TUGAS FINAL POETRY

                                                                                            NAMA: ARLNG. S

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William Blake  (1757 - 1827) Short Biography

Birth
William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, Soho, where his father had a hosiery business. 

Education
In 1767 (12) he began study at Henry Pars’ Drawing Class in the Strand, and in 1771 (14) was apprenticed to James Basire of Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, who was engraver to the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 1779 (22) he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools as a student. 

Marriage
He married Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a market gardener, in 1782 (25), and moved to Green Street, near Leicester Square. 

The print seller
He returned to Broad Street, this time at number 27, when his father died in 1784 (27), to set up in business as a print seller with James Parker, a friend and former fellow apprentice. The partnership ended in 1787 (30), and Blake moved to nearby Poland Street. 

Brother dies and Blake is visited by his spirit
In the same year Blake’s brother Robert died. Blake claimed that the spirit of Robert came to him in a vision in the night, and revealed the technique of combining text and pictures on one engraved plate. 

The Songs of Innocence
He hand produced the Songs of Innocence using this new method in 1789 (32) with the help of his wife, having taught her to read and write. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and the illustrations then finished by hand with watercolours. 

More prophetic books
They moved to No 13 Hercules Buildings in Lambeth in 1791 (34), and it was in this period that he produced many of his ‘prophetic’ books : The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, The Songs of Experience and The First Book of Urizen. 

Moves to Felpham
In September 1800 (43) he left London for Felpham, Sussex (about 50 miles south west of London on the south coast), to live near William Hayley, an eccentric gentleman poet who had written biographies of Milton and Cowper, and through whom he hoped to get commissions for engraving. 

Returns to London
But by the beginning of 1803 (46) he had tired of the trivial nature of these commissions. He had come to believe that only in London could he carry on his visionary studies, and he moved back to the capital, to 17 South Moulton Street, near Tyburn (now Marble Arch). 

Milton and Jerusalem
He began work on his illuminated books Milton and Jerusalem, but struggled to find other commercial work. 

Exhibition and criticism
In May 1809 (52) he held an exhibition on the first floor of his brother’s hosiery shop in Broad Street, but few people attended, and he was dismissed by Robert Hunt in a review in The Examiner as ‘an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement’.

A new generation of admirers
After 1818 (61) his work found admirers amongst water-colourists of the next generation, particularly John Linnell and John Varley, who encouraged him and commissioned works. Linnell wrote : ‘I soon encountered Blake’s peculiarities and [was] somewhat taken aback by the boldness of some of his assertions. I never saw anything the least like madness, for I never opposed him spitefully, as many did - but being really anxious to fathom, if possible, the amount of truth which might be in his most startling assertions, I generally met with a sufficiently rational explanation in the most really friendly and conciliatory tone. Even when John Varley, to whom I introduced to Blake, and who readily devoured all the marvellous in Blake’s most extravagant utterances - even to Varley, Blake would occasionally explain unasked how he believed that both Varley and I could see the same visions as he saw - making it evident to me, that Blake claimed the possession of some powers, only in a greater degree, that all men possessed, and which they undervalued in themselves but lost through love of sordid pursuits - pride, vanity, and the unrighteous mammon.’ 

Death
He died in 1827 (70), and was buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenter’s graveyard in Bunhill Fields.

           A Dream

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

                                                    William Blake

John Keats (1795 - 1821) Short Biography

Birth
John Keats was born in Moorfields, London. His father, Thomas, worked in the Swan and Hoop Inn and Stables owned by his wife Frances’ father (Keats’ maternal grandfather). 

Early life and education
He attended a Dame school as an infant, moving to a school in Enfield in 1803 (8) whose headmaster, John Clarke, taught in the tradition of the dissenting academies. In 1804 (9) his father died after a fall from a horse. Two months later his mother married William Rawlings of Moorgate, who was a stable keeper. Her father (Keats’ maternal grandfather) died in 1805 (10), and a bitter dispute with her brother (Keats’ uncle) followed regarding the will. In the summer of 1805 (10) Frances and Rawlings filed a legal petition against her brother, her mother and the second executor of her father’s will. His mother’s new marriage collapsed, however, and she disappeared, leaving her 69 year old mother Alice (Keats’ grandmother) to take responsibility for her children. When Keats’ mother returned in 1809 (14), she was already ill, and Keats tended her and read to her until she died in 1810 (15). She left Keats’ finances under the control of Richard Abbey, a prosperous partner in a firm of tea brokers. 

