英国文学史key points (12-2).doc

I. Terms required to remember Ode: A long, stately lyric poem in stanzas of varied metrical pattern, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or serious subject. Odes are often written for a special occasion, to honor a person or a season or commemorate an event. Two famous odes are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “ Ode to the West wind” and John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The English odes fall into 3 categories: Pindaric ode; Cowleyan ode and Horatian ode. Shelley抯 ode is of Horatian type. aLake poets: The Lake Poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they belonged to the first generation of the Romantic poets, represented by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Byronic hero: As a leading Romanticist, Byron抯 chief contribution is his creation of the 揃yronic hero? a proud, myst arerious rebel figure of noble origin and. This idealized but flawed character pervades much of Byron抯 work and appears first in Childe Harold抯 Pilgrimage. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt world, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies. 4. Utilitarianism In the Victorian age, almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. This theory held a special appeal to the middle-classed industrialists, whose greed drove them to exploiting workers to the utmost and brought greater suffering and poverty to the working mass. 5. dramatic monologue: a poem in which a single speaker who is not the poet utters the entire poem to a silent ‘audience’ of one or more persons at a critical moment. The speaker has a listener within the poem, but we too are his/her listener