“Darkling I Listen”: Melancholia, Self and Creativity in Romantic Nightingale Poems

• Authors: Łuczyńska-Hołdys Małgorzata
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The present article is an attempt to look at selected Romantic poems which concentrate on the image of the nightingale. Starting from Charlotte Smith’s sonnets and continuing with poems by other writers of the period, I will try to trace the link between nature and poetic convention in English Romanticism. While some of the nightingales which sing in Romantic poetry seem deeply symbolic, other forsake poetic tradition and stubbornly persist in their birdy nature, resisting descriptions in terms of melancholia or woe. Nevertheless, the fate of Philomela, whose sad story of violation identifies the nightingale with loss, suffering and poetic creation, still remains an important context for Romantic nightingale poems.

Keywords

EN

poetry; John Milton; Charlotte Smith; John Clare; John Keats; nightingale poems; Romanticism; Ovid; Sappho

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 23/1
• Pages: 105-114

Contributors

author

Łuczyńska-Hołdys Małgorzata

• University of Warsaw

References

• Bate, Jonathan. 2004. John Clare: A Biography. Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador.
• Bloom, Harold. 1971. The Visionary Company. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Clare, John. 2009. John Clare Poems. The Lifetime Published Poetry. Ed. Simon Sanada. <http://www.johnclare.info/sanada/>.
• Coleridge, S. T. 1997. The Complete Poems. Ed. William Keach. London: Penguin Books, Kindle edition.
• Fay, Elizabeth A. 1993. “Romantic Men, Victorian Women: The Nightingale Talks Back.” Studies in Romanticism 32. 2: 211–224.
• Hartman, Geoffrey. 1975. “Evening Star and Evening Land.” The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 147–178.
• Kappel, Andrew J. 1978. “The Immortality of the Natural: Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’” ELH 45. 2: 270–284.
• Keats, John. 1970. The Complete Poems. Ed. Miriam Allott. London: Longman.
• McKusick, James C. 2007. “The Return of the Nightingale.” Wordsworth Circle 38: 34–40.
• Milton, John. 1909–1917. The Complete Poems. The Harvard Classics, Vol 4. New York: P.F. Collier & Son.
• Ovid. Metamorphoses. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=90&fk_files=385497.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1909. Shelley’s Literary and Philosophical Criticism. Ed. John Shawcross. London: Henry Frowde.
• Smith, Charlotte. 1993. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Wordsworth, William. 2003. Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited.