19世纪英国文学-Wordsworth Coleridge.ppt

Romantic Poets (I) Wordsworth Coleridge William Wordsworth (1770-1850) founder of Romanticism a poet a worshipper of nature singer of simple songs for children humble rustic subject matter didacticism pantheism nature in two extremes: simple, gentle and sublime, magnificent, grand, terrifying About didacticism ‘Every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing’. ‘There is scarcely one of my poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution.’ ‘Each of them has a purpose.’ Not that I always begin to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived: but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings will be found to carry along with them a purpose.’ Comments by his Contemporaries Keats: “Wordsworth thinks into the human heart.” Hazlitt: “The vulgar do not read them; the learned… do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable… ridicule them.” Coleridge: “the new Milton” Coleridge wrote to one of his admirers, Cottle, a publisher and book seller: ‘I speak with heart felt sincerity and, I think, unblended judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side.’ To his brother-in-law, Southey, a radical, Coleridge wrote: ‘Wordsworth is a very great man, the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior, the only one, I mean, whom I have yet met with.’ When one of his best and most generous friends and admirers scolded him for belittling himself with this excessive reverence for Wordsworth, Coleridge replied with a description of the thrill he felt at having been the first to appreciate ‘the new Milton.’ His Major Works Tintern Abbey (1798) It starts with a description of the scene that is the occasion for the poem, but keeps it at a distance and