Unit 6 The Age of Romanticism

(1798—1832)

l       Key Words: Industrial Revolution; French Revolution; Romanticism; William Wordsworth; Lyric Ballad; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Robert Southey; George Golden Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Walter Scott

l       Target: The students are supposed to get the basic literary history of Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism in English literature, the important figures of this period and their works.

l       Study Points:

1.      Romanticism;

2.      William Wordsworth;

3.      Samuel Taylor Coleridge;

4.      Robert Southey

5.      George Golden Byron;

6.      Percy Bysshe Shelley;

7.      John Keats

l         Time Span: 3 weeks        

 Part 1 Romanticism

1.    Industrial Revolution

•     One of the impetuses that pushed the Romantic Movement forward was the Industrial Revolution, which began in mid-18th century. As a result, the ruling power was shifted from the old aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, who found themselves facing an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive working class.

•     In rural areas, the peasants, now made landless and homeless by the enclosures, had to either pour into the city to earn their livings in factories, or remain as hired workers in the countryside.  This process vas lamented by Goldsmith in his The Deserted Village as early as 1770.  Keat's Isabella too faithfully describes the hard life of the workers.

•     the movement of the Luddites, or frame breakers, who destroyed their masters' machines to show their hatred. For this movement, Byron wrote his “Song for the Luddites.”

•     the notorious "Peterloo Massacre", which incited Shelley to write his great poems for the working class: “England in 1819”, “Song to the Men of England,” and “The Masque of Anarchy.”

2.    The French Revolution (July 14, 1789)

•     The most important impetus of the Romantic Movement was the French Revolution. Although many of the political changes brought about in France by the Revolution had already taken place in the 17th century, it had a most far-reaching effect upon men's thought and was reflected in literature.

•     The French Revolution evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and intellectuals and stimulated two influential books: one is Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791-92), which justifies the revolution; the other is William Godwin's Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, which was more important for its influence on Wordsworth, Shelley, and other poets.

•     During the Romantic period, almost all the leading writers were in sympathy with and were inspired by the French Revolution, though some of them were disappointed by its white terror later. William Hazlitt described the French Revolution as" the dawn of a new era," maintaining that the new poetry of the Romantic poets had its origin in the French Revolution.

•     Its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity had a very strong influence upon the writers during the period.

3.    Romanticism

Romanticism is a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period.

As a historical period in English literature, the age of Romanticism extends from 1798, when Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, to the 1832, when all the major Romantic writers were either dead or no longer productive. Romanticism, the predominant literary mode of the first third of the 19th century, was expressed almost entirely in poetry.

•     Victor Hugo calls Romanticism "liberalism in literature."

•     According to Heine, it is the revival of medievalism in art.

•     the expression of life as seen by the imagination rather than by prosaic "common sense", which was the central doctrine of English philosophy in the 18th century--the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules of classicism.

–  Therefore, the beauty of a temple lies in its actual form for classicists and in associated ideas conjured up by imagination for Romantics.

•     As a way of thinking and as an approach to literature, Romanticism is associated with vitality powerful emotion limitless and dreamlike ideas; Classicism, by contrast, is associated with order, common sense, and controlled reason.

•     Although it was very difficult to give an adequate definition of Romanticism, many of the major writers did feel that there was something distinctive about their time, which some of them called "the spirit of the age." 

–  Shelley explained this literary spirit as the accompaniment of political and social revolution and other writers agreed.

–  Hazlitt also maintained that the new poetry of the school of Wordsworth "had its origin in the French Revolution."

–  Some critics even define Romanticism as "the literary form of the Revolution".

–  In another sense, the Romantic Movement itself was a poetic revolution. For example, in their Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and Coleridge revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. The imagination of the Romantic writers was, indeed, preoccupied with the fact and ideas of revolution.

•     As a literary renaissance, the Romantic period exceeds all ages of English literature in the range and diversity of its achievements. In fact, Romanticism was an international movement, which had great representatives all over Europe, such as Goethe (1749-1832) in Germany, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) in France, Pushkin (1799-1837) in Russia, and Longfellow (1807 1882), Lowell (1819-l891), and Whittier (1807-1892) in America.

