David Turner Sublime Essay

I chose to study and analyze J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship for this project and found it to be very interesting. Immediately while looking at the piece you get a strong sense of emotion and drama that is being portrayed. There is a lot of depth and warmth in the colors that are used and wide swift brush strokes to create the images. The first image that caught my eye was of waves crashing on the left side of the painting. The white tips of the waves are very noticeable against the softer shades of the ocean. Behind the waves is a ship which is the next part of the painting that drew my attention. The ship seems to be caught in the rough waves of the sea and barely able to keep afloat. There is a glimmer of light from the sun peeking through

It was painted and completed by Joseph Mallord William Turner in England around 1820 and is an oil on canvas painting created during the romanticism era. The story behind this piece is, when a slave ship set out on a voyage they would pack the ships full of slaves, and along the way the slaves would get sick and die so the crew would throw them over board to avoid paying cargo tax. In the painting viewers see a satanic sky and dark murky water with limbs sticking out of it (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The brush strokes are all sort of slanted down to the right and some are even curled to depict waves that look to be swallowing up the slaves as well as the ship. This painting is very sublime because it has beautiful colors and form yet the meaning behind it all is

Richard Blanco is the son of two immigrants from Cuba: he grew up in a Cuban cohort in Miami, Florida. It was instilled in him at a young age that his ancestry and America were one in the same. They were both magical. His foreign home was talked about often, never condemned, while America was their physical home and their place to earn a better life than their previous one could afford them. Blanco’s poem, “One Today,” exhibits his cultural pride, optimism, and gratitude for life and his country: The United States.

‘Look We Have Come Through! The title of this section suggests a note of hope and faith in human resilience. How far is this reflected in the poems?’

What was the importance of Nat Turner and where does he stand in American history? Nat Turner is an American slave, who has been forgotten about in history as well in the hearts of African-Americans. He led and organized one of the bloodiest slave rebellions in American history. This rebellion was "…the rebellion that served to change the course of American history in the three decades before the Civil War" (Goldman 10). Within this paper, it is to analyze on his impact on the nation.

Edward Taylor’s “Meditation Six” uses a coin-based conceit to explore the ambivalence of the persona; using the coin, Taylor describes his spiritual value to God in material terms. The first stanza reflects an uncertainty within Taylor about his worth to God. He equates himself to gold, asking if he is “thy gold” (1) or merely a vessel for God’s wealth—the congregation. The speaker worries he may only appear to be worthful to God, but he is worthless underneath and “brass in heart,” alluding to the Brazen Serpent of the Bible. Working through his ambivalence, the speaker compares the impression of the grace of God to the stamp on a coin, and he asks if God has left such an impression on him, stamping value onto worthless metal. Taylor writes that he is “a golden angel” in God’s hand, meaning he is valuable to God, which ends his ambivalence as he concludes that he is worthful as a man. In the final stanza, the speaker asks God to make his soul the plate, a blank coin, onto which God stamps value with his “superscription in a holy style” (16). The speaker then becomes a coin with value to God, part of God’s hoard, whereby Taylor acknowledges that he is one of many. A surrender ends the conceit and poem, the speaker asks if he may be an angel, period slang for an English coin, in God’s eyes and if God may be his Lord.

During the late 18th century, a period known as Romanticism started to develop. People began to shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses. The key concepts that people cared about included topics about the: individual, intuition, and imagination. Many artworks expressed individualism, in which creative spirit was praised more than traditional procedures. Intuition was often valued over controlled reason. Overall, Romanticism allowed a different approach of thinking to develop, and inspired people to shift from traditional norms and into a more personal society.

