浪漫主义时期历史背景及诗人简介

浪漫主义时期（1798-1832）

历史背景：

Political and social factors:

1. The American and French revolution: an upsurge of national liberation and democratic movements

American revolution (1775-1783)—The formation of the independent United States.

French revolution of 1789—“Liberty, equality and fraternity”

2. The Industrial Revolution

Effect：1. One of the main effects of the rapid and vast economic changes was the urbanization of the growing population.

2. The conditions of the working poor in the cities was intolerable.

3. There were children working in dark, dangerous factories.

4. The working classes and the poor lived in polluted, congested slums. Mass epidemics like typhoid fever afflicted the slums. The romantics, the liberals, the socialists, the anarchists and the communists all emerged with their ideologies at this point in history to criticize these man-made horrors.

3. The Luddite movement （工人运动）

思想文化背景:

1.Rousseau 卢梭(page 2)—the father of romanticism

—To rely on feelings, to follow the instincts and emotions.

—Return to nature。

2.Edmund Burke 埃德蒙伯克( Page 2)

—Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790)《法国革命感想》

3.Thomas Paine 托马斯潘恩(page 3)

—Rights of Man (1791)

浪漫主义简介：

+It was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

+Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

+ It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences.

+ Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.

+The term was used in Germany and France at the end of 18th and beginning of 19th C to classify a new movement in literature, especially in poetry.

浪漫主义时期代表人物共同特征：

(1) They cultivated imaginative freedom, though in very various ways, and this encouraged them to use a variety of sometimes very loose poetic forms.

(2) Each of them tended to express the feelings of man in solitude as opposed to those of man in society.

(3) They shared a tendency to be "inward turning" rather than outward-looking.

(4) All, except perhaps Blake, responded vividly to nature and the natural and uncivilized way of life..

(5) They tended to use language with more freedom and information than the 18th C poets, and emphasize the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought.

(6) They were all, but in different ways, profoundly affected by the great historical fact of the French Revolution, and by its various immediate consequences, especially the career of Napoleon; Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge began as warm revolutionary sympathizers, but the Napoleonic wars caused Blake to withdraw and turned the other two into convinced conservatives.

(7) All of them exalted the individual genius.

General characteristic features of the romantic movement（Page.3）

1. Subjectivism

2. Spontaneity

3. Singularity

4. Simplicity: everyday language spoken by the rustic people

5. A dominating note of melancholy

6. A freer verse form

浪漫主义诗人派别:

ke poet—the passive or escapist romanticists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey

—detesting the real world, escaping from the reality.

2.Active or radical romanticists: Byron, Shelley, Keats

—striving to strengthen man’s will to live and r aise him up against the darkness in the world.

Principles of poetry

1 Subjects:

1). The great subjects of poetry are “essential passions of the heart” and “the great and simple affections.”(Preface to Lyrical Ballads(2nd ed.)).

2). Incidents and situations from common life

2. Source of poetry: feelings

1). “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

2). Emotion recollected in tranquility

3. Language: “real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (no poetic diction)