"Whether the serpent is the 'founder of Romanticism' is questionable, but nevertheless it is an interesting suggestion. Little research is required...to discover the profound influence the serpent has had on the thoughts and literature of all people since the beginning of time. At times, the snake is regarded as sacred, at other times profane, or sometimes as an object evoking both reverence and hatred, but the snake is rarely considered just an ordinary animal pursuing its own way of existence with no significance for man...The Romanticists were fascinated by the serpent and were interested in its symbolic and imaginative value." - Pedrini, Pedrini (1966)
As probably none of you know, one of my greatest prose projects - several works of varying lengths and at varying stages of completeness and/or development - is a project I fondly refer to as Serpents. In preparation for my efforts in actually putting some ideas down to paper, I've begun to do some more reading. I hope to compile a sort of annotated bibliography for it onto this blog.
The first book is Serpent Imagery and Symbolism by Drs. Lura Nancy Pedrini and Duilio T. Pedrini of Princeton University. It is almost precisely what it says on its cover with the small exception that...
...the cover neglects to mention that the entire book is about serpent imagery and symbolism precisely in the works of Romantic poets and only Romantic poets.
This is not exactly what I was looking for. Also, not being a huge poetry buff, I was less engaged than I had hoped to be while reading a book entirely about serpents.
As I'm not well-educated on the ways of reading books about...reading poetry...I won't attempt to write a great deal of critique or anything that resembles a review. This isn't my aim. I'm working on a project that will inevitably have a great deal of serpent imagery and symbolism, so what's said in this book, while I'm not a Romantic and don't want to be one, is still useful.
The table of contents does a fair job at delineating what, exactly, this book is about. The title will be followed either with a representative quote from that section, or a remark from yours truly. My remarks are in italics. Here it is:
I. Symbolism and Romanticism - this first chapter serves to establish the significance of the symbol as a conduit between the spiritual/intangible world and the physical/tangible world. This is especially important as Romanticism seemed, at least to me, to be a reactionary expression of dramatic and powerful imagination and creativity and emotion against scientific rationality and empiricism...or something similar.
II. The Serpent and Romanticism - "No literary movement has lent itself to a greater expression of symbolism than Romanticism; no animal has lent itself to more symbolical interpretation than the serpent..." (26)
III. Serpent Imagery in the Major Romantics - chapter III subdivides serpent imagery into six sectors, then analyzes examples from poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats (always in that order) for each of these categories.
- Man's emotions
- Man's physical and mental attributes
- The whole man
- Areas and aspects of Man's life and experiences
- Natural phenomena and man-made objects
- Pictorial detail
These sectors overlap and since I'm not well-versed (get it?) in the source material, I'll let the following quotes help me out:
"The serpent images of the first five classifications are generally expressed in metaphors and similes. The last classification does not use the serpent for comparison but only for a description of a phenomenalistic world." (38)
"...images are analyzed in light of what they state, not what they imply." (39) - Imagery conveys obvious meaning while symbolism conveys latent meaning.
IV. Serpent Symbolism in the Major Romantics - chapter IV strays from the format of III where each category is discussed in that precise order of poets. Some of them don't have examples in all categories. The categories in IV are subdivided and themselves progress from positive symbolism of serpents to negative.
- Idealism
- Imagination
- Benevolence
- Pantheism
- The Fall of Man
- Serpent as beguiler
- Woman as serpent-beguiler
- Materialism
- Analytic reason
- Empiricism
- Sensuousness
- Man against Man
- Enmity
- Literary criticism
- Institutions against Man
- Kings and kingcraft
- Priests and priestcraft
"The reader, then, is permitted to see the Romanticists' view of a world deteriorating from a perfect, idealistic condition of love, innocence, and harmony to an imperfect, materialistic condition of hatred, guilt, and discord." (75) - Astute readers of The Smiling Spider (or of Tolkien or of Norse mythology or of ANYTHING about serpents besides Romantic poetry) will recognize that this link between serpents and materialism, the physical world, etc is very obvious, especially with the strong association of serpents with mineral wealth (GOLD! Dragons hoard GOLD! Serpents are, by nature, voraciously greedy.)
"No animal has lent itself to more symbolical interpretation than the serpent." (75) - I feel as if this exact sentence was used earlier on in the book (it was) but that the serpent is used to symbolize both extremes is a testament to its versatility and its great symbolic value.
Summary and Conclusions - the bulk of this slim book was systematic analysis of the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats in the previously delineated categories. But, at the end, there is a bottom line:
"Literature and art, in general, are abundant in symbols because the creative man is aware of the conflict between conscious and unconscious forces." (135) - well...obviously. To go even further, symbols reconcile conscious and unconscious, tangible and intangible, etc...
"...[symbols] probe the unconscious and give to themselves and the world a better meaning of life." (136)
But the real, real bottom line:
"Whether the serpent is the 'founder of Romanticism' is questionable, but nevertheless it is an interesting suggestion. Little research is required...to discover the profound influence the serpent has had on the thoughts and literature of all people since the beginning of time. At times, the snake is regarded as sacred, at other times profane, or sometimes as an object evoking both reverence and hatred, but the snake is rarely considered just an ordinary animal pursuing its own way of existence with no significance for man...The Romanticists were fascinated by the serpent and were interested in its symbolic and imaginative value."
