英美文学简史 第7章 浪漫主义时期

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• and aspiration is evidenced in the Gothic romance and in the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. William Blake was probably the most singular of the English romantics. His poems and paintings are radiant, imaginative, and heavily symbolic, indicating the spiritual reality underlying the physical reality.
Part VII The Romantic Period
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Romanticism in England
History background The Industrial Revolution The French Revolution
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• Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it had swept through Europe, conquering at last even its most stubborn foe, the French. It traveled quickly to the Western Hemisphere。 Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, it transformed poetry, the novel, drama, painting, sculpture, all forms of concert music (especially opera), and ballet.
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Characteristics of Romanticism
Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of classicism. The basic aims of romanticism were various: a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; 11
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• often focused on the individual self, on the poet’s personal reaction to life. • This emphasis can also be found in such prose works as the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt and in Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). The interest of romantics in the medieval period as a time of mystery, adventure, 9
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• Romantic writers defied those literary conventions and standards of taste which had dominated literature for centuries. Their exploratory (and often self-exploratory) poetry developed ideals of originality, creativity and imagination, and often elaborated in direct response to the deep social, political and cultural turmoil 5
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• the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.
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• It was deeply connected with the politics of the time, echoing people's fears, hopes, and aspirations. It was the voice of revolution at the beginning of the 19th century and the voice of the Establishment at the end of it. • Romanticism was a turning point in the history of English literature.
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• “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and pressed for the use of natural everyday diction in literary works. Coleridge emphasized the importance of the poet’s imagination and discounted adherence to arbitrary literary rules. • Such English romantic poets as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Robert Southey, and William Cowper 8
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• which characterized England and Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This course will address someof the important innovations in the nature, function and language of poetry brought about by the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and by a few prose writers and minor poets.
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• Although in literature romantic elements were known much earlier, as in the Elizabethan dramas, many critics now date English literary romanticism from the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the preface to the second edition of that influential work (1800), Wordsworth stated his belief that poetry results from
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Poetry I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Influence of Natural Objects London, 1802 Love My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways To a Skylark To the Cuckoo We Are Seven
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1791 took his B.A. from Cambridge 1798 wrote Lyrical Ballads
1799 moved to the Lake District of England with his sister 1843 succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843) as England's poet laureate. 1850 died April 23,.
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3. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
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This poem describes a kind of recollection in tranquility that a lonely boy wandered as a cloud and watched the beautiful starry sky and the dancing daffodils in the breeze. In the last stanza, he comprehended that the greatest happiness came from solitude. “The bliss of solitude “ stands for absolute freedom. There are several expressions implying this. 21 21
• First, in the title, “a cloud” is able to travel everywhere and change itself into whatever shapes. While in the real world, people are under all kinds of burdens and constraints. So “a cloud “has absolute freedom. Second, in the first stanza, “ a crowd of daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze “ shows us a picture that thousands of daffodils dance freely and sprightly in a beautiful peaceful wild scene. 22 22