Chapter III The Romantic Period
一 本章的学习目的和要求
通过本章的学习，了解浪漫主义文学的产生的历史，文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征，基本主张，及其对时代及后世英国文学用至文化的影响； 了解该时期重要作家的文学生涯，创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物刻画，语言风格，思想意义等； 同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。
二 本章考核知识点及考核要求
（一） 考核知识点
1 浪漫主义时期概述
1） 浪漫主义时期英国社会的政治，经济，文化背景
2） 浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张
3） 英国浪漫主义文学的特色
4） 浪漫主义文学对同时代及后世英国文学的影响
2 浪漫主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法及社会意义等。
威廉·布莱克；威廉·华兹华斯；塞·特·科勒律治；乔治·戈登·拜伦；珀·比·雪莱；约翰·济兹；简·奥斯汀
（二） 考核要求
1 浪漫主义时期概述
1）识记：a.浪漫主义时期的界定
b.历史文化背景
2) 领会：a.浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响。
b.浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响。、
3) 应用：a.名词解释：浪漫主义
b.浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析
2 该时期的重要作家
1） 识记：浪漫主义时期的重要作家，代表作品及其主要内容。
2） 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。
3） 应用：a.浪漫派诗歌（所选作品）的主题，意象分析
b.小说《傲慢与偏见》的主题和主要人物的性格分析。
一 概述
1. 一般识记
English Romanticism
English Romanticism, as a historical phase of
literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of
Wordsworth & Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads & to have ended in 1832
with Sir Walter Scott's death & the passage of the first Reform Bill in the
Parliament.
2. 识记 Historical & Cultural background
During this period, England had experienced
profound economic & social change. The biggest social change in English
history was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside
to the towns. As a result of the Enclosures & the agricultural
mechanization, the peasants were driven of their land; some emigrated to the
colonies; some sank to the level of farm laborers & many others drifted to
the industrial towns where there was a growing demand for labor. But the new
industrial towns were no better than jungles, where the law was "the
survival of the fittest." The cruel economic exploitation caused
large-scale workers' disturbances in
3 领会
（1） Influences
of the Romantic Movement
Romanticism constitutes a change of direction
from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of
the human spirit. In essence it designates a literary & philosophical
theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life &
all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making
literature most valuable as an expression of this or her unique feelings &
particular attitudes & valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual's
experiences.
(2) The Romantic views about literature
a. The Romantic period is
an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are
the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical
literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution.
b. The Romantic period is
also a great age of prose. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are
Jane Austen & Walter Scott.
c. Besides poetry &
prose, there are quite a number of writers who have fried their hand at poetic
dramas in this period.
4 应用
(1) Literary Terms
a. The Romantic Movement
It expressed a more or less negative attitude
towards the existing social & political conditions that came with
industrialization & the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The
Romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human
needs, so they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of
thinking of the 18th-century writers & philosophers. Where their
predecessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as
an individual in the solitary state & emphasized the special qualities of
each individual's mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction
from attention to the outer.
b. The Gothic novel
It is a type of romantic fiction that
predominated in the late 18th century & was one phase of the Romantic
movement, its principal elements are violence, horror & the supernatural,
which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the
dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great
influence over the writer of the Romantic period. Works like The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe & Frankenstein (1818) by Mary
Shelley are typical Gothic romance.
(2) Characteristics of Romantic literature
in English history.
The Romantic period is
an age of poetry Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are
the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical
literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth &
Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. They explored new
theories & innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a
healing energy: they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls
& the society. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but
also stress the concept of spontaneity & 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 poetic imagery,
but also provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth is the closest to
nature.
To escape from a world that had became
excessively rational, as well as excessively materialistic & ugly, the
Romantics would turn to other times & places, where the qualities they
valued could be convincingly depicted. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic,
defending the great poets & dramatists of their own national heritage
against the advocates of classical rules who tended to glorify
二 该时期的重要作家
1.一般识记： His life
English poet, artist, & philosopher, born
in London England, Nov 28, 1757, and died in London, Aug 12,1827. Blake made
distinguished contributions to both Literature & art. He ranks with great
poets in the English language & may be considered the earliest of the major
English Romantic poets. His poems range from lyrics of childlike simplicity to
mystical or prophetic works of great complexity. As an artist he is best known
for his engravings, which are among the masterpieces of graphic art.
