems, which went through five editions between 1773 and 1777 and immediately established her as a leading poet. In 1774 she married Rochemont Barbauld, a Dissenting minister, and with him comanaged a school at Palgrave, in Suffolk. Thereafter, becoming increasingly famous and respected in literary circles as (according to the custom of the day) "Mrs. Barbauld," she divided her time between the teaching of younger pupils at Palgrave and a series of writings focused on education, politics, and literature. She published Devotional Pieces (1775), three volumes of Lessons for Children (1778�79), and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), all of which were reprinted many times. William Hazlitt records a common experience in recalling that he read her works "before those of any other author, male or female, when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her storybooks for children."

She wrote political pamphlets in the 1790s, opposing Britain's declaration of war against France, defending democratic government and popular education, and campaigning for the repeal of the Test Acts that had long excluded Nonconformist Protestants (those who would not subscribe, as a "test" of their loyalty, to the thirty-nine Articles of the Established Church) from the public life of the nation. Her 1791 "Epistle to William Wilberforce" attacked Britain's involvement in the slave trade. She accompanied her poetry and political writing with editing, producing an edition of William Collins's poems (1797), six volumes of the correspondence of the mideighteenth- century novelist Samuel Richardson (1804), fifty volumes of The British Novelists (beginning in 1810), and a popular anthology of poetry and prose for young women called The Female Speaker (1811). The British Novelists was the first attempt to establish a national canon in fiction paralleling the multivolume collections of British poets (such as the one associated with Samuel Johnson's prefaces) that had been appearing since the 1770s. Her introductory essay, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," is a pioneering statement concerning the educational value of novels.

Barbauld's last major work in poetry was Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a bitter diagnosis of contemporary British life and politics, which lamented the war with France (then in its seventeenth year), the poverty of leadership, the fallen economy, colonialism, and the failure of genius (at the conclusion, the Spirit of Genius emigrates to South America). Critics, even the more liberal ones, were antagonized by a woman writer's use of the scourge of Juvenalian satire, and their response was anguished and unanimously negative; and Barbauld seems not to have attempted another long work after this (she was, by this time, in her late sixties). After Barbauld's death, her niece Lucy Aikin brought out her aunt's Works (two volumes), including several previously unpublished pieces.

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T HE M OUSE'S PETITION / 27

The Mouse's Petition1

Found in the trap where he had heen confined all night by Dr. Priestle}', for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air

"Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos."

�Virgil

Oh hear a pensive prisoner's prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the wretch's cries.

5 For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry gate; And tremble at th' approaching morn, Which brings impending fate.

If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,

10 And spurn'd a tyrant's chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain.

Oh do not stain with guiltless blood Thy hospitable hearth; 15 Nor triumph that thy wiles betray'd A prize so little worth.

The scatter'd gleanings of a feast My frugal meals supply; But if thine unrelenting heart

20 That slender boon deny,

The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature's commoners enjoy The common gifts of heaven.

25 The well-taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.

If mind, as ancient sages taught,2 30 A never dying flame,

1. Addressed to the clergyman, political theorist, and scientist Joseph Priestley (1733�1804), who at this time was the most distinguished teacher at the Nonconformist Protestant Warrington Academy, where Barbauld's father was also a member of the faculty. The imagined speaker (the petitioning mouse) is destined to participate in just the sort of experiment that led Priestley, a few years later, to the discovery of "phlogiston"�what we now- call oxygen. Tradition has it that when Barbauld showed him the lines, Priestley set the mouse free. According to Barbauid's modern editors, the poem was many times reprinted and was a favorite to assign students for memorizing. The Latin epigraph is from The Aeneid 6.853, "To spare the humbled, and to tame in war the proud."

2. Lines 29�36 p!ay on the idea of transmigration of souls, a doctrine that Priestley believed until the early 1770s.

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28 / ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD

Still shifts through matter's varying forms, In every form the same,

Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother's soul you find; 35 And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind.

Or, if this transient gleam of day Be all of life we share, Let pity plead within thy breast

40 That little all to spare.

So may thy hospitable board With health and peace be crown'd; And every charm of heartfelt ease Beneath thy roof be found.

