WilliamWordsworthTU学习课件.pptVIP

Point of view Wordsworth asserted that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in tranquility.” He maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made. The most important contribution he has made that he has not only started the modern poetry, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature. Major works Poems about nature and poems about human life He is regarded as a “worshipper of nature”. He thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. He is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginnings turns out to be its end. * * The Romantic Period William Wordsworth Cultural background Romanticism as a literary movement appeared in England from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 to the death of Sir Walter Scott and the passage of the first reform bill in the Parliament in 1832. The Romantic movement expressed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions, for the romantics saw both the corruption and injustice of the feudal societies and the fundamental inhumanity of the economic, social and political forces of capitalism. Cultural background Romanticism constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social activities to the inner world of the human spirit, tending to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. In literature, the romantics shifted their emphasis from reason, which was a dominant mode of thinking among the 18th century writers and philosophers, to instinct and emotion, which made literature most valuable as an expression of an individual’s unique feelings. The Age of (Romantic) Poetry The Romantic period is an age of