•     three schools of romantics:

–  "the Lake School" of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey;

–  "the Cockney School" of Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and associated writers, including Keats;

–  "the Satanic School" of Byron, Shelley and their followers

•     Others group them differently:

–  "the Passive Romantic School" of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; (1790s—1810s)

–  "the Active Romantic School" of Byron, Shelley and Keats. (1810s—1830s:)

•     However, most critics preferred to call them

–  "the First Generation"

–  "the Second (or Younger) Generation" of Romantic poets

4.   The Special Qualities of Romanticism

Romanticism favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature. It has the following prominent characteristics which distinguish it from the neoclassical literature introduced in the previous section.

1) The Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings

•     In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth described good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"

•    Romantic poems take as their subject matter the experience, thoughts and feelings of the individual writer, or natural and human objects as they modified by the writer's feelings.

•    while Wordsworth and his followers laid emphasis on the emotion and untrammeled(自由自在的，无阻碍的) imagination.  According to Wordsworth, although the writing of a poem may be preceded by reflection and followed by second thoughts and revisions, the immediate act of composition, if a poem is to be genuine, must be spontaneous that is, arising from impulse.

•     Keats wrote, "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. ”

•     Blake insisted that he wrote from "Inspiration and Vision".

•    Shelley also maintained it is "an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study," and suggested that they are the products of an unconscious creativity.

2) The Creation of a world of Imagination

•     The Romantic poets found undiscovered countries in their own imaginations.

•     Shelley and Blake described a poem as the poet's imaginative vision.

•    Coleridge also introduced into English criticism an organic theory of the imaginative process, describing a great work of literature as a self-originating and self-organizing process which begins with a seedlike idea in the poet's imagination.

•     By vivid imagination, the Romantic writers were capable of fantastic dream worlds, thus much of romantic literature has magical or miraculous effects.

3) The Return to Nature for Material

•     Romantic writers took the world of nature as a persistent subject of their poetry, and described it with an accuracy of observation unprecedented in earlier writers.

•     To the popular mind, Romantic poetry has become almost synonymous with "nature poetry”

•    The natural scene in Romantic poetry is not presented for its own sake, but serves as a stimulus to thought, therefore Romantic nature poems are, in fact, meditative poems.

•     Romantic poems often fill the natural scene with human life, passion, and expressiveness, or give them symbolic meanings. 

•     The following lines are written by William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in a hour.

4) Sympathy with the Humble and Glorification of the Commonplace

•     Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent understanding of the human heart.

•     The Romantic writers sympathized with the poor and cried against oppression. This grew stronger in the works of the Romantics of the younger generation.

•     Romanticism also glorified the commonplace.

–  the aim of Lyrical Ballads was "to choose incidents and situations from common life", and to use "a selection of language really spoken by men." This serious treatment of lovely subjects in common language violated the basic neoclassical rule

–  Romantic writers turned to describe humble people, everyday life, trivial things, and familiar matters. Sometimes, not only the humble but also the ignominious could be found in Romantic poetry.

–  Wordsworth's poems were crowded with convicts, female vagrants, gypsies, idiot boys and mad mothers, as well as peasants, peddlers, and village barbers.

5) Emphasis Upon the Expression of Individual Genius

•    The Romantic period is also an age of radical individualism. Emphasis was on the individual. Man was no regarded as having infinite potentialities and creative power.

•     The Romantic Movement was the expression of individual genius, which was marked by strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rules.

•     In consequence, the literature of Romanticism was as varied as the character and moods of the different writers.

–  In the works of the best Romantics, there is endless variety. Romantic writers experimented boldly in poetic language versification, and design, and produced an astonishingly variety of forms constructed on novel principles of organization and style.

6) The Return to Milton and Elizabethans for Literary Models

•    Romantic writers looked back to the Renaissance poets as their masters. Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and we can hardly read a poem of the early Romantics without finding a suggestion of the influence of one of these great poets.

7) The Interest in Old Stories and Medieval Romances

•     Although many of the Romantic writers dealt with the everyday things of their contemporary world, they also took great interest in the supernatural, "the far away and the long age."

•     They drew materials from the old legends, myths, folktales , especially the chivalry and high adventures of the Middle Ages, and restored them into vivid and beautiful passions of new ideas and feelings.

–  Walter Scott, with his historical novels, and his popular long narrative poems.

–  Coleridge and Keats chose stories of far off ages, and wrote at times in the form of the medieval ballad.