45 So, when destruction lurks unseen, Which men, like mice, may share, May some kind angel clear thy path, And break the hidden snare.

ca. 1771 1773

An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study

A map of every country known,1 With not a foot of land his own. A list of folks that kicked a dust On this poor globe, from Ptol. the First;2

5 He hopes,�indeed it is but fair,� Some day to get a corner there. A group of all the British kings, Fair emblem! on a packthread swings. The Fathers, ranged in goodly row,3

10 A decent, venerable show, Writ a great while ago, they tell us, And many an inch o'ertop their fellows. A Juvenal to hunt for mottos; And Ovid's tales of nymphs and grottos.4

15 The meek-robed lawyers, all in white; Pure as the lamb,�at least, to sight. A shelf of bottles, jar and phial,0 vial By which the rogues he can defy all,� All filled with lightning keen and genuine,

20 And many a little imp he'll pen you in;

1. The maps, historical charts, books, and scien-Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. tific apparatus are all part of the "furniture" (fur-3. The works of the Catholic Church Fathers. nishings) of Joseph Priestley's study (see the first 4. Ovid's Metamorphoses and the works of the note to the preceding poem). Roman satirist Juvenal. 2. Ptolemy I (ca. 367�283 B.C.E.), founder of the

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A SUMMER EVENING'S MEDITATION / 29

Which, like Le Sage's sprite, let out, Among the neighbours makes a rout;5 Brings down the lightning on their houses, And lulls their geese, and frights their spouses.

25 A rare thermometer, by which He settles, to the nicest pitch, The just degrees of heat, to raise Sermons, or politics, or plays. Papers and books, a strange mixed olio,

30 From shilling touch0 to pompous folio; cheap pamphlet Answer, remark, reply, rejoinder, Fresh from the mint, all stamped and coined here; Like new-made glass, set by to cool, Before it bears the workman's tool.

35 A blotted proof-sheet, wet from Bowling.6 �"How can a man his anger hold in?"� Forgotten rimes, and college themes, Worm-eaten plans, and embryo schemes;� A mass of heterogeneous matter,

40 A chaos dark, nor land nor water;� New books, like new-born infants, stand, Waiting the printer's clothing hand;� Others, a motley ragged brood, Their limbs unfashioned all, and rude,

45 Like Cadmus' half-formed men appear;7 One rears a helm, one lifts a spear, And feet were lopped and fingers torn Before their fellow limbs were born; A leg began to kick and sprawl

50 Before the head was seen at all, Which quiet as a mushroom lay Till crumbling hillocks gave it way; And all, like controversial writing, Were born with teeth, and sprung up fighting.

55 "But what is this," I hear you cry, "Which saucily provokes my eye?"� A thing unknown, without a name, Born of the air and doomed to flame.

ca.1771 1825

A Summer Evening's Meditation1

Tis past! The sultry tyrant of the south Has spent his short-lived rage; more grateful0 hours pleasing Move silent on; the skies no more repel

5. In Rene LeSage's Le Diable Boiteiix (1707), a (Ovid's Metamorphoses 3.95-114). laboratory-created spirit lifts the roofs from the 1. This poem looks backward to poems such as neighbors' houses, exposing their private lives and William Collins's "Ode to Evening" (1747), Anne creating havoc. Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie" (1713), and even to 6. Presumably a local printer. Milton's description in book 2 of Paradise Lost of 7. Armed men created when Cadmus sowed the Satan's daring navigation of the realm of Chaos. At earth with the teeth of a dragon he had killed the same time Barbauld's excursion-and-return

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3 0 / ANN A LETITI A BARBAUL D The dazzled sight, but with mild maiden beams 5 Of tempered lustre court the cherished eye To wander o'er their sphere; where, hung aloft, Dian's bright crescent, like a silver bow New strung in heaven, lifts high its beamy horns Impatient for the night, and seems to push 10 Her brother" down the sky. Fair Venus shines Apollo Even in the eye of day; with sweetest beam Propitious shines, and shakes a trembling flood Of softened radiance from her dewy locks. The shadows spread apace; while meekened2 Eve, is Her cheek yet warm with blushes, slow retires Through the Hesperian gardens of the west, And shuts the gates of day. Tis now the hour When Contemplation from her sunless haunts, The cool damp grotto, or the lonely depth 20 Of unpierced woods, where wrapt in solid shade She mused away the gaudy hours of noon, And fed on thoughts unripened by the sun, Moves forward; and with radiant finger points To yon blue concave swelled by breath divine, 25 Where, one by one, the living eyes of heaven Awake, quick kindling o'er the face of ether One boundless blaze; ten thousand trembling fires, And dancing lustres, where the unsteady eye, Restless and dazzled, wanders unconfined 30 O'er all this field of glories; spacious field, And worthy of the Master: he, whose hand With hieroglyphics elder than the Nile Inscribed the mystic tablet, hung on high To public gaze, and said, "Adore, O man! 35 The finger of thy God." From what pure wells Of milky light, what soft o'erflowing urn, Are all these lamps so fill'd? these friendly lamps, For ever streaming o'er the azure deep To point our path, and light us to our home. 40 How soft they slide along their lucid spheres! And silent as the foot of Time, fulfill Their destined courses: Nature's self is hushed, And, but� a scattered leaf, which rustles through except for The thick-wove foliage, not a sound is heard 45 To break the midnight air; though the raised ear, Intensely listening, drinks in every breath. How deep the silence, yet how loud the praise! But are they silent all? or is there not A tongue in every star, that talks with man, so And woos him to be wise? nor woos in vain: This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.

structure anticipates the high flights (and returns) sweetest beams (10 and 11) is differently gendered: of later lyrics by Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and this soul that launches "into the trackless deeps" Keats. But her account of the journey, with its ref-(82) is clearly female. erences to Diana's crescent (line 7) and Venus's 2. Softened, made meek.

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A SUMMER EVENING'S MEDITATION / 31

At this still hour the self-collected soul Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there

55 Of high descent, and more than mortal rank; An embryo God; a spark of fire divine, Which must burn on for ages, when the sun,� Fair transitory creature of a day!� Has closed his golden eye, and wrapt in shades

60 Forgets his wonted journey through the east.

Ye citadels of light, and seats of Gods! Perhaps my future home, from whence the soul, Revolving0 periods past, may oft look back Meditating on With recollected tenderness on all

65 The various busy scenes she left below, Its deep-laid projects and its strange events, As on some fond and doting tale that soothed Her infant hours�O be it lawful now To tread the hallowed circle of your courts,

70 And with mute wonder and delighted awe Approach your burning confines. Seized in thought, On Fancy's wild and roving wing I sail, From the green borders of the peopled Earth, And the pale Moon, her duteous fair attendant;

75 From solitary Mars; from the vast orb Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk Dances in ether like the lightest leaf; To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system, Where cheerless Saturn 'midst his watery moons3

so Girt with a lucid zone," in gloomy pomp, belt Sits like an exiled monarch: fearless thence I launch into the trackless deeps of space, Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear, Of elder beam, which ask no leave to shine

85 Of our terrestrial star, nor borrow light From the proud regent of our scanty day; Sons of the morning, first-born of creation, And only less than Him who marks their track, And guides their fiery wheels. Here must I stop,

90 Or is there aught beyond? What hand unseen Impels me onward through the glowing orbs Of habitable nature, far remote, To the dread confines of eternal night, To solitudes of vast unpeopled space,

95 The deserts of creation, wide and wild; Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the womb of chaos? fancy droops, And thought astonished stops her bold career. But O thou mighty mind! whose powerful word ioo Said, thus let all things be, and thus they were,4 Where shall I seek thy presence? how unblamed

3. Saturn marked the outmost bounds of the solar 4. An echo of Genesis 1.3. system until the discovery of Uranus in 1781.

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32 / ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD

Invoke thy dread perfection? Have the broad eyelids of the morn beheld thee? Or does the beamy shoulder of Orion

105 Support thy throne? O look with pity down On erring, guilty man! not in thy names Of terror clad; not with those thunders armed That conscious Sinai felt, when fear appalled The scattered tribes;5�thou hast a gentler voice,

no" That whispers comfort to the swelling heart, Abashed, yet longing to behold her Maker.

But now my soul, unused to stretch her powers In flight so daring, drops her weary wing, And seeks again the known accustomed spot,

115 Drest up with sun, and shade, and lawns, and streams, A mansion fair, and spacious for its guest, And full replete with wonders. Let me here, Content and grateful, wait the appointed time, And ripen for the skies: the hour will come

120 When all these splendours bursting on my sight Shall stand unveiled, and to my ravished sense Unlock the glories of the world unknown.