Apprenticeship
Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary, Thomas Hammond, but continued to visit Charles Clarke, son of John Clarke and himself a teacher at the Enfield school, who encouraged him to broaden his reading. In 1815 (20) he finished his apprenticeship, and registered at Guy’s Hospital to complete his training, becoming the assistant to a surgeon. 

First poetry
His first published poem On Solitude appeared in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner in 1816 (21). In early 1817 (22) he abandoned his medical career, and his first book of poems, Poems, was published in March, but failed to achieve recognition. His publisher, Olliers, disappointed by their lack of success, made it clear that they did not wish to persevere with his work. Taylor & Hessey, however, agreed to keep him in funds against the promise of his future works, and, with this financial reassurance, he began Endymion, an epic poem projected to extend to some four thousand lines. He made a trip to the Isle of Wight, where he composed the sonnet To the Sea, and where he finished the first section of Endymion. 

Travel
Still working on his epic, he moved to Margate, then Canterbury, then Bo Peep near Hastings, where he met Isabella Jones, with whom he developed a ‘warm’ relationship. He visited Oxford, staying in his friend Benjamin Bailey’s rooms overlooking the quadrangle of Magdelen College, then moved to Devon with his consumptive brother, Tom (who died shortly after), where he completed Endymion, which was published in May 1818 (23). Shortly afterwards, he left on a walking tour of the North of England and Scotland with Charles Brown, beginning at the Lake District. 

Hostile reviews
Endymion was not a success, and attracted hostile reviews particularly from Blackwoods Magazine, in which Lockhart wrote in a review he called ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’ : ‘The phrenzy of the Poems was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion.’

Further poetry
During the next few months, he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and his great odes To Melancholy, To a Nightingale, To Psyche and To a Grecian Urn, while he also attempted a second epic poem, Hyperion.

Fanny Brawn, tuberculosis, final poems and death in Italy
In 1819 (24) he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawn, his neighbour in Hampstead. Shortly afterwards he began to show the first signs of tuberculosis, and after overseeing the publication of his final book of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, he left England for Italy, arriving in Naples in late 1820 (25), then travelling on to Rome, where he died in February 1821 (26). 

Burial
He left instructions that he was to be buried with the unopened letters from Fanny Brawn which he had received since arriving in Rome, together with a lock of her hair and a purse made by his sister. His headstone was to be engraved with a lyre and with the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls of Rome.

To Fanny

 

Physician Nature! let my spirit blood!

   O ease my heart of verse and let me rest;

Throw me upon thy tripod, till the flood

   Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast.

A theme! a theme! Great Nature! give a theme;

         Let me begin my dream.

I come—I see thee, as thou standest there,

Beckon me out into the wintry air.

                                                                           by John Keats

                                                                                  

Robert Browning                             

(1812 ­­­­­– 1889)
Short  biography
The English poet Robert Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues (dramatic readings done by only one character). By vividly portraying a central character against a social background, these poems explore complex human motives in a variety of historical periods.

Youth

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, London, England. His father, a senior clerk with the Bank of England, provided a comfortable living for his family and passed on a love of art and literature to Robert. His mother, an excellent amateur pianist, gave him a love of music, while her strong and simple religious faith provided him with an lifelong belief in the existence of God. Robert was a bright child creating "masterpieces" of jam and pencil at the age of two and attending day school as "an infant."
Browning went to primary school until he was fourteen, when his parents decided that he should be sent neither to a public nor a private school, but should instead be taught at home by a tutor. His training included riding, fencing, boxing, singing, and dancing along with the basics. The Brownings were a small, close-knit family, and Robert spent much time reading in his father's library of over seven thousand volumes. His father's love of the Greek tragedies prompted drawing room romps with the chairs as cities of Troy. Robert was very attached to all species of animals, hosting a wide variety of pets in his childhood. In 1828 Browning entered the University of London, but he dropped out after just half a year.