2. 识记 His political, religious & literary views
Blake never tried to fit into the world; he
was a rebel innocently & completely all his life. He was politically of the
permanent left & mixed a good deal with the radicals like Thomas Paine&
William Godwin. Like Shelley, Blake strongly criticized the capitalists' cruel
exploitation, saying that the "dark satanic mills left men unemployed,
killed children & forced prostitution." Meanwhile he cherished great
expectations & enthusiasm for the French Revolution, & regarded it as a
necessary stage leading to the millennium predicted by the biblical prophets.
Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing contempt for
the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century &
treasuring the individual's imagination.
3. 领会 His poems
(1) Early works
The Songs of Innocence (1809) is a
lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not
without its evils & sufferings. For instance, " Holy Thursday"
with its vision of charity children lit " with a radiance all their
own" reminds us terribly of a world of loss & institutional cruelty.
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. His
Songs of Experience (1794) paints a different world, a world of misery,
poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone. The benighted
(2) Later works
In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few
prophetic books, which reveal him as the prophet of universal political &
spiritual freedom and show the poet himself as the spokesman of revolt. The
major ones are: The Book of Urizen(1794),The Book of Los(1795).The
Four Zoas (1796-1807) & Milton (1804-1920).
4.领会 Characteristics of Blake's poems
Blake who lived in the blaze of revelation,
felt bound to declare that " I know that This world is a world of
IMAGINATION & Vision," & that "The Nature of my work is
visionary or imaginative."
From childhood, Blake had a strongly visual mind; whatever he imagined, he also
saw. As an imaginative poet, he presents his view in visual images instead of
abstract terms.
Blake writes his poems in plain & direct language. His poems often carry
the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the
abstractness & tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in
wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
5. 应用 Select Readings:
1) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of
Innocence)
Songs of Innocence is a lovely
volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without
its evils & sufferings. In this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new
poetics forms & techniques, broke completely with the traditions of the
18th century. He experimented in meter & rhymes & introduced bold
metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.
In the 18th century, small boys sometimes no
more than 4 or 5 years old, were employed to climb up the narrow chimney flues
& clean them, collecting the soot in bags. Such boys, sometimes sold to the
master sweepers by their parents were miserably treated by their master &
often suffered disease & physical deformity.
This poem, in fact, is a protest against the harm that society does to its
children by exploiting them for labor of this kind, The poem was written in the
child's-eye point of view, & the dramatic irony (what the speaker says in
the poem is different from what the poet means) arises from the poet's knowing
more or seeing more than the child does.
2) The Chimney Sweeper
(from songs of Experience)
Songs of Experience paints a
different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with
a melancholy tone, The benighted England becomes the world of dark wood &
of the weeping prophet. The poem selected here reveals the true nature of
religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. The poem also reveals
the relation between are economic circumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child
labor & an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in
making people compliant to exploitation.
3) The Tyger
The Tyger, included in Songs of Experience,
is one of Blake's best-known poems. It seemingly praises the great power of
tiger, but what the tiger symbolizes remains disputable: the power of man? Or
the revolutionary force? Or the evil? Or as it is usually interpreted, the
Almighty Maker who created both the meek & gentle lamb & the terrible
& awesome tiger? The poem is highly symbolic with a touch of mysticism
& it is open to various interpretations. The poem contains six quatrains in
rhyming couplets & its language is terse & forceful with an anvil
rhythm.
1.一般识记：His life
& career
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at
Cockermouth, Cambarland, in the family of an attorney. He received education at
As a great Romantic poet, Wordsworth had a
long poetic career. His Lyrical Ballads, written together with
Coleridge, is generally regarded as the symbol of the beginning of the Romantic
period in
2. 识记：His poetic outlook
Wordsworth is regarded as a " worshipper
of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things & give the reader
the very life of nature. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps
the most anthologized poem in English literature, & one that takes us to
the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. To Wordsworth, nature embodies, human
beings in their diverse circumstances. It is nature that gives him
"strength & knowledge full of peace."
