Chapter 3 The Romantic Period
1. The Romantic Period: The Romantic period is the period generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament. It is emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind.
2. Social background:
a. during this period, England itself had experienced profound economic and social changes. The primarily agricultural society had been replaced by a modern industrialized one.
b. With the British Industrial Revolution coming into its full swing, the capitalist class came to dominate not only the means of production, but also trade and world market.
3. The Romantic Movement: it expressed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoise. The romantics demontrated a a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers and philosophers. They saw man as an individual in the solitary state. Thus, the Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit.
The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. Wordsworth defines the poet as a “man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Imagination, defined by Coleridge, is the vital faculty that creates new wholes out of disparate elements. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imamgination, but also elevate the concepts of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of the poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject mattre. It is in solitude, in communion with the natural universe, that man can exercise this most valuable of faculties.
Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets and dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules.
Poetry: to the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules.they would turn to the humble people and the common everyday life for subjects.
Prose: It’s also a great age of prose. With education greatly developed for the middle-class people, there was a rapid growth in the reading public and an increasing demand for reading materials. Romantics made literary comments on the writers with high standards, which paved the way for the development of a new and valuable type of critical writings. Colerige, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leading figures in this new development.
Novel: the 2 major novelists of the period are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
Gothic novel: a tyoe of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century, was one of the Romantic movement. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader’s emotion. With is description of the dark, irritional side of human nature, the Gothic form exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period.
3. Ballads: the most important form of popular literature; flourished during the 15th century; Most written down in 18th century; mostly written in quatrains; Most important is the Robin Hood ballads.
4. Romanticism: it is romanticism is a literary trend. It prevailed in England during the period of 1798-1832. Romanticists were discontent with and opposed to the development of capitalism. They split into two groups.
Some Romantic writers reflected the thinking of those classes which had been ruined by the bourgeoisie called Passive Romantic poets represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.
Others expressed the aspiration of the labouring classes called Active or Revolutionary Romantic poets represented by Byron and Shelley and Keats.
5. Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey have often been mentioned as the “Lake Poets” because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England
6. Byronic Hero a proud, mysterious rebelling figure of noble origin rights all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and is against any kind of tyrannical rules; It appeared first in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and then further developed in later works as the Oriental Tales, Manfred and Don Juan; the figure is somewhat modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad. 7. Main Writers:
A. William Blake(1757-1827):
1. Literarily, Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing a comtempt for the rule of reason, opposing the calssical tradition of the 18th century,and treasuring the individual’s imagination.
2. His first printed work, Poetic Skelches, is a collection of youthful verse. Joy, laughter, love and harmony are the prevailing notes.
3. The Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evils and sufferings. The wretched child described in “The Chimney Sweeper,” orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. Blake experimented in meter and rhyme and introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.
4. The Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a malancholy tone. The little chinmney sweeper sings “notes of woe” while his parents go to the church and praise “God & his Priest & King”—the very intrument of their repression. A number of poems in the Songs of Experience also find a counterpart in the Songs of Experience. The 2 books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ.
5. Childhood is central to Blake’s concern in the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience, and this concern gives the 2 books a strong social and historical reference. The two “Chimney Sweeper” poems are good examples to reveal the relation between an economic ciecumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor, and an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation. The poem from the Songs of Innocence indicates the conditions which make religion a consolation, a prospect “illusionary happiness;” the poem from the Songs of Experience reveals the nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children.
6. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell marks his entry into maturity. The poem plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary prophecy. Blake explores the relationship of the contrries. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. The “Marriage” means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other. Main works: Poetical Sketches
Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems
Holy Thursday reminds us terribly of a world of loss and institutional cruelty.
Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell The book of Urizen The Book of Los
The Four Zoas Milton
7. Language Character: he writes his poems in plain and direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
B. William Wordsworth(1770-1850) In 1842 he received a government pension, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate. Lyrical Ballads:
But the Lyrical Ballads differs in marked ways from his early poetry, notably the uncompromising simplicity of much of the language, the strong sympathy not merely with the poor in general but with particular, dramatized examples of them, and the fusion of natural description with expressions of inward states of mind. Short poems:
According to the subjects, Wordsworth’s short poems can be calssified into two groups: poems about nature and poems about human life.
Wordsworth is regarde as a “worshipper of nature.” He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is perhaps the most anthologized poem in english literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth’s poetic beliefs. It’s nature that gives him “strength and knowledge full of peace.”
Wordswoth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. “The Solitary Reaper” and “To a Highland Girl” use rural figures to suggest the timeless mystery of sorrowful humanity and its radiant beauty. In its daring use of subject matter and sense of the authenticity of the experience of the poorest, “Resolution and Independence ” is the triumphant conclusion of ideas first developed in the Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. His philosophy of life is presented in his masterpiece The Prelude.
Wordsworth deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profoud poetry which no othr poet has ever equaled. He maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made. Main Works: Descriptive Sketches, and Evening Walk Lyrical Ballads. The Prelude
Poems in Two Volumes
Ode: Intimations of Immortality Resolution and Independence. The Excursion
Poets: The Sparrow’s Nest, To a Skylark, To the Cuckoo, To a Butterfly, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud( is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.), An Evening Walk, My Heart Leaps up, Tintern Abbey The Thorn
The sailor’s mother Michael,
The Affliction of Margaret The Old Cumberland Beggar Lucy Poems The Idiot Boy
英美文学选读(英国)浪漫主义时期笔记