S. Giorgio Maggiore: Early Morning , one of Turner’s watercolor paintings depicts sale boats on the at the shore of a large building. The sky and sea are pale yellow and the buildings lining the horizon are blue. The buildings have a defined shape and the boats are more elusive in their form. The bottom of the boats, especially those in the foreground of the painting blend into the reflection in the water. The serenity of the scene juxtaposes with the tone of his later

Romanticism is an intellectual, spiritual, and literary movement that begins at the start of the nineteenth century and concludes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of the many characteristics that are associated with Romanticism, the characteristics that are most evident in literature from this period are the characteristics of individuality and imagination. The author Edgar Allen Poe exhibits these characteristics in his works “The Black Cat”, and the “The Raven”.

Slave Ship was painted by J.M.W. Turner in the year 1840. At first glance, the sky and the ship in the background stood out to me above all else. The intensity of the brushstrokes and the colors of the sunlight set the stage for the powerful scene in the water. Between the strong waves in the water and the hands reaching out in desperation, this painting truly captures the horrors of the ships used to transport slaves. One aspect of this painting that I find quite interesting is the sky. The way the sunlight seems to shine through a thin layer of clouds adds to the intensity of the scene by illuminating the sky with the eerie colors of dusk, which set the tone of the

They are living in a moment of revolution, of innovation, of speed and steam; and they are longing for returning to past ages where everything seems easier, like the Ancient Rome or Greece. But especially they are going to look for that innocence and purity in their inner souls, in something that everybody has had the pleasure to experience. For the Romantic poets childhood is vital, for they understood that the child has a wider overview of the world given that he has not lost the innocence that characterizes him; there is something magical, pure and divine in a child’s vision of the world and that is what the Romantics are longing

In order to fully understand how supernatural themes played such a large role in Romanticism, we must further explore what Romanticism really is. This spiritual and artistic movement rejected rationalism, and emerged as a reaction against ‘the age of enlightenment’, which put strong emphasis on reason and logic. Thus, for the Romantics, literary creation was what the artist produced after reconstructing or developing a new interpretation of the world around him. It was the offspring of imagination applied to the writer’s impressions of real life. Authors such as Coleridge, Blake, and Shelley, believed that literary creation was the product of transforming reality into something beyond reason, but not beyond the

Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is a great example of when two seemingly opposing styles of writing, romanticism and realism, meet. The two intertwine in this work to form a masterpiece of natural beauty and painful realism. His use of nature to drive many of his deeper contemplations gives this work an air of romanticism. He contrast this beauty by discussing topics that a writer of strict romanticism would typically stray away from, such as the strongly negative reality of human behavior. However, the combination of these two styles that appear to stand in opposition of one another is part of the unique and haunting beauty that Baudelaire offers in his poetry.

The Romantic period was primarily an intellectual movement filled with and moved by art, and literature. The era is seen by many as an outbreak or revolt against the “norms,” not only that but many see the movement as one of the main reactions to the rationalization of both science and nature as well, the era that some would refer to as the Enlightenment. When thought of or talked about today Romanticism is more commonly associated with liberalism and radicalism. The movement was based on the idea that intense emotion could actually be used as an actual and valid source, it also confronted the sublimity of nature and many, if not all, of its picturesque qualities. This period was home to many great writers, writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley. One can imagine that among the many topics that preoccupied the many different works and ideas of these Romantic poets and writers was the Romantic conception of sublime, or idea of being able to connect to one’s own experiences of awe and other emotions like those of terror or even danger. The writers and poets of the Romantic era would no doubt have been familiar with this concept. In fact, this the Romantic conception of sublime shows up repeatedly throughout Mary Shelley’s work, Frankenstein. Shelley is able to bring the idea of sublimity into her text by not only using her imagination, and the thoughts and ideas of her colleagues and fellow writers, but also by

Art has evolved and regenerated itself many times during our human existence. These differences are defined through changes in styles under various theories. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a style known as Expressionism became popular. During this movement the artists were trying to use their artwork as a tool of expression toward life. It was mainly dominant in the nonrepresentational arts, such as abstract visual arts and music. It also was probably one of the most difficult movements to understand because the whole point of the piece lay within the artist. Not only was it a movement, it defined the act of art as a whole. From the beginning of time, each work of art, excluding replicas, show a way of expressing