Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental FigureBased on years of archival research in various British and American libraries, Living Forms examines the early nineteenth century s fascination with representations of the human form, particularly those from the past, which, having no adequate verbal explanatory text, are vulnerable to having their meanings erased by time. The author explores a variety of such representations and responses to them, including Coleridge s Shakespeare lectures, Hazlitt s essays on portraits, Keats s poems on mythic and sculpted figures, meditations by Byron s Childe Harold on the monuments of Italy, Felicia Hemans s verses on monuments to and by women, and Shelley s poems and letters on figures from Italy, Egypt, and other antique lands. Haley argues that in what has been called the museum age, Romantics sought aesthetically to frame these figures as living forms, mental images capable of realization in alternate modes or forms. |
Contents
CHAPTER ONE | 13 |
CHAPTER TWO | 35 |
CHAPTER THREE | 59 |
CHAPTER FOUR | 83 |
CHAPTER FIVE | 111 |
CHAPTER SIX | 129 |
CHAPTER SEVEN | 147 |
CHAPTER EIGHT | 165 |
Works Cited | 281 |
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Adonais aesthetic allegorical ancient artist beauty Belvedere Torso Byron canto Cenci character Childe Harold Coleridge Coleridge's cultural dead death Defence depicted effect Elgin Marbles embodied Endymion essay eternal expression Fall of Hyperion feeling Felicia Hemans figures Fortune's rhetoric fragments Greek Hazlitt Hemans Hemans's human Hyperion Hyperion poems idea ideal imagination impression John Flaxman John Keats Keats Keats's language Laocoon lectures Letters literary living form London marble meaning melancholy memory mind monu monumental form mourning museum nature Niobe object Ozymandias painter painting past Peacock Peele Castle person picture poem poet poet's poetic poetry poiein Portland Vase portrait Prelude present Prometheus Unbound Prose reader record representation Romantic Rome ruins scene Schlegel sculpture sense Shakespeare shape Shelley Shelley's shrine silent sonnet soul spirit stand statue stone symbol temple things thought tion tomb unity University Press viewer visual vols whole Winckelmann Wordsworth