Common life is Wordsworth's only subject of
literary interest. The joys & sorrows of the common people are his themes.
His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor.
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. Wordsworth's
deliberate simplicity & refusal to decorate the truth of experience
produced a kind of pure & profound poetry which no other poets has ever
equaled. Poetry, he believes originates from "emotion recollected in
tranquility." Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form &
intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he
maintains that the scenes & events of everyday life & the speech of
ordinary people are the raw material of which poetry can & should be made.
3. 领会His poetical works
1) Lyrics
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, & the fusion of natural
description with expressions of inward states of mind. The poems Wordsworth
added to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads are among the best of his
achievements.
"Tintern Abbey" remains a profoundly
original & imaginative achievement; the valley of the Wye itself, the quiet
center of the returning wanderer's thoughts is described with a detail that
conveys a sense of natural order at once vivid & eternal. Beyond the
pleasures of the picturesque with their emphasis on the eye & the external
aspects of nature, however, lies a deeper moral awareness, a sense of
completeness in multiplicity. But the poem progresses beyond such moral
reflections. As he is aware of his own sublime communion with all things,
nature becomes an inspiring force of rapture, a power that reveals the workings
of the soul. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative &
intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their
diverse circumstances. It's nature that gives him "strength &
knowledge full of peace."
2) The Prelude
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. It opens
with a literal journey whose goal is to return to the vale of
4.领会 Characteristics of Wordsworth Poems & His
Achievements.
William Wordsworth is the leading figure of
the English romantic poetry, the focal poetic voice of the period. His is a
voice of searchingly comprehensive humanity & one that inspires his audience
to see the world freshly, sympathetically & naturally. The most important
contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the
poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry
by using ordinary speech of the language & by advocating a return to
nature.
5. 应用：Selected Readings
1) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1)
Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper
of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things & give the reader
the very life of nature. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps
the most anthologized poem in English literature, & one that takes us to
the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem
of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing &
reeling & dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the
daffodils here, mixed with the poet's philosophical & somewhat mystical
thoughts.
The poem consists of four 6-lined stanzas of
iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcc in each stanza. The last stanza
describes the poet's recollection in tranquility from which this poem arose.
The poet thinks that it is a bliss to recollect the beauty of nature in his
mind while he is in solitude
2) Composed upon
Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (1)
This sonnet, written on the roof of a coach as
Wordsworth was on his way to France, was published in Poems in Two Volumes,
1807. The poem presents the speaker's view of London in the early morning. The
speaker is not only profoundly touched by its beauty & tranquility of the
morning, but even surprised to realize that London is part of Nature just as
much as is his own beloved Lake Country.
Wordsworth is regarded as a " worshipper
of nature." Even in this poem, though he is looking at
The poem is written after the pattern of the Italian sonnet. The octave
recreates the experience of
3) She Dwelt Among the
Untrodden Ways (1)
This is one of the "Lucy poems,"
written in 1799. The "Lucy Poems" describe with rare elusive beauty
of simple lyricism & haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple
life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love
& loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time
& death which rises to universal stature.
4) The Solitary Reaper (1)
Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only
subject of literary interest. The joys & sorrows of the common people are
his themes.
"The Solitary Reaper" is an example
of his literary views. It describes vividly a young peasant girl working alone
in the fields & singing as she works. The plot of the little incident is told
straightforwardly in stanzas 1, 3, & 4. Stanza 2, with its comparison of
the girl's song to the cuckoo & the nightingale cannot be dismissed as
vaguely ornamental comparisons. They are much more than that, & the
impression of the girl's singing on the traveler is heightened through these
comparisons.
This poem is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics.
The rhyme-scheme for each stanza is ababccdd.
1一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet
& critic, was born in Ottery St. Mary,
In 1798, he traveled with the Wordsworths to
2.识记 His Literary Outlook & Philosophy
Philosophically & critically, Coleridge
opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th-century thought. He
courageously stemmed the tide of the prevailing doctrines derived from Hume
& Hartley, advocating a more spiritual & religious interpretation of
life, based on what he had learnt from Kant & Schelling. He believed that
art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality. A poet should
realize the vague intimations derived from his unconsciousness without
sacrificing the vitality of the inspiration.
