English 12 Unit 4: Romantic Poets | Notes and practice

Notes

Romanticism

Romantics reacted against reason, industrialization and strict rules. They valued emotion, imagination, nature, the individual and the sublime.
Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge launched English Romanticism.

The poets

Wordsworth: plain language, feeling recollected in tranquillity ("I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud").
Coleridge: supernatural imagination and the "willing suspension of disbelief" (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner).
Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience contrast childlike trust with suffering and injustice; "The Tyger" asks what kind of creator made it.
Keats: beauty, sensory detail, negative capability ("Ode on a Grecian Urn").
Shelley: rebellion and renewal; "Ozymandias" is ironic about power.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel uses a frame structure (Walton, Victor, the Creature). Its themes include forbidden ambition, the creator's responsibility, isolation and nature.

Topics in this unit

Each topic has its own short notes and practice.

Practice

Which feature most clearly marks Romantic poetry?

In "Ozymandias," the phrase "Nothing beside remains" creates which effect?

In Blake's "The Tyger," the speaker's repeated questions suggest:

A poem recalls the memory of a field of flowers that later fills the speaker with joy while resting at home. This best illustrates which Romantic idea?

In Frankenstein, which event most clearly shows Victor's failure of responsibility?

Walton's letters, Victor's story and the Creature's story create a nested structure. Which statement best describes why Shelley might do this?

Free response

Write your answer first, then open the scoring guide.

Free-response question

Read these final lines of "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley: "And on the pedestal, these words appear: / My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."

(a) Explain the irony in the contrast between the inscription and the setting.

Show the answer and scoring guide

The inscription boasts of great works that others should despair over, but the statue is a "colossal Wreck" in a vast empty desert. The king's pride is contradicted by what remains.

Check off the points you earned:

1 point: identifies the contrast between boast and ruin
1 point: uses specific words from the passage as evidence

(b) What Romantic idea about nature or time does the passage express?

Show the answer and scoring guide

Nature and time outlast human power. The "lone and level sands" suggest that the desert absorbs even a king's greatest works, which fits the Romantic view of nature's lasting force.

Check off the points you earned:

1 point: states the idea (time or nature outlasts human power)
1 point: supports it with a detail such as "boundless and bare" or "sands"

(c) How does this theme connect to Victor Frankenstein's ambition in Mary Shelley's novel?

Show the answer and scoring guide

Like Ozymandias, Victor is proud of his achievement, but his creation leads to ruin, loss and isolation. Both works warn that human ambition without humility or responsibility ends in destruction.

Check off the points you earned:

1 point: connects pride or ambition in the two works
1 point: explains a shared warning about the consequences