PartVIITheRomanticPeriod浪漫主义.ppt

The Romantic Period
Introduction
Romantic Poets
William Wordsworth
. Coleridge
. Byron
. Shelley
John Keats
Introduction
Romanticism as a literary movement came into being in England early in the latter half of the 18th century.
English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death.
The eighteenth century was distinctively an age of prose. The Age of Wordsworth—like the Age of Shakespeare—was decidedly an age of poetry.
English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism. The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions.
They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero. The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination. English Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the greatest English writers. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules.
Lake poets
William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey were known as Lake Poets because they lived and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. They were friends and traversed the same path in politics and poetry.
The former two published The Lyrical Ballads together in 1798, while all three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative and received pensions and poet laureateships from the aristocracy.
Other greatest Romantic poets are: e Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.
Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much. MU Dan(穆旦/查良铮),a renowned Chinese poet and translator , did splendid work to popularize Byron and Shelley in China.
Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled “negative/passive romantic poet