Dan〔穆旦查良铮).ppt

English Romanticism Introduction Romantic poetry William Wordsworth S.T. Coleridge G.G. Byron P.B. Shelley John Keats Introduction 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. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they live prior to the Romantic period. Overview of Romantic literature The romantic period is an age of poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge are the most representative writers. They explore new theories and innovate new techniques in versification. They believe that poetry could purify individual souls and society. For further study of their literary theory, please refer to Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and 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. 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. His major works Wordsworth’s fame lies chiefly in his short poems. His short poems fall into 2 categories: poems about nature and poems about human life. He is a “worshipper of nature”. It is nature that gives him “strength and knowledge full of grace”. Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth’s Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads is the manifesto of English Romanticism. It is “one of the revolutionary works of criticism, helping usher in the Romantic Age in literature” (Dutton, 1984:50). He is primarily concerned to justify the kinds of his poems which he had contributed to Lyrical Ballads. Key points in his Preface Definition of a poet He ( poet) is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthus