“My First Acquaintance with Poets” was first published in 1823 in a short-lived but a highly significant periodical of the Romantic Age, The Liberal. If we go by the generic distinction this document is primarily an essay based on the reminiscences of the author of the experience he had almost twenty five years back when he met a “poet” for the first time in life, a moment of “baptism”, as he says, in the world of poetry and philosophy (Hazlitt, First Acquaintance). The essay can be taken as a memoir because it moves round a particular incident in the author’s life, i.e., his meeting with Coleridge, the successive interactions they had had in course of getting acquainted with each other in the next few months, the impact of this acquaintance that the author bears in his mind and the inevitable although temporal separation between the two. This whole process of “acquaintance” not only with poet in singular but “poets” took place within the most significant year in the history of English Romanticism, 1798. As a memoir is expected to be, the essay documents a very important part in the author’s life relating to a life changing event and the author’s response to it.
In the hierarchy of the genre of life writing memoir comes in the lower order, regarded as a sub genre of autobiography since it involves a lesser degree of seriousness, as Laura Marcus puts it, “the autobiography/memoir distinction--ostensibly formal and generic--is bound up with a typological distinction between those human beings who are capable of self-reflection and those who are not” (p.21). Although if a memoir can be self-reflective or not is a matter debatable, the basic issue is that a memoir is required to be a more truthful and graphic represent...
... middle of paper ...
...wspaper and Magazines”. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. 426-444. Print
Dibley, David Jesson. “William Hazlitt”. The Colleridge Bulletin. New Series No 2. Autumn, 1993. 33-46. Web.10 Dec.2013
Hazlitt, William."Samuel Taylor Coleridge." The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825). 61-79. Web. 9 Feb. 2014
_____________“My First Acquaintance with Poets”. n.pag. web 5 Dec. 2013
Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
“Memoir”. From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. n. pag. Web. 13 Dec.2013
When I decide to read a memoir, I imagine sitting down to read the story of someone’s life. I in vision myself learning s...
Matterson, Stephan. " 1820-1860s Romanticism". PBS. Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2003. Web.
It should be noted that gaining an identity in autobiographical writing is crucial “because literacy becomes a way of creating an identity where before there was none in the public discourse” (Finkelman, vol.2, 190). Although the identities of William and Ellen Craft may have been revealed partially before their narrative, their own words and experience have a much greater impact on the reader than if told by a secondary source.
...d recommend[s] books based on [her] connection with the written word and its message” (Baillie). She claims that the publishers should be the ones to define a memoir as a memoir and she will accept the book as the category given to her, and that if it is a memoir, she understands that the dates and facts may be blurred and compressed; however, an argument forms that a memoir should not be composed of blurred and compressed facts, but the simple truth. The most important aspect of Defonseca’s book is the truth; however, when the validity is taken from a memoir, the meaning of it follows. Her book’s themes, messages, and morals derive from the fact that it is a true experience; however, when the truth of the memoir was taken away, the meaning of the memoir was too. Her inspirational story is no longer inspirational when it becomes fictional, causing it to lose value.
Romanticism has been described as a “‘Protestantism in the arts and letters’, an ideological shift on the grand scale from conservative to liberal ideas”. (Keenan, 2005) It was a movement into the era of imagination and feelings instead of objective reasoning.
G. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: Norton, 2000. Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Spiegelman, Willard. "Revolutionary Romanticism." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Aug. 2009. Web. Mar. 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204119704574236393080650258
"Morton, Thomas - Introduction." Literary Criticism (1400-1800). Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg. Vol. 72. Gale Cengage, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. 21 Feb, 2011
What provokes a person to write about his or her life? What motivates us to read it? Moreover, do men and women tell their life story in the same way? The answers may vary depending on the person who answers the questions. However, one may suggest a reader elects to read an autobiography because there is an interest. This interest allows the reader to draw from the narrator's experience and to gain understanding from the experience. When the reader involves him/herself in the experience, the reader encounters what is known and felt by the narrator. The encounter may provide the reader an opportunity to explore a time and place long past.
Griffith University Faculty 1999, Romanticism And Modern Culture Readings Booklet, Griffith University.
Keenan, Richard "Romanticism." Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. London: Continuum, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 25 April 2014.
In studying the advent of autobiography as a genre in its own right, it would seem to be a particularly modern form of literature, a hybrid form of biography. Also, the distinctions between the forms of the biography, personal history or diary and novel are becoming questioned in that the autobiography is not an account of wisdom accumulated in a lifetime but a defining of identity. 2
Mileur, J. 1982. Coleridge and the Art of Immanence. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Magnuson, Paul. "The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & The Wordsworths in 1802." Criticism 4(2001):451. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Wordsworth and Schelling a Typical Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.