The Essence Of Gothic Romanticism English Literature Essay

English literature at the turn of XVIII-XIX centuries was flourishing. It was period of Romanticism, that was not only one of the biggest trends in the literature of the time, but also a broad ideological and artistic movement, a sort of cultural shift that affected all spheres of social consciousness and change the perception of people in the turn of the centuries. In the language of literature images romantists sought to convey the philosophical quest of that time, to identify common patterns of contemporary spiritual development.

Already in the 60s of the XVIII century there was a new theory of art, cleared the way for the romantic genre of lyric-epic poem, revived the interest in Shakespeare, English Renaissance writers, to folk poetry, beautifully developed later by romantics -Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Southey, Scott.

That period was also time of birth of gothic literature. Somewhere at the end of XVIII century Gothic motifs here and there in Romantic literature, and soon Gothic style became widely used by romantics. 

Gothic is closely related to Romanism. Romantic literature is filled with emotions, imagination, melancholy, and the same terms can be used to the gothic literature.

The authors of gothic poetry were representatives of the so-called Lake Poets – Southey, Wadsworth, Coleridge. Each of them left its own image: Southey – an “old woman from Berkeley,” Wadsworth – a “Lucy Gray”, Coleridge – an “ancient mariner” and “Christabel”.

Above all, gothic genre make riders start to see the great emotions that writers evoke, awake the readers imagination; it has elements of darkness and mystery, it is sensional and dramatic. All this characteristics we can see in the works of significant romantics Coleridge and Byron, their poems “Darkness” and “The ancient mariner” truly present the ideas of gothic literature.

“The ancient mariner”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his famous ballad “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 with his colleague William Wordsworth. This collection of poems is often seen as the Romantic Movement’s true inception.

Later in the 1817 Coleridge published an edited version of his poem in “Sibylline Leaves”, and added another layer to the poem in the form of marginal glosses. These explanations amplified the allegorical feel of the poem, established a nostalgic, fictitiously historical mood. But nevertheless, this poem is referred to the gothic style, that is evident.

It is worth mentioning, that Coleridge’s “mystery” poems are based on dreams. For example, “Kubla Khan” is the poem of an attractive phantom-world, “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner” are nightmare poems, being perhaps Coleridge’s most celebrated nightmares.

First of all, Coleridge used the gothic as the mean of showing the things which he felt. Concretely, he did not bear the light of day: as “lightness” often implicates clarity and sim-plicity, “darkness” is used to implicate complexity and unknowability. Coleridge’s deep-set anxiety and fears found poetic expression in the gothic.

Among the romantic poets, it is Coleridge who fully went away from the ordinary world of conscious experience to the gothic, which means the world of the unconscious.( Davidson,47)

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” differentiated from Romantic stylistic tendencies.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is unique among Coleridge’s important works – unique in its archaic language, its length, it’s moral narrative, it’s thematic ambiguity. (Davidson, 32)

These peculiarities were quite atypical of that period, it had little in common with other Romantic works. The examples are evident. At that time Romantic poets emphasized the natural world’s majesty, they by diminishing humans in comparison to nature. So Coleridge places his hero, the ancient Mariner, out in the open ocean, making him very small in comparison to the forces of nature. The Romantics also went against the earlier trend of religious institutions, they sublimed spiritual and nature. Despite the Ancient Mariner’s expression of love for communal prayer, his message reveals his belief that the true path to God is through communing with and respecting nature.

A distinctive feature of the poem is an organic combination of real images, almost physically perceived and tangible, with the fantastic one. And precisely because it is absolutely fantastic images coexist with real, taken from reality, the poem makes a very strong impression.

So the leading idea of Coleridge’s poem – is a permanent presence in the life of agony, mysterious, that is so difficult to understand.

“Darkness” by Byron

The largest representative of romanticism was a famous English poet Lord Byron. Heroes of Byron are dark, full of pride exiles, battling with the world and embody the absolute, bordering on the absurd individualism.

His poem “Darkness” was written in 1816, and that was the “Year without summer”. The reason of that cold weather in Europe was ash in the atmosphere that blocked the sunshine, so this darkness inspired the author.

This poem has historical context and is supposed to have anti-biblical nature, even despite its references to the Bible. In general, the theme of the poem is the end of the world from the view of the last man on the Earth. Byron uses the hellish biblical language of the apocalypse to show the possibility of events to his readers. And it is a well-known fact, that the the poem can be interpreted as a reference to Bible, Matthew 24:29: “the sun shall be darkened.”( Gordon,57)

In his poem “Darkness,” Byron presents stark images of chaos, and oblivion.  The sun unexpectedly disappeared, and people tried to make large bonfires, but they destroyed what they had been supposed to illuminate.  To point out this sense of chaos, Byron presents words with antithetical definitions.  Darkness becomes the natural state of the universe, and light is presented as a violent, blunder, crime that destroys both civilization and nature. It is surely gothic elements, that make readers behold great emotions. The text is full of horrific, supernatural, it contains darkness and mystery.

As a gothic poem, “Darkness” creates dramatic feelings, gloom and mystery. Ruin, death, and oblivion are evident themes in Byron’s poetry, and “Darkness” clearly articulates these themes. Byron’s pessimistic view makes the poem a key to exploring Byron’s struggle with reality. (Gordon,98)

It’s important to point out the biblical theme of the poem, and its connection with natural phenomenon. As we see, riots, suicides, fear are associated with the strange weather, destruction of the sun. These events had eradicated people’s hope for a long life, and even their beliefs in God.

Byron points the idea of the men becoming beasts with idea of total destruction, everything is fading and disappearing, all the humankind is being degraded and becoming irrational beasts. Byron vision of men as devils really impress. He shows the picture of the end of times: cities are in fire, humans are beasts.

In conclusion with the analysis, it should be said, that a poem has a depressing, catastrophic mood. So it is a gothic poem, having specific characteristics: the type of plot development, determined by the specific key emerging in this genre aspects of human existence: the restriction of human freedom outside of fate, the physical conclusion, the collision with the irrational and the devil, mental disorder, physical and psychological violence.