3.识记 His Major Works
(1)"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," told an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting the law
of hospitality, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship
through thick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The breeze died down; the
ship stopped; the hot tropical sun shone all day long. The other sailors died
of thirst one after another, while the mariner alone was alive, being tortured
all the time with thirst & the horror of death. Only when the mariner finally
repented & blessed for the water snake did the spell break & the ship
was then able to go back home. The story moves on through a world of wonder,
from mysterious preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear
& vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner is
registered. The whole experience is an ordeal of oppressive weariness.
(2) "Kubla Khan" was composed in a dream after Coleridge took the opium. The poet was reading about Kubla Khan when he fell asleep. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace & other marvelous scenes deposited in his unconsciousness were expressed into about two or three hundred lines. But when he was writing them down, a stranger interrupted him & the vision was never recaptured. Only 54 lines survived.
(3) "Christabel" uses
a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror
at once delicate & sinister. The tale is an old one of a serpent disguised
as a beautiful lady to victimize an innocent maiden. The standard trappings of
Gothic horror----the remote castle & the wood, the virgin Christabel in
peril & the subtly wicked Geraldine ---- dramatize a confrontation with
evil through disturbing suggestions of the sexual, supernatural & fantastic
elements of dream. The moaning of the owl & the crowing of the cock,
together with the response of the dog to the regular strokes of the clock,
produced the effect of mystery & horror in the dead night. Opposed to the
nightmarish are images of religious grace & the spring of love that had gushed
from the poet's heart. It has been said that the thing attempted in
"Christabel" is the most difficult in the whole field of romance,
& nothing could come nearer the mark. The miraculous element, which lies on
the face of " The Ancient Marines," is here driven beneath the
surface.
(4) Biographia Literaria, his major
prose work is a series of autobiographical notes & dissertations on many
subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The
sections in which he expresses his views on the nature of poetry & discusses
the works of Wordsworth are especially notable.
4.领会 Characteristics of His Poems
Coleridge was esteemed by some of his
contemporaries & is generally recognized today as a lyrical poet &
literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the
supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, & compelling
conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary
critics & philosophers of the 19th century.
5.领会:His Achievements
His actual achievement as a poet can be
divided into two remarkably diverse groups: the demonic & the
conversational. The demonic group includes his three masterpieces: "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel" & "Kubla
Khan." Mysticism & demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive
features of this group. Generally, the conversational group speaks more
directly of an allied theme: the desire to go home, not to the past, but to
" an improved infancy." Each of these poems bears a kind of
purgatorial atonement, in which Coleridge must fail or suffer so that someone
he loves may succeed or experience joy.
Coleridge is one of the first critics to give
close critical attention to language, maintaining that the aim of poetry is to
give pleasure "through the medium of beauty." In analyzing
Shakespeare, Coleridge emphasizes the philosophic implication, reading more
into the subject than the text & going deeper into the inner reality than
only caring for the outer form.
6. 应用Selected Reading
Kubla Khan (1)
"Kubla Khan" is one of
the best-known poems written by Coloridge. It is a vision, a fragment painting,
a gorgeous Oriental picture. When the poem was published in 1816, Coleridge
prefaced it explaining that the poem came to him in 1797, as he lay asleep at
the moment when he was reading a story from Maco polo in an old travel book
named Purcha's Pilgrimage. Though the poet calls this poem a fragment,
there is a wholeness in the poem & it is highly symbolic. The places
symbolize conflicting forces --Xanadu, which represents a beautifully
cultivated & ordered product of the rational will, is opposed to Alph's
wild & savage chasm which represents an irrationally mysterious creative
energy or inspiration. The speaker realizes that the opposites can be
reconciled through the creative imagination. "Ancestral voices prophesying
war" confirms that the conflict is always present; the
"pleasure-dome," the product of human imaginative vision is the
device (poetry) which will reconcile the opposites; & "a damsel with a
dulcimer" is anything which releases the poetic vision.
Either ways, however, the description of
Xanadu, the pleasure dome, the chasm the sacred river Alph bursts out of, along
with the speaker's reaction to this revision of them is exotic & vivid.
