Tài liệu english romatism

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.. The French Revolution of 1789-1794

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

English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination. English

Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the greatest English writers They argue that poetry

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

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

Other greatest Romantic poets are: John Keats, P.B Shelley and G G Byron

Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much

MU Dan （ 穆 旦 / 查 良 查 ） ， a renowned Chinese poet and translator , did splendid work to popularize Byron and Shelley in China

Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled “negative romantic poets” while Byron and Shelley were hailed as “positive (revolutionary) Romantic poets” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s literary achievements were

English fiction gropes its way amidst the

overwhelming Romantic poetry It revives its

popularity in the hands of Jane Austen & Walt Scott

Walt Scott is noted for his historical novel based

on Scottish history and legends He exerted great influence on European literature of his time

Jane Austen is the first and foremost English

women novelist Following the neoclassical

tradition, she is unsurpassed in the description of

Essayists in English Romanticism

Essayists Representative works

William Hazlitt Familiar essays

from Shakespeare

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth is the most representative poet of English

Romanticism He was born into a lawyer’s

family in 1770 at Cockmouth,

Cumberland His parents died when he

He was taken care of by his relatives He got his education at the Grammar School of Hawkshead and then at St John’s College, Cambridge

He was a worshipper of nature from his childhood

He frequently visited places of beautiful scenery

A walking tour of the Swiss Alps heightened his addiction to nature

He had great sympathy with the French

Revolution He paid 2 visits to France, during the second visit he fell in love with Annette Vallon,

Wordsworth was totally disillusioned by the

Jacobin dictatorship and the French invasion of

other European countries He became conservative

in politics He was labeled as “negative Romantic poet” by Karl Marx and was severely criticized by Byron

In 1795 he and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth

settled down in Racedown, Dorsetshire In 1797 he made friends with Coleridge The three persons

became “three people with one soul” in literary

Legend has it that Wordsorth and his sister lived a kind of incestuous life during this period Dorothy helped Wordsworth turn his eyes to “the face of nature” and “preserved the poet in him” She

served as Wordsworth’s confidante and inspirer

As Wordsworth put it in his poem:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love, and thought, and joy.

In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published

their Lyrical Ballads !n 1798 and 1799, he made a tour around Germany Upon his return to England,

he and his sister moved to Dove Cottage in

Grasmere, the most beautiful place in the Lake

District Coleridge & Robert Southey lived a

stone’s throw from their dwelling place The three poets came to be known as Lake Poets

In 1802, Wordsworth got married to Mary

Hutchingson In 1813, he got a sinecure job as

In 1842, he received the government

pension and in the following year, he

succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate

He died at Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

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”

His best known poems of nature include: I

Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Tintern Abbey,

To the Cuckoo, My Heart Leaps up, To a

Butterfly, An Evening Walk, & The Sparrow’s Nest.

His best known poems about human life

include: Lucy Poems, The Solitary Reaper

and The Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, &

To a Highland Girl.

Wordsworth wrote many sonnets His famous

sonnets are: Earth Has Not Anything to Show

More Fair, On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, & Thought of a Briton on the

Subjugation of Switzerland

His best known long poem is The Prelude In this

poem Wordsworth analyses the growth of hispoetic genius during his childhood and youth, and recalls the lessons he owes to nature

Wordsworth’s greatest contribution to English

literature is his poems and his Preface to The

Lyrical Ballads

Though The Lyrical Ballads is known as the

collaborated work of Wordsworth and Coleridge,

all the poems but one (The Rime of The Ancient

Mariner) are written by Wordsworth Most of his

most quoted poem are taken from this collection

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

man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and

tenderness, who has a greater knowledge

of human nature, and a more

comprehensive soul, than are supposed to

be common among mankind.

Creative process of authentic poetry

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origin from emotion

recollected in tranquility: the emotion is

contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the

tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred (similar) to that which before was the

subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind In this mood successful composition generally

Subject matter & poetic language

The principal object…was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or

describe them, throughout, as far as was possible

in a selection of language really used by men , and

at the same time, to throw over them a certain

coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented in an unusual aspect……

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Humble and rustic life was generally chosen,

because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity……

The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real

defects, from all lasting and rational causes of

dislike or disgust) because such men hourly

communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived

has exerted profound influence on later poets (mimesis imaginative recreation)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge was born into a clergyman’s family in 1772 He was a great genius

At the age of six, he had read the Bible,

Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights.

He was a mentally precocious boy, full

of fantasy and dreams in his mind

During his Cambridge years, he made friends with Charles Lamb, the great

essayist of English Romanticism

But the campus life bored him He ran away from the university and enlisted in the army

but discharged after a few months and he

returned to Cambridge He joined Robert

Southey in a utopian plan of establishing an ideal democratic community (named

Pantisocracy) in America The plan resulted in nothing but his marriage to Sara Fricker,

which turned out to be an unhappy marriage

In 1797 he began his friendship with

Wordsworth In 1798 they published The

In 1798 he traveled to Germany with Wordsworth and began to take to Germany philosophy Upon his return to England, he became addicted to

opium with a view to relieving his headache He quarreled seriously with Wordsworth in 1810

Though they were reconciled to each other later, their friendship had never reached its former

intimacy

In his later years, he turned conservative and

resorted to theology for his spiritual support

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

It is Coleridge’s contribution to The

Lyrical Ballads It tells us a strange

story in ballad meter Three guests are

on their way to a wedding party when

an ancient mariner stopped one of them The mariner tells of his adventures on the sea When his ship sails towards the South Pole, an albatross ( 信天翁） comes through the snow-fog and alights on the rigging

The mariner shoots at it quite thoughtlessly Then misfortune befalls The whole crew, with the only exception of the old mariner, die of thirst as punishment for the act of inhospitality The spell breaks only when the mariner repents his cruelty.

The poem is famous for its beautiful cadence （音查） and wonderful imagery The combination of the natural and supernatural, the ordinary and extraordinary makes it one

of the masterpieces of Romantic poetry.

Kubla Khan

During an illness in 1797 Coleridge retired to

a lonely farmhouse One day he fell asleep as

he was reading a passage about Kubla Khan

from Pilgrimage by Purchas While dreaming

he composed a poem about 200 or 300 lines

On waking he began to write down the poem But he was interrupted by a person on

business from Porlock and the vision faded

He left a fragment of only 54 lines and never finished the poem

Christabel

It tells a story of a sorcerer ( 男巫） who casts a spell over a pure young girl It is written in ballad meter Its mysterious atmosphere and the Gothic horror may freeze our blood It is not wholesome to read the poem

Biographia Literaria

It is Coleridge’s most influential book of literary essays The main ideas can be summed up as follows

A poem should not be judged as a

mirror of truth—as we judge

science but as a thing in itself, almost as a living organism

Poets are born and not made Poems should be

judged only according to their own lights and not according to any established precept or precedent

Coleridge envisages that the poet as a man of great integrity as well as of special gifts, producing

poems which would offer profound insights into man’s imaginative, psychological, and ultimately, moral being

Coleridge is a great Romantic poet His poetic imagination is unique He is fond of unusual and supernatural things

Coleridge is one of the first critics to pay close attention to language of poetry He maintains that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure “through the medium of beauty”

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

Biographical Introduction

Byron was born into an aristocratic

family His father is a profligate His

mother was a passionate Scotswoman

He was born with a clubfoot, which

made him feel sore and unhappy all his life

He was a radical supporter of worker’s movement

In 1811, Byron took seat in the House of

Lords He made vehement speeches to attack English government’s policy for the Luddites (workers who destroy machinery).

Byron left England for ever in 1816

He first visited Switzerland, where he made

acquaintance with Shelley He wrote Sonnet on

Chillon in Switzerland

Then he moved to Italy, where he finished

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and wrote his

masterpiece Don Juan.

Upon hearing the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron plunged himself into the struggle.The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in 1824 Due to months’ hard work under

bad weather, he fell ill and died The Greek people mourned over his premature death

Byron was regarded as the “satanic poet” by the

English government when he died It was not until

1969 that a white marble memorial to Byron was erected in Westminster Abbey

She Walks in Beauty The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan)

Sonnet on Chillon

Brief comments

Byron’s poetry is based upon his own experience His heroes are more or less pictures of himself His hero is known

as “Byronic Hero”, a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin For such a hero, the conflict is usually one of rebellious individual against outworn social systems and conventions

The figure is, to some extent, modeled

on the life and personality of Byron

Byron’s poetry exerts great influence

on the Romantic Movement He stands with Shakespeare and Scott among the British writers who exert great influence over the mainland of Europe

P B SHELLEY (1792-1822)

Life story

Shelley was born into an affluent family

at Sussex He got a very good school education, first at Eton and then at

Oxford

In 1811, while he was still a student at

Oxford, he wrote a pamphlet The

Necessity of Atheism, repudiating the

existence of God

He was expelled from Oxford for his seditious

pamphlet Then he eloped with Harriet Westbrook

to Edinburgh

When he returned to London, he became a disciple

of William Godwin, a radical social philosopher

He fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Harriet’s drowning enabled him to marry Godwin’s

daughter, but left him a bad reputation as an

immoralist

He left England and went to the Continent

He made friends with Byron while they were in

Geneva, Switzerland He wrote his best poems

during this period

On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small

boat along the coast of Italy, a tempest struck her boat and he was drowned He was buried in Rome The inscription on his tombstone reads: “Percy

Bysshe Shelley, COR CORDIUM” ( meaning

heart of hearts)