–  The Romantic writers turned from the actual world to the past or imaginary worlds, because there were no boundaries to confine them.

8)   A Sense of Melancholy and Loneliness

•    In the works of the Romantics, we can often sense a gloomy mood of Melancholy and loneliness, resulting from, the frustration of their efforts in revolting against the established code and convention.

•     To most Romantics, poetry was the hope of the world.

–  Shelley wrote that poets were the prophets of future, and the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

–  Keats sought steadily for perfect beauty and perfect truth, expressed in perfect poetry.

•    Such high hopes of ideal attainment, however, could hardly be realized. The consequent disappointment led to a kind of melancholy that underlies much Romantic poetry. 

–  Shelley said, "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts." 

–  Keats also learned that melancholy sprang from knowing that beauty "must die," and that "the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do."

–  Because they aimed' so high, the Romantics were often in anguish at falling short of their aims.

9) The Rebellious Spirit

•      Most of the Romantic writers were rebels against society or social conventions.'

–  The first generation of Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, deliberately isolated themselves from society to live near nature, and wrote poems about nature, about common people, and about supernatural dreams, 'trying' to find a substitute for the ugly industrial life that 'worked such hardships on working people.

–  The second generation, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, were even more radical. They openly sang for revolutions, spoke for the working people, and wished for a better world. Byron and' Shelley themselves were revolutionaries in their desire for liberty for the individual. Because the two generations faced the society' in different ways, Gorky divided them into the "passive and the "active" Romantic school. 

Part II Romantic Poets

I.  The First Generation

The first generation of Romantics includes Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. They were also called "Lake Poets" because they had lived for a time in close association in the mountainous Lake District in the northwest of England. They are regarded as one group also because of their community of literary and social outlook. They traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives. 

1.    William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

◆ Life

•    the representative poet of the first generation of Romantics and the chief spokesman of Romantic poetry

•    born in 1770 in the Lake District of Cumberland.

•    lost both parents when still very young and was brought up by relatives, who sent him to school at Hawksherd in the beautiful lake region in Northwestern England, where he had time to lead a life of delighted freedom in the surrounding hills. 

•    loved nature more than his books

•    entered Cambridge in 1787, but left it without distinction.

•    in 1790, he took a Continental tour to France, Alps, and Italy;

•    returned to France in 1791 and spent a year there. The French Revolution was then at its height and exercised a strong influence on his mind.

•    in 1795, he received a legacy, which freed him from monetary cares, and he settled down with his sister Dorothy, one of the most sustaining personal influences of his life.

•    in 1797, he made friends with Coleridge, a personal influence of at least equal importance, and they lived together in the Lake District, devoting their time to the writing of poetry.

•     in 1798, they jointly published a memorable volume, Lyrical Ballads.

•    Although Lyrical Ballads was not favorably received by reviewers at the time, it marked the opening of an epoch in the history of English poetry, the break with the conventional poetical tradition of 18th century neoclassicism, and the beginning of the Romantic Movement in England.

•    With the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship in France (1793-94), Wordsworth's attitude towards revolution changed into conservative, and the younger Romantics like Byron and Shelley criticized him.  He accepted the office of a distributor of stamps, and on the death of Southey (1843) he was made Poet Laureate.

•    For nearly 50 years, he lived a secluded life close to nature and died in 1850.

•    Wordsworth wrote a great many poems, among which only a small number are good. His best poems are descriptions of nature: of mountains, rivers, flowers, birds, children and peasants, and reminiscences of his own childhood and youth. 

◆  Principal works

–  We Are Seven

–  Lines Written in Early Spring

–  To the Cuckoo

–  I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

–  the Lucy Poems

–  The Solitary. Reaper

–  Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

–  The Prelude

•     The great decade of his poetry was from 1797 to 1807; thereafter it slowly declined in merit while his reputation slowly grew, until it became almost unreadable, although his reputation continued to grow.

◆  Summary

He was born in a lawyer’s family. He went to school in the beautiful Lake District, which nurtured his love of nature. He studied at Cambridge from 1787 to 1791. While university, he associated with those young republicans whose political enthusiasm had been aroused by French Revolution. In the years 1790—1792, he twice visited France and joined the Gerondists, but he forced to return to England because the financial difficulty.