1773

Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade1

Cease, Wilberforce, to urge thy generous aim! Thy Country knows the sin, and stands the shame! The Preacher, Poet, Senator in vain Has rattled in her sight the Negro's chain;

5 With his deep groans assail'd her startled ear, And rent the veil that hid his constant tear; Forc'd her averted eyes his stripes to scan, Beneath the bloody scourge laid bare the man, Claim'd Pity's tear, urg'd Conscience' strong control,

10 And flash'd conviction on her shrinking soul. The Muse too, soon awak'd, with ready tongue At Mercy's shrine applausive0 paeans rung; approving And Freedom's eager sons, in vain foretold A new Astrean reign,� an age of gold: reign of justice

15 She knows and she persists�Still Afric bleeds, Uncheck'd, the human traffic still proceeds; She stamps her infamy to future time,

5. When God came down to deliver the Ten Commandments "there were thunders and lightnings . . . so that all the people . . . trembled" (Exodus 19.16). 1. On April 18, 1791, the politician and humanitarian Wilberforce (1759�1833) presented a motion in the House of Commons to abolish the slave trade. The motion was rejected a day later by a vote of 163 to 88. Sixteen years passed before the trade was outlawed in the British West Indies (1807), and another twenty-six before it was abolished in the rest of the British Empire (1833).

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E PISTLE TO W ILLIAM W ILBERFORCE, E SQ. / 3 3 And on her harden'd forehead seals the crime. In vain, to thy white standard gathering round, 20 Wit, Worth, and Parts and Eloquence are found: In vain, to push to birth thy great design, Contending chiefs, and hostile virtues join; All, from conflicting ranks, of power possest To rouse, to melt, or to inform the breast. 25 Where seasoned tools of Avarice prevail, A Nation's eloquence, combined, must fail: Each flimsy sophistry by turns they try; The plausive0 argument, the daring lie, specious The artful gloss, that moral sense confounds,

30 Th' acknowledged thirst of gain that honour wounds: Bane of ingenuous minds, th' unfeeling sneer, Which, sudden, turns to stone the falling tear: They search assiduous, with inverted skill, For forms of wrong, and precedents of ill;

35 With impious mockery west the sacred page, And glean up crimes from each remoter age: Wrung Nature's tortures, shuddering, while you tell, From scoffing fiends bursts forth the laugh of hell; In Britain's senate, Misery's pangs give birth

40 To jests unseemly, and to horrid mirth� Forbear!�thy virtues but provoke our doom, And swell th' account of vengeance yet to come; For, not unmark'd in Heaven's impartial plan, Shall man, proud worm, contemn his fellow-man?

45 And injur'd Afric, by herself redrest, Darts her own serpents at her Tyrant's breast. Each vice, to minds deprav'd by bondage known, With sure contagion fastens on his own; In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame,

50 And blows to rage impetuous Passion's flame: Fermenting swift, the fiery venom gains The milky innocence of infant veins; There swells the stubborn will, damps learning's fire, The whirlwind wakes of uncontrol'd desire,

55 Sears the young heart to images of woe, And blasts the buds of Virtue as they blow.0 bloom

Lo! where reclin'd, pale Beauty courts the breeze, Diffus'd on sofas of voluptuous ease; With anxious awe, her menial train around,

60 Catch her faint whispers of half-utter'd sound; See her, in monstrous fellowship, unite At once the Scythian, and the Sybarite;2 Blending repugnant vices, misallied, Which frugal nature purpos'd to divide;

65 See her, with indolence to fierceness join'd, Of body delicate, infirm of mind, With languid tones imperious mandates urge; With arm recumbent wield the household scourge;

2. I.e., the contraries of pastoral wildness and effeminate voluptuousness.

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34 / ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD

And with unruffled mien, and placid sounds, 70 Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds.

Nor, in their palmy walks and spicy groves, The form benign of rural Pleasure roves; No milk-maid's song, or hum of village talk, Sooths the lone Poet in his evening walk:

75 No willing arm the flail unwearied plies,

- Where the mix'd sounds of cheerful labour rise; No blooming maids and frolic swains are seen To pay gay homage to their harvest queen: No heart-expanding scenes their eyes must prove so Of thriving industry, and faithful love: But shrieks and yells disturb the balmy air, Dumb sullen looks of woe announce despair, And angry eyes through dusky features glare. Far from the sounding lash the Muses fly,

85 And sensual riot drowns each finer joy.

Nor less from the gay East, on essenc'd wings, Breathing unnam'd perfumes, Contagion springs; The soft luxurious plague alike pervades The marble palaces, and rural shades;

90 Hence, throng'd Augusta0 builds her rosy bowers, London And decks in summer wreaths her smoky towers; And hence, in summer bow'rs, Art's costly hand Pours courtly splendours o'er the dazzled land: The manners melt�One undistinguish'd blaze