The melancholy imagination and the Romantic poets: English, French, and German.
Item
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Title
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The melancholy imagination and the Romantic poets: English, French, and German.
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Identifier
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AAI9020816
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identifier
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9020816
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Creator
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Tobias, Lillian.
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Contributor
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Adviser: E. Allen McCormick
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, English | Literature, Germanic
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Abstract
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This study considers the treatment of melancholy as a dominant and recurrent theme and mood that attempts to explore--through the medium of themes--the thematic possibilities by which melancholy, as a literary phenomenon, makes itself felt in some of the major and lesser poems of the English, French, and German Romantics. The perpetual reference to melancholy in this study is not to be understood as a "social" phenomenon in its conceptual aspect as a concern of human beings that creeps into the mind. Rather, it is the "poetic" aspect of the term that we are dealing with, and that we characteristically identify as a feeling that is there, or that we sense in the way the poet has injected a mood into the work that, among other things, has solidified into a poem.;The focus of this inquiry rests on the assumption that the more commonplace melancholy themes appearing in Romantic poetry did not occur by chance but may be traced back to some of the more prevalent themes of melancholy that characterized the poetry of the three literatures considered here in the decades immediately preceding the coming of the Romantics. By examining Romantic melancholy poetry in this way we have focused on questions that go far beyond the neoclassic melancholy themes of sentimentalism, where they will express a different kind of melancholy 'Weltschmerz' and 'mal du siecle,' that is darker and gloomier in feeling, to accommodate the growing despair reflected in the changing spirit of the time after 1789. Although the individual poet's state of mind is not to be inferred from the mood expressed in his verse, restrictive or disturbing outside forces were able to inflict much havoc on sensitive minds. As a result, a different state of mind affected the poet's 'Weltanschauung' that allowed him through the power of his imagination to seek new frontiers in worlds of his own making, often beyond accepted reality. Later, as the nineteenth century moved on, more extreme expressions of Romantic melancholy would reveal in the poetry of Vigny's pessimism and Baudelaire's black nightmares of the mind a poetry that in turn would harden into nihilism, eroticism, and even terror.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