This poem can be a source of pleasure of verbal music or of freely associated
& impressive images. Notice how the meter of the poem supports its shifting
ideas: lines 1 through 11 are orderly Iambic tetrameter broken only in line 5;
lines 12 through 30 are iambic pentameter which is poly-rhythmic in its
diversity; lines 31 through 34 are in a lilting iambic tetrameter shifting to a
couplet of iambic pentameter in lines 35 & 36. The poem ends with
tetrameter iambic occasionally interrupted by trochaic. The rhymes are also
arranged haphazardly to accommodate the idea.
1. 一般识记 His Life
English poet, born George Gordon Byron, in
London, England, Jan. 22, 1788, and died in
Lord Byron was perhaps the most fascinating & influential literary
personality of the Romantic age. An eloquent poet, handsome nobleman, &
political rebel, he was one of the most popular & notorious figures of the
19th century.
He was educated first at Harrow & then
In 1811, Byron took his seat in the House of
Lords, & made vehement speeches, attacking the reactionary policy of the
English government, & showing his great sympathy for the oppressed poor. At
the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the
insurgent Greeks financial help but plunged himself into the struggle for the
national independence of that country. In July 1823, Byron joined the Greek
insurgents at Missolonghi. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their
forces in January 1824. Because of several months' hard work under bad weather,
Byron fell ill & died. The whole Greek nation mourned over his death.
2. 识记 His Literary Career
In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems, Hours
of idleness, was published. In 1809, he wrote a satirical reply to a harsh
review in the Edinburgh Review in heroic couplets, entitled English
Bards & Scotch Reviewers. The publication in 1812 of the first
two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem narrating his travels
between 1809 & 1811 in Europe, brought Byron fame. In the following two
years. He had written a number of long verse-tales, generally known as the Oriented
Tales, with similar kind of heroes. In 1816, he wrote the third canto of Childe
Harold & the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon. From 1816
to 1819, he produced, among other works, the verse drama Manfred (1817),
the first two cantos of Don Juan (1818-1819), & the fourth &
final canto of Childe Harold (1818). In 1821, Byron wrote the verse
drama Cain & the narrative poem The Island. He published, in
1822, one of the greatest political satires, The Vision of Judgment,
with its main attack on Southey, the Tory Poet Laureate. Don Juan, a
mock epic in 16 cantos, was finished in 1823.
3. 识记His Major works
(1)
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young
wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked & traveled around the
continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable
features of Romantic poetry --- the medieval, the outcast figure, love of
nature, hatred of tyranny, preoccupation with the remote & savage, & so
on. It also contains many vivid & exotic descriptive passages on mountains,
rivers & seas. With his strong passion for liberty & his intense hatred
for all tyrants, Byron shows his sympathy for the oppressed Portuguese under
French occupation; he gives his strong support to the Spanish people fighting
for their national independences; he laments over the fallen Greece, expressing
his ardent wish that the suppressed Greek people should win their freedom; he
glorifies the French Revolution & condemns the despotic Napoleon period;
& he appeals for the liberty of the oppressed nations while exalting the
great fighters for freedom in history.
2) Don Juan
Don Juan is Byron's
masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem based
on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover & seducer of women. In the
conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most
moral. He invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity &
frankness, which, according to Byron are virtues neglected by the modern
society. In addition, though Don Juan is the central figure & all the
threads of the story are woven around him, he & his adventures only provide
the framework: the poet's true intention is, by making use of Juan's
adventures, to present a panoramic view of different types of society.
4. 领会Characteristics of Byron's Poems
Byron's poetry, though much criticized by some
critics on moral grounds, was immensely popular at home, & also abroad,
where it exerted great influence on the Romantic Movement. This popularity it
owed to the author's persistent attacks on "cant political, religious,
& moral," to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic
character of the Byronic hero, & to the easy, fluent, & natural beauty
of his verse. Byron's diction, though unequal & frequently faulty, has on
the whole a freedom, copiousness & vigor. His descriptions are simple &
fresh, & often bring vivid objects before the reader. Byron's poetry is
like the oratory which hurries the hearers without applause. The glowing
imagination of the poet rises & sinks with the tones of his enthusiasm,
roughing into argument, or softening into the melody feeling & sentiments.
Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza) from Italians mock-heroic poetry.
It was perfected in Don Juan in which the convention flows with ease &
naturalness, as Colonel Stanhope described "a stream sometimes smooth,
sometimes rapid & sometimes rushing down in cataracts-a mixture of
philosophy & slang-of everything."
5 领会 Byronic Hero
As a leading Romanticist, Byron's chief
contribution is his creation of the " Byronic hero," a proud &
mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his
passions & powers, the Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden
of righting all the wrongs in an evil society, & would fight
single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in
religion or in moral principles with unconquerable wills & inexhaustible
energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn
social systems & convention. Such a hero appears first in Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, & then further developed in later works such as Oriented
Tales, Manfred, & Don Juan in different guises. The figure is,
to some extent, modeled on the life & personality of Byron himself, &
makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.
6 领会 His influence
For a long time, there existed two
controversial opinions on Byron. He was regarded in England as the perverted
man, the satanic poet; while on the Continent, he was hailed as the champion of
liberty, poet of the people. Byron's poetry has great influence on the
literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriots & painters &
musicians are all inspired by him. Poets & novelists are profoundly
influenced by his works. Actually Byron has enriched European poetry with an
abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms & innovations. He stands with
Shakespeare & Scott among the British writers who exert the greatest influence
over the mainland of Europe.
7 应用 Selected
Readings
1) Song for the Luddites(1)
Luddites named after Ned Ludd, a late
18th-century workers' leader, were craftsmen who deliberately smashed machinery
in the industrial centers of the East-Midlands, Lancashire & Yorkshire,
because they believed that machinery was a cause of their unemployment. On
February 27, 1812, Byron in the House of Lords made his famous parliamentary
speech, showing his sympathy for the Luddites & indignation at the
Frame-breakers Bill(《破坏织机者法案》) which
would induce capital punishment to the destroyers of machines.
The poem selected here was written in March
1817. It shows his sympathy & support for the workers in their struggle
against the capitalist oppression & exploitation. It is composed of three
5-lined stanzas, each with a rhyme scheme of abaab, all of which are strong
& vigorous masculine rhymes. The general metrical movement is anapestic
trimeter & dimeter with line 3 in iambic dimeter..
2) The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan,
III)
Don Juan, the masterpiece of
Byron, is a long satirical poem. Its hero Juan is an aristocratic libertine,
amiable & charming to ladies. Byron puts into Don Juan his rich
knowledge of his world & his wisdom. It presents brilliant pictures of life
in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred & fear. The unifying
principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance & reality,
i.e. what things seem to be & what they actually are. The selected section,
"The Isles of Greece," is taken from Canto III, which is sung by a
Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan & Haidee, the pure & beautiful
daughter of a pirate. In the early 19th century,
1. 一般识记 His Life
Shelley (1792-1822) was born into a wealthy
family at Sussex. Though gentle by nature, his rebellious qualities were
cultivated in his early years. At 18, Shelley entered
2. 识记 His Literary Outlook
Shelley grew up with violent revolutionary
ideas under the influence of the free thinkers like Hume & Godwin, so he
held a life-long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional
religion & the formal shams of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny
& exploitation, However, under the influence of Christian humanism, Shelley
took interest in social reforms. He realized that the evil was also in man's
mind. So he predicted that only trough gradual & suitable reforms of the
existing institutions could benevolence be universally established & none
of the evils would survive in this "genuine society", where people
could live together happily, freely & peacefully.
3. 识记 His major works
1) Lyrics: "To a Skylark" &
"Ode to the West Wind"
In "To a
Skylark," the bird, suspended between reality & poetic image, pours
forth an exultant song which suggests to the poet both celestial rapture &
human limitation. Best of all the well-known lyric pieces is Shelley's
"Ode to the West Wind " (1819); here Shelley's rhapsodic &
declamatory tendencies find a subject perfectly suited to them. The autumn
wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of
Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its
destructive-constructive potential, its universality. "I fall upon the
thorns of Life! I bleed!" calls the Shelley that could not bear being
fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of
feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant,
hopeful & convincing conclusion: "If winter comes, can Spring before
behind?" The poem is written in the terza rima form Shelley derived
from his reading of Dante. The nervous thrill of Shelley's response to nature
however is here transformed through the power of art & imagination into a
longing to be united with a force at once physical & prophetic. Here is no
conservative reassurance, no comfortable mysticism, but the primal amorality of
nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is
an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to
trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth.
