英国文学选读unit6

William Blake (1757-1827)
• Son of a small London tradesman, William Blake was born on November 28, 1757. He was the most independent and the most original poet of the 18th century. AS a strange and imaginative child, his soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets. He never went to school, but picked up his education as well as he could. His favorite writers include such giants as Shakespeare and Milton. At the age of ten, he was sent to a drawing school, and at 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver(雕刻师) and later began to earn his living as an engraver for various publishers. But he was never prosperous in this business and remained poor and obscure all his life.
Hale Waihona Puke • During the years 1788—1793, Blake mixed a lot with such political radicals and social reformers of the time as Thomas Paine and Richard Price. At the same time, under the stimulus of the French Revolution, he wrote a series of long poems, which he called Prophecies, including the famous “The French Revolution, a Prophecy(预言)” (1791)— describing the epoch-making attack on Bastille(监狱). In the meantime, Blake also turned to the triumph of American Independence, which is well interpreted in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, a Prophecy”(1783). In these poems, Blake was in sympathy with the political radicals in their revolt against priests and kings, against the slavery and the oppression and exploitation of the poor. However, he differed from them in that he cared more for what he considered to be inner spiritual liberty rather than their external political and social liberty. Besides this, Blake also wrote a prophetic satire mainly in prose—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which contains “A Song of liberty” as its last section and was considered by Swinburne as the greatest of Blake’s works. This prose word is great and important for its expression of Blake’s spirit of rebellion against oppression.
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Robert Burns, the greatest Scottish peasant poet, was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the winter of 1759. His father was an excellent Scottish peasant who toiled from dawn till dark to wrest a living for his family from the barren soil. Burns was the eldest of the seven sons. He had only two and a half years of regular schooling and after that he was chiefly taught by his father while he helped with the work on the farm. He did a lot of reading and became quite familiar with the old Scottish songs and ballads and also some French. At 13, Burns a full peasant’s labour; at 16, he was a chief labourer on his father’s farm. While working in the fields, Burns often sang to himself, composing new lines in his mind to the old popular Scottish tunes which he knew.
英国文学选读 教学课件
Unit6 Romantic Poets (I)
William Blake (1757-1827) Robert Burns (1759-1796) William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
• In 1789, Blake published Songs of Innocence and in 1794, Songs of Experience. In his old age, Blake gave up poetry and devoted himself to painting and engraving. In 1827, he died in obscurity and poverty.
• In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate girl. Blake taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. At about the same time when they got married, Blake mixed with a group of bourgeois intellectuals in London. Tow of his friends among the group printed his Poetical Sketches(诗的 素描) at their expense. In these poems, He showed contempt for the rule of reason then prevailing in English poetry and voiced his sympathy with the fresh spirit of Elizabethan poetry.
• In 1784, the father died. They buried him ，moved to Mossgiel, and began the hard struggle with poverty. In spite of his prudence(节俭) and industry( 勤劳), he couldn’t support his family. In 1786, bankruptcy threatened the family. Burns decided to go abroad in search of a living. He collected some of his early poems, hoping to sell them to get some money for the journey. The poems were published in July, 1786, under the title of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was well received. Burns got 20 pounds for this. He had already bought the ticket for the journey and was ready to leave when a letter from the publisher reached him. The letter encouraged him to issue a second edition of his poems. Burns gave up his plan and went to Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. But at Edinburgh, he felt himself quite an alien(外乡人) in the aristocratic circle who despised him as a ploughman-poet. So he left the city in anger and disappointment and went back to the soil, where he felt more at home. The last few years of Burns’ life were a sad story. His public support of the French Revolution both in speech and writing brought him into confrontation with the authorities and his position as an exciseman(英国的收税官) was endangered. Soon, a long illness strangled his great poetic genius and he died miserably in 1796 at only 37.
• Burns is chiefly remembered for the songs written in the Scottish folk songs for the two anthologies( 诗 集 ), entitled respectively The Scots Museum and select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. Themes of these songs range from love and friendship to patriotism and revolution.