英国文学选读unit6课件.ppt

Unit6 Romantic Poets (I) William Blake (1757-1827) Robert Burns (1759-1796) William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) William Blake (1757-1827) Son of a small London tradesman, William Blake was born on November 28, 1757. He was the most independent and the most original poet of the 18th century. AS a strange and imaginative child, his soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets. He never went to school, but picked up his education as well as he could. His favorite writers include such giants as Shakespeare and Milton. At the age of ten, he was sent to a drawing school, and at 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver(雕刻师) and later began to earn his living as an engraver for various publishers. But he was never prosperous in this business and remained poor and obscure all his life. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate girl. Blake taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. At about the same time when they got married, Blake mixed with a group of bourgeois intellectuals in London. Tow of his friends among the group printed his Poetical Sketches(诗的素描) at their expense. In these poems, He showed contempt for the rule of reason then prevailing in English poetry and voiced his sympathy with the fresh spirit of Elizabethan poetry. During the years 1788—1793, Blake mixed a lot with such political radicals and social reformers of the time as Thomas Paine and Richard Price. At the same time, under the stimulus of the French Revolution, he wrote a series of long poems, which he called Prophecies, including the famous “The French Revolution, a Prophecy(预言)” (1791)—describing the epoch-making attack on Bastille(监狱). In the meantime, Blake also turned to the triumph of American Independence, which is well interpreted in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, a Prophecy”(1783). In these poems, Blake was in sympathy with the political radicals in their r