In 1795, Wordsworth lived with his sister at Racedown. His sister induced him to write poems. In 1799, he made friends with Coleridge. Then they lived together, devoting their time to writing of poetry. In 1798, they jointly published the Lyrical Ballads.

With the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship and the rise of Napoleon in France, Wordsworth gave up his former political enthusiasm. He was made poet laureate during 1843 to 1850.

Nearly all Wordsworth’s good poetry was written during the first decade of his literary career. His later writings were full of mysticism.

Works: Lyrical Ballads (抒情民谣集)

The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads served as the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry. 

◆  Lyrical Ballads

•     It is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often seen as the starting point of the Romantic Movement.

•     The volume first appeared anonymously in 1798.  Most of the poems were by Wordsworth, Coleridge’s contributions being “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” “To the Nightingale,” and “The Dungeon.”  The second edition (1800) appeared under Wordsworth’s name only, and included the famous Preface.

•    In Chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes how the collaboration came about.  He and Wordsworth had discussing ‘two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination.’ 

•    They projected a volume in which Coleridge should direct himself to characters ‘supernatural’ or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest sufficient to procure…that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.’

•    Wordsworth’s object would be to ‘excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural’ for everyday things the beauty of which was normally concealed by the ‘film of familiarity.’

•    Wordsworth’s “Preface” (1800) to Lyrical Ballads is a poetic manifesto attacking the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ if poets such as Thomas Gray, who attempt to separate the language of poetry as far as possible from that of real life.

•    Wordsworth proposes instead to fit ‘to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.’  ‘Humble and rustic life’ is the chosen subject ‘because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.’

•    Therefore, the poet should use diction as natural and direct as that of the most natural speech.  "The language of the poet should not be abstract.  "It is the figure of speech which makes poetry, not the elegance of vocabulary.  It is important not to oversimplify his aims or practice here.

•    His language in the volume does sometimes affect the flat plainness of prose and at other times he employs the sing-song meter and artless repetitions of the primitive ballad.  Sometimes however, as in the non-ballad blank verse poem “Lines written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” the philosophical, literary vocabulary of earlier reflective verse is in evidence (“tranquil restoration”, “somewhat of a sad perplexity”).

•    Further more, "All good poetry" he asserted, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The strong emotion which poetry records is inevitably "emotion recollected in tranquility.”  

◆  Major Features of Wordsworth’s Poetry

•     A constant theme of Wordsworth's poetry was the growth of the human spirit through the natural environment;

•     He skillfully combined natural description with expressions of inward states of mind.

•     His poems are characterized by sympathy with the poor, simple peasants, and a passionate love of nature.

•    They have been much admired for their perfect simplicity, vivid imagery, directness of language, and unadorned beauty. His deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry that no other poet has ever equaled.

•     Because of his wonderful description of nature, he is often called the "Nature Poet."  

2.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

•    poet and critic, was the son of a country clergyman; He began reading books at the age of three, and by the time he was six he had read the Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and A Thousand and One Nithts.

•     He was educated at Christ's Hospital, a charity school, after his father's death. He studied at Cambridge from 1791 to 1793, and left it without taking his degree.

•    He made the acquaintance with Robert Southey, with whom he wrote The Fall of Robespierre, a poetical drama, and planned to set up a Utopian society, "Pantisocracy", but failed. He and Southey married two sisters.

•    The greater influence upon him was his long enduring friendship with Wordsworth.  Together they published Lyrical Ballads. The principle of the collaboration was that while Wordsworth was to reveal the poetical significance of the commonplace of life, Coleridge was to dramatize human emotions aroused by extraordinary events.

•    Like Wordsworth, Coleridge also turned from radical to conservative in political ideas. He suffered from poor health all his life, and after 1800 became an opium eater. He died in 1834.

•    Coleridge's literary production was relatively small. He wrote all his best poetry between 1797 and 1802, including the supernatural poems--”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” (imagination, combination of the natural and supernatural.) “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan;” (a drama poem) and the "conversation" poems--“Frost at Night,” “The Nightingale,” “This Lime-tree Bower,” as well as “Dejection; An Ode.”

•    His poetry shares with Wordsworth's new simplicity of diction and fluency of movement

•    but his finest poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel,” are characterized by a sense of mystery. These three poems of mystery and demonism are indeed great and unprecedented achievements. They are especially noted for their supernatural and fantastic atmosphere, their peculiar and mystic imagery, and their haunting music.