2) Poetic drama: Prometheus Unbound
(1820)
Shelley's greatest achievement is his four-act
poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound. According to the Greek mythology,
Prometheus, the champion of humanity, who has stolen the fire from Heaven, is
punished by Zeus to be chained on
3) Prose: Defence of Poetry
4. 领会 Characteristics of Shelley's Poetry
Shelley is one of the lending Romantic poets,
an intense & original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he
has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of
classical & mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification &
metaphor & other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see &
feel, or express what passionately moves us.
5. 应用 Selected Readings
1) A Song: Men of England (1)
This poem was written in 1819, the year of the
Peterloo Massacre. It is unquestionably one of Shelley's greatest political
lyrics. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to
rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to
them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. In the poem Shelley
pictured the capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the
parasitic class ("drones") & the working class
("bees").
The song contains eight quatrains; generally
each line contains 4 accented syllables. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is
uniformly aabb. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to
those workers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a
warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle
they would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to
the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak & ineffectual.
2) Ode to the West
Wind
The poem Ode to the West Wind was the
best known of Shelley's shorter poems. In the poem the poet describes vividly
the activities of the West Wind on the earth, in the sky & on the sea,
& then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the West Wind &
his wish to be free like the wind & scatter his words among mankind. He
gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art &
his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest. The autumn wind,
burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley
himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive
power, its universality, "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"
calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities
of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a progression that leads to
the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: "If Winter comes, can
Spring be far behind?" Here is no reassurance, no mysticism, but the
primal amorality of nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan
ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to
exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope &
rebirth.
1. 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London
& educated at the Clarke's School. At 15, he left school & was apprenticed
to a surgeon, Thomas Hammond. Subsequently from 1815 to 1816, Keats studied
medicine at Guy's Hospital in
Keats's first important poem "On first
Looking into Chapman's Homer" was published in 1816 in the paper,
Examiner, run by Hunt. In 1817, he published his first volume of poems. In
1818, a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess,
Endymion, was published. From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of
his poetic creation. In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of
poetry,
2. 识记 His Major Poetic Works
The odes are generally regarded as Keats's
most important & mature works. Their subject matter, however, is the poet's
abiding preoccupation with the imagination as it reaches out to union with the
beautiful. In the greatest of these works, he also suggests the undercurrent of
disillusion that accompanies such ecstasy, the human suffering which forever
questions the visionary transcendence achieved by art.
1)"Ode to a Nightingale"
It expresses the contrast between the happy
world of natural loveliness & human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy
roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a
longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy & sorrow, song
& music. Death & rapture which free him into the world of dream. By
combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats
manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth & despair, rapture &
grief. Inspired by the nightingale's song, his thoughts now ascend from the
transfigured physical world, through the imagined ecstasy of death, to the
timeless present of the nightingale's song. The ultimate imaginative view of
"faery lands forlorn" evaporates in its extremity as the full associations
of the word "toll" the poet back from his near-loss of self-hood to
the real & human world of sorrow & death.
2) "Ode on an Grecian Urn"
It shows the contrast between the permanence
of art & the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself
into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn: the lovers,
musicians & worshippers on the Urn exist simultaneously & for ever in
their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation.
This is at once the glory & the limitation of the world conjured up by an
object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by
seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience & suffering.
3) Endymion
Endymion was a poem based on
the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats
described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world
where human love & ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion
marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not
satisfied with it.
4) Isabella
In July 1820, the third & best of his
volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems,
was published, The three title poems all deal with mythical & legendary
themes of ancient, medieval, & Renaissance times. At the heart of these
poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the
imagined with the actual & man with woman.
4.领会Characteristics of Keats's Poetry
Keats's poetry is always sensuous, colorful
& rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of his senses. Sight,
sound, scent, taste & feeling are all used to give an entire understanding
of an experience. He has the power of entering the feelings of others-either
human or animal. With vivid & rich images, he paints poetic pictures full
of wonderful color. Keats's poetry, characterized by exact & closely-knit
construction, sensual descriptions, & by force in imagination, gives
transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.