Early poems and plays

Browning began to write verses at the age of six. His first published work was Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession, issued anonymously (without his name) in 1833. The hero of the poem is a young poet, obviously Browning himself, who bares his soul to a patient heroine. When a critic commented that the anonymous author seemed "possessed with a more intense and morbid [involving thoughts of death] self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being," Browning promised himself to never again reveal his thoughts directly to his readers. Henceforth, he would "only make men and women speak."
This major step in Browning's poetic development was evident in his next long poem, Paracelsus (1835), whose hero was a Renaissance (a revival in art and knowledge during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries that started in Italy and moved to the rest of Europe) alchemist (early chemist). Though Browning later called the poem "a failure," it received favorable reviews and brought about important friendships with the authors William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and with the actor William C. Macready (1793–1873). Encouraged by these friendships, Browning began to emerge in the London social scene.
Encouraged by Macready, Browning turned to writing drama. But his first play, Strafford (1837), closed after only five performances. During the next ten years he wrote six other plays, none of which were successfully produced. All of Browning's plays are marred by abundant character analysis and meager dramatic action.
In 1838 Browning traveled to northern Italy to acquire firsthand knowledge of its setting and atmosphere for his next long poem. But the publication of Sordello in 1840 was a disaster that dealt Browning's growing reputation a severe blow. Critics unanimously declared the poem totally unclear and unreadable, and modern readers still find it difficult.

Development of the dramatic monologue

After the disappointing reception of both Strafford and Sordello, Browning turned to the dramatic monologue. He experimented with and perfected this form in the long poem Pippa Passes (1841) and two collections of shorter poems, Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845).
Usually written in blank verse (unrhymed verse), the dramatic monologue is the speech of a single character in a moment of some dramatic significance. In the course of his monologue, the speaker reveals what this situation is, as well as the setting of the situation and to whom he is speaking. Of greatest interest, however, is what he reveals about his own motives and personality. Often the speaker, while trying to justify himself to his listeners, actually reveals the faults of his character to the reader. Such works as "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," and "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" are poems in which the reader is given the pleasure of discovering more about the speaker than he understands about himself.

Marriage to Elizabeth Barrett

After reading Elizabeth Barrett's flattering reference to him in her Poems, Browning wrote to her in January 1845. At that time, Barrett was an invalid confined to her room by a nervous disorder. The two became frequent correspondents nonetheless, and on May 20, 1845, Browning made his first personal visit. With his constant urging, she gained steadily in strength, hope, and will until she agreed to a secret marriage on September 12, 1846. Such secrecy was necessary because Barrett's father had forbidden all of his children to marry.
Shortly after their marriage, the Brownings left London for Italy, and they made Casa Guidi in Florence their home from 1847 until 1861. It was there that their son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, was born on March 9, 1849.

Mature poetry

In 1855 Browning published Men and Women, a collection of fifty-one poems. Though the volume contained many of the dramatic monologues that are best known and loved by modern readers, it was not popular with Browning's peers. But it did receive several favorable critical reviews.
After gradually declining in health for several years, Elizabeth Browning died on June 29, 1861. Browning found that he could no longer remain in Florence because of the memories it brought forth. He resolved to "go to England, and live and work and write." In 1864 he published Dramatis Personae. Though some of the dramatic monologues in the collection are complex and difficult or overlong, this was the first of Browning's works to become popular with the general reading public. His popularity increased with the publication of The Ring and the Book in 1868–69. This long poem is based on a murder and subsequent trial in Rome, Italy, in 1698. In a Florentine bookstall Browning had found an "old Yellow Book" that contained records of these events. The poem is composed of twelve dramatic monologues, in which the major characters give their interpretations of the crime. The accounts contradict each other, but eventually the truth emerges from behind the tangled web of lies and excuses.
The Ring and the Book was enthusiastically received by the public, and Browning became an important figure in London society. He was a frequent guest at dinners, concerts, and receptions. In the next ten years Browning wrote with great energy, publishing a volume almost every year. But none of these works match the quality of Men and Women, and they are little read today.

Extended influence

Though in the early stages of his career Browning's poetic reputation was far less than that of his wife, by 1870 he had achieved equal status with the famous poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). The energy and roughness of Browning's poetry, however, contrasts sharply with the melancholy and polish of Tennyson's. Today, through his influence on Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1885–1965), Browning seems the most modern and enduring of all the mid-Victorian poets.
Browning died at his son's home in Venice, Italy, on December 12, 1889. In the "Epilogue" to his last collection of lyrics, Browning described himself as "One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,/ Never doubted clouds would break." He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

A Pretty Woman

That fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers,
And the blue eye
Dear and dewy,
And that infantine fresh air of hers!

                                                        Robert Browning

Posted By Arling Sapri