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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life," George Meredith masterfully explores the depths of human experience through a collection of lyrical poems and ballads that examine love, loss, and existential despair. The work is characterized by rich imagery, musicality, and a keen psychological insight that was ahead of its time. Meredith deftly weaves themes of fate and suffering into a tapestry that echoes the Romantic tradition while simultaneously paving the way for modernist sensibilities. The interplay of voice and form in this collection defies conventional ballad structure, compelling readers to confront the paradoxes of life's beauty and sorrow. George Meredith (1828-1909) was a pivotal figure in Victorian literature, influenced by his experiences in a tumultuous world marked by social change and personal tragedy. His diverse upbringing, coupled with a career that included poetry, novels, and criticism, informed his deep inquiries into the human condition. Drawing from his own life encounters, including failed relationships and the complexities of love, Meredith's work reflects a profound empathy for the struggles of individuals as they navigate moral and emotional landscapes. I highly recommend "Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life" to readers seeking an introspective journey through the heart of human experience. Meredith's evocative language and poignant themes resonate with contemporary issues, making this collection a timeless reflection on the challenges that define our existence. Engaging with his work offers not only aesthetic pleasure but also a profound understanding of the tragic aspects of life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents George Meredith’s sustained meditation on the conditions of tragic experience through a deliberately varied suite of poems and ballads. Rather than gathering his fiction or dramatic prose, it offers a concentrated vista of his poetic art, arranging narratives, portraits, and meditative pieces to examine how individuals and communities meet crisis. The scope is at once historical and imaginative: figures from legend, chronicle, and contemporary Europe are brought into focus not to rehearse events, but to test character and law. The purpose is cohesive: to sound the moral weather of human action when pressured by fate, duty, passion, and statecraft.
The collection is entirely poetic in form, comprising narrative ballads, dramatic monologues, and reflective lyrics. Several pieces unfold in numbered parts, allowing shifts of voice and vantage within a single design. Meredith draws on modes akin to the folk ballad, the civic ode, and the classical epistle, yet he keeps them within compact, metrical structures suited to narration and debate. No novels, plays, essays, or letters appear here. Even where certain titles recall theatrical or Romantic prototypes, the works themselves are poems, adopting dialogic textures, choral asides, and oratorical cadences to dramatize conflict, counsel, resolve, and the sudden reversals that define a tragic arc.
Across the book, tragedy is treated as an ethical inquiry rather than mere catastrophe. Power confronts conscience, love encounters law, and public duty interrupts private desire. Warriors, rulers, lovers, and poets are shown at the edge of decision, where necessity tightens and choice becomes character. Meredith’s tragic lens prizes lucidity over lament: he stages consequence without sensational detail and allows irony to illuminate motive. The poems ask how courage hardens into hubris, how mercy bargains with justice, and how communities absorb loss. The prevailing tone is grave yet energetic, seeking not despair but a clarified recognition of limits, debts, and costs.
Stylistically, the poems display compact phrasing, tensile rhythms, and a quick, intelligent turn of image. Meredith favors vivid figurative leaps and an idiom that can shift from ballad plainness to high civic speech without strain. He often adopts a dramatic mask or composite voice, letting the poem behave like a scene played in compressed time. Refrains are sparing, but cadence is carefully engineered; alliteration and internal rhyme harden the line, while enjambment propels narrative. The diction resists ease, asking the reader to move alertly through argument and image; the reward is a poetry of high pressure, clarity, and thought.
The range of subjects is cosmopolitan, drawing from classical antiquity, medieval chronicle, Northern saga, and modern European crisis. Mythic figures such as Bellerophon and Phaethon stand beside lawgivers like Periander and Solon; kings and captains enter with bards and queens. Northern and steppe histories frame encounters of will and empire, while pieces responding to nineteenth-century upheaval set civic feeling against war’s demand. A Welsh harp, a Spanish ballad, and Germanic legend are all recast into English measure with reflective intent. This breadth is not ornamental; it builds a comparative theatre in which different ages test the same human predicates.
Women of rank and renown are afforded complex ethical space, their choices constrained by custom yet charged with agency. The poems observe how ceremonial power and intimate feeling collide, and how reputation itself becomes a tragic instrument. Elsewhere, animal fable and courtly episode sharpen human motive, and the social texture comes forward: men measured against men, the many against the one. Recurrent attention falls on counsel, consent, and the claims of the tribe or nation. Tragedy here is seldom solitary; it radiates outward, touching law, kinship, and polity, until private decision acquires public consequence and leaves a communal aftersound.