5.应用 Selected Reading:
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
The Grecian Urn that the poem depicts is a
piece of ancient Greek pottery with a pastoral scene overwrought upon it. The
urn represents a piece of artifact, & it has endured a long history, yet
remains untarnished, & the pastoral scene on it can still be seen clearly.
On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian
Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature & art, for art has
the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being
enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be
protected from change, while artifact can remain intact.
The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four
stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, & the last epitomizing the
relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.
1. 一般识记Her life & Literary Career
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in a country
clergyman's family on 16 December 1775, in the parish of Steventon. She was
educated at home with her sister. Through a wide reading of books available in
her father's library, Jane acquired a thorough knowledge of 18th -century of
Dr. Johnson, the poetry of W. Cowper, as well as the novels by Richardson &
Fielding. She lived a quiet, retired &, in public terms, uneventful life,
though she did move to several places like
In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote
altogether six complete novels, which can be divided into two distinct periods.
Her first novel, Sense & Sensibility (1811), tells a story about two
sisters & their love affairs; Pride & Prejudice (1813), the most
popular of he novels, deals with the five Bennet sisters & their search for
suitable husbands; & Northanger Abbey (1818) satirizes those popular
Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Mansfield Park (1814) presents
the antithesis of worldliness & unworldliness; Emma (1815) gives the
thought over self-deceptive vanity; & Persuasion (1818) contrasts
the true love with the prudential calculations. Several incomplete works were
published long after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923),
Fragment of a Novel (1925), & Plan of a Novel (1926).
2.识记 Her Major
Works
Pride & Prejudice, originally
drafted as "First Impressions" in 1796, is the most delightful of
Jane Austen's works. The title tells of a major concern of the novel pride
& prejudice. If to form good relationships is our main task in life, we
must first have good judgment. Our first impressions, according to Jane Austen,
are usually wrong, as is shown here by those of
3. 领会 Her Literary creation & literary
achievements
In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote
altogether 6 complete novels. They are Sense & Sensibility; Pride &
Prejudice; Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park; Emma & Persuasion.
Austen's main literary concern is about human beings in their personal
relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. She
is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men & women in
love. Stories of love & marriage provide the major themes in all her
novels.
The works of Jane Austen, delightful
&profound are part of the supreme achievements of English literature. With
trenchant observation & in meticulous detail, she presents the quiet,
day-to-day life of the upper-middle-class English. Her characteristic theme is
that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character
displayed by the people of her novels are corrected when, through tribulation,
lessons are learned. Even the most minor characters are vividly particularized
in Austen's lucid style. All these show a mind of the shrewdest intelligence
adapting the available traditions & deepening the resources of art with
consummate craftsmanship. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of
human behavior, Jane Austen has brought the English novels, as an art form, to
its maturity, & she has been regarded by many critics as one of the
greatest of all novelists.
4. 应用Selected Reading
An Excerpt From Chapter I of Pride &
Prejudice
1) Structure, characterization &
language style
The structure of the
novel is exquisitely deft, the characterization in the highest degree
memorable, while the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. At the
heart of the novelist's exploration of the marriage, property & intrigue
lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet
& Darcy, & Jane Austen's delicate probing of the values of the gentry.
The moments of high comedy in the novel are always related to deeper issues.
5. 应用 Characteristics of Jane Austen's novels
1) Austen's novels describe a narrow range of
society & events: a quiet, prosperous, middle class circle in provincial
surroundings, which she knew well from her own experience
2) Her subject matter is also limited, for
most of her novels deal with the subject of getting married, which was in fact
the central problem for the young leisure-class lady of that age, who had no
other choice in her life but to find a good husband.
3) Austen's interest was in human nature; in
her depiction of human nature, instead of being fascinated by great waves of
elevated emotion, by passion or heroic experience, she focused on the trivial
& petty details of everyday living, which became very interesting through
her truthful & lively description.
4) Austen's novels are brightened by their
witty conversation & omnipresent humor. Her language shines with an
exquisite touch of lively gracefulness, elegant & refined, but never showy.
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