英国伟大诗人威廉布莱克 William Blake.pptVIP

The Romantic Period Neoclassicism: reason, order, accuracy and elegant wit Romanticism: passion, emotion, and natural beauty The romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats are the major romantic poets. Imagination is the vital faculty that creates new wholes out of disparate elements. It is in solitude, in communion with the natural universe that man can exercise this most valuable faculty. This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom. Where intelligence was fallible, limited, the Imagination was our hope of contact with eternal forces, with the whole spiritual world. Nature comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Wordsworth is the closest to nature He conceives nature as “the nurse,/ the guide, /The guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being” Poetry should be free from all rules They turned to the humble people and the common everyday life for subjects. Wordsworth defines the poet as “a man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in tranquility” To escape from a world that had become excessively rational, materialistic and ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times and places. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey chose to live by the lakeside so as to escape from the “madding crowd”; Byron and Shelley rejected the entire English society by their self-imposed exile. In order to achieve the effect of the individual vision, they would turn to the medieval or renaissance, or the mysterious east or even the supernatural for poetic resources and inspiration. William Blake To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. 一沙见世界， 一花窥天堂。 掌中握无限， 须臾纳永恒。 Major Works 1. Poetical Sketches A collection of youthful verse/Joy, Laughter, love and harmony are the prevailing notes