•    The romanticism of both Wordsworth and Coleridge comes out in their reverence for the spontaneity and inherent dignity of the feelings, and their cultivation of truthful and profound expression of them.

•    Apart from his poetry, Coleridge also did valuable work in literary criticism. His most important criticism is in his Biographia Literaria. He was one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language.

•    In both poetry and criticism, his work is outstanding, but it is typical of him that his critical work is very scattered and disorganized, that two of his best known poems, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” are unfinished, and that he was most famous among his contemporaries for his talk. He introduced to England the 18th century German philosophy of Kant and other. He was also an original thinker, and he attempted to give his literary criticism a profound philosophical basis.

3.    Robert Southey (1774-1843)

•    Robert Southey, poet and biographer, was the son of a linen draper, educated first at Westminster School and the Oxford.

•    He was a friend of Coleridge and also of Wordsworth. He shared their revolutionary ardour in the 1790's, but his opinions, like theirs, became conservative during the first decade of the 19th century, and from the founding of the Quarterly Review in 1809, he became one of its leading contributors.

•    Southey had distinguished literary career, and won respect and admiration quite beyond the merit of his poetic gifts.

•    In 1813, he was made Poet Laureate, a post he held for 30 years, until his death in 1843.

•    His long poems were written with great facility. They exhibit the more obvious aspects of Romanticism, but lack any profound poetic quality, and are not likely to find admirers again.

•    Works

Inspired by the French Revolution, he wrote an epic Joan of Arc.

Drama: Wat Tyler

Drama: The Fall of Robespierre

But later, he abandoned his old principles and became an opponent of all liberal ideas. He was made poet laureate in 1813.

A Visition of Judgement

“Most of his works are the product of literary industry, not of literary creation.”

•    He is now chiefly remembered for a handful of short poems, of which the best known are

–  After Blenheim

–  The Scholar

–  The Holy Tree

•    After his fortieth year, Southey's writings were mostly in prose. His biography of Nelson is the best of these.

•    On the whole, Southey's importance is rather historical than literary. 

II. The Second Generation

The second or younger generation of Romantics includes Byron, Shelly and Keats. Byron and Shelley were also called "Satanic" by Robert Southey because of their revolutionary spirit and their rebellion against society.

1.     George Golden Byron (1788—1824)

◆   Life

① At 19, he published his first collection of poems, entitled House of Idleness but attacked severely by a certain critic. Byron received it as a challenge. Two years later, he published English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in the form of a satire.

② After enjoying the success of his counter-attack, Byron set sail for Europe and this tour lasted for two years. 91809—1811)

③ On his return to England, Byron embarked on his political career. On February 27, 1812, he made his maiden speech, at 23.

④ In 1815, Byron married miss Milbank, which proved to be a most unhappy marriage.

⑤ On April 25, 1816, he set sail for Europe, never to return.

      1816—1823, Italy. He took an active part in the revolutionary work;

      1823, he went to Greece and plunged into the struggle for the national independence of that country.

⑥ April 19, 1824, Byron died.

◆   Works

Byron was made famous chiefly by his long narrative and dramatic poems:

–   Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

–   Oriental Tales

–   Manfred, Cain,

–   Don Juan, Byron’s most important work, and his unfinished masterpiece.

Byron's short lyrics are also among the simplest and most moving ever written in the English language.

–   When We Two Parted

–   She Walks in Beauty

–   Stanzas for Music

–   So We’ll Go No More

–   On the Day I Completed My Thirty-Sixth Year

◆   Features of Byron's Poems

•    Byron's poetry was distinguished for

–   the novelty of his subject matter

–   the exotic quality of his descriptions of oriental scenery which he got to know during his travel, and which was unfamiliar to most of his English readers.

•    He also introduced into English poetry a new style of character, which has often been referred to as "Byronic Hero" of "satanic Spirit".

•    Byron's long narrative poems are intermingled with innumerable digressions which express his opinions on different political, social and cultural problems.

•    There are magnificent descriptions of natural scenery and exquisite lyrics of love and despair.

•    Byron in a way was also a Neoclassic in taste, admiring Pope and his school. He never believed himself to break away from tradition, and his lucid perfection of form is akin to the Classical ideal.

•    Byron's poetic style is loose, fluent, and vivid. Ease and raciness are always characteristic of him.

