浪漫主义诗歌的特点

The Characteristics of the Romantic Poetry

---by He Zhi

English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.

The romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and nature provided romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over “artifice” and “convention,” the hu man need for emotional outlets, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings are often set in rural or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive con cern with “innocent” children, young lovers, and animals. The major romantic poets included William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Gordon Byron. This essay describes two major characteristics of the romantic poetry, namely, nature and emotion.

Nature

The romanticism poet's poetry mostly originates from the nature. The romanticism poets almost all advocate the nature. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth conceives of nature as “the nurse, the guide and guardian of my heart and soul.” Nature to the romanticists is a source of cleanliness and spiritual understanding; it is a teacher; it is the stepping-stone between man and god, so romantic poets mostly take describing the nature to eulogize the nature as the subject.

Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of golden daffodils tossing, reeling and dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here: When all at once I saw a crowd，A host，of golden daffodils，/ Beside the lake，beneath the trees，/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze./ Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way，/ They stretch'd in never-ending line/Along the margin of a bay：/Ten thousand saw I at a glance /Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

"To a Skylark" is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A skylark soars into the sky singing happily. As it flies upward, the clouds of evening make it invisible, but its song enables the poet to follow its flight. All the earth and air is filled