![]() Getting back to the sources is considered essential. It means reconnecting with one’s origins and then infusing the necessary changes. Indeed whether in his theological writings or in his conception of the education of young people through his Idea of University (1852), Newman advocates this re-foundation. The main purpose of the Movement was to go back to religious sources while setting out on a new intellectual journey. Newman played a key role in the launching and the success of the Movement, contributing a large number of Tracts. The key figures were John Henry Newman (1801–1890), John Keble (1792–1866), Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), and Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836) all fellows at Oriel College, Oxford. The Poetic Dream: A Return to Medieval Rootsģ In 1833 was founded the Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement because of the use of Tracts by its members to spread their ideas. Far from constituting a nostalgic reaction, the founding element in Newman’s thought is that of a Renaissance which, by repeating old modalities, fosters the deployment of new ideas and creative form. Thus, this relatively little-known poetic work aims to return to artistic and intellectual roots, just as his widely studied writings did in the fields of theology, patristics and ecclesiology. Through all these modalities, Newman thus carries out a typically Victorian re-appropriation and rewriting of the poetic heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, borrowing formally from sometimes distant literary and aesthetic sources.Ģ In line with the original principles of the Oxford Movement he had been originally involved with, Newman sought more generally to restore in his work the lost correspondence between the aesthetic and the religious which characterized the medieval era and that of the first modernity. Finally, the narrative theme of the accompaniment of the subject-character, in his passage from one world to another, by a character-guide (here, an angel) echoes the role that Dante ascribes to Virgil and Beatrice in the Divine Comedy. The use of angelic and demonic choirs by Newman brings to mind the dramatic conventions of the 15th-century mystery plays (still present a century later in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus ) and express the individual experience of the modern subject faced with death. Moreover, the theme of the poetic journey recalls a poem from the same period, The Wanderer. Among the several medieval sources of Newman’s work is the anonymous Old English alliterative poem, The Dream of the Rood. Some scholars place it second to Tennyson’s In Memoriam ’ (Rainof 227). For Rebecca Rainof, ‘ The Dream of Gerontius, Newman’s poem about an old man’s journey to the afterlife, became one of the best-known and best-loved Victorian consolation poems about death. When Edward Elgar turned the poem into an oratorio in 1900, he popularized this work which has enjoyed great success ever since, mainly for its refreshing tone in dealing with the issue of death. ![]() ![]() Newman’s main poetic piece, The Dream of Gerontius (1865), is a poetic dream about the death of an old fictional character called Gerontius. 1 Although John Henry Newman (1801–1890) is no longer a central figure in today’s literary canon, his poetic work, by blending tradition and renewal, can still be remembered as an essential contribution to the intellectual and religious debate that characterized the Victorian era.
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