As a whole, the collection remains significant for marrying the swiftness of ballad narrative to a strenuous moral intelligence. It shows how English verse can carry story, character, and public argument without surrendering musical life. By setting ancient and medieval materials beside reflections on recent events, it keeps history alive as a medium of present thought. The poems invite rereading, not for puzzle but for deepened perspective: they clarify rather than console, and they honor dignity without disguising cost. In the late Victorian landscape, this sustained, cosmopolitan tragic imagination marks a distinctive, durable achievement in Meredith’s body of poetry.
Historical Context
George Meredith (1828–1909), born in Portsmouth and long resident at Flint Cottage, Box Hill, Surrey (from 1868), wrote Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life in the late Victorian moment of intellectual ferment and imperial reach. Issued in 1887, the volume gathers mythic, historical, and continental subjects into a single tragic register consistent with his career-long preoccupations—nature’s discipline, ethical courage, and social reform. Earlier landmarks—Poems (1851), Modern Love (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), and the Essay on Comedy (1877)—had already allied him with a cosmopolitan, intellectually strenuous poetry. The 1887 collection thus synthesizes decades of reading in Greek and Norse antiquity, medieval legend, and modern European politics into emblematic narratives.
Meredith’s European outlook formed amid post-Napoleonic realignments and the liberal-nationalist revolutions of 1848, whose aftershocks persisted through the Risorgimento and the unifications of Italy and Germany. As a correspondent in 1866 he observed the Third Italian War of Independence, when Italy and Prussia confronted Austria at Custoza and Lissa, experiences that fed his sensitivity to dynastic decline and civic renewal. The fall of Napoleon III after Sedan (1–2 September 1870), the siege of Paris (1870–71), and the proclamation of the Third Republic provided touchstones for poems on France and on the tragic costs of national transformation. Across the volume, dynastic courts, tribal hosts, and city-states mirror this continental drama of political modernization.
Victorian medievalism and the ballad revival furnished Meredith with both form and archive. The era’s renewed appetite for folk narrative—shaped by Bishop Percy’s Reliques (revived across the century), Scott’s Minstrelsy (1802–03), and, decisively, Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98)—legitimized tragic, impersonal storytelling. In parallel, William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon’s saga translations (from 1869) and G. W. Dasent’s Popular Tales from the Norse (1859) popularized Northern subjects. Spanish romancero traditions, disseminated in English since J. G. Lockhart’s 1823 versions and George Borrow’s writings (1841–43), broadened the field. Meredith draws on these sources to stage moral tests—kings, queens, tricksters, and war-bands—as transhistorical figures of conscience and fate.
Nineteenth-century Hellenism supplied the ethical and political grammar through which Meredith interrogated hubris, law, and civic responsibility. George Grote’s History of Greece (1846–56) and Benjamin Jowett’s translations of Plato (1871) made archaic and classical thought a Victorian lingua franca, while Matthew Arnold’s essays attuned readers to Greek measure and clarity. Figures such as Solon and Periander allow Meredith to dramatize tensions between custom and reform, personal will and public ordinance. Heroes like Bellerophon and Phaethon, refracted through modern evolutionary and psychological optics, become exemplary of the peril of overreach and the saving discipline of limits. Classical exempla thus underpin a modern argument about character, citizenship, and the ordering of desire.
Meredith’s tragic ballads also converse with European Romanticism’s theatrical insurgencies and ethical dilemmas. Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Victor Hugo’s Hernani (premiered 1830 amid the celebrated bataille at the Comédie-Française) model a defiance of convention that Meredith re-examines under stricter natural and social law. His early immersion in continental letters—reinforced by schooling at the Moravian academy at Neuwied on the Rhine (1842–44)—gave him a polyglot vantage. His entanglement with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, notably through Henry Wallis’s painting The Death of Chatterton (1856), for which Meredith sat, sharpened his sense of artistic martyrdom. Throughout the 1887 volume, Romantic heroics are tested against communal claims, historical causation, and moral consequence.
Scientific debates after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the controversies surrounding Essays and Reviews (1860), and the Huxley–Wilberforce confrontation at Oxford (1860) reshaped Victorian understandings of law, agency, and providence. Meredith, sympathetic to an empirical “religion of Nature,” treats catastrophe and restraint as organic facts rather than mere allegory. The sky-fall of Phaethon or the ground-swallowing of Bellerophon become parables of adaptive wisdom and the penalties of disproportion. Poems that weigh the individual against the group—echoing Herbert Spencer’s social evolution and Auguste Comte’s positivist climate—insist that character is tested by impersonal forces. Tragic life, in this view, is the crucible where temperament meets environment and earns or wastes its chance.
Questions of marriage, property, and female agency saturate Meredith’s oeuvre and inform his tragic ballads’ courts and queens. The Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882), and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) framed public debate that Meredith pursued in fiction—The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885)—and in verse. Medieval and Renaissance settings, or Lombard and Habsburg resonances, permit him to stage “old laws of love” against emergent rights, dramatizing negotiation rather than mere rebellion. The figure of the princess or archduchess becomes a lens on succession, consent, and political prudence, while the chorus of courtiers and people registers the social cost of private passion.
Meredith’s professional life—reader for Chapman & Hall in the 1860s, novelist of European politics in Vittoria (1867) and Beauchamp’s Career (1875), poet-philosopher at Box Hill—situates Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life within networks of periodical culture and transnational readership. France, December 1870 speaks to immediate events; pieces on Attila, Harald, Aneirin, or Theodolinda demonstrate his method of folding remote chronicle into present argument. Issued in 1887, the book appeared as Britain extended its global power yet confronted democratic reform (Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884). Later honored with the Order of Merit (1905), Meredith forged from pan-European memory and naturalist conviction a tragic poetics equal to modernity’s pressures.
Synopsis (Selection)
Archduchess Anne (I–III)
A portrait in three parts of a Habsburg princess caught between personal desire and the imperatives of statecraft. The poem traces the formal rituals and inner renunciations that fix her destiny.
Theodolinda (including 'The Song of Theodolinda')
Linked lyrics on the Lombard queen who uses tact and piety to pacify a warlike people. They present rulership as a harmonizing art, wedding private resolve to public peace.
A Preaching from a Spanish Ballad
A moral drawn from a chivalric tale, urging restraint and humility over vendetta and proud display.
The Young Princess — A Ballad of Old Laws of Love (I–IV)
A coming-of-age ballad in which a sheltered princess learns the austere 'old laws' of love. Innocence yields to tempered understanding as ceremony, passion, and obligation collide.
King Harald's Trance
A Norse king lies in a battle-stilled trance while loyal voices strive to summon him back, entwining war-fury, prophecy, and love. The ballad frames leadership as a perilous marriage to fate.
Whimper of Sympathy
A brief, ironic lyric on fashionable pity, contrasting easy sentiment with the harder work of compassion.
Young Reynard
A fox-bright youth tests the world with cunning and charm, only to find wit entails risks and reckonings.
Manfred
A concentrated homage to Byron’s haunted protagonist, charting a proud will’s wrestle with guilt and the supernatural. It distills defiance, remorse, and the search for release.
Hernani
A ballad recasting Hugo’s romantic drama, where outlaw honor and imperious power contend for love. Passion and oath-bound duty drive the characters toward an inescapable end.
The Nuptials of Attila
On the Hunnish king’s fateful wedding night, omen, pride, and desire converge. The poem sets imperial might against the intimations of mortality.
Aneurin's Harp
A bardic lament evoking Welsh heroic ages, where song keeps faith with the fallen. Memory and music preserve valor beyond defeat.
France, December 1870
A wartime vignette of a nation under siege during the Franco-Prussian War, balancing stoicism, sorrow, and flickers of resolve.
Men and Man
A reflective piece contrasting the mass of 'men' with the solitary 'man,' weighing social pressure against individual conscience.
The Last Contention
A visionary scene of an ultimate struggle in which rival prides and ideals meet. Its emphasis falls on the hush after conflict as much as the clash itself.
Periander
A study of the Corinthian tyrant, probing how expediency and fear shadow even prudent rule. The poem weighs order’s gains against its human costs.
Solon
A portrait of Athens’ lawgiver negotiating extremes to found a durable civic balance. Reform appears as measured courage rather than zeal.
Bellerophon
A retelling of the hero’s ascent and Chimera-slaying, and the fatal overreach that follows. Valor turns precarious when divorced from humility.
Phaethon (including 'Phaëthôn')
The myth of the youth who drives the sun’s chariot beyond his ken, an emblem of dazzling ambition and catastrophic excess. The treatment stresses the pathos of desire outrunning judgment.