•    He is the master of cutting wit and biting repartee(巧妙应答), and superior in imagery and diction.

•    His works exerted a very powerful influence on the literature of France, Germany, Italy and Russia, and were translated into all European languages. He still remains one of the most influential Romantic poets to foreign readers. 

◆   More About Byron

2.     Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

◆   Life

Shelly was born into a very wealthy family. His grandfather loved him so much that appointed him as his property heir. Shelly was early displayed an inclination for independence thinking and a strong love of literature. He was gentle and kind by nature, but he had a stout heart. He could not stand any injustice. When he was at Oxford, he wrote and published an anti-religious pamphlet, for this he was expelled from the university and disowned by his father. When he was living alone in London at the age of 19, he met with and married a school-girl of 16. In 1812, he went to Ireland and attended political activities.

Shelly’s marriage with Harriet had proved hasty and unsuitable. The unhappy union was dissolved in 1814. In 1816, Shelly married Mary Godwin. Their peaceful and happy life was broken by the sudden death of Harriet, who drowned herself in a river. Shelly was compelled to leave England in 1818 and spent all the rest of his life in Italy.

On July 8, 1822, while he was sailing in a small boat along the coast of Italy, a sudden tempest struck his boat and he was drowned. The inscription on his tombstone reads, “Percy Bysshe Shelly, CoR CORDIUM” (众心之心)

◆   Works

Queen Mab (麦布女王)

① It is written in a form of a fairy-tale dream;

② The poem has 9 cantos.

The first 2 cantos deal with a vision of past.

The last 2 with an ideal view of the future.

The 5 central cantos are devoted to a fierce attacked on the social evils of the day.

It is a revolutionary poem. Shelly in this poem was looking forward to a happy future but rejecting violence revolution.

The Revolt of Islam

In this poem Shelly described “the bloodless dethronement” of the people’s oppressors and express his belief in “a slow, gradual, silent change”. Here, he did not understand the necessity of armed struggle for a better society.

Prometheus Unbound

① a lyrical drama in 4 acts;

② The poem symbolizes the victory for man’s struggle against tyranny and oppression.

The Masque of Anarchy

Anarchy here means the tyranny of a handful of oppressors and exploiters over the popular masses. In this poem, Shelly sings the men of England, their strength and future victory. He calls upon them to rise against the oppressors and blood-suckers. (Peterloo Massacre August 16, 1819)

Other political lyrics: Song to the Men of England

Lyrics on Nature and Love

Ode to the West Wind (an expression of the poet’s eager aspiration for something free from the care and misery of real life.)

To a Skylark

Love Lyrics (Love is sung as sth. Noble, high above the “cash payment” marriage institution under capitalism.)

A Defence of Poetry (literary criticism)

Shelly wrote this essay in order to refute the view that poetry must inevitably decline with the progress of civilization. He maintained that poetry, so far from being deteriorated and made powerless by the advance of civilization, is actually the indispensable agent of civilization.

◆   Features of Shelly’s Poetry

1.    Shelley’s rebellious spirit can be found in such poems as

–   Queen Mab

–   Revolt of Islam

–   The Cenci

–   The Masque of Anarchy

–   Prometheus Unbound

2.    Shelley as a lyrical poet is admired for such lyrics as

–   Ode to the West Wind

–   To a Skylark

–   The Cloud

These three poems are regarded as the most beautiful nature poems in English language

3.    Shelley is one of the greatest English nature poets.  Descriptions of nature reveal his political ideas. West wind, for instance, is associated with revolution, signifying the destruction of the old world and the coming of a new world.

4.    Shelley’s poems shine with radiant beauty, marvelous symbolism and imagery, exalted exquisiteness of personification, and perfectness of artistry

–   spontaneous flow

–   youthful freshness and enthusiasm

5.    Shelley’s poetry are rich in scenes of dreamlike lands and possesses an ethereal musical quality. 

◆   More About Shelley

3.    John Keats (1795—1821)

◆   Life

John Keats was born in 1795 in London. Before he was fifteen, both his parents died and he was sent to be an apprentice to a surgeon. During his seven years’ apprenticeship, he developed a love of poetry and got acquired with some prose-writers and published some poems. With the help of Shelly, he published his first collection of poems in 1817. In the same year, he left London and started on a walking tour around England and Scotland. His poems during this period of time show his interest in the political life and his concern for the miserable condition of the common people.

