The English and the American

 Mostly 1800s  Language of every day man (even though it doesn’t appear that way to our modern minds)  Topics that every one could relate to  Nature, human nature, carpe diem, worship of imagination and sensation (a direct backlash to religion that shunned the natural self)  Nature Nature Nature  Size (large)  Use the ordinary to talk about transcending the ordinary existence

 William Wordsworth ( ) – “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”; “Composed Upon a Westminster Bridge”; “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”; “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold”; “Lucy”  Percy Shelley ( ) – “Ozymandias”; “Ode to the West Wind”; “Adonais – An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”; “The Cloud”  John Keats ( ) – “Ode to a Grecian Urn; “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”; “To Autumn”

MY heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began, So is it now I am a man, So be it when I shall grow old Or let me die! The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. William Wordsworth

I WANDERED lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed--and gazed--but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils

 Adonais Adonais

John Keats WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And feel that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson ( ) – “Ode to Beauty”; “The World-Soul”; “Song of Nature”  Walt Whitman ( ) – “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”; “A Noiseless Patient Spider”; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “There Was a Child Went Forth”; “Song of the Open Road”

 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott  Les Miserables by Victor Hugo  The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne  The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson  Walking by Henry David Thoreau

 The World-Soul The World-Soul

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.