◆   Works

Keats poems revealed mastery of formal (aestheticism) and depth of feeling. But his democratic views offended the aristocratic-bourgeois literary circles, who attacked Keats savagely. Under the great stress of poverty, personal sorrow and his own poor health, he wrote some magnificent poems.

When Keats on the brink of death, his some long poems containing Isbella, the Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia appeared.

Endymion

① A poetic romance is a poem of 4,000 lines;

② The effect of this poem is like a sort of fairy voyage after beauty. It symbolizes the truth of life and the beauty of life.

Isabella

The basic idea in Isabella is sympathy for the oppressed and indignation at the cruelty of the rich. The root of the evils in the system of exploitation.

The Eve of St. Agnes

In this poem, Keats expressed his fondness for sensuous beauty and showed his ability of painting exact word-pictures.

Lamia

Keats emphasizes the theme on appreciation of sensuous beauty.

Hyperion

① Its theme is the conflict between the old and the new;

② Keats shows that each stage of development is fated to give place to a higher excellence and the victory of life and youth over the forces of decay and retrogression. The passing of an old order of things and the coming of a new—this is the eternal law of nature.

Short Poems:

The one artistic aim in his poetry was to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. His leading principle is: “Beauty in truth, truth in beauty.” What the imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth.

Ode to a Greek Urn

The most important short poems of Keats are sonnets and odes.

Keats voiced his resentment against the rule of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in a manner different from his brother-poets, Byron and Shelly. Byron and Shelly attempted to remould the contemporary society with both poetry and political action, while Keats restricted his application of the principle of liberty to the sphere of art. His pursuit of beauty in all things showed an aspiration after a better life than the sordid reality under capitalism.

◆   Features of Keats’ Poetry

•    Keats’ lyrics are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be satisfied until he knows more of such delightful poetry. Those who study only "Ode to a Nightingale" will find four things a love of sensuous beauty, a touch of pessimism, a purely pagan conception of nature, and a strong individualism, which are characteristic of this last poet of Romanticism.

•    In many respects he is the best workman of all romantic poets. 

–   his poetic expression, or the harmony of word and thought, is generally more perfect than theirs

–   More than any other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of arts.

–   he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his "On a Grecian Urn," beauty and truth were one and inseparable. To him, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."  He is an apostle of beauty. Some of his poems incline toward "Art for art's sake."

–   He shows certain aloftness from the interest of worldly life and seems seeking refuge in an idealistic world of illusions and dreams, but this is due to his resentment of the bourgeois aristocratic society.

–   The poetry of Keats shows the enthralling beauty of line, colour, shape, order and taste.

–   His poems are marked by the mastery of artistic form, depth of feeling, vivid imagery, perfect finish, and touching melody.

◆   More About Keats

4.    Walter Scott (1771—1832)

Scott himself is a romanticist in that he was interested in the past and his rich imagination.

① vivify the past;

② historical events are closely interwoven with the fates of individuals;

③ he was mindful of the fates of the ordinary people;

④ careful studies into the historical life and imagination;

⑤ Conservative but he shows the decay of the old and the victory of the new social forms.

Scott’s literary career makes the transition from romanticism to realism in English literature of the 19^th century. 

◆    Works

The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Marmion; The Lady of the Lake; Rob Roy; Ivanhoe, etc.

III. English Novel—Jane Austen (1775—1817)

Jane Austen was the first great woman novelist. Jane Austen, within her accurate and exquisitely feminine sense of character and scene, has probably never been equaled within her deliberately limited range. Her works were regarded as realistic works, but they have a tendency of classicism, because in her novel, she emphasized reason.

◆    Works (6 novels)

Northanger Abbey;

Persuasion;

Sense and Sensibility;

Pride and Prejudice;

Mansfield Park;

Emma.

IV. English Essay—Charles Lamb (1775—1834)

◆    Works

① His early literary efforts;

② Literary Criticism: Tales from Shakespeare;

③ Criticism of life: Essays of Elia;

Reference Books:

1.    Liu Bingshan: A Short History of English Literature, Zhenzhou: Henan People’s Publishing House,2000

2.    Wu Weiren: History and Anthology of English Literature, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1998

3.    李正栓，李翠葶：《英国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002

4.    万